On the occasion of the publication of their father’s posthumous memoir, Katerina and Gabriel Tana reminisce about their childhood at Dan Tana’s Italian restaurant in Los Angeles.
Dan Tana’s, the beloved restaurant with the legendary red sauce in a little yellow house on Santa Monica Boulevard, has been a Los Angeles fixture since 1964. With the restaurant owned by their father, the namesake Dan Tana, the two girls, Katerina and Gabrielle, grew up among the red-and-white checkered vinyl tablecloths. seats and the parmesan chicken.
“We lived in West Hollywood and went to West Hollywood Elementary School, which was right up the hill from the restaurant,” Gabrielle tells Vanity Fair.
“We would pass the restaurant on our way home, sit at the bar and drink Shirley Temple before the restaurant opened.” They used to steal bread from the kitchen and dip it in the restaurant’s famous sauce.
“Customers are waiting”
When dinner time approached, however, they had to: “I need this table. Get up, get out of here. what are you doing We have customers waiting! You can’t sit here while the customers are waiting,’” Gabrielle remembers her father used to say when she lingered a little longer in the dining room.
Growing up, they didn’t just drink Shirley Temple. Gabrielle got her first job at the restaurant, tasked with putting olives on the salads, while the young adult Katerina worked in the main office, taking care of reservations, placing customers at tables and paying regulars.
Some regulars at Dan Tana’s—and there were many—didn’t need to whip out their credit cards for every meal. Oh, and he catered to the occasional odd request, too, like “people who wanted to order ice cream from the restaurant because they were addicted to it”—his unsurpassed creamy cappuccino ice cream.
“I need this table. Get up, get out of here. what are you doing We have customers waiting! You can’t sit here while the customers are waiting,’” Gabrielle remembers her father used to say
“to stay”
The two women have been reminiscing about the restaurant a lot lately. Their father passed away almost a year ago, in August 2025, and his posthumous memoir, Everybody Came to Tana’s: An American Dream Come True, has just been released.
Everybody Came to Tana’s is, first and foremost, a biography of the restaurateur. Born Dobrivoje Tanasijevic on May 26, 1935 in Yugoslavia, he defected from the communist country when a soccer tournament took him to Belgium.
After years of a professional soccer career in Europe and Canada, he found himself in Los Angeles on a whim. Then he made a risky decision: to stay.
Secrets and lies
He worked at the Villa Capri, a popular 1950s hangout where James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Jimmy Durante were among the regulars.
In the book, Tana claims that Monroe had a secret rendezvous with Frank Sinatra in her apartment above the restaurant.
He writes of the cognitive dissonance he experienced in transitioning between his previous and subsequent celebrity lives: “It was hard to believe that just three years earlier I was living in a West German POW camp. How do you reconcile memories so wildly at odds with each other?’ writes.
He changed his name
In the early 1960s, he became maître d’hôtel at La Scala and helped manage a nightclub, Peppermint West. At some point he tried his hand at acting, changing his name to Dan Tana on the advice of an agent.
In 1964 he partnered with Dan Reeves, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams, to establish a professional football league in the United States. They often met at the same restaurant in West Hollywood for lunch.
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Success story
When the restaurant came up for sale, Reeves offered to buy it, with Tana taking over the day-to-day operations.
Tana hung bottles of Chianti from the ceiling and asked a chef to create a simple but delicious menu: seven variations of spaghetti, seven variations of beef and seven variations of chicken.
Over the next six decades, Dan Tana’s transformed from a fledgling shop to a bustling restaurant and, eventually, an institution. “Brad Pitt, Michael Douglas, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Wasserman, Fred Astaire, Larry King, Elizabeth Taylor, Magic Johnson, Linda Ronstadt, Drew Barrymore, Leonardo DiCaprio, John Wayne, Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, Barack Obama… Joni Mitchell, John Belushi… all regulars.
“All with their own stories. So are countless others that no one has heard of,” Tana writes.
Famous dishes with famous inspiration
It was a source of pride for many to have a dish named after them, such as Nicky Hilton’s chopped salad or George Clooney’s veal cutlet.
“It’s incredibly unassuming, whereas LA is a very pretentious city,” says Katerina, explaining why she thinks Dan Tana’s has become a hangout.
However, as much as Tana’s book is about him, it is also about the dark yet glamorous history of Hollywood and those who have made it famous. It begins with the golden age of cinema, when the MGM and Paramount studios dominated, which symbolically ended with the brutal murders of the “Manson family” in 1969.
“Belushi ordered a steak delivered to his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, where he died of a drug overdose later that night”
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That night in August 1969
“A night I’ll never forget: August 9, 1969. Celebrity hairstylist Jay Sembring, who was friends with Sharon Tate, was hosting a party for six people at the restaurant.
“In the middle of dinner, someone called him. He paid the bill and left. I think he then met Tate and some friends at another restaurant and then they went to Roman Polanski’s house. Hours later, Tate and four others were brutally murdered by three members of Charles Manson’s family.”
Belushi’s last steak
In the 1980s, as cocaine became the party drug of choice, Tana witnessed the devastating cost of addiction with the death of John Belushi.
“Belushi was also a regular customer whenever he was in town. People used to put mirrors on tables or at the bar and sniff lines of cocaine, with Belushi being one of the most open about it.
“Belushi declined Robert De Niro and Harry Dean’s invitation to join them for dinner, but ordered a steak delivered to his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, where he died of a drug overdose later that night.”
John Wayne -‘he was so tall. When he sat down at the table, it was as if he were standing. He was like a giant,” says Katerina
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He denied him entry
Then came OJ. Simpson. For years, the former American football player came once or twice a week. After being accused of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and her boyfriend Ron Goldman (of which he was acquitted), Tana told him not to go to the restaurant again.
His daughters have fond memories of their encounters, as children, with iconic figures of the entertainment world at the restaurant. Fred Astaire. Peter Falk.
Bruce Springsteen. John Wayne -‘he was so tall. When he sat down at the table, it was as if he were standing. He was like a giant,” says Katerina.
And when the family moved to London in 1973, resulting in Tana becoming a board member of an English football club, the stars followed them there too. Gene Hackman lived in their basement during the filming of the movie “Superman”.
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“Real People”
Although celebrities loved Dan Tana’s and Dan Tana, Katerina and Gabrielle say their father was never blinded by the star’s glare.
“Once our father came from London and saw a celebrity at every table,” says Katerina. “He turned to Maître de Guido and said, ‘Next time you come here, you’ll be fired if that happens, because I want real people here.
“These people will come one day and not come the next. They will succeed each other, and they are unstable. I want real people, I want doctors, I want lawyers, I want entrepreneurs.”
No excuse
Did they learn anything about their father from his memoirs? There’s a chapter about his first girlfriend, Gabrielle says, a story he certainly never mentioned to them while they were alive.
He also protected them from the atrocities he experienced while in a refugee camp in Germany. But above all, as Katerina says, “he never felt sorry for himself. He never used anything as an excuse not to continue.”
Source: In
