The “You’ve Got Mail” Breakup Restaurant

Locations from the movie You’ve Got Mail have been well-documented online on countless sites.  I chronicled quite a few of them on mine – in a December 2007 post, as well as in follow-up posts that you can read here and here.  One spot that hasn’t been mentioned anywhere and one that I was desperate to find was the café where Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Frank Navasky (Greg Kinnear) so amicably broke up in the 1998 comedy.  So I got to work in tracking it down shortly before heading out to NYC in April.

While scanning the breakup scene for clues, I spotted a (rather blurry) neon sign reading “Monsoon” posted on the window of the storefront across the street.  Figuring it was most likely an eatery of some sort, I did a Google search for “Monsoon,” “restaurant,” and “Upper West Side” (since the vast majority of the movie was shot in that area of the city), and the first result kicked back was for Monsoon Vietnamese Cooking at 435 Amsterdam Avenue.  Though that spot is now shuttered and looks a bit different today, I was able to toggle back to the 2007 Street View image of it and the red patio area shown matched perfectly to what was seen in You’ve Got Mail.

A current view of that site is pictured below.  As you can see, not only has it been cleaned up significantly, but the entire patio area has been removed.  The space is now occupied by a Thai eatery named Spice.

I then used Street View to see what restaurant was located across the street from the former Monsoon site.  At present, there is an American/Irish bar in that spot named St. James Gate.

Toggling back through the years, I could see that St. James Gate took over the space in 2008 and that, prior to that, it was the site of a different eatery, one that I could not make out the name of.  So I did a deep Google search of the place’s address – 441 Amsterdam Avenue – and was able to discern that the location’s previous occupant was an American Nouveau/Mediterranean restaurant named Louie’s Westside Café, which originally opened on the premises in 1986.  Eureka!  As you can see below, despite the change in tenancy, little else of the structure has been altered since St. James Gate moved in.

Some further research on Louie’s pulled up the review pictured below.  Looks like I should have just used Yelp from the get-go to find this locale!

Louie’s Westside Café was originally established by a woman named Louie Sloves and in its early days boasted a scant 11 tables with seating for 35.  Despite the small size and lack of a liquor license, it managed to become a local favorite.

Louie eventually expanded the space and installed a full bar and a glass-enclosed patio.  You can see photos of what Louie’s Westside Café looked like when it was still in operation here, here, and here.  I was floored to see that, though the décor is now different, the basic layout of the restaurant remains the same.

Louie’s Westside Café popped up towards the end of You’ve Got Mail in the scene in which Kathleen and Frank admit to each other that they are in love with other people – Frank with Sydney Anne (Jane Adams) and Kathleen with “the dream of someone else.”

In the scene, they sat in the southwest corner of the restaurant, in the area pictured below.

The brick beam visible behind Kathleen in the scene is still there.

Though we did not have time to eat on the premises, the employees at St. James Gate could not have been nicer and invited me in to take all of the photographs that I wanted.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: St. James Gate, aka Louie’s Westside Café, aka the You’ve Got Mail breakup restaurant, is located at 441 Amsterdam Avenue on New York’s Upper West Side.

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