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"I learned that Edna Lewis co-owned and operated Café Nicholson, a stylish French restaurant in a brownstone on East 52nd Street that opened in 1949; she left the kitchen in early 1953 but remained a business partner for decades. The place catered to a glamorous, literary and celebrity crowd — Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Salvador Dalí, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marlon Brando, and Gloria Vanderbilt were among her admirers — and marked her engagement with French cooking during the city’s midcentury love affair with that cuisine." - Robert Sietsema