Raoul’s — the 50-year-old Soho French restaurant that’s still a celebrity haunt, helped launch Thomas Keller’s career, and is home to the one of the city’s best off-menu burgers — now has its very own documentary.
Raoul’s, a New York Story comes from next-generation owner, Karim Raoul, who teamed up with fellow writer director Greg Olliver. Over a decade in the making, the film — with tickets on sale now — will debut at this year’s Tribeca Festival, with theater times on June 10, 11, and 15.
The French restaurant that brothers from Alsace, Serge and Guy Raoul, opened in December of 1975. It became the Soho art-crowd spot — with visitors like Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Andy Warhol — along with regulars like Al Pacino, Sarah Jessica Parker, Quentin Tarantino, and Tribeca Festival co-founder Robert De Niro, notes the Hollywood Reporter. Even some of its staff became New York famous, including maître d’ Rob Jones, known for their after-hours drag, who Raoul told the New York Times, he’d walk around Soho with “and spray-paint all the dog poop gold.”
Raoul says he was filming in Indonesia in 2010 when he had to come back to take care of his father, Serge — what he thought was a detour before he’d go back to his firm career, he told Eater. To stay fluent, he’d bring his gear to the restaurant periodically to film “sweeping shots of the room” as he became more involved with the restaurant. “Maybe there’s enough here for something,” he eventually said, at which point he brought in Olliver to help.
As Karim took over the restaurant — and became restaurateur in his own right, opening sibling luncheonette across the street, Revelie — he became part of the story. His father died in 2024 at the age of 86; he ran the front of house while his brother had been the chef. “His restaurant existed before the McNally brothers’ restaurants,” said Andrew Zimmern, who worked for Raoul. “It existed before all the other New York-style French bistros. I think he deserves a lot of credit for creating a style of restaurant here in America that has been often copied but rarely, if ever, duplicated.”
Seven years ago, Karim hired writer Kathleen Squires, who was also a co-producer behind a PBS documentary on James Beard (and a contributor to Eater). With her hiring, the documentary “started to take on its own life,” he says. Edgar Sabounghi and Beth Hamlin join Squires as co-producer. It also features a roster of chefs, including Keller, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Tom Colicchio, and more. The film is produced by Secret Weapon Studios and Tribeca Studios in partnership with Resy.
Keller, who’s in the film, landed at Raoul’s in the early 1980s; When he went to Paris, he ended up staying in Serge’s Paris apartment during a series of restaurant stages. After he returned to New York, Raoul and Keller opened Rakel in 1986 — where Colicchio and Zimmern both worked — with Raoul and Keller parting ways in the restaurant by 1990.
As for that off-menu burger ($32), it’s a Pat LaFrieda blend, coated like steak au poivre with peppercorns and salt, seared in butter, topped with triple cream Saint-André cheese, along with watercress, red onions, and cornichons. It’s served with cream and cognac au poivre, along with a side of duck fat fries. Years after it was first introduced, only a dozen are still offered nightly, exclusively at the bar. Once the film releases, they’ll be harder than ever to order during dinner: The workaround is to order the (very same) one on the menu during brunch.
Sign up for the
newsletter
Eater NY