Before the Screen, a Bartender Worth Crossing Town For

Long before Moonlighting put him in living rooms and Die Hard put him everywhere else, Bruce Willis was the draw at Cafe Central on the Upper West Side. The regulars knew it before the casting directors did. There is a particular kind of New Yorker who can tell you the name of the man pouring at their favorite room, and for a stretch of years that name was his. Anyone who has sat at a good bar on this island knows the gift is not the drink but the man making it, and that the best ones hold a room the way a leading man holds a scene.

With reporting from Vanity Fair.