Entertainment

The Beatrice Inn rises again

A disco ball refracted light onto the haze of smoke that filled the back room, with its low ceilings and black-and-white checkered floor. Samantha Ronson was working the DJ booth, and girlfriend Lindsay Lohan was by her side.

Ashley Olsen worked her way through the A-list crowd — whose favorite activities included getting trashed, dancing and locking lips — to say hello to Ronson, but Lohan was not having it.

“Get your 15-year-old ‘Full House’ ass away from my girlfriend!” she reportedly screamed.

Welcome to the Beatrice Inn, circa 2008.

PHOTOS: THE BEATRICE INN THROUGH THE YEARS

But the fun was fleeting. In 2009, the legendary nightclub run by scenesters Matt Abramcyk and Paul Sevigny was raided and padlocked by the city for overcrowding and building code violations. Speculating on its future tenant has been a favorite New York pastime ever since.

Now, the latest chapter in the storied history of the Beatrice Inn — the unassuming subterranean spot on the corner of West 12th and West Fourth streets — is about to unfold.

Late this month, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, along with partners Emil Varda and Brett Rasinski, will breathe new life into the fabled Greewich Village haunt, transforming it into a cozy chophouse with a seasonal menu by Brian Nasworthy, a former sous-chef at the Time Warner Center’s vaunted Per Se. It promises to be a neighborly place, with a published phone number and reservations on OpenTable.

“Democracy will be the order of the day at the Beatrice,” Carter tells The Post.

“Most tables will be available on a first-come, first-seated basis. This will be a restaurant for our West Village neighbors and their friends,” adds the bon vivant, who also owns venerable NYC restaurants Monkey Bar and the Waverly Inn, which had a nonworking phone number when it opened in 2006 (instead, insiders called Carter’s office directly, or e-mailed “Fritz”).

In many ways, the new Beatrice Inn will have more in common with the original Beatrice Inn. Before the young Hollywood set descended upon it in the late aughts, it had been a red-sauce Italian joint run by husband-and-wife team Elsie and Ubaldo Cardia for 50 years.

The old Beatrice Inn, with its pink walls and cold 75-cent martinis, drew an old-school Village mix of editors, oddballs and power brokers — some of whom dined there as many as six nights a week. According to its menu cover, “The charm and the mystique of Bohemian Greenwich Village is alive, affordable and just around the corner . . .”

The late journalist Charles Kuralt was perhaps its most famous regular, and even dedicated the final chapter of his 1995 best seller, “Charles Kuralt’s America,” to the restaurant.

“I doubt that the Beatrice will ever become trendy,” Kuralt told C-SPAN in 1995. (He was proven wrong a decade later.)

“It’s an institution I couldn’t do without.

For one thing, they give me the illusion that I never pay for dinner there because they run a tab and the bill only gets paid once a month.”

Elsie and Ubaldo were married at the Beatrice Inn in 1951, then purchased the restaurant in 1955 when the elderly couple who ran it wanted to retire and return to Italy. Before that, it had been a speakeasy, and there’s still a back door leading into an alleyway connecting 12th Street and Eighth Avenue.

“We had a lot of interesting people there,” says Aldo Cardia Jr., who sold the building at 285 W. 12th St. after his mother, Elsie, passed away in 2005 (his father Ubaldo died in 1993).

“Woody Allen came in for a while,” he recalls. “He shot a scene from one of his movies, ‘Another Woman,’ there.”

“The customers became part of the family. Some — say, an elderly man who had lost his wife — would spend the holidays with us,” says Cardia.

Carter also has fond memories of the old place going back to his days as co-founder of Spy magazine: “You’d see the Kuralts there, and the Navaskys [chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review Victor Navasky was also an editor and publisher of The Nation]. It was one of the last places in New York where smoking wasn’t frowned upon.

“Plus, the Cardia family were big Spy and Vanity Fair readers, which I appreciated. A number of times, I held my Christmas dinner there for former assistants at both magazines. We would stumble out into the snow in the early morning hours and try to find our way home. Many did.”

When their parents died, Aldo and his sister Vivian sold the building and, in 2006, it became a louche playpen. The late-night stumbling — albeit more lithe — continued. (Carter recently told the Wall Street Journal, “I’m too old to have gone there, but my kids went.”)

Former Beatrice doorman Angelo Bianchi recalls the cast of characters who paraded in nightly: “The people who came were icons — there were a lot of emerging artists.”

His favorite regular was Malcolm McLaren, the legendary manager of the Sex Pistols, who died in 2010. “The fact that he came all the time, that was really cool and special.”

And while reports from inside the inner sanctum were strictly forbidden, the boldface high jinks invariably leaked to the gossip pages. Page Six was brimming with accounts of Kirsten Dunst “sucking face” with DJ Matt Creed and actress Paz de la Huerta “pulling down her top, pulling up her dress, making a real gruesome spectacle.”

But while the Beatrice Inn had no shortage of celebrity mystique, part of the magic, says Bianchi, was derived from its unique, low-slung setting.

“A lot of it was not up to current code [when we took over], but it had a certain intimacy, a closeness, that made it feel like no other place that existed. It felt like someone’s living room,” says Bianchi, now an owner of downtown Italian restaurant Rubirosa.

There were working fireplaces. And beams in the cellar formed by a tree.

Even when the place was packed with the likes of Dunst and Kate Moss, old-school patrons would drop by still thinking it was an Italian restaurant.

“Anytime that happened, we were thrilled and delighted to walk them in,” says Bianchi.

“They would tell us stories. Some of the neighbors on the block weren’t happy with us, what with the cabs and the traffic and the noise, but others embraced us. They remembered it from when they were young and would come in and have a drink and reminisce.”

A curious Cardia, who still lives in the Village, dropped in a few times to see what they had done with the place. “It wasn’t for me,” he says. “It was for my two daughters — they wanted to go. I once stopped by at 11 o’clock and nobody was there yet.”

The nightclub fiercely divided neighbors — leading to its eventual closure in 2009 — but vocal community leaders are looking forward to its latest resurrection.

“I’m expecting it to be very lovely,” says longtime Village resident and Greenwich Village Block Association President Marilyn Dorato.

Carter says the design “will reflect what it has long been: a cozy, warm restaurant with working fireplaces and paneled walls.”

“We will have a classic cocktail list, and we hope, the best martini in town — a drink the Beatrice was long famous for,” he adds.

Its previous operators are also pleased that the torch is being passed on to Carter.

Cardia, for one, has been watching the recent flurry of construction with great anticipation. “Absolutely, I’m gonna go,” he says.

And Abramcyk, the Beatrice Inn’s last proprietor, sounds genuinely elated: “I’m relieved and excited and very encouraged that they’ll do a great job,” he says.

“It’s very nice to see in New York how one space can have so many robust, wonderful memories for so many people and have such a colorful history,” adds Abramcyk, who now runs several downtown restaurants, including TriBeCa’s Super Linda.

“I can’t think of any other spaces that seem to have been operated by so many people in so many ways,” he says, “and remain so beloved.”