Vincent Sardi Jr gave his name to the Manhattan restaurant in West 44th Street that for years was synonymous with Broadway, a theatre district eatery where many a production’s fate was celebrated — or mourned. For several generations of show folk, Sardi’s was the canopied dining emporium to which Broadway opening-night revellers would repair after the performance as part of a New York theatrical routine.

There, they would await the first editions of the next day’s papers containing the critics’ make-or-break reviews, all the while scanning the artists’ sketches of Broadway’s fabled denizens, past and present, that continue to line the walls.

New York had, and still has, other theatre hang-outs: Joe Allen and Orso, of course, both of which are also popular in London, and Angus McIndoe, a newer, trendier hang-out located down the same street, closer to Eighth Avenue. But for many producers, investors and stars encompassing several generations of the New York theatre, Sardi’s was one of the mainstays of the Great White Way. No London showbiz restaurant has ever managed to encapsulate the West End in quite the same fashion.

The restaurant first opened in 1921 in basement premises a few doors away from its present location at 234 West 44th Street, the Sardi family’s culinary base of operation since 1927. (Its earlier home was knocked down to enable the building of the St James Theatre.) Vincent Sardi Jr was 12 when the restaurant took up new occupancy in the same street, and had spent his early years in a Manhattan-style railroad flat half a mile or so uptown. But in 1926 the family moved to a larger home in the outlying borough of Queens, necessitating a daily commute to a restaurant that did not close until the last patron, whether a Broadway diva or chorus gypsy, had gone home.

Sardi flirted initially with becoming a doctor, opting instead for Columbia Business School. In 1939 he joined the family business as dining room captain and took over as its manager, and unofficial Broadway standard-bearer, when his father retired in 1947. In 1985 he sold the restaurant, only to resume ownership after its interim owners declared bankruptcy in 1990. He retired in 1997 and lived his final years in Vermont.

For many, the room itself, and the people it accommodated, were far more important than the food, which was rarely the reason the theatre community flocked to Sardi’s. A spacious ground floor featured red banquette tables ideal for star-spotting, while numerous round tables catered to a Broadway citizenry that would come in en masse. And though the building contains two other floors, the action all seemed to happen in that one room, which in turn became the preferred home away from home of many a New York columnist.

Though now more of a tourist destination than it once was, Sardi’s has retained some of its potency as a showbiz watering hole. Various American critics’ organisations still gather there to give out annual awards, while the recent Broadway Tony-winner John Lloyd Young (Jersey Boys) is just one of the new crop of US theatre stars to join the parade of legends immortalised on the wall.

The idea of Vincent Sardi Sr, the sketches have long been an important way-station in the career of any Broadway name: Richard Griffiths, for one, capped an outstanding Broadway season last year with not just a Tony Award for The History Boys but, three months later, the unveiling of a Sardi’s caricature of him by way of recognition that he had arrived.

Not everything Sardi Jr touched became the stuff of showbiz lore. An East Side branch called, aptly enough, Sardi’s East, lasted only ten years, while a TV chat show, Dinner at Sardi’s, in the late 1940s came across as merely so much thespian self-aggrandisement. But for many, Sardi’s in its heyday was to the New York theatre as Big Ben, say, is to London’s tourists: an icon instantly recognised by everyone.

Sardi Jr is survived by his third wife (his first two marriages ended in divorce) and by three children.

Vincent Sardi Jr, restaurateur, was born on July 23, 1915. He died on January 4, 2007, aged 91