Growing Up at Dan Tana’s, Hollywood’s Most Celebrated Restaurant

As they got older, it wasn’t all Shirley Temples. Gabrielle got her first job at the restaurant, tasked with putting olives on top of salads, whereas a youthful adult Katerina worked in the main office, handling reservations, table seating, and house accounts. (Certain regulars at Dan Tana’s—of which there were many—didn’t need to whip out their credit card for every meal.) Oh, and she took care of the occasional odd request, like “people wanting to order ice cream from the restaurant because they were addicted to it.” (Don’t judge until you’ve tried its creamy cappuccino dairy creation.)

The two have been reminiscing a lot about the restaurant lately. Their father died nearly a year ago, in August 2025, and his posthumous memoir, Everybody Came to Tana’s: An American Dream Come True, comes out today.

Everybody Came to Tana’s is, first and foremost, a biography of the restaurateur. Born Dobrivoje Tanasijević on May 26, 1935, in Yugoslavia, he defected from the communist country and Tito dictatorship when a soccer tournament took him to Belgium. After years of playing professional soccer in Europe and Canada, he found himself in Los Angeles on a whim. Then he made a risky choice: to stay.

He worked at Villa Capri, a 1950s sizzling spot that counted James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Jimmy Durante as regulars. (In the book, Tana claims that Monroe had a secret tryst with Frank Sinatra in Tana’s apartment above the restaurant. He writes about the cognitive dissonance experienced in transitioning from living amongst communism to living amongst celebrity: “It was hard to believe that only three years earlier I had been living in a West German prison camp. How do you reconcile memories so wildly at odds with each other…?” he writes.) In the early 1960s, he became the maître d’ at La Scala, and he helped run a nightclub, Peppermint West. At one point he tried his hand at acting, changing his name to Dan Tana on advice from a casting agent. In 1964 he partnered with Dan Reeves, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams, to launch a professional soccer league in the United States. They met frequently at the same West Hollywood restaurant for lunch. When it went up for sale, Reeves suggested they buy the place, with Tana running the day-to-day operations. Tana strung Chianti bottles from the ceiling and had a chef come up with a elementary yet delicious menu: seven variations of spaghetti, seven variations of veal, and seven variations of chicken.