As a young man newly arrived in New York, Josip Petrsoric spoke only patchy English and had little interest in the theatre. Yet he soon found himself in the company of Broadway’s finest.
He got to know Jack Lemmon, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and in the decades that followed, a succession of leading actors from Paul Newman to James Gandolfini sought his attention late in the evening.
Petrsoric was their bartender. He worked at Sardis, a restaurant that bills itself as the longest-running show on Broadway and the New York equivalent to the Mermaid Tavern in London, which once served the luminaries of Elizabethan theatre. Petrsoric, known simply as Joe, has been behind the bar there for 55 years, and became something of an
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