Collage by Carlie Burton
It was another elegant Saturday night at Maisonette, Cincinnati’s most famous restaurant, and as usual everything was perfect. Three generations of obsession with perfection had earned the restaurant the Mobil Travel Guide’s five-star rating for a record-breaking 41 consecutive years, and tonight was no different—except for one thing. This was July 23, 2005, Maisonette’s final night. The doors would close forever in a few hours, and only one person working the floor knew.
“Nobody on the staff or in the kitchen knew except me,” recalls Nat Comisar. “One friend in the know had called around and told everyone to be there that night without telling them why. In a way, it was a marvelous night.”
Nat had to smile through each goodnight handshake without betraying that he was really saying goodbye. He later had to give stunned staff members the bad news, and relay it again to the media the next afternoon as a locksmith changed the front door locks.
Numerous plans for revamping, refinancing, and relocating the restaurant (to Covington, say, or Kenwood) had fallen through. By Sunday night, all Nat had left were grim stares from his family and from his hometown. Plus $2 million of debt.
Great rises and heartbreaking falls appear throughout Nat’s family history. Samuel, the original patriarch, was born in a village in what was then Russia, is now Ukraine, and was once Poland. He brought his wife and five kids to Cincinnati in the early 1900s, and one day he simply disappeared. His son Nathan worked relentlessly in the restaurant business with a vision of opening a place like Maisonette, and after finally achieving his vision in 1949 he abruptly died six weeks later.
At the height of the next generation’s success, they faced the horror of a Comisar toddler being suddenly kidnapped for ransom. (He was quickly rescued, unharmed.) And in 2005—after decades of worldwide renown and awards and countless satisfied diners—this century’s Nat Comisar made the decision to shut it all down.
There was no time to grieve the closure of Maisonette. “I was so lost, with no clue what to do,” Nat says. “Four kids, two in college, a mortgage, alimony, child support, and no money…I simply had no choice but to jump into full-time survival.”
I had become friends with Nat Comisar during better times, back when I was a DJ at WEBN and the station’s latest stunt was to spoof the hot new TV show, Survivor. Instead of stranding contestants on a desert island, we forced three people to live for a week inside a dumpster. They had to endure several gross hardships, including being fed increasingly disgusting meals: uncooked scraps, fried insects, etc. And then, after warning our victims that their next meal would be something beyond anything they’d yet endured, we handed them a three-course feast from Maisonette. Thanks, Nat.
Would that moment make it onto a list of Maisonette’s 50 most interesting memories? No, not even close.
Nat grew up hearing his parents and grandparents tell amazing stories starring some of the world’s most famous and powerful people. Dining at Cincinnati’s celebrated Maisonette was simply a given for anyone of note who visited here or anyone of note who lived here or anyone at all who could afford to celebrate a special occasion by sharing the same luxurious space, exquisite food, and indulgent service that the 1 Percenters take for granted.
As inheritor of Maisonette and its prestigious legend, Nat eventually got to host some of those great stories himself. But on this heartbreaking night in 2005, all the legends and stories were gone. He had to find a job, fast.
“The guy who owned The Phoenix said I could work the door there until Christmas, which was generous,” he says. “But every day people would say, What the hell are you doing here? It was horribly depressing, and then a buddy told me you have to choose: You can save your ass or your pride.”
In the 20 years since that body blow, Nat has gone from absolute zero to a successful real estate career. Oh, what a deceptively breezy statement that is. How it glosses over so much between then and now. He wasn’t the least bit confident about making such a move. He had no experience in the world of real estate, but someone who did said to him, Nat, you know everybody! And they’re constantly buying and selling some very nice homes.
The pep talk had three immediate results: One, it gave Nat the confidence to take the leap of getting a real estate license; two, it quickly became apparent that the everybody he knew already had solid relationships with real estate agents; and three, that fact didn’t stop him from plugging away and making his new career start to work.
A fourth thing happened along the way. Despite Maisonette having handed over its inventory to an auctioneer, Nat still owned the restaurant’s library of world-famous recipes. He began sending out one recipe per month—like a one-page-at-a-time cookbook—to his e-mail list of, well, everybody. He started with that famous chocolate mousse. Some readers out there can taste it right now, I’m sure.
“I told them to forward the recipe to friends and family,” says Nat. “And each one contains a little section where you can see my current house listings. I get about a deal a month out of a piece of chicken. How fun is that?”
His e-mail list now numbers about 20,000 people.
The skills and intuitions Nat learned at Maisonette turned out to mesh surprisingly well with his new life. He’d been taught early in life that people entering a Comisar restaurant were not customers but honored guests being welcomed inside Maisonette’s “little house” (the French translation).
Nat carried that philosophy over into real estate. “There’s a big difference between selling something and caring for somebody,” he says. “Part of caring for somebody is relieving the burden of making decisions. And so Here is the best wine to go with your menu choice has become Here are the best properties I’ve found for you. Instead of just scrolling and bookmarking properties for clients, I phone each Realtor about each property.
“I’ve now started a relationship that could make them a hero, and it makes them more likely to pay attention to my listings. Agents read and write dozens of e-mails a day, but I do what I did for 33 years: I talk to people.”
This is a good place to mention that Nat Comisar also sings to people. As far back as the old country, there’s hardly ever been a Comisar not singing and/or playing and/or dancing at home and on stages. I would submit that the professional joie de vivre Cincinnati enjoyed for so long at Maisonette arose from this innate Comisar love for music and harmony.
Music can simultaneously excite and soothe you. Composers arrange sequences, separate and combined, intending to trigger certain emotions. Music delivers structured perfection and passionate abandon at the same time, and the result can be indescribably joyous. Did I not just describe the experience of an evening at Maisonette?
Nat has been a member of jazz vocal groups and barbershop quartets since adolescence. His most visible gig today is with the NO PROMISES Vocal Band, an a cappella jazz ensemble that often stretches well beyond jazz.
NO PROMISES performs regularly around town and on the road, and they have some CDs and online videos you should check out. These guys are really good.
Nat might not come right out and say that singing literally saved his life, so I will. The worst of all those Comisar lightning-strike catastrophes came in 2018, when his son died by suicide.
“We were working on a NO PROMISES album at the time, which kept me going,” he says about those dark days. “All my other commitments were handled by others, but I kept on rehearsing and recording. It allowed me to stay sane. I asked the guys if they would sing with me at the memorial, and they didn’t hesitate.”
All those motivational posters with beautiful fonts come to mind: When you’re going through hell, keep going. It matters not how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. Fall seven times; stand up eight. One day at a time. That last one is associated with the place where Nat and I first met long ago.
Our professional lives haven’t crossed paths much, but some of our other lives have, including our near-spiritual reverence for music. Nat stays on pitch better than I do. I remember which bands recorded on which labels better than he does.
We can both visit the American Sign Museum and see Maisonette’s elegant circular entrance awning, retrieving our own memories from it. Nat has more memories than I do, no doubt, and they’re certainly a rich combination of both highs and lows. Kind of like music.
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