It’s late afternoon on Restaurant Row and, in a short time, the dinner crowd will start arriving at the Broadway haunt Joe Allen, where the walls are lined with posters from Broadway flops, celebrities know they’ll feel safe and tourists know they’ll see A-listers.

Managers Kevin Skinner and Glenn English sit in the empty dining room. Skinner has been here 11 years. English, more than 25. They tell stories of Joe Allen, the man who opened this place in 1965 with an idea in mind: Serve good food at a good price, and let working actors run a tab, paying when they could.

“We like to think our standards are very high, but you can’t see it. It looks like everything’s casual,” Skinner said. “It’s all brick. It’s all failures on the walls. It’s a fun place to be, but we also take it very seriously.”

“We get very famous people in here. We want them to feel like they’re normal and like we don’t treat them any other differently than someone from across the bridge in Jersey or Queens.”

‘The Pacino light’ offers privacy

But then there’s Al Pacino.

“See that light all the way back there?” said English, pointing toward the kitchen and a back room of sorts. “That’s on a dimmer. That’s officially the Pacino light. If you run back into the kitchen, it says on the wall ‘Pacino light.’ When Pacino is sitting back there, you turn that light down so nobody can see him. So he can hide a little bit.”

Very little has changed about Joe Allen over the years, except for the addition of computers and hand-held devices to take dinner orders, a change Skinner said Allen would have hated.

“Joe hated automation,” English said. “He was a very traditional guy.”

Allen died at 87 on Feb. 7, 2021, in Hampton, New Hampshire. His daughter, Julie Lumia, now runs the place.

Finding success surrounded by Broadway flops

The posters of flops are a Joe Allen tradition, and note the passing of shows that either closed after two weeks or two acts.

“What I like to tell people, especially young people like yourself, is that what these posters represent is what you do with failure,” Skinner said. “A lot of times in life you’re gonna fail. It’s just gonna happen. And how you handle that failure is what determines where you go, who you are. You can be embarrassed about it, or you can let it build character. It’s a simple concept, but it’s difficult to pull off sometimes.”

Take the producers of the “Kelly” – a musical about a daredevil busboy and a jump from the Brooklyn Bridge. It closed after one performance.

“Two of the producers that did that show still come in here, and they always want to sit under that poster,” English said.

“Kelly” opened and closed on Feb. 6, 1965, the same year Joe Allen opened. One is long gone, except for the poster. The other shows no signs of stopping.

Part restaurant, part warm hug

Skinner said the warmth of Joe Allen has spoiled him. He couldn’t possibly work anywhere else.

“At the end of the day, we care about you,” Skinner said. “No matter who you are, you walk through that door, we care about you. And it’s just kind of how Joe curated this place. That he cared about these broke actors so much that he opened up this place to give them a place to eat.”

“You can feel the love here,” English said.

For its loyal regulars – and those A-listers – there’s nowhere but Joe Allen.

Did you know?

In 1983, Joe Allen opened the more elegant Orso next door, where “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels is a regular. In 2005, Allen opened Bar Centrale, a throwback bar with small-plate offerings, up one brownstone flight between Orso and Joe Allen. There’s no sign. Manager Glenn English said each spot has its regulars, who don’t generally show up at the other restaurants. At Joe Allen: Al Pacino, Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig. At Orso: Lorne Michaels, Barbra Streisand.

Dasiel DeJesus is a senior at United Charter High School for the Humanities in the Bronx.