Star status in world's most eccentric restaurant Nello Balan in front of his restaurant. Picture: Corbis Source: Corbis NEXT to the bar at Nello on Madison Avenue is a collage of pictures, where the faces of New York celebrities accumulate like sediment. New layers of star are laid down with every passing year: after a while, unless you are royalty - the king of Saudi Arabia, say - or a Hollywood star such as Dustin Hoffman or Denise Richards, you are liable to find yourself buried beneath Jay-Z or Lady Gaga. Former British prime minister John Major, for instance, is obscured by a more recent British visitor. "Oh, he got covered by Naomi Campbell," says Nello Balan, chef, restaurateur, bon viveur and, he claims, descendant of the 15th-century warrior prince, Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula. For 22 years Balan has ruled a small celebrity-filled realm on the Upper East Side, charging $US250 ($277) for pasta with truffles and garnishing the gossip column of the New York Post with shavings of high society tittle tattle. Now the show is coming to London with Balan opening a restaurant in Mayfair. Throughout his life, he says, he has tried "to emulate the journey of my hero, Lord Byron. My order was reversed, therefore I am ending up in London. We sit at a round table in the middle of Nello, a light, breezy place that opens up on to the street to display the diners to passers-by. Balan wears a pink shirt made by the Savile Row tailor Alan Bennett and jeans "by my friend Stefano Gabbana." His friend George Nicholas, the restaurant's general manager, is there to assist, like a balladeer, in recounting the legend of Balan's life. Occasionally he seems more familiar with the details than Balan himself. Balan says that he was born in northeastern Romania, though he won't reveal when. "I am a vampire," he says later. We don't age. He will allow that he is in his fifties and describes an aristocratic upbringing near Sibiu in the mountains of Transylvania: "The land's been in the family for over 700 years." It is through his mother, Lucille Geta, that he claims to be directly descended from Vlad the Impaler, who fought against the advancing armies of the Ottoman Empire and was shown in woodcuts eating dinner amid a forest of pointy stakes strewn with his enemies' impaled bodies. Charging $US250 for truffle pasta seems a petty crime in comparison. Can he prove his link? "I have certain documents," he says, promising to send them to me. Balan says that his family shielded him and his two siblings from the upheavals of the communist era. When he was 16, "my grandfather, through his connections, was able to enable me to leave." After school in Lugano, Switzerland, he travelled the world, funding his adventures with restaurant work. He wanted to be an archaeologist. "But you can't make money from that," he says, "unless you discover, I don't know, maybe Genghis Khan's tomb." After Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979, he took a bus from Tel Aviv to Cairo. "He spent some time with the Bedouins," Nicholas chimes in. He also visited Santa Katarina, the Greek orthodox monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. Looking up at the stars, under the mountain where Moses received his Commandments, Balan received the intuition that "I must go to New York" to open a restaurant. He was in his late twenties when he arrived in Manhattan and the bar of Le Cirque, a famous French restaurant. Nicholas, then a journalist for a Greek newspaper, worked there part-time. "Nello was like a Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page kind of guy," Nicholas says. Wandering up Madison Avenue one day, Balan saw Robert De Niro eating lunch with dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. "I thought, this is a great street," he says and, after persuading a landlord to let him take over the lease of a struggling coffee shop, soon had his eponymous restaurant. A KEY to Nello's early success was that it remained open at a time when most places closed from 2.30pm to 6pm. "Rod Stewart would land at 4pm," Nicholas says. Where does he go to eat? Nello. Madison Avenue also attracted rich shoppers. "If you have the money to buy the $10,000 bags ... you don't shop in the morning," Balan says. You're also unlikely to quibble over a few hundred dollars for truffle pasta, though there has been the occasional howl of astonishment. Balan says that the price fluctuates with the seasonal market for truffles. Russian billionaires who patronise Nello are less likely to complain, although a spokesman for Roman Abramovich once contested a $52,000 bill, a story that made its way to the celebrity website, TMZ. "We have people spending much more than that," Balan says, adding that he is "not claiming that Mr Abramovich spent whatever amount you say. It's unfortunate what happened. A waiter was fired, he had been taking the cheques and giving them to the media. Reviewers often argued that the prices were really beside the point. You went for the social theatre; it was fast becoming a fixture on the New York celebrity scene as portrayed on Richard Johnson's Page Six, the gossip column of the New York Post. Balan points out a photograph of a very young Charlize Theron. She used to hang out here. I said, 'Richard, there's this new actress and model'. He wrote about her as the new kid on the block. In 2007 the New York Post acknowledged that Johnson had accepted a gift of $1000 from Balan a decade earlier. Balan says it was a misunderstanding. "Every Christmas, I buy gifts for my friends," he says. I don't want to be like Mr Scrooge. I was in Aspen, skiing, so I told my manager to take $1000, something like that, go to Hermes, buy the ties and things, go to the New York Post, go here, go there, give everybody. So he misunderstood me ... he was a very nice guy but he was afraid that maybe (Johnson) doesn't like the colour ... so he decides: 'Why don't I just give him the money?' So I thought he had brought gifts and everyone's happy. Later it's this big scandal. There were other scandals too. In 2006 he was arrested for assaulting his then girlfriend. He pleaded guilty to attempted assault and agreed to attend classes on domestic abuse. Then there was the umbrella. In 2008 he launched a $US1 million suit against Nathaniel Rothschild and the model Le Call over a Jean Paul Gaultier leather umbrella he lent to the couple, only for Rothschild's chauffeur to return it in pieces. "It had sentimental value," Nicholas says. He walked with some special ladies under this umbrella. Balan says he and Nicholas were eating lunch with a lawyer when the pieces were delivered. "I wasn't going to do anything," Balan says. I said, 'It's amazing, if somebody do a good deed look what happens'. The lawyer said, 'Wow, we have to sue'. And so they did. For $US1 million. This was later reduced to $US30,000. A judge eventually dismissed the claim as "frivolous" and declared that the brolly was worth no more than $US5000, making it a matter for the small claims courts. He agrees to pose beneath the umbrella for a photograph, but insists on wearing an enormous pair of blue-tinted glasses, lowered like a visor. For all his big public gestures he often presents a guarded front, particularly when talking about life before New York. You begin to wonder about his aristocratic upbringing and lineage, and think he might be yet another Gatsby-ish figure who came to the city and made good. After our interview I consult a couple of historians, who prove sceptical of his claim to be related to Vlad the Impaler. Irina Livezeanu, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, notes that Dracula is possibly the only Romanian with worldwide recognition. "I think that a person such as Nello Balan ... probably wants to capitalise on one of the few Romanian things that people have heard about," she says. Or maybe he really is related. I'd like to be able to show her the documents that prove it, but they have not yet arrived. He's been rather busy preparing for his London opening, but he'll surely get round to sending them to me soon. He'll send them along, no doubt, just as soon as he has finished straightening out his collage so that Naomi Campbell's photograph no longer obscures John Major's head. SOME of Australia's high-profile restaurateurs through the decades: Gloria Staley (1920-2010): Hailed as Melbourne's doyenne of fine dining and gracious hospitality, Staley presided over French restaurant Fanny's for 33 years (1960-1993). Intuitive and attuned to contemporary trends, Staley introduced seasonal menus and ran a wine bar and bistro downstairs. In 1973, she opened Glo Glo's in Toorak and, in 1985, Chez Oz in Sydney. Not so much a restaurant as an institution, Beppi's opened its doors in 1956 and has not moved or changed hands since, thanks to the consistency and dedication of its 87-year-old owner, Beppi Polese. He still drops into his East Sydney establishment frequently, along with his wife Norma, greeting patrons at their table and proudly recounting its history. Over the years its cloistered rooms attracted business executives with a desire for privacy, including Frank Packer, his son Kerry and grandson James, as well as two generations of the Murdochs, to sample the signature angel-hair pasta and vitello tonnato in this traditional trattoria. Mietta O'Donnell (1950-2001): The original Mietta's opened in Fitzroy in 1974 before moving to the grand site in Alfred Place, Melbourne, in 1985. Under chef Jacques Reymond, the upstairs dining room became firmly French; downstairs was a Parisian-style salon and hub for artists and intellectuals. It closed in 1996. Hong Kong-born Gilbert Lau opened The Flower Drum in Melbourne in 1975 and built it into the country's leading Chinese restaurant. With his passionate focus on high-quality ingredients - when other restaurants were serving skirt steak, Lau's was sourcing eye fillet - and his one-on-one engagement with diners about the menu, he redefined our notion of hospitality. Hastings Street, Noosa, restaurants come and go, but the chic Berardo's has maintained its place at the top of the strip for nearly 15 years. Jim Berardo also owns, with partner Greg O'Brien, the casual Berardo's on the Beach, but is best known beyond the resort town as the mastermind behind the annual Noosa International Food & Wine Festival. For three decades, Paul Lynch ran his clubby, decadent restaurant Lynch's, in South Yarra, like a personal fiefdom, pampering the rich, famous and old-school-tie brigade. The Frenchish food was fine, but the bordello-like atmosphere was the thing. Lynch retired in 2007 and the restaurant was sold. Rinaldo (Ronnie) di Stasio opened his eponymous Cafe in 1988 in the then unlikely strip of Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, where it still reigns today as Melbourne's definitive, and most desirable, Italian restaurant. Di Stasio's prescience is matched by his obsessive focus on the core business: he has never wanted to open a second restaurant. Bar di Stasio, steeped in the culture of the mothership, opened next door late last year. Lucio Galletto had a vision to serve Sydney refined but hearty versions of Italian peasant dishes he had eaten in the restaurants in his home province of Liguria. Thirty years ago he saw his chance, taking over a French restaurant in Sydney's Paddington with his wife Sally. Lucio's opened in 1983 and has been a favoured venue of the powerful and discerning ever since. Its tagliolini alla granseola (green noodles with blue swimmer crab) has been on the menu since day one.