The Quintessential Hostess

Lumi Hadri-Devine has created a world to her liking at Lumi, her namesake restaurant at East 70th Street and Lexington Avenue. â??I treat it like my home, she said. Fortunately, her â??home is open to others. The location scout for the film version of Sex and the City called it â??the quintessential New York restaurant. Check out the scene in which pregnant Charlotte spots Big and overturns a table. Hadri-Devine is there too, a head-turning blond at a corner table, in her cameo role as a patron. Upper East Side neighbors are devoted, repeat customers. She charmed Community Board 8's one of the toughest's and got a unanimous â??yes for sidewalk seating. Each spring she sits outside in â??my little garden, as she calls it, â??watching the world go by. From this perch, she has gotten to know her neighbors, like Zoe, an 8-year-old, who helps her decorate the restaurant at Christmas, or a woman living with celiac disease who needs a gluten-free diet's a request the chef can accommodate. Hadri-Devine left Albania in 1986, at her father"s urging, during a time of political unrest. He was killed a few months later and she did not return to her homeland for 13 years. She came here to do research at the Columbia University library (she has a master"s degree in English) but spent eight years working her way up the food chain instead, from coat check to cashier to maitre-d", under the tutelage of restaurateur Pino Luongo. Fifteen years ago, itching to â??do my own thing, she peered through a window and fell in love. â??This space just spoke to me, she said. â??I loved this townhouse setting. She and her first husband opened Lumi in 1995. A pretty spiral staircase connects the ground floor to the parlor above. Each floor has a fireplace and on one recent, chilly, wet Monday afternoon, as customers shook out their umbrellas and shed coats, they were offered a table by the fire. â??I am the only person in my family to own a business, Hadri-Devine said. She was groomed for academia. Her father, a man she reveres, was a professor of Albanian history. She describes him as a calm man with clout. One could describe her similarly; she has a soft, yet firm, hand in every aspect of the business, from the ambiance's crisp white linen and silver's to the decision to put light, healthy fare, like freshly pureed pea soup, on the Tuscan-inspired menu. Hadri-Devine lives with her second husband, Patrick, not far from the restaurant and is active in Albanian politics. Although Big, Charlotte and a stream of other boldfaced names's Brooke Shields, Chief Justice John Roberts, Gay Talese, Robert DeNiro and Judd Hirsch, to name a few's have eaten at Lumi over the years, what really turns her head are the politicians and activists who met for historic meetings on behalf of the Republic of Kosovo upstairs.