American Psycho | Jazz Bistro — The Lunch Where a Detective Asks About Paul Allen

Detective Donald Kimball takes Bateman to lunch, orders nothing memorable, and asks a series of very quiet questions about a missing colleague. In the film the restaurant is Smith & Wollensky. In life it is 251 Victoria Street, Toronto, and in 1999 it was the Savoy, the ground-floor dining room beneath one of the best jazz rooms the city ever had.

The address has a long memory. Robert Angeloff opened the Busy Bee Diner here in 1929. George Nicolau bought it in 1948, remodelled it and renamed it the Senator. Bob Sniderman — son of Sam the Record Man, whose shop stood a short walk away on Yonge — took it over in 1984, added the Senator Steakhouse next door in 1989, and in June 1990 opened Top o' the Senator upstairs with Sybil Walker running the room. Both closed in March 2005, five years after the crew packed up.

It stayed shut for eight years. The Jazz Bistro opened in the same space in April 2013, Colin and Joan Hunter behind it, Sybil Walker brought back to manage. There is a red piano on the stage and live music most nights of the week.

Take a table on the main floor rather than up by the band, order lunch, and sit with your back to the room the way Bateman does. The scene works because nobody in it is listening properly. The room still lets you do that.