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3 unusual facts about Enrico Banducci


Enrico Banducci

Banducci operated the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, where he launched the careers of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters, and Barbra Streisand, and featured Woody Allen and Dick Cavett before they were well-known, as well as countless folk singers.

The film is intercut with reminiscences by Bill Cosby, Maya Angelou (who started at Banducci's club performing Caribbean songs and patter with a Caribbean accent) and Phyllis Diller.

In 1988, after he lost Enrico's to one of its several closures over the years, he became a hot dog vendor in Richmond, Virginia, at the "hungry i hot dog stand," located on very expensive property in the city's most upscale restaurant district that he'd purchased for his son years earlier; he moved back to San Francisco in the late 1990s.



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