Each June, as the Tribeca Film Festival draws a slice of Hollywood to downtown Manhattan, Chanel hosts its swanky artists dinner to mark the occasion. For the last decade or so, it’s been held at Balthazar, the cavernous celeb-fave joint a neighborhood or two north in Soho. But in what amounted to a big old realignment for an extremely small Venn diagram of the film, fashion, and art establishments, this year’s dinner returned Monday night to its former home at the Odeon, the bistro that for four decades has occupied a prime perch of West Broadway. This is key, as the Tribeca Festival dinner was once again actually in Tribeca, the neighborhood that Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal were seeking to revitalize post 9/11 when they founded the festival in 2002.

De Niro’s ties to the Triangle Below Canal run deep. He first visited the neighborhood in the late 1940s, venturing down from the Bleecker Street apartment where his artist parents, friends with Jack Kerouac and Jackson Pollock, had a loft. The Lower West Side was all industrial then, and the Odeon was the Towers Cafeteria, serving lunch to factory workers. The original terrazzo floor from the Towers Cafeteria remains as an unforgettable Odeon feature, and those iconic bulb lights? Those are from the Towers too.

Basically from its 1980 opening, the Odeon was an epicenter of art and movie stardom. This was in large part the doing of original owners Brian McNally, his brother, Keith McNally (who went on to open Balthazar and is best known these days for his spicy Instagram captions), and Keith’s former wife, Lynn Wagenknecht, who owns the Odeon to this day. The cast of Saturday Night Live came down from Rock Center after shows. De Niro was a fixture too, especially in his Raging Bull era, even if he had to stick to salads to shed the weight he famously put on to play Jake LaMotta.

On Monday night, the Tribeca Fest cofounder had to leave early after an hour sitting at a table with David O. Russell, Darren Aronofsky, and Jude Law. “Bob has a 5:45 call time tomorrow, because he’s still working for some reason,” Rosenthal told the crowd. Indeed, De Niro’s got a gig playing an ex-president in the upcoming Netflix conspiracy thriller Zero Days. “But he wanted to thank Chanel for the 17 years of this dinner,” Rosenthal continued.

There were a few other Tribeca locals also in attendance. At Rosenthal’s table was the artist Laurie Simmons, who lived in a former textile mill on Desbrosses Street. Ditto actor sisters Grace Gummer and Louisa Jacobson—their parents, the artist Don Gummer and actor Meryl Streep, lived for years in a former masonry warehouse on Laight Street. And there was plenty of slightly less hyperlocal star power too: Katie Holmes, Blake Lively, Dianna Agron, Hannah Einbender, and Natasha Lyonne were all there. This being an artists dinner, there were those as well: Jose Parla, Glenn Ligon, Jenny Holzer, and Debroah Kass. Curator Racquel Chevremont had selected each of them to make work paired with films in this year’s festival. “I tried to choose the artists who I feel like best befit the moment,” Chevremont said as servers plopped down steak frites.

It seems like the art folk actually like coming to this thing. At various points in the evening Colman Domingo sat chatting with Studio Museum director Thelma Golden, and Ligon sidled up to the bar next to David Harbour and Lily Allen. Anna Weyant walked by Olivia Munn and Rachel Antonoff to say hello to Dan Colen. Deborah Kass gushed to Chevremont about how she can tell her niece about hanging out with Holmes; she had just completed a Dawson’s Creek rewatch. Vito Schnabel chose Tribeca over Basel, chatting with Gus and Theo Wenner. Dustin Yellin was cracking up Colson Whitehead in a temporary, lushly astroturfed garden. Visiting Angelenos take note: that’s usually a row of subway grates. Trevor Noah, Selma Blair, and Hari Nef were all there too. (The crowd was preoccupied enough with wining and dining that nobody—well nobody at my table, at least—brought up last week's news that Chanel designer Virginie Viard was leaving the brand.)

In another nod to the art world, each year the organizers buy up a bunch of artist monographs and place one on each guest’s seat. I’d like to think there’s personal thought that goes into matching the attendee to the artist book. This year I received a copy of Julian Schnabel’s 1987 memoir CVJ: Nicknames of Maitre D's & Other Excerpts from Life, which details the artist-director’s youth in Texas and working at Max’s Kansas City. I can only describe it as precisely up my alley. But there are also stacks of books that the culturally omnivorous can snap up as they please.

“I’ll be taking that,” Jude Law said while grabbing a book about the paintings of Robert De Niro Sr., who appeared in group shows with De Kooning and Dali but felt under-appreciated during his lifetime. There was a book on Deborah Kass, so Law plucked that up as well, adding to a legitimate stack.

“It’s nice to leave a party with a library, but do I look needy?” Law said.

And while guests took their books out the door, many were not headed home. Rosenthal had arranged for a very late night viewing of De Niro Con, a celebration of all things Bob that’s taken over a floor of Spring Studios nearby. It’s open to the public through June 16. The rooms go through the actor’s entire career, ephemera filling vitrines and pictures blown up on the walls, culminating in a room where snippets from his best-known dramatic performances play on a heroic loop.

There Rosenthal led me to a secret part of the show, one for the real heads. It was a small room with one screen showing a loop of De Niro’s appearances on Saturday Night Live. There’s an old clip of him getting faux-hassled backstage, only to have Martin Scorsese and Joe Pesci come to his defense. There’s a “Weekend Update” in which De Niro shows up to confront Jimmy Fallon’s bad review of Meet the Parents and then proceeds to absolutely demolish Fallon’s attempt to do a De Niro impression. There’s a frankly kind of one-note bit in which Bobby Moynihan plays a Little Fockers fanatic who just happens to not care about De Niro. As I took it in, one guy in the room was just absolutely losing his shit over it all.

“Just really fantastic stuff,” Law said in between laughs.