John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
The breakfast room at the Loews Regency Hotel, featuring $24 omelets, $8 coffee and power brokers.
The breakfast room at the Loews Regency Hotel has long been a favorite forum for New York's political elite. But is that daily gathering of power brokers over $24 omelets and $8 coffees a movable feast?
Jonathan M. Tisch, the chairman of Loews Hotels, hopes it is. But the Rev. Al Sharpton, for one, is skeptical.
Mr. Sharpton is a longtime regular at the Regency, which calls itself the undisputed home of the power breakfast. He said the news that the hotel, at Park Avenue and 61st Street, will close Jan. 1 for a wholesale renovation that could last a full year left him feeling "very disappointed" and displaced.
Where else, he asked, would a United States senator like Barbara Boxer stop by his table in a jogging suit, without makeup, to harangue him about what to discuss on his talk show on MSNBC? Where else, he said, would Shimon Peres, the president of Israel, cross the room to embrace him?
But most important, Mr. Sharpton wanted to know, how will political insiders handicap the 2013 mayoral race without being able to see who is sitting with whom at the Regency?
He recalled how diners glanced over to monitor Andrew M. Cuomo's dining companions when he was running for governor in 2010. Without those visual aids, he said, "we're going to have to do a lot more intelligence gathering" to size up the race for mayor.
Mr. Tisch said Monday that he understood what an important place the Regency held in the life of the city. After all, he credits his father, Preston Robert Tisch, with coining the term "power breakfast" to describe the morning meetings of city and state officials and business and labor leaders to try to solve the city's financial problems in the mid-1970s.
Since then, the moving and shaking there has involved lobbyists of all stripes amid a spectrum of big personalities, including Percy E. Sutton, the former Manhattan borough president; George Steinbrenner, the late owner of the Yankees; and Larry King, the veteran talk-show host.
John LoCicero, a lobbyist who meets clients and friends there for breakfast about once a month, said the primary draw was the ability to see important people and be seen by them.
"If you're running for office and you want to meet money people, that's a great place to go," he said. As for the high-priced eggs and cereals, he added, "If they're worrying about the food or the price, go someplace else."
Still, Mr. Tisch said, the time has come for a top-to-bottom refurbishing of the hotel so that it will be more inviting by the time the 2014 Super Bowl is held at MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands. The stadium is home to the New York Giants, the football team his family owns with the Mara family.
That work will require closing all parts of the hotel, including the dining areas and the nightclub run by Michael Feinstein. Mr. Feinstein has said he plans to move his operation next year. In all, 350 jobs in the hotel will be lost, and talks are continuing with unions as to whether the workers will be rehired.
In the meantime, Mr. Tisch plans to try to coax the breakfast club to decamp to a restaurant in the neighborhood that he declined to identify. He said he was close to working out the details for what he called a "pop-up power breakfast" location but had not broached the idea with even his most loyal customers.
"Our regulars are family," Mr. Tisch said. "They have been coming here for so many years." As soon as he is ready to divulge the interim plan, he said, "I will explain it as I walk around the room, as I do on most mornings."
But Mr. Sharpton said he was not sure whether the scene would survive that long an absence from its familiar surroundings. The closing might just cause the regulars to scatter to other established breakfast spots across the city, he said.
"Usually people that consider themselves to be people of power don't take kindly to being displaced," Mr. Sharpton said. "All my life, I've fought for the 99 percent, but I guess this time I will have to fight for the 1 percent to have a place to have breakfast."
By PATRICK McGEEHAN 18 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/nyregion/manhattan-power-breakfast-crisis-regency-will-close.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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