Around the World in 80 Days Part III: Depart New York City

By Temple Ligon
January 31, 2014

 
After drinks for three the day before at Bemelmans Bar next to the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel, what the Wall Street Journal recently called the world’s most glamorous hotel, and after dinner for five that night at the Four Seasons Restaurant, Passepartout and I agreed we might as well blow it out for both breakfast and lunch on our day of departure in our Queens Grill Penthouse Suite aboard Cunard’s Queen Victoria for England.
 
For breakfast at seven, which was our earliest opportunity, we chose Loews Regency Hotel at the corner of 61st and Park and its main dining room, now called the Regency Bar and Grill. We were having breakfast there on Friday morning, March 16, 2012, but in the time since the Loews people have pumped $100 million into a new finishes, fixtures and furnishings package, completely renovating the world’s most powerful power breakfast venue. Just this past January 16 the New York press was occupied in covering the restaurant’s invite-only power breakfast to reopen the place. Where Passepartout and I sat two years ago was where former NYC Mayor David Dinkins and his son sat for the reopening across the room from NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. Spike Lee and Al Sharpton were at their own table facing Anna Maria Chavez, CEO of Girl Scouts USA. And so it went through the private sector and the people representing the shareholder-owned properties, too.
 
And so it went similarly for me and Passepartout at our inaugural breakfast at Loews. We had our reservation more than a week in advance, so there was plenty of time to Google our collective checkered pasts. Somehow we came across as curiously interesting and readily acceptable because we were put at the first table closest to the receptionist’s desk. In other words, Passpartout and I were the first two to be seen for anybody being led to a table. We were not relegated to the rear reaches off the right, and we were not banished to what we called Siberia off to the left. We were at the turning point. I guess Passepartout dressed the part to make the correct impression for us and for the restaurant.
 
The division of the patrons was almost hilarious and altogether too obvious. The crowd led to right and out of sight were certainly still presentable and seen by everybody as they negotiated through the gauntlet of tables. And to me they appeared to understand the unwritten dress code. But somehow they didn’t look the part. They missed the cut. On the other hand, they might well have been the quiet upper crust who didn’t want to be seen once they sat for breakfast.
 
Then there was Siberia, well off to the left and seen only by the Siberians, no other patrons.
 
And there we were, Passepartout and I, sitting at the turning point and ranking the arrivistes and agreeing for the most part with Ms. Wynn. Leigh Wynn has been running the place for what must be more than 20 years, and it has been her keen eye and wit and understanding of the pecking order that makes the place.
 
Now all this is pretentious as all hell, I know, but it’s also more fun than you can imagine. Go ahead. Call at least one week ahead for a 7:00 breakfast, chat it up with Ms. Wynn, make sure she knows you’re from South Carolina, and see where she puts you.
 
When in doubt, pig out. That must have been our guiding principle because we knew we were headed that afternoon to start eight days in one of the world’s great dining experiences, Cunard’s Queens Grill, and we still wanted to take in one more tour of another player on the power scale in New York City lunch operations. This time our eatery advisor was William F. Buckley Jr. He died several years ago, 2008 I think, but an article by him on his favorite New York restaurant still directed me for a power lunch place on a par with the Grill Room at the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building. We went to San Pietro on 54th between Madison and 5th.
 
In the cab between the Carlyle and San Pietro, I was telling Passepartout all about what I read by Buckley about the place, presumably placed at the top since it began in 1990. But Passepartout was on the lookout for Bill Clinton or Henry Kissinger or some other comparably respected luminary famous as a loyal regular.
 
The loyalty comes partly from the genuineness of the fare. San Pietro imports 85% of its food ingredients from Southern Italy. According to some of its press, San Pietro is “…the best and most authentic Italian restaurant outside of Italy.” Its dishes are the American branch of Southern Italy’s Amalfi Coast, places like Campania, Sicilla, Sardinia, and Puglia, to cite a few. And there’s no trendy fusion, no confusing mix with another culture. This is it – the real deal.
 
Being on vacation, Passepartout and I asked for the wine list, an impressive listing of what must be a global bank of southern Italian wines.
 
For take-out and I gather for mail-order, the restaurant’s owner, Mr. Bruno, offers his Famiglia Bruno Extra Virgin Olive Oil. It’s from Campania with a pure light taste and 0% acidity. You can run it down on San Pietro’s website and order 12 bottles for $240, just to share one of the chef’s secrets on how to run “the best and most authentic Italian restaurant outside of Italy.”
 
After our Southern Italian lunch and dessert and espresso, we were ready to take a cab to board the Queen Victoria on the west side of Manhattan. Neither Passepartout nor I had ever been on a luxury cruise liner and it showed. We were a couple of kids out to see this thing, the whole thing. Just finding our suite was fun. Once we had taken charge of our home base, we took a map of the ship and went exploring, just enough to get a feel for how damn big this boat was. We were among thousands of passengers helped by thousands of staff.
 
Our immediate staff was our butler who introduced and located himself when I asked about his origins. He was from southern India, and as I had always understood it, Madras and parts south are more civilized with a higher order of hygiene than India above Mumbai, before 1995 what we called Bombay.
 
He came across as a little too correct – stuffy, I should say. Well, hell, that was OK. We were paying for the show, and our butler was part of the show.
 
Since I paid for less than 200 square feet and ended up with almost 700 square feet – that’s two or three free upgrades – I couldn’t quite believe our roominess inside and the expansiveness of our deck outside. Not big enough to work as a tennis backboard, but almost.
 
For our 5:00 p.m. departure, the crowd with little or no deck attended a ship’s party of some kind as the Queen Victoria pulled out from its dock. We stayed on our deck to watch the water below and the spire of the Empire State Building above as the Queen Victoria backed into the Hudson, reversed propellers and sailed through New York Harbor between the tip of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. We were on the Statue of Liberty side. It was about then, about the time we were under the narrows bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn – where the NYC Marathon begins – that I declared it aperitif time. Our butler left us with a liter and a half of Beefeaters, and two or three ounces each was what we needed to savor the moment.

(To be continued…)

Reach Temple at – [email protected]

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