“I said, ‘Ken, we want to make it glamorous,’” Starr told me. “We want to make this the place where people go to be seen to have power lunches and power dinners. Intrigue, CIA affairs with a Russian spy—this is the narrative. This is the place.”
Or, there’s a chance things will all go back to the way they were during the first Trump term: the president dining every night in a hotel that bears his name, the US government putting up Secret Service agents in the suites alongside foreign dignitaries. We’ll all once again need intro-level courses on the emoluments clause. Last Friday, Eric Trump called up the New York Post and delivered a bombshell: The Trump Organization was looking into a way in which it could get its hotel back.
“Our family has saved the hotel once. If asked, we would save it again,” he told the paper.
Sources for the tabloid stressed that there hasn’t been any negotiations as of yet, but the Waldorf is primed for a takeover. The Trump Organization sold its lease in 2022 for $375 million, making $100 million in profit. Since then, it’s already exchanged hands. After failing to make payments on its $285 million loan, the original buyer of the hotel—an investor consortium backed by Alex Rodriguez, among others—got stripped of the asset, and it was bought at a foreclosure auction for $100 million by the bank BDT & MSD Partners, co-led by former Goldman Sachs hitter Byron Trott, who merged his company with the firm that functioned as Michael Dell’s family office. Seems like a deal is in the air.
If the Trump family does make an improbable return to the DC hospitality scene, it’s unclear what that means for Andrés, whose recent opening in the hotel was supposed to have capped a nine-year odyssey. After first announcing the space in 2014, Andrés told The Washington Post in July 2015 that the project was “impossible” after Trump’s rhetoric about Mexican immigrants early in the 2016 campaign. The Trump family sued the chef for $10 million. Andrés’s company countersued, and the case was settled in 2017.
While Trump’s name was physically removed from the premises, to my eyes on a recent visit, the place, with its vast marble lobby, still had a tinge of Trump gaudiness. Above the restaurant’s balcony, the Robert Irwin installation 48 Shadow Planes was still hanging in the center of the room, more than 40 years after it was installed. (Irwin, who passed away last year, once told me that “it’s a hell of a good piece, and it will live on—it will outlive Trump’s reign. I don’t know if I’m going to make it back, but it’ll be there after I’m done—and after he’s done.”) The food at The Bazaar was great—Maryland blue crab was featured in not one, not two, but five different tapas—but the vibe was a bit off, with fork taps echoing through a half-empty gigantic hotel lobby that still had a whiff of the 45th presidency to it.
That was not the case during dinner at Minetta Tavern on Thursday evening. A native New Yorker, who had been to the one in Manhattan weeks before, remarked that it was an uncanny replica of the original, but filled to the brim with DC folk. This is what I had been hoping for: the instruments of the Washington machine settling into plush booths with rounds of holiday cocktails, congressional staffers celebrating with their bosses that they’d snagged a clutch DC res in the days before said bosses had to return to their constituents in, say, Ohio or Arkansas or Arizona.
But in the hours before my reservation, I came to the sad realization that it was deeply unlikely that I’d be crammed in next to a congressman. Trump’s DC had poked its head out early, with a vengeance. Elon Musk had spent Wednesday bashing the 1,500-page bipartisan spending bill set to fund the government through mid-March 2025, and the president-elect had later expressed support for torpedoing it in favor of a bill that would suspend the debt ceiling—a complete nonstarter, leaving Speaker Mike Johnson with the unenviable Scrooge position of leading the country into a government shutdown days before Christmas. Johnson had introduced a last-second bill—which Democrats would ultimately, gleefully doom to failure with the help of hard-right Republicans—and it was set to hit the floor late Thursday night. Any House member with a Minetta reservation would have to order takeout to Capitol Hill instead.
Still, there were trays of martinis floating through the room, Sinatra blasting out of the speakers, and dry-aged côte de boeuf going to nearly every table.
After dinner we decamped upstairs, where behind actual velvet curtains was the Lucy Mercer Bar, a Victorian-bordello-esque lounge concept unique to the DC Minetta chockablock with old paintings and funky lamps. Photos are strictly forbidden; nobody could snap a photo of McNally himself sitting in the corner, personally DJ’ing: David Bowie, Elton John, Taylor Swift.
“It took me three years to build this place, and it’s perfect,” McNally said, looking out wistfully into the crowd.
And then, while taking my seat with a cocktail, an honest-to-God Christmas miracle. As McNally amped up the volume of “All Too Well,” a real-life Democratic congressman sat down next to me, fresh off voting no on Johnson’s bill. He tucked into a cocktail, staff surrounding him, looking triumphant, unwilling to let his Minetta Tavern plans go to waste just because of some chicanery on the Hill.
McNally’s right. It’s perfect.
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…It may not surprise you that Tom Hanks—Oscar winner, best-selling novelist, America’s dad—is an avid collector of historic typewriters. He’s amassed a trove of more than 300 of them, and also has a habit of surprising small businesses with a typewriter if he feels they deserve one. “They’re just showing up on doorsteps unannounced,” Tom Furrier, owner of Cambridge Typewriter, said of the unprompted gifting of typewriters. To get a peek into this odd but endearing quirk of an extremely famous person, Sag Harbor’s The Church—the wonderful art concern started by artist couple Eric Fischl and April Gornik and run by Sheri Pasquarella—is opening a show next month called “Some of Tom’s Typewriters,” which will feature 35 of the typewriters, handpicked by Simon Doonan. And why not! “After all, the soundtrack of the 20th century is the magical clacking and pinging of a typewriter. Clack, clack, clack…ping!” Doonan said in a statement.