Graydon, Anna, and Tina Had Their Own Booths

BACK IN THE EARLY 1990S, when magazines were fat with ads, relevance, and prestige, there was no place where the raw social power of Condé Nast’s top editors was more on display than at 44. The restaurant was housed inside an Ian Schrager hotel called the Royalton at 44 West 44th Street, just around the corner from Condé’s offices. The hotel’s interior was designed by Philippe Starck. “An early-’90s masterpiece,” remembers Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair starting in 1992.

It was run by Brian Mcnally, who had been encouraged to open it by his friend Vogue editor Anna Wintour. “She was there from day one, which, you know, certainly didn’t hurt,” Mcnally recalls. “Graydon was a good friend as well, and he came every day as soon as he took over Vanity Fair, so that starts a little bit of a thing, having those two there every day. And Tina Brown, too.” The most important thing about having lunch at 44 was where you sat. Dana Brown wrote about the status scramble in his memoir, Dilettante, beginning with how he was actually working at 44 when Carter took a shine to him and hired him at Vanity Fair. There were only four banquettes at 44; one belonged to Wintour, one to Carter, one to Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker. The remaining banquette “was left open for whatever big shot happened to be in that day—jackie O., Karl Lagerfeld,” Brown wrote. When Condé boss Si Newhouse was lunching, he bumped everyone down a banquette.

The rest of the room was defined by proximity to those tables. Gabé Doppelt, a former Condé editor, says, “Sometimes, Brian would ask, ‘Whose number is this?’” when a reservation would come in. “I would look it up in the directory, and I’d say, ‘Oh, a junior editor at Glamour,’ which basically informed him that he could put them near the kitchen.” (“We weren’t that snobbish!” insists Mcnally, laughing.)

“Inevitably,” says Doppelt, who now works for the San Vicente Bungalows, “in the middle of the morning, Brian would call me in a panic and say, ‘I only have three booths, and Anna, Calvin, Donna, and Ralph are coming. What am I going to do?!’ ”