2nd course for Gray-Don feud
KEEP slinging the sauce, boys!
Donald Trump and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter are trashing each other over their shortcomings as restaurateurs — and the food feud’s the jolliest holiday-season spectacle in town.
The culinary combatants on Thursday managed to make us forget about Russian hacking. After Vanity Fair posted a vicious “review” of Trump Grill at Trump Tower, saying it “could be the worst restaurant in America,” The Donald tweeted in kind: “Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!”
The mutual non-admiration society dates back to 1988, when Carter’s now-long-defunct Spy magazine ridiculed Trump as the “short-fingered vulgarian” — a line with which Carter again tormented the president-elect in a recent Editor’s Letter.
Their mutual bitching really came to a boil in 2006 when Carter opened the Waverly Inn downtown. Whenever Vanity Fair has taken a dig at Trump since then, Trump’s trashed the magazine as on the BRINK of collapse and the Waverly Inn as “terrible” — especially after Trump took to Twitter in 2009.
But Carter should be the last guy to complain about bad food. Although Waverly Inn is still open after dumping early stinkers like $55 macand-cheese with a few molecules of truffles, Carter unloaded his Beatrice Inn this year after a disastrous procession of revolving-door chefs and a zero-star New York Times review.
Meanwhile, Carter’s Monkey Bar in Midtown has quietly been shopped around to other restaurateurs. Not even Carter seems to love the place much: Before Condé Nast moved downtown, he was more often seen lunching at the Lambs Club nearby than at Monkey Bar a few blocks more distant.
Vanity Fair snarks that tacky Trump Grill is designed for “the hooded masses to visit once and never return.” But I’ll take open-toall seating over the velvet rope-like attitude of Carter’s joints, where celebrities and Friends of Graydon are welcomed but others might be chopped liver.
Waverly Inn didn’t even have a phone number at first, and when Beatrice Inn opened, I noted, “A recording in a weird accent steers you to an e-mail address too unintelligible to discern.” That’s one way to build a wall! But at least Carter has a sense of humor about it. The Waverly Inn’s menu sports an odd endorsement on top: “Worst Food in City — Donald Trump.”
So far as is known, business hasn’t suffered.