THE MOGULS WHO FELLED THE PLAZA'S MIGHTY OAK
How $cams & drug bust shuttered a fabled tavern
IF you miss The Plaza hotel’s fabled Oak Room and Oak Bar, you’d better get used to seeing them only in movies. The elegantly paneled, German Renaissance Revival-style dining and wining venues were where Cary Grant was kidnapped in “North by Northwest.” They made romantic backdrops in “Arthur” and “Scent of a Woman” and brought a touch of class to TV’s “Gossip Girl.”
But the long-shuttered Oaks, cherished postcard icons of Neww York City, might never again be open to the public — or at least not for years.
A sign on the Oak Bar’s Central Park South windows proudly reads, “Since 1907.” But the bar and the Oak Room have been closed since 2011, except for private events.
While Plaza muse Eloise might weep, real-world foodies are enraged: “Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves,” fumed Lockhart Steele, founder of the blog site Eater.
Saudi Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal, who owns 25 percent of the hotel, is said to be seething.
“It’s an embarrassment to the prince’s company, Kingdom Holdings, and it pulls down the Plaza’s value,” a hotel-industry expert said.
THE Plaza’s embattled majority owners, India’s Sahara Group, recently fired celebrity TV and Lambs Club chef Geoffrey Zakarian, whom they had brought on board to relaunch the mighty Oaks. They no longer needed him since a couple of old restaurants are the last thing on their minds.
Few who pass through The Plaza’s grand Fifth Avenue entrance — or sip $24 cocktails in the garish, mezzanine-level Rose Club — know of the sleaze behind the gilded facade.
Of the three tycoons who hold the keys to the Oak Room and Oak Bar, one spent most of the past two years behind bars and the other two narrowly escaped their own prison terms.
Plaza owner Subrata Roy, the multibillionaire head of India’s octopus-like Sahara Group — which owns real estate, TV stations, a movie channel, newspapers and even a Formula One team — was locked up for two years in connection with a massive fraud case. He was just paroled but will be jailed again if he doesn’t soon repay investors $46 million.
Sant Singh Chatwal’s Manhattan-based Dream Hotel Group, which owns or operates dozens of hotels under brand names including Dream and Time — and plans to soon open more in the US and the Mideast — is in charge of The Plaza’s food-andbeverage operation.
But Chatwal, a Clinton Foundation trustee and a close pal of Bill and Hillary Clinton, has been distracted: He pleaded guilty to illegal campaign contributions but somehow avoided a jail term.
One of Chatwal’s sons, party animal Vikram Chatwal, who founded Dream’s “Lifestyle Division,” also dodged jail time after he was busted for drugs. Two weeks later, volatile Vikram, a Lindsay Lohan pal who has dated Kate Moss and Gisele Bundchen, was booted from a restaurant in the Dream Downtown hotel for throwing a tantrum.
Page Six reported in April 2013 that he “jumped up and started screaming” at a table full of bankers, yelling, “I own this place! I want them thrown out.”
In fact, he didn’t own it: The Chatwals sold the Dream Downtown to Roy’s Sahara Group the year before.
Zakarian recently sued Sahara for dumping him without paying a required termination fee. In the suit, which was later settled, the popular chef revealed that Sahara had decided “to abandon or at least shelve plans for the Oak Room.”
THE Oaks long held a storied place in the city’s celebration fabric.
Gore Vidal and Truman Capote lunched there weekly in the 1960s, as described in Gerald Clarke’s biography “Capote.” “They nibbled at their friends during the first course, devoured their enemies during the second, and savored their own glorious futures over coffee and dessert,” Clark wrote.
In 1980, customers might spot “a few luminaries like Liza Minnelli or Harry Reasoner,” New York magazine said, and, “You have to pay $4.05 a drink for the privilege, but the peanuts and pretzels are plentiful and free.”
The Oaks’ tumble from glory started in 2004, when Israeli realestate company Elad bought The Plaza for $675 million. Elad’s chief, blustering megabillionaire Yitzhak Tshuva, is so coarse that an Israeli-born real-estate executive in New York cackled, “You can’t take him to a meeting, even in Israel.”
Tshuva successfully converted most of the former 800-room hotel to condos. But shortly before Elad reopened The Plaza in March 2008, he leased the Oak Room and Oak Bar to small-time Joey Allaham, who had run only a few kosher eateries.
Why was Allaham hot to run the beloved Plaza spots?
“The kosher market is limited,” he told The Post at the time.
Allaham tapped French-born, Atlanta-based Joël Antunes to be the chef. “I’m a very lucky man,” Antunes told me in February 2008 — just 11 months before Allaham axed him.
Allaham launched rowdy Sunday-night “burlesque parties” under the Oak Room’s barrelvaulted ceiling. In May 2011, Elad sued Allaham and partner Eli Gindi for $33 million for allegedly owing $900,000 in rent, allowing illegal drugs and “raucous and/or vulgar” behavior, and for getting a “C” rating from the Department of Health. The Post described the scene as a “champagne-fueled orgy of gyrating jet-setters.”
The Oak Room and Oak Bar shuttered in summer 2011 and lay dark when Elad unloaded the building’s hotel portion in July 2012 to Sahara for $570 million.
The purchase was nudged along by none other than Sant Singh Chatwal, who was friendly with both Elad and Sahara. As a reward, Sahara gave Chatwal’s company a 20-year contract to run The Plaza’s restaurants and bars.
His son Vikram boasted in September 2012 that he was teaming up with Tommy Hilfiger to buy a 30 percent stake in the hotel as well as to take over the Oak Room. “We want to restore the history and cultural symbolism of this treasure of New York real estate,” he told Page Six.
But media-darling Vikram had a different kind of booty on him when he was arrested trying to board a plane in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in April, 2013: a load of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, opioids, Xanax, sedatives, horse-tranquilizer ketamine and other controlled substances for which he had no prescription. Unlike poor New York youths who have gotten 15 years to life for carrying much less, Vikram — estimated net worth, $50 million — dodged a possible three-year term for trafficking and possession by completing a “rigorous” rehab program.
Vikram’s Plaza deal never happened.
IN July 2013, Zakarian was tapped as The Plaza’s culinary director. He rejuvenated The Plaza’s Palm Court tea room, which was still recovering from earlier days when clueless waiters greeted The Post’s Cindy Adams as “Mrs. Zimmerman.”
But reopening the Oaks required first making a deal with tough hotel-union boss Peter Ward. “You can’t pay a dishwasher $25 an hour,” said New York restaurateur/club king Frederick Lesort, who backed out of a prospective contract there.
Making labor peace was a job for Roy. But in February 2014, he was arrested for contempt of court as part of a case that involved an illegal $4.8 billion realestate bond sale by Sahara, much of it to gullible peasants. Roy balked at a court order to refund the rupees.
Two months after Roy’s arrest, Dream Chairman Sant Singh Chatwal pleaded guilty in Brooklyn federal court to masterminding illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering. Chatwal’s straw-donor scheme had funneled more than $180,000 in contributions to Hillary Clinton and two other Democrats.
Although Chatwal could have been sent away for five years, a judge in December 2014 let him off with probation, a fine and community service. The judge called the bundling an “aberrance,” although it had gone on for four years. The wrist slap followed a letter-writing campaign for leniency by Chatwal’s celebrity pals, including Deepak Chopra.
Roy has now been ordered by Indian courts to sell The Plaza, the Dream Downtown and London’s Grosvenor House. A foreclosure auction was canceled, but several prospective deals subsequently have fallen through. Prince al-Waleed is among the bidders.
Dream Hotels Management insists there’s hope for the Oak Room and Oak Bar.
“We continue to work with [Sahara] and will open as soon as we are ready,” it said in a statement.
Tell that to Eloise.