The editorial elite are to return to the legendary Condé Nast cafeteria — where for many years the staff of Vogue didn’t eat lunch — for a book bash, Page Six is told.
For a decade, the Frank Gehry-designed mess hall at 4 Times Square was part of the Condé myth, along with the lines of Town Cars that lined up outside to ferry editors like Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter, Andre Leon Talley and Grace Coddington to chic affairs across the city.
It was shuttered after Condé relocated to One World Trade in 2011, and only reopened in 2017 as Well& by Durst, a cafeteria for the legal firms that now inhabit the building.
But next week Condé Nast editors will ignore food there once again, this time for the launch of “Empire Of The Elite: Inside Condé Nast, The Media Dynasty That Reshaped America” by Michael M. Grynbaum.
In the book, Grynbaum writes that in 1999 Condé staff were reluctant to move from their comfortable Madison Avenue digs to the modern, status-cementing offices that Condé chairman Si Newhouse had picked out in Times Square, and that Newhouse conceived of the exravagant cafeteria as a way to “make the move more palatable.”
“The result was the most scrutinized and celebrated corporate cafeteria in the world,” he writes. “Blue titanium panels grew like stalactites from the room’s perimeter walls, creating recesses that housed the lush banquettes and seemed to encourage furtive gossip. Seventy-six unique panels of sinuous Venetian glass dangled overhead, and the tabletops were made of taxi-yellow plastic laminate, perhaps a nod to the industrious city outside.”
He adds that, “Informed by [Conde brass] that Condé employed ‘mostly young women who were quite conscious of their appearance and their body shape.” Gehry decided to affix distorted mirrors to the columns bracketing the cafeteria’s exit doors, so that passersby looked smaller and thinner.”
Grynbaum also claims that “garlic was banned from the cafeteria kitchens solely because Si abhorred it.”
“Depending on who you ask, Si spent anywhere from $10 million to $30 million to enact Gehry’s avant-garde vision,” he writes.
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