It’s unclear when Donald first began to attend the 21 Club himself—except for during the December holidays, children under the drinking age are rarely seen inside the restaurant—but Shaker Naini, a host who’s worked at the 21 Club for more than 40 years, says that his first memory of Trump was in 1977, when he came as the guest of Roy Cohn.
Cohn, a lawyer who aided Joseph McCarthy in his anti-communist crusades in the 1950s and then shifted to a flourishing private practice representing everyone from mob bosses to George Steinbrenner, was a regular at the 21 Club, Naini said. (Cohn later died of AIDS- related complications in 1986.) Cohn reportedly took Trump under his wing, and after a period, Trump became a regular at the club himself. He even tried to buy the restaurant in 1984, according to memoirs published by H. Peter Kriendler, whose brother co-founded the restaurant. The deal fell through when Trump tried to make the sale conditional on a 10-to-20-year payment scheme, according to the book. "We insisted on a five-year arrangement," Kriendler wrote. "No deal."
Trump’s Dining Style
Naini, who is a first-generation immigrant from Hyderabad, India, said that Trump would regularly spend five or six minutes chatting with him before his meal, talking, Naini said, about New York politics; Naini added that Trump tipped well "occasionally, he said. "Not always, but occasionally."
Trump’s well-publicized visit last November wasn’t actually his last before becoming president. On a Sunday afternoon in December, the 21 Club's general manager received a call requesting a last-minute reservation for one of the private dining rooms. It was Trump on the line: Weeks away from his inauguration, he’d picked up the phone to make the reservation himself.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.