During the nascent years of the first Trump administration, I worked as a captain at the Grill, the former Four Seasons dining room where on any given night I dropped checks that totaled more than a year's tuition at a public university and took orders for individual bottles of wine that cost more than my monthly Manhattan rent. Serving filthy rich customers in exclusive places like Carbone and the Grill when the rich are getting richer, as they did under Trump's first term, means watching the joy they take in spending copious amounts of their money, which made it easier to convince them to buy obnoxiously expensive steaks and shellfish towers each night. The years I spent at the Grill were the most money I've ever made in any job; in 2018, I cleared six figures, most of it in tips.
'The Trump years were definitely the best years for me financially,' says Randy Kuszmaul, who worked as a server at Del Frisco's Double Eagle Steakhouse, within walking distance of Fox News headquarters, between 2018 and 2019. 'Most people who came in to Del Frisco's when Trump won the first time felt like those four years were one big victory lap and were spending accordingly.'
During Trump's first term, Jameson Brown was the assistant general manager of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's private restaurant inside 220 Park, a luxury residential tower, where he witnessed a spike in luxury spending among the building's ultrawealthy residents. 'For people in this tax bracket, they might buy out the entire restaurant just for a meeting, which could cost up to $30,000 depending on the time of year,' he says. 'You saw more of that activity in the earlier days of Trump, as opposed to during the Biden administration, where things got a little more constrained for the corporate sector.'
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