A recent weekday lunch at Tommy Bahama.
Photo: Daniel Paik
On a Tuesday afternoon a week and a half before Christmas, the sharks are swimming at the Marlin Bar. Sharp winds whip down Fifth Avenue, but the scene inside the Tommy Bahama Restaurant on the corner of 45th Street is far more serene, Frank Sinatra playing softly over a low murmur of mergers and acquisitions. Near the entrance, just past a beached log and some dangling strings of seashells, a traffic jam of customers tries to sneak in before rushing back to the office. The Morton’s steakhouse around the corner is half full. Tommy Bahama is, as it is nearly every weekday, slammed.
“I made my reservation last week — I wouldn’t leave it up to chance,” one guest says as he waits to check in. He explains that he works in finance but doesn’t want to share any other details because he “can’t talk to the press.” Scanning the room, it isn’t hard to identify other diners’ employers. Company logos are everywhere: An Ernst & Young jacket here, a VARS cybersecurity puffer there, branded Patagonia vests all over the room.
“Power dining” conjures images of grand architecture and ornate salads, not the upscale-Margaritaville vibes of this second-floor restaurant, reached via a spiral staircase in the street-level Tommy Bahama store. Martinis, yes. Coconut Cloud martinis (vanilla rum, coconut rum, and coconut cream), not so much. But sometime over the past few years, midtown’s captains of industry coalesced on this particular restaurant — part of a national chain with 29 outposts — that now does between 200 and 250 covers during lunch, 80 to 90 percent of which are business diners. An old friend who works in private equity confirms that Tommy Bahama is “right up there now with all the Greek places and the Lobster Club” on the midtown business-meal ladder.
“I’ve done all the power-lunch places for the last 20 years,” says Ron Geffner, a former SEC enforcement lawyer who is a founding partner in the firm Sadis & Goldberg. “They’re inconsistent, in my mind, with the current economic reality of the world — if I take someone to a very, very expensive restaurant, either prospective clients or people I do business with, they might question my value of money.” Here, he knows the staff so well they sometimes choose his order, and he maintains a preferred spot (table No. 16, in a corner that offers a view of the street and host stand).
A plush banquette matches the sand-white walls, but the main appeal is not décor. It’s utility. A private dining room is “perfect for throwing up some slides,” according to one regular. There’s plenty of space between tables and little concern that a sensitive conversation will be overheard. And the food — coconut shrimp, crab-and-avocado salads, tuna poke bowls — comes out fast, an important detail for customers with small windows on their calendars. “If I miss lunch, if I miss it within that 45 minutes, I’m not eating,” says Geffner.
“We affectionately refer to it as our cafeteria,” Nate Burbank, a vice-president at the reinsurance firm Guy Carpenter, tells me. When I’d asked if he would meet me there, he’d quickly texted back, “I’m always down for more Tommy B’s.” And as we settle in, he offers his view of the midtown lunch landscape. “We sometimes do the Rock Center circuit. Butter sucks. We do Bobby Van’s, which just feels tired,” Burbank says. “This area is such a nexus of midtown, and they do a good job. It’s right by the train, which is good for the people who need to get back to the suburbs.”
General manager Christopher McLeod says he often tells his staff that they’re essentially serving two different restaurants — the weekday lunch crowd and everyone else: “We have the lunchtime Tommy Bahama in Manhattan and then we have a ‘regular’ Tommy Bahama dinner time.” McLeod was on the staff when the Fifth Avenue restaurant opened, having also put in time at the company’s restaurants in Texas and Florida. Half-American, half-French, he grew up in Alsace with a family of butchers, bakers, and brasserie owners. Before landing at Tommy Bahama, he was a director of guest relations for Boston’s Ritz-Carlton hotel. “They have an amazing hospitality school,” he says. Does he apply some of the Ritz’s approach — a warm welcome, anticipating guest needs, knowing how to read the power players — to Tommy B’s? “I don’t know if I’m doing it on purpose, but it is ingrained in me for sure.”
How did a brand best known for golf shirts and beach-chair-market dominance become the default dining option for so many white-collar workers? It may have something to do with changing cultural norms. Jamie Hodari, an executive at real-estate firm CBRE, suggests that a younger generation of workers can be turned off by traditional power hubs. “There’s something self-effacing about saying, ‘Let’s do that M&A meeting at Tommy’s,’ ” he says.
Douglas Meyer, the regional president of New York City commercial banking for Valley Bank (and one of Crain’s “Notable Leaders in Finance” for 2025) says he has been eating at the Tommy Bahama restaurant since the day it opened in 2012 — years before it became a destination. At the time, he worked in the same building. “It was a secret for a little while,” he says wistfully. “There were days — I’m laughing at myself — that I would go for breakfast and then lunch and then happy hour.” He estimates he has been hundreds of times (though breakfast service has been scrapped). And he admits he developed a reputation among his co-workers. “Some of my colleagues, they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re Mr. Tommy Bahama over here,’ ” Meyer says. “And then my question back is always, ‘Well, do you ever have a bad time?’ They’re like, ‘No, no. I’ve never had a bad time, ever.”’
Now that word is out, of course, some people in the area have started to avoid Tommy Bahama, a friend who works in midtown says, because they’ll inevitably run into “too many” people they know. But McLeod, the GM, isn’t worried. In October, JPMorgan Chase celebrated the grand opening of its new headquarters at 270 Park Avenue, a few blocks away. “They have different restaurants there, but we are going to see a big push,” he says.
