Originally designed by architect Elmer Grey and given a 1940s glow-up (and an additional wing) by Paul Revere Williams, the hotel’s distinctive pink and green exterior and interior banana-leaf wallpaper are nearly as recognizable as the celebrities who have made it famous. So too the Polo Lounge, the epitome of Hollywood see-and-be-seen culture. (One memorable Easter brunch, I watched from afar as Beyoncé and Jay-Z introduced toddler Blue Ivy Carter to the Easter Bunny.) It’s to that restaurant — or the Fountain Coffee Room downstairs — you should venture for a taste of Tinseltown that won’t cost you an arm and a leg (room rates start $1,425 a night).
At the former, you can’t get more quintessential than the McCarthy salad (two types of lettuce, diced cubes of grilled chicken, cheddar cheese, bacon, beets, hard-boiled eggs, tomato and avocado served with a creamy balsamic dressing), a signature dish named after a millionaire polo player. At the latter, the perfect place for an under-the-radar, feel-like-a-million-bucks breakfast, you won’t go wrong with an order of silver dollar buttermilk pancakes; a stack of nine tiny flapjacks — each the size of a canning jar lid — dotted with three perfectly round marbles of butter, garnished with a sliced strawberry and served with two tiny bottles of Vermont maple syrup.
Whatever your visit to the Pink Palace entails, you’ll stroll in and out beneath a white and green striped awning and along an honest-to-goodness red carpet, an experience that can’t help but connect you — if only momentarily — with the celebrity set that put the place on the pop-culture map.