Every workday for 20 years when he was in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover sat at the same table at the same hotel and ordered the same meal.
He was not, according to those who chronicled that bit of history, a culinary adventurer.
For starters, the FBI director chose chicken soup, followed by a salad of iceberg lettuce, grapefruit and cottage cheese. He liked to bring his own bottle of diet dressing. Buttered white toast came on the side.
The hotel, the fabled Mayflower, threw itself an 80th birthday party yesterday, serving guests and passersby cake and champagne, and offering them the chance to dine on the J. Edgar Hoover special.
"It's really good," Rose Bartley, a white-jacketed waitress, advised James Lilley, a former ambassador to China, after he had settled into a plush seat in the hotel's main dining room, Cafe Promenade.
Lilley blinked but kept his gaze on the menu, which offered such fare as grilled swordfish ($27), crab cakes ($23) and veal piccata ($22.50).
"It sounds very enticing," Lilley said. "I think I'll have something else."
He ordered the Boston clam chowder and a green salad.
A venerable past
By early afternoon, the waiters reported no takers for the special. That did not come as much of a surprise to the celebration's organizers, who were intent on shedding light on the hotel's venerable past, one that stretches back to the Coolidge administration and has included countless black-tie balls and society dinners.
At one time, before restaurants began popping up all over town and suburban enclaves spread across the region, the Mayflower, on Connecticut Avenue NW, was among the District's few palatial destination spots.
There, in Suite 776, is where then President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly wrote, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." It is where Herbert Hoover's vice president, Charles Curtis, kept an apartment during the four years he held office.
And it was where every president from Coolidge to Reagan hosted inaugural balls. Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, Jean Harlow and John Wayne have all walked the ornate lobby, with its 16 marble pillars and expansive skylight.
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"It was elegant," said Sidney Seidenman Jr., 80, whose father managed a music business from an office in the hotel beginning in 1926.
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The main dining room, Seidenman said, was often filled with Washington socialites, whom his father, accompanied by a pianist, serenaded with a violin.
"It was so Victorian," Seidenman recalled between sips of white wine in the dining room.
'I don't do cottage cheese'
In recent years, the hotel has sought to recover remnants of its past. Keith McClinsey, the Mayflower's senior event manager, has scoured eBay in search of lost Mayflower china. He said he found a set for $12, as well as a postcard from the 1960s and a silver Reed & Barton champagne bucket complete with the hotel's insignia.
So far, McClinsey said, he has not yet discovered any J. Edgar Hoover-related artifacts, although various accounts, including that of the hotel's historian, have described the FBI's founding father and his aide Clyde Tolson as regulars at lunch from 1952 to 1972.
Their restaurant of choice was the Carvery, which has since closed, but Hoover's devotion to the Mayflower was so well known that reporters would stake out the lobby to find him. Sometimes, Hoover would sneak out through the kitchen.
Seidenman said he could recall seeing Hoover virtually "every day" in the hotel. "He was always with Tolson," he said. "He was so famous. It was a heady experience."
Not heady enough, though, to inspire Seidenman to order the Hoover special for old time's sake.
"I do whiskey, I do women -- wild, wild women," he said. "I don't do cottage cheese."