Crown Center’s forgotten restaurant
In the glory days of the midtown hotel formerly known as the Hyatt Regency Crown Center (it became a Sheraton property earlier this year), the venue operated three successful restaurants — actually four if you counted the sports bar, currently called Spectators. Two of the hotel’s restaurants were upscale, even glamorous dining rooms: Skies and the Peppercorn Duck Club. The less expensive restaurant in the Hyatt was The Terrace, which once served breakfast, lunch and dinner and a wildly popular Sunday brunch.
“People would stand in line — it would snake down through the first-floor lobby — to get into that brunch,” recalls a friend of mine, a former server at The Terrace. “It was a gigantic brunch. There were ice sculptures, a musician from the Conservatory playing the harp, and the longest chocolate dessert bar in the city. This was in the 1980s when the Hyatt was the newest, grooviest hotel in the city.”
