Source: King Cole Bar
The History Of King Cole Bar
The King Cole Bar sits inside the St. Regis Hotel on East 55th Street, off Fifth Avenue, and it has been part of Midtown life for generations. The name comes from the English nursery rhyme, and the room takes its tone from it: playful at the edges, serious about the drinks. Old King Cole called for his pipe, his bowl, and his fiddlers three; the modern version calls for a Red Snapper and a seat where he can watch the room.
The hotel behind it explains much of the bar's standing. John Jacob Astor IV opened the St. Regis in 1904, building a Beaux-Arts hotel that quickly drew the city's wealthy, artistic, and well-connected guests. The bar inherited that company and that standard. Its central Midtown address put it within walking distance of the theatres, offices, and hotels where New York planned its evenings, and it became a meeting place rather than simply a place to drink.
The bar built its name on classic cocktails, and one drink did more than any other. In 1934, bartender Fernand Petiot brought his tomato-and-vodka drink from Paris and served it here as the Red Snapper, the name considered suitable for the St. Regis crowd. That drink became the Bloody Mary, and every St. Regis property since has served its own version of it. Martinis remain the other test of the bar, and regulars will tell you it passes that one too.
Above the bar hangs the reason for the name. Maxfield Parrish, painted the whimsical King Cole mural for Astor's Knickerbocker Hotel, showing the king and his court in rich, glowing colour. When the Knickerbocker closed, the panels eventually came to the St. Regis, where they were installed in the early 1930s. The mural is now the room's signature: a piece of old New York advertising-age art that turned a hotel bar into a landmark people visit even when they only order one drink.
Part of the appeal is that very little here feels staged. The mural was not painted as a photo backdrop, and the Red Snapper was not invented as a marketing line. The bar grew famous the slow way, by being useful to the same neighbourhood for a long time: a place to meet before dinner, to close a deal, or to take a visitor who wanted old New York without a museum.
That combination explains the bar's pull on people who never stay at the hotel. Salvador Dalí, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and John Lennon all drank here, according to the hotel, and locals still treat the room as a Midtown institution. Come for the mural, stay for a Red Snapper, and you are taking part in a routine that New Yorkers have kept going for more than ninety years.
Source: Squarespace/ Unsplash
The Bar’s Perseverance
The bar has had to survive the century it helped define. It traded through the Great Depression, kept its place after the Second World War, and remained a Midtown fixture while the city changed around it after 9/11. Hotels can rely on rooms when a bar goes quiet; a famous bar has only its name, its regulars, and whether the next generation decides it still matters. The King Cole Bar kept all three.
The pandemic gave it a harder test. The St. Regis closed to the public in 2020, and the space was used to house hospital patients who were not in critical care. A bar built for conversation sat inside a hotel given over to an emergency, its mural watching over a room with no drinkers at all. For a business that had measured its life in nightly service, the silence was the threat.
That patience matters in a city that replaces bars. Hotel bars are remodelled into something unrecognisable all the time. The St. Regis treated this room as part of the building's identity, and each closure ended with the same room coming back.
Recovery came in stages rather than once. The hotel reopened, the regulars returned, and then the bar closed for a renovation that ran from January to September 2024. It reopened that September, in time for the hotel's 120th anniversary, refreshed by Champalimaud Design with dark wood and a deep green ceiling. The mural stayed where it belonged. Ninety years on from the Red Snapper, the room had been remade without losing the thing people come to see.
Source: The Devil Wears Prada
Reputation In Popular Culture
Film gave the bar a second life beyond its regulars. The hotel's own history notes appearances in Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, and The First Wives Club, but the cameo that now brings in first-time visitors came in 2006, in The Devil Wears Prada. For many viewers who had never heard of the St. Regis, the mural was their introduction to the room.
The scene itself is short and precise. Andy Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway, has been set another of Miranda Priestly's impossible tasks: get hold of the unpublished manuscript of the next Harry Potter book for Miranda's twins. Writer Christian Thompson, played by Simon Baker, has it, and he hands it over to Andy in the King Cole Bar. She rushes in, takes the manuscript beneath the Parrish mural, and rushes out again. Even the delivery of a magic book, it turns out, needed a grand hotel bar and a strict deadline.
That is really the joke of the sequence. Andy's whole job is running errands that cannot be done, usually in heels, and the one place in New York where an unpublished Harry Potter manuscript changes hands over a drink is a bar named for a nursery-rhyme king. The setting does quiet work for the film: old money, publishing power, and fashion money meeting in a room that had hosted all three long before the cameras arrived.
The wider film gives the bar useful company. Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, edits the fictional Runway magazine, and her world runs on access: the right table, the right manuscript, the right person answering the telephone. The St. Regis appears elsewhere in the film too, with its Presidential Suite standing in for a Paris hotel room in a later scene. One hotel therefore supplies both the public deal and the private moment, the bar downstairs and the suite upstairs, which suits a story about how much of fashion happens behind closed doors.
The effect has lasted longer than the scene. Fans of the film still come looking for the bar, often starting with the mural and ending with a Red Snapper, while people who care nothing for fashion come for Petiot and Parrish. Few film locations let you sit in the exact spot, order the house drink, and stay for the evening. The King Cole Bar does, and that is why a few seconds of screen time turned into a steady line of new patrons.
It was not made famous by a film, and it did not need rescuing by one. The Devil Wears Prada found it because it already looked like the kind of place where a secret manuscript might change hands.
Conclusion
King Cole Bar is an institution in New York City that has survived many challenges over the years. The bar's classic cocktails and elegant atmosphere have made it a popular destination for tourists and locals alike. The COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique challenge, but the bar's management team was able to find a way to keep it afloat unlike some other notable institutions that couldn’t cut it like “The 21 Club,” may it rest in peace.
The bar's appearances in popular culture, including in The Devil Wears Prada, have also helped to solidify its status as an iconic establishment in the city. King Cole Bar's resilience and popularity are a testament to the strength of the hospitality industry in New York City.
