dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Tommy Jacomo, executive director of D.C. power lunch institution the Palm, dies at 75

The Palm restaurant in Washington has become one of the city’s most venerable preserves of the power lunch, where lobbyists, politicos and the media elite gather to gnaw on steak and lobster and guzzle gossip and martinis.

The high priest of this “cholesterol temple,” as journalist Maureen Dowd once described the Palm, was Tommy Jacomo, who presided as manager and later executive director almost from the day it opened in 1972 until his retirement in 2016.

With his thick mustache and mastery of the convivial welcome, Mr. Jacomo was an out-front man in the mold of restaurateurs Duke Zeibert and Toots Shor, someone who greeted regulars by name and always knew their tastes and table preferences. He was the guardian of the restaurant’s wall of caricatures, controlling who made the grade for the highly coveted Beltway status symbol and who, alas, did not.

The former magazine publisher William A. Regardie, who like many longtime Palm patrons considered himself as much a friend of Mr. Jacomo as a customer, once called him “the most powerful man at the most powerful restaurant in the most powerful city in the world.”

Mr. Jacomo, 75, died March 6 at his home in St. Augustine, Fla. The cause was lung disease, said his wife, Kim Jacomo.

Working 12-hour days and running a more-than-40-year streak of working on New Year’s Eve, he served regulars that ranged from political consultants Mary Matalin and James Carville to TV personality Larry King, Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke and entertainer Frank Sinatra. Boxer Muhammad Ali visited in 1976 and engaged Mr. Jacomo in a friendly sparring match; the manager later called it “the biggest thrill of my life.”

In 1977, Mr. Jacomo and a waiter were arrested for allegedly selling an ounce of cocaine to an undercover federal agent at the restaurant. They were among 20 people arrested in a five-month Drug Enforcement Administration operation that centered on sales at restaurants around the Palm’s Dupont Circle neighborhood.

Mr. Jacomo’s first call after the arrest was to criminal defense lawyer and Redskins co-owner Edward Bennett Williams, a Palm patron and friend with whom he sometimes traveled to Atlantic City boxing matches.

“I always wanted to be a mob guy,” he told the Times.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/tommy-jacomo-executive-director-of-dc-power-lunch-institution-the-palm-dies-at-75/2020/03/07/ab9714da-60c7-11ea-b014-4fafa866bb81_story.html