{"id":22441,"date":"2025-10-30T12:25:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T12:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/22441\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T12:25:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T12:25:11","slug":"taking-a-smoke-break-with-eric-adams-whos-still-living-it-up-as-mayor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/22441\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking a Smoke Break With Eric Adams, Who\u2019s Still Living It Up as Mayor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meanwhile, Adams himself seemed to feel a new liberation, leaning into the role of jesting city booster. Not that his calculating\u2014some might say vindictive\u2014political instincts necessarily deserted him. The day after we meet, the New York Post reports<\/a> that he may be planning a move to block Mamdami\u2019s ability to institute a citywide rent freeze, a key campaign promise. Adams isn\u2019t the first politician to be adopted as a kind of mascot by the same irony-afflicted, hard-tweeting people who denounce their politics\u2014the disgraced former congressman George Santos is treated as a diva, and even young progressives are sharing Trump memes and doing impressions of him for laughs. I was curious to meet the man behind the mayoral sash. Was the real Eric Adams as charming as some of us have made him out to be?<\/p>\n

Adams certainly sees himself that way. It\u2019s obvious that he likes to be liked, and he clearly relishes the opportunity to kick back with a cigar and answer even my most frivolous questions. For example\u2014Dimes Square. Has the Mayor heard of it?<\/p>\n

Eric Adams: No, no, no, no. Tell me about that.
GQ: It is kind of a hip, young person, little enclave of Lower Manhattan.
Eric Adams: Dime Square?
GQ: Dimes Square. Clandestino, Le Dive. These are the bars that are kind of the face of\u2014
Eric Adams: Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it.
GQ: You’ve never been?
Eric Adams: No. So I’ll do that tonight in memory of the interview.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also more than happy, in between blowing experienced plumes of cigar smoke, to give the origin story of his legendary \u201cAll my haters\u201d bar.<\/p>\n

I was in a restaurant. It was a place called One Fish Two Fish on Madison Avenue and 90-something Street. It was low budget. If you wanted to bring your shorty somewhere in Manhattan, you could do that. There was a waiter that I asked to send back a dish because it was cold, and every time he came back to the table, he would step on my foot. He did it the first time, I said it was an accident. Then like three times he did it. I said, \u201cYou know what, this guy’s a hater.\u201d Let your hater be your waiter. No matter how angry he was, I’m sitting down at the table of success.<\/p>\n

Adams rather impressively fills out his navy blue suit, which he\u2019s wearing without a tie. He is, unquestionably, in the top percentile in terms of fitness among 65-year-old men. He begins every day at six in the morning. His restaurant-style kitchen is full of fruits and healthy foods like chia seeds, wheat germ, and pumpkin seeds, all organized nicely into labeled Tupperware containers. From here he\u2019s headed to an event for \u201cNYC\u2019s disability community and allies\u201d in the mansion\u2019s backyard. His energy is seemingly unflagging, and if the fact that he will soon need to vacate Gracie is weighing on him, he shows no sign of it. There is a lightness in his step and a lilt in his outer-borough accent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meanwhile, Adams himself seemed to feel a new liberation, leaning into the role of jesting city booster. Not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[14879,17,9,24,55,54,56,14880,87,14881,990],"class_list":["post-22441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-affiliate-disabled","tag-culture","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-onecolumn","tag-politics","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}