Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

Standard Hotel: Too Sexy for Its Own Good, Perhaps | All that unbridled sexual energy at the Standard has a downside, it seems. A guest staying at the hotel was arrested on Saturday after he forced himself on a maid and has since been charged with attempted rape, sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment. Needless to say, when the hotel was informing guests that the Standard was "all about sex all the time" and "you're our star," this wasn't quite what they had in mind. [NYP]

• The hotel bar is experiencing a resurgence, as you've probably noticed. [VF]
• Indochine is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a new book. [GoaG]
• Does Danny Meyer have a new restaurant in store for the church on 21st Street and Park Avenue South? That's the rumor anyway. [Eater]
• A Q&A with Locanda Verde's Andrew Carmellini. [Blackbook]
• The annual Chocolate Show goes down this weekend. [ChocolateShow]
• A few suggestions on where to carbo-load if you're planning to run the marathon this Sunday. Or where to just pig out if you're not. [SE]

• The New York City Wine & Food Festival is underway, although if you haven't secured tickets by now, you can forget about attending any of the events. [GS]
• What should Andre Balazs call the Standard's Boom Boom Room now that legal issues have forced a name change? "Mile High Club" gets one vote. [NYT]
• Buddha Bar has been sued over 400K in unpaid legal bills. [Eater]
• There's a pasta renaissance taking place in the city, apparently. [NYP]
• A Q&A with Katie Lee Joel, who has a new cookbook (and who says she'd be just as well known today even if she'd never married Billy Joel). [TONY]
• The Times Magazine's "food issue" is now online. [NYT]

Designer Betsey Johnson is creating an Eloise-themed suite at The Plaza, which is also where she held her Fashion Week show on Tuesday. According to the press release, "The Plaza's two-bedroom Eloise Suite will be whimsically decorated in a color palette of 'Eloise pink' and black, and will be full of surprises and distinct "Eloise moments" throughout the guest room."More

NYC To Become One Big Hotel | Were you having difficulty keeping track of all the new hotels sprouting up around the city? Get ready to be even more confused. According to a study prepared by NYU's Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism, and Sports Management (who knew?), 61 new hotels—with more than 10,000 rooms in total—will be added to the city's supply between the beginning of 2009 and the end of 2011. [HVS.com via Curbed]

Christine Quinn has been slacking, clearly. This week the City Council speaker denounced the nudie show at the Standard Hotel, a faux scandal cooked up by the tabloids during a slow news week, and one that wasn't even newsworthy considering the existence of the sex shows —and the fact it was largely a publicity stunt to drum up interest in the hotel—were reported, like, ages ago. More

The Standard's campaign to make the hotel synonymous with sex appears to be backfiring. The Post caught on to shenanigans over the weekend, and in an "exclusive" today, breaks the big news that some of the Standard's neighbors in the meatpacking district are being routinely exposed to hanky-panky in the hotel's windows. And some of the witnesses to these acts have been innocent children! Even more outrageous: The hotel even appears to be encouraging this behavior on its own website! More

Minimalism To the Max | In addition to the handful of glassy hotels downtown that are already open for business, and the two new properties that are currently under construction, there's a third ultra-modern high-rise hotel now in the works. It doesn't have a name yet and the owners have yet to settle on a final location—it will be somewhere "between the Lower East Side and Soho"—but it may very well feature the smallest rooms in town when it eventually opens. How small? "So small that the shower is now a cylindrical tube," and there wasn't really any room for a proper bathroom, so "the toilet appears to be more or less on full display." [Curbed]

The Standard Is as Fleshy as Ever | Andre Balazs' quest to make the Standard the official hotel of visiting nudists seems to be paying off. (Either that or the hotel's adult-themed promo campaign continues.) A blogger spotted a naked man in the window over the weekend, and it didn't require much waiting around either: "It took less than 20 minutes into my first visit to the High Line, on Sunday, to capture it," he says. [Restlus via Curbed]

What Not to Do If You're Newly Divorced | Did your husband just leave you? Well, then, have a look at the "Suddenly Splitsville" package that the Marmara Manhattan, an "extended-stay" hotel on the Upper East Side, is now offering. In addition to a fully-furnished luxury apartment, you'll get a one-year subscription to Divorce magazine, "a pint of Haagen Daz [sic] ice cream to drown those sorrows in," a free pass to the 92nd Street Y "to work on that new physique," a complimentary copy of Confessions Of An Online Dating Addict, "a book about the trials and tribulations of a woman who dated online in New York City to learn all about dating on the Web," and free wireless Internet access so you "can start surfing the dating sites." You really couldn't ask for anything else, could you? [Marmara Manhattan via YM]

Aby Under Pressure | Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs, the real estate tycoons behind RFR Holdings and the owners of Lever House and the Seagram building, had been planning to build a Shangri-La hotel on Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street. That was before all the economic messiness, of course, and last month the project was dealt a death blow when several banks foreclosed on the property. Now the already bad situation is getting worse. More

Remember about a month ago when people reported seeing couples having wild sex in the windows of the new Standard Hotel? Those couples that managed to cover every possible sexual preference (men/women, men/men, women/women), and were almost always described as gorgeous by passerby? Just in case it wasn't clear that it was all part of an elaborate viral marketing campaign by hotelier (and hottie) Andre Balazs—conveniently timed to coincide with the opening of the hotel's new bar and restaurant in early June—comes a post on the hotel's official blog, which not only touts the "floor to ceiling glass windows" that "offer direct views to your most intimate moments," but also asks "amateur pornographers" to send in their "most erotic photos shot at The Standard" or upload them to Facebook: More

Playboy hotelier Vikram Chatwal is the owner of several properties around town, including Midtown's Stay and Dream hotels. He says another property will be added to his portfolio in September when The Chatwal opens its doors on East 44th Street, which is also supposed to house the Lamb's Club, a restaurant by chef Geoffrey Zakarian with a bar by nightlife impresarios David Rabin and Will Regen. Whether Chatwal's plans stand any chance of panning out, though, is anyone's guess.More

It's no secret that the situation at the Plaza has been pretty grim what with all the apartments for sale that haven't been selling, retail space that hasn't been renting, bitter lawsuits, and reports of shoddy construction work. And it definitely wasn't a great sign when the condo/hotel started offering free architecture tours to lure people into the building a couple of months ago. We're going to guess, though, that the Plaza's new marketing approach—offering Eloise-themed party packages—won't do much to improve matters: "The Live Like Eloise Slumber Party Package accommodates six guests and includes a suite, a copy of The Eloise Guide to Life, Eloise DVDs, Eloise postcards, Eloise snacks, rollaway beds, and a trophy party for elementary schoolers, or, the hotel hopes, a 'girls night' for adult women. It starts at $3,595." It's really too bad those Russian billionaires who bought condos in the building are moving out. They would have totally loved this. [NYO]

You might want to inspect your bill closely the next time you stay at a hotel. Thanks to the plunging economy and the decline in travel, hotels have come up with all sorts of ingenious new ways to make money, as you may have noticed. Take, for example, the pool or exercise room that you had no intention of visiting anyway. You may end up seeing a "facility free" or "resort fee" appear on your bill, even though you went to Denver on a business trip, not to swim laps, and you've never heard anyone even use the words "resort" and "Denver" in the same sentence. You're perfectly aware that drinking a miniature-sized can of soda from the mini-bar will end up costing you $10. These days, though, you may also get slapped with a $1 "mini-bar restocking fee," which accounts for the 3.2 seconds or so it took someone to replace that $10 can of soda you just consumed.More