New York restaurateur Stephen Hanson at the ART FOR LIFE benefit in East Hampton on July 29, 2006. (Photo by Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images.)

O nce upon a time, Stephen Hanson was a major player in New York restaurants. Now in his 70s, he worked at the original TGI Fridays as an NYU student in the 1970s, opened a hot Westchester club after graduation, spent a few years in the commodities market and garment industry, and then opened the Upper East Side’s tropically-themed Coconut Grill in 1987. Hanson would go on to launch a slew of city hot spots over the coming years, frequented by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Alec Baldwin, under the umbrella of his BR Guest Hospitality group, which he sold in 2007 to Starwood’s Barry Sternlicht. (The New York Post reported a price tag of $150 million.)

Hanson’s restaurant empire included the Asian fusion clubstaurant Ruby Foo’s, which he once aimed to take national; Isabella’s, which appeared in season four of Seinfeld; Blue Water Grill in Union Square; Dos Caminos; Blue Fin; Fiamma; Primehouse; Wildwood. And Atlantic Grill, which was a popular lunch choice for a more notorious individual: Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, Hanson—whose “kindness and loyalty to friends,” Gael Greene once wrote in a New York Magazine review of Blue Water Grill, “seemed surreal”—appears to have been quite chummy with the sex-trafficking financier in the wake of the most recent release of Epstein emails. Enough that Hanson looks to have been trying to help Epstein buy a plane. And in late 2017, Epstein wrote Hanson telling him he was one of “my closes[t] friends” and “there is still little i wouldnt do for you.”

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