Travel & Leisure celebrates “World’s Best” with big party, weird demonic symbols

By Rachel on July 15, 2005 3:53 PM

Last night Travel & Leisure hosted 600 of their closest friends at a party celebrating the 10th Annual “World’s Best” issue and awards celebration. Held in the airy, sprawling Skylight Studios in west SoHo, partygoers enjoyed drinking champagne, minty slushy tropical drinks and shots of flavored Absolut, and nibbling on big juicy coconut-coated shrimp, quesadilla-like chicken bites, canapes topped with shredded suckling pig, and really tasty desserts like dulce-de-leche mini-sandwich cookies, mini-key lime pies, chocolate truffles and (also mini) cones of vanilla and mango sorbet. Guests also enjoyed feeling short and squat beside random attractive shirtless men on ginormous stilts. (No, really, these stilts were really tall. If they were bad at their jobs there would have been rather serious OMG-the-stilt-guy-just-fell-on-me-related injuries.)

Fabulous star-spangled attendees included (but were not limited to) the following: Nancy Novogrod, T&L editor-in-chief, Ellen Asmodeo, T&L VP/publisher, and Ed Kelly, president and CEO of American Express Publishing, which owns T&L; the still-a-total-knockout Faye Dunaway, eschewer of wire hangers (but not, it seemed, of hair extensions); Peter Boyle from “Everybody Loves Raymond,” Andre Balazs, sans Uma, sadly; restauranteur Steve Hanson; Rent‘s one-song-glorious Adam Pascal with his playwright wife Cybele; Vivienne Tam; actor Peter Coyote, who killed in “Outrageous Fortune”; Nikki Haskell; Naima Mora, Kahlen Rondot, and Tatiana Dante from “America’s Next Top Model,” who probably felt just fine next to the skinny stilt guys; and Julian Niccolini (who maybe wants to join us for lunch on Wednesday?). Equally fabulous but maybe a mite less star-studded media people included Jason Binn, who owes Choire Sicha a magazine; Michael Gross, in festive orange; roving reporter Greg Lindsay with lovely City editor Sophie Donelson, AdAge’s Nat Ives; BusinessWeek‘s Jon Fine with blushing lunch-o-licious bride Laurel Touby of ye olde MB; ASME exec director Marlene Kahan; the recently-sutured Ben Widdicome; Daily Candy’s Pavia Rosati; the NY Observer ‘s Gabriel Sherman and Sheelah Kolhatkar, looking the very opposite of terrified and mousy; and fishy and fabulous MB editrix Elizabeth Spiers, who very graciously pretended not to be embarrassed when this reporter went in for third, fourths, and fifths of the mini-key lime pies.

Whew! Lots of people. If you want to see what they were wearing check them out here.

We should mention some things about the magazine, not just those it kept fed and watered last night: aside from missing the deeper symbolism of the figure on the cover (A-list crop circle? Shout-out to Scientology? Disgraceful waste of energy?) there is lots of wisdom contained within, culled from the globe-trotting T&L readership. Interestingly, Asia is the big winner this year, with the top hotel (Four Season’s Resort Bali at Sayan) and a whopping five Bangkok hotels in the top 100 – more than any other city. Other shout-outs go to NYC, the best reader-voted U.S. city, Midwest Airlines for best domestic airline, and – wait for it – Aerie Resort in Canada, the world’s best hotel for $250 or less. Canadians do cheap real good.

Thanks, T&L, for the delicious snacks and the opportunity to dance with a stilt-man. Survey results here; larger version of the cover after the jump, because the demonic symbol isn’t that clear above and we want you to get the joke.