The Swan in the Room: What 23 Years at The Odeon Teaches Us About the Lost Art of Hospitality

Roya Shanks has been working at the same restaurant since 2001.

Twenty-three years on the floor at The Odeon, the Tribeca institution that opened in 1980 and somehow still feels like the platonic ideal of a New York restaurant. In an industry built on turnover, that kind of tenure is almost incomprehensible. It's also, increasingly, the most interesting question in hospitality: what does longevity actually look like? Not for the restaurant, for the people inside it?

The answer, as Roya tells it on this week's episode of Hot Gossip, has very little to do with the things the industry typically rewards.

The Job She Didn't Plan to Have

Roya didn't move to New York to work in restaurants. She'd graduated from Yale, done all of pre-med, taken the MCAT. She came to the city in November 2001, two months after 9/11, to act. The Odeon was advertising for hostesses in the Village Voice, and the woman she was subletting from in Brooklyn said it was a good place. She walked in, got interviewed by a Brazilian manager named Marcello, and was hired as a server despite having zero experience.

"It was just kind of the right moment for them," she says. "They needed people and it was a lark for him to hire me."

She's still there. So is the restaurant. And the through-line between those two facts is the thing the rest of the industry might want to pay attention to.

Because Roya isn't the exception that proves the rule about restaurant attrition. She's a working example of what happens when a hospitality operator, in this case The Odeon's longtime owner, actually creates the conditions for someone to stay. Roya has left the floor to do plays. She's left to travel. She's left to have two children. Each time, she was told to come back when she was ready. Each time, she did.

"That's also why I've worked there so long," Roya says. The infrastructure of her career has been built on a single sentence: just come back.

The Difference Between a Day Job and a Passion

For most of her career, Roya has held two professional identities at once. She's an actor, auditions, voice work, the slow grind of a profession with its own unpredictable rhythms. And she's a restaurant manager at one of the most recognizable rooms in the city.

The conventional framing would call one her real career and the other her day job. Roya has spent two decades quietly dismantling that hierarchy.

"Going to work doesn't drain me," she says. "At the end of a long shift, yes, I'm tired. Sometimes I come home and I'm like, I was just nice to 400 people, I don't want to talk right now. But I get there and I feel good."

She defines passion, in fact, as something specific and unglamorous: the thing that authentically gives you energy. Not the thing that requires the most sacrifice or the loudest ambition. The thing that fills the tank rather than draining it.

That's a useful operating definition for anyone running a hospitality business. It's also a quiet rebuke of the industry's most romantic mythology, the chef-as-martyr, the manager-as-monk, the server who treats the floor as penance for a creative life that hasn't quite happened yet. Roya's career suggests that the people who last in this work are the ones for whom the work itself is generative.

"If I had no financial need to work there whatsoever, like if I was on a TV show," she says, "I feel like if I wasn't shooting, I would need my Sunday nights just to show up. See the people. See my community. I am happier being in the social mix."

What a 23-Year Guest Relationship Actually Looks Like

There's a particular kind of regular customer The Odeon has cultivated that almost no other restaurant in the city can claim. Roya describes meeting people who had their first date there thirty years ago and now come in for their anniversary. Children she watched grow up in Tribeca who are now back booking their weddings. People who have used the room to mark every significant event of their adult lives, promotions, breakups, deaths.

She's also watching a new generation of regulars come up. People in their twenties and thirties and forties who have discovered the restaurant on their own terms and adopted it the same way.

"I say it's my living room," she says. "Everyone there thinks and acts like it's their living room. I have people sprawled on the banquette trying to take their shoes off, staying for four hours. That's why it's popular. People are comfortable there."

This is the part of the hospitality conversation that gets the least airtime in the industry press, because it can't be photographed and it doesn't open. It's just the slow, decades-long accumulation of a room that knows who you are. Roya is the person doing that knowing.

She talks about her role on the floor in almost mechanical terms, the strategizing and re-strategizing of a seating plan, the constant adjustment, the briefing of servers on which regulars are in a hurry and which ones want to disappear for four hours. But the part of the work she returns to, again and again, is the soft skill the industry has all but forgotten how to teach: turning a room around.

"There are a few servers who I don't think are going to last," she says, "because they're constantly complaining to me about how rude people are. And yes, there are rude guests sometimes. But some of what their interpretation of rude is, I'm like, oh, I've known that man for ten years. He's just a gruff person. You can turn him around. Just be nice to him. He's going to melt in a second."

Marcello, the manager who hired her, gave her one piece of operational guidance early on: make them feel fabulous. She's been doing it for 23 years.

Color, Presence, and the Authority of Showing Up as Yourself

The other thing you notice about Roya, before you notice anything else, is what she's wearing. She has been featured on Vogue's best-dressed list, which, for someone working in a service uniform of black and white, is its own kind of statement. Her dresses are vintage, colorful, often deliberately over the top. She has become known for it.

She didn't plan it that way. She started buying vintage in her mid-twenties because she liked it. When she became a manager and could choose her own clothes, the choice slowly became part of how the dining room knew her. Guests who don't know her name describe her as the one with the dresses.

It would be easy to read this as branding, but Roya is clear that it isn't. "I dress for myself because it makes me happy," she says. "I don't believe in fashion rules at all."

What's interesting from a hospitality-operator standpoint isn't the clothes themselves. It's what they signal about authority on the floor. In a room where every other staff member is in uniform, Roya's presence is unmistakable. Guests find her easily. New servers can locate her instantly. She is visually and operationally the person you go to if anything is wrong. The color isn't ornament, it's wayfinding.

And underneath it is something more durable: a working definition of authority that comes from showing up as yourself, every shift, for two decades, in a space that has given you the room to do that.

A Quieter Theory of Impact

Late in the conversation, Roya raises a question that anyone who has spent their career outside the conventional achievement track has probably asked themselves. Could she have had a bigger impact? She's a Yale graduate. Her cohort is now in positions of significant power. She works at the same restaurant she walked into 23 years ago.

She thinks about it openly, without defensiveness. And then she answers her own question.

"I think I have a pretty good life. I have a job that I enjoy, and that's more than 95 percent of people can say. I'm not stressed financially. I don't think the families I see in Tribeca are happier than I am just because they're richer."

This is, quietly, one of the most countercultural statements in hospitality right now. The industry runs on aspiration, bigger rooms, bigger covers, bigger ambitions. Roya is offering a different metric. Did the work give you energy. Did the people in the room feel cared for. Did the life you built around it sustain you.

By those measurements, 23 years at The Odeon is not a holding pattern. It's the whole point.
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• Listen to the full conversation with Roya Shanks on Hot Gossip → https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/hot-gossip-podcast‍
• Follow Roya and The Odeon on Instagram → @roya_intheworld & @theodeonnyc‍
• Hot Gossip is hosted by Hannah Collins Tate and Jacob Cross → https://www.thisisroy.com/podcast
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