With six days to the Met Gala, The Surrey’s managing director Pradeep Raman is finalizing the curb choreography for round two. Round one, last May 5, turned the Madison Avenue hotel’s lobby into an A-list traffic jam. Zendaya checked in. So did Tom Holland, Cardi B, Angela Bassett, Burberry’s Daniel Lee, Charlotte Tilbury, supermodel Liu Wen, “Bridgerton’s” Rege-Jean Page, Ncuti Gatwa and Jodie Turner Smith. The sports contingent landed harder still: Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts and his wife Bry; Vikings receiver Justin Jefferson; WNBA stars Breanna Stewart, Jonquel Jones and Sabrina Ionescu. The Corinthia-managed newcomer had been open six months, and crashed the exclusive Met Gala hotel club with its first effort.
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The 100-key property at 76th Street and Madison Avenue is Corinthia Hotels’ first North American flagship, with a Sisley Paris spa and 14 private residences. Its food and beverage program is run by Casa Tua, the hot-spot Italian members’ club making its New York debut after outposts in Miami, Aspen and Paris.
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The morning after last year’s Met, while everyone else nursed a hangover, Raman was at the curb taking notes on how to handle this year. From body language, elevator timing to the line of cars idling on Madison: it all went into the file.
“Planning for 2026 began that day,” he shared with WWD in an exclusive interview.
Monthly staff meetings have since tightened to biweekly, then weekly. “This morning I was talking to my hotel manager about how many safety pins we have,” Raman said, also referencing the seamstress needles, handheld steamers, shoe polish and bow-tie expert he keeps on standby.
By next Monday morning, suites will have been reconfigured to each stylist’s specs, makeup mirrors angled to the lighting, beds shifted, glam stations built to order before talent walks in. Learnings from last year are taken into consideration too. The biggest tweak? Pre-set room service offerings with simple sushi-style check-box menus. After watching guests fumble with menus, the team built pre-set platters tied to a pre-arrival questionnaire.
“No one wants to look at a menu while they’re getting glammed,” Raman said.
On Met day, the entire team goes into all-hands-on-deck mode. Every senior leader is on the floor, no matter the title. The director of finance becomes a flow manager. The HR head works as a floor butler. Raman himself can be found holding doors open.
“We don’t need any of our guests picking up the phone and calling 10 different departments,” he said.
Each floor has a dedicated concierge handling everything from package coordination — FedEx and UPS deliveries arrive constantly — to managing the steamers, photographers and florists on standby. The aim is for the guest to never have to ask twice.
On the surface, calm is non-negotiable. Raman invokes a duck-on-a-pond metaphor: serene above the water, paddling furiously beneath. “That is hospitality,” he said. Stressed-out talent in a stressed-out lobby, he argued, is the fastest way to lose them.
On Met night, The Surrey shuts down the portion of 76th Street in front of the hotel and runs the curb like an air-traffic operation. Raman has named the chief concierge the hotel’s “VP of Exit,” coordinating a fleet of color-coded Cadillac Escalades against guest exit times radioed in from each floor.
Inside, the lobby goes on full lockdown the day of. Press credentials are vetted in advance by Raman’s in-house team and PR firm Nike Communications, and lanyards dictate who moves where. Media photographers are outside. “My focus is safety, security and privacy,” Raman said. “That is all I want to be known for.” Even the elevators are run by security personnel for the night.
The Met Gala has been The Surrey’s most consequential commercial day of the year, and Raman is direct about it. The 2025 event was “massive” for the brand, he said, a chance to plant a Corinthia flag in a U.S. market the management group is aggressively expanding into. “Everything we did leading up to the Met was sowing the seeds,” he said. “How do we be better than the best?”
The numbers vindicated the bet. The Surrey logged a 24 percent first-year repeat-guest ratio overall, which Raman called “incredible” for the New York market, and runs near 100 percent occupancy, capped at 95 to protect service. Brand partnerships run with the same selectivity as room rates. “The brand needs to be on par, just as we need to be on par with them,” Raman said, declining activations he describes as forced. Between 50 and 60 percent of last year’s Met Gala guests are returning for this year’s May 4 event, and not a single room is comped, for talent, brands or influence.
What pulls Hollywood A-listers, editors, NFL quarterbacks and WNBA stars back to the same address? Service and hyper attention to detail, Raman opined. The same they offer year round. Housekeepers leaving handwritten notes; doormen memorizing the neighborhood dogs, and bespoke Sisley pre-Met treatments on sculpting and lymphatic drainage. Raman revealed a special after-Met moment is in the works this year, built around what talent actually wants at midnight: “tranquility, not another step-and-repeat.”