Breakfast at Tiffany's at 65: Tiffany Served None for 56 Years

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Woody Magazine

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Oct. 5, 2026 (Mon.)

Company StoryOct. 5, 2026

Breakfast at Tiffany's at 65: Tiffany Didn't Serve Breakfast for 56 Years

The jeweler opened its first cafe in 2017, after two straight years of falling sales. This summer it opened three more in three months.

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In Three Lines

  1. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" premiered in New York 65 years ago today. You could not actually buy breakfast at Tiffany until 2017.
  2. Tiffany was using the movie for publicity before it reached theaters. It put a kitchen in the store only after flagship sales fell 11% in a year and its chief executive left.
  3. This is not a story about Tiffany missing out on the film. It is about a company that profited from the title for 56 years without building the kitchen.

On Oct. 5, 1961, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" opened at Radio City Music Hall. Most people remember the first shot. A cab stops on an empty Fifth Avenue at dawn, and Audrey Hepburn, as Holly Golightly, steps out in a black gown. She stands at the Tiffany windows, pulls coffee and a pastry from a paper bag and eats while she looks at the jewels. People tend to remember a croissant. It was a Danish.

The title promises breakfast at Tiffany's, but in that opening scene Holly stays on the sidewalk. Going inside would not have helped. Tiffany had no restaurant. The company began serving breakfast inside its store in November 2017, 56 years after the film came out. For more than half a century, the title hung over the store like a sign advertising a meal, with no kitchen behind it.

The obvious explanation is that fans kept asking until Tiffany gave in. That is a reasonable guess. Two facts get in its way. Tiffany treated the film as a business opportunity from the start. And the cafe came in 2017, the year the chief executive stepped down, after two straight years of falling sales.

Thirty Tiffany executives on a Sunday at dawn

The opening scene was shot early on Sunday, Oct. 2, 1960. It was the first film ever shot at Tiffany's Fifth Avenue store. According to the New York Herald Tribune, the crew that day included 75 technicians and two dozen extras, along with 20 Tiffany clerks and 30 Tiffany executives. Everyone was paid double for working on a Sunday, and the day cost $45,000.

Around the same time, Hepburn posed inside the store for publicity photos wearing the Tiffany Diamond, a 128.54-carat yellow stone set in a necklace. In the film itself, Hepburn wears no Tiffany jewelry at all. What the company got out of the film was a set of photographs, not product placement.

Tiffany did not even write the title. Truman Capote did, for a novella published in 1958. For decades the film carried the store's name through theaters and television screens. Tiffany still did not put a table on the sales floor. It enjoyed the sign someone else had hung and never sold the meal written on it. There is no public record of the company explaining why.

In 2016, sales at the Fifth Avenue store fell 11%

Tiffany's annual results, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March 2017, show worldwide sales of $4 billion for fiscal 2016, down 3% from the year before. Sales had also fallen 3% the previous year. Comparable-store sales dropped 5%.

11%
Decline in sales at Tiffany's Fifth Avenue flagship, fiscal 2016

The flagship took the worst of it. Its sales fell 11% over the year and 14% over the holiday season. That one store brought in close to a tenth of the company's revenue, so when it slipped, the whole company slipped with it.

Tiffany's own explanation had some merit. The company blamed part of the drop on traffic disruptions after the 2016 election. Its next-door neighbor was Trump Tower, and security around the building tightened sharply once the votes were counted. Shoppers who wanted to come had a harder time getting there.

On Feb. 5, 2017, chief executive Frederic Cumenal stepped down, effective immediately, and the board said it was disappointed by recent results. In October, Alessandro Bogliolo, a former Diesel chief executive, took over. Analysts at RBC Capital Markets summed up investors' worries in two questions. Could Tiffany appeal to younger customers? And could it get people into its stores?

A cafe in the middle of the china department

The Blue Box Cafe opened on Nov. 10, 2017, on the fourth floor of the flagship. It was the first restaurant Tiffany had run since its founding in 1837. The fourth floor had just been redone as a home and accessories department, and the cafe sat among the china, the silver and the baby gifts. The walls, the chairs and the plates were all Tiffany blue. The tableware came from a new home line designed by Reed Krakoff, the company's recently hired chief artistic officer.

The set breakfast cost $29 and was named, inevitably, Breakfast at Tiffany. After 56 years, the words on the sign had made it onto a menu. That put breakfast within reach of a tourist who could never afford the jewelry. Some of the cafe's tableware was also sold in the store and online. The set came with a croissant, not a Danish, so the menu followed the scene as people remembered it rather than as it was filmed.

Customers heard "experience." Investors heard "lines."

In a statement at the opening, Krakoff said the cafe and the redesigned floor reflected a modern luxury experience. He called the space experimental and experiential, a window into the new Tiffany. That was a fair description of the room.

A few weeks later, on a call with investors, the message changed. Mark Aaron, who ran investor relations, pointed to the long lines every day as evidence that the cafe was becoming a New York tradition. A year after that, Bogliolo told investors that new products and a culturally relevant message were meant to increase store and online traffic and turn more of it into sales.

Customers were told about an experience. Investors were shown a line.

The difference is not hard to explain. Luxury goods command their prices partly because they feel out of ordinary reach. A jeweler that says it is selling coffee to bring shoppers back undercuts that feeling.

Other brands hired famous chefs

Tiffany was not the first retailer to feed its customers. American department stores had run cafes for decades, and in the 2010s more luxury brands picked up the habit. Burberry and Ralph Lauren added cafes to their flagships. The head of the British menswear brand Hackett admitted that he offered free gin and tonics because men did not linger in shops. The trend forecaster WGSN put it plainly: as more shopping moved online, stores needed to give people another reason to come in.

In 2018, Gucci opened a restaurant in Florence with the chef Massimo Bottura. Other brands hired a famous chef and hung a new sign. Tiffany's sign had been up since 1961. All it had to do was print the words on a menu.

Three new cafes in three months

When the first cafe opened in 2017, a Tiffany spokesperson said there were no plans for others. In 2019 Tiffany opened a second one, in Hong Kong. Its store design chief, Richard Moore, said the company would consider cafes only in its most important locations, where it could offer a truly elevated meal. Shanghai followed, then London's Harrods in 2020, Dubai and Taipei in late 2023 and Tokyo in the summer of 2025.

This year the pace changed. A cafe opened in Hong Kong's Causeway Bay in June, another in Singapore in July and a third in Costa Mesa, California, on Sept. 8. The new Hong Kong store puts its cafe on the same floor as its home and accessories collection, the arrangement Tiffany first tried in New York nine years ago.

On a Sunday morning in 1960, Tiffany sent 30 executives to watch a film crew work outside its windows. Then it left the sign up for 56 years with nothing behind it. The kitchen arrived the year sales fell and the leadership changed. This summer, three more opened in less than three months. The movie supplied the name. Tiffany chose when to use it.

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Sources

Woody Magazine is edited and published by Woody. Claude AI is used as a tool in the editorial process, and all editorial judgment and final responsibility rest with the editorial desk. Readers are encouraged to verify independently.

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