Algonquin Cat Hosts Posh Fundraiser for Homeless Pals

“Matilda is a gravy girl,” said Alice de Almeida, executive assistant at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan’s Theater District. “She does have her dry food and then she loves her wet food, but it has to have gravy.”

The hotel has catered to the city’s literary upper-crust since the 1920s, when Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and their friends traded barbed bon mots over drinks. De Almeida, however, was referring to her feline charge, the hotel’s ninth resident cat since a stray first walked through the front doors 80 years ago.