How a Hotel Concierge Spends His Sundays

When George Gaffney tells people that he’s the chef concierge at the Beekman hotel, they normally respond with some version of: “I didn’t know there was a concierge in the kitchen.”

“I just laugh and tell them chef is French for chief,” he said. “It’s really just a fancy term for the concierge manager. It has nothing to do with dining — except for all the restaurant recommendations you give.”

Mr. Gaffney, 49, never envisioned a career in the hotel industry. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he started acting. He played Bodie in the pilot episode of “Dawson’s Creek” and made a handful of movie and TV movie appearances in the late 1990s. To pay the bills, he became a night auditor at a hotel in Cary, N.C.

A Queens native, Mr. Gaffney moved back to New York in 2000 to help open an Embassy Suites as a front office director. He went on to become the concierge manager at the Waldorf Astoria in Midtown and has been with the Beekman since it opened in 2016.

“I love being a concierge,” he said. “It was a great accident. To be a concierge in a city like this where there’s endless stuff going on — it’s great.”

Mr. Gaffney lives in a two-bedroom co-op in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx with his wife, Esfir Shamilova, an office coordinator at Columbia University, and their two sons, August, 6, and Julius, 4.