Gristede's Guy.(The Talk of the Town)(John Catsimatidis)

John Catsimatidis, whose name rhymes with Gristede's, has been considering a run for mayor since 2003, on the strength of his business record and his life story: born in Greece, son of a busboy, amateur pilot, self-made billionaire. Catsimatidis owns Gristede's, the middling New York City supermarket chain, along with a few hundred gas stations and the Hellenic Times, among other enterprises, and for the past twenty years he has maintained an office on the third floor of the impressively dingy Gristede's headquarters, on Eleventh Avenue, amid samples of peanut butter and feta cheese. "I would say ninety per cent of the people know me as 'Oh, yeah, Gristede's guy,' " he said there last week, laying out his strategy to secure, first, the Republican nomination, and then the mayoralty, using--such is Bloomberg's legacy--millions from his personal fortune.

Catsimatidis, who is fifty-nine, is not, according to one of his friends, a "matinee idol, like Mitt Romney," and all those years in the grocery business have affected his waistline. He was wearing suspenders, and the pocket of his white shirt was stained with what looked like mustard."I'm going to lose that weight if it kills me," he said, referring to a recent pledge to drop thirty pounds before the race. He mentioned that he'd just run into Marty Markowitz, the ever-dieting Brooklyn borough president and a potential rival. "He looked good," Catsimatidis said.

Last year, Catsimatidis switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican, and hired his first political adviser, Rob Ryan, a former campaign manager for George Pataki. Ryan joined him at the office. "One of the things John has that the other candidates don't have is that John can get on the telephone and call up all these people on the wall," Ryan said, indicating scores of framed pictures of Catsimatidis with world leaders and luminaries: Jimmy Carter, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Tom Ridge, Frank Perdue, the Pope. "He can say, 'You know, I need somebody who has experience in x-y-z and we need them to help on this project for the city.' "

"Probably more than half the U.S. Senate has walked through this office," Catsimatidis said, before getting up to refill his coffee cup from a machine in the corner. (A note scrawled on an unused filter said, "Please pay for coffee and tea, 25 cents.") "I probably know at least ...