The word "break" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used as both a noun and a verb. Example sentence: We had a break for lunch at noon.
Tom Wolfe, the writer, has his hair cut there, and former Gov. Eliot Spitzer used to, but then he got tangled in an escort scandal, resigned and never came back, Mr. Rottura said.
"I'm always very careful with what I ask the mayor," Mr. Rottura said.
"I gave his children their first haircut," Mr. Rottura said.
The mayor's haircut has no particular style, Mr. Rottura explained.
"She has lousy hair," Mr. Rottura said, "very fine".
So when a black sport utility vehicle carrying Mr. Bloomberg pulls up outside his hair salon on Madison Avenue — sometimes at 7 a.m., but usually a bit later, around 7 30, he said — Mr. Rottura is ready with a pair of Solingen scissors in his hands.
Mr. Rottura is 66, a short man with an aquiline nose, a receding hairline and a gray mustache that stretches the length of his upper lip.
He and Mr. Rottura have known each other since the 1970s, when Mr. Rottura worked on Sutton Place and Mr. Bloomberg was working at Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank, now a subsidiary of Citigroup.
"A lot of the men we do here are usually the husband, boyfriend or lover of one of the women who are our clients," said Mr. Rottura, who also lives on the Upper East Side.
Mr. Rottura speaks descriptively, and with sympathy, about his prominent clients' hair struggles.
