Your table is ready : tales of a New York City maître d'

Your table is ready Tales of a New York City maître d'

Michael Cecchi-Azzolina

Book - 2022

"A front-of-the-house Kitchen Confidential from a career maître d'hotel who manned the front of the room in New York City's hottest and most in-demand restaurants. From the glamorous to the entitled, from royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who wanted to be seen-or just to gawk-at the hottest restaurants in New York City came to places Michael Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number was passed around among those who wanted to curry favor, during the decades when restaurants replaced clubs and theater as, well, theater in the most visible, vibrant city in the world. Besides dropping us back into a vanished time, Your Table Is Ready takes us places we'd never be able to get into on our own: Raoul's in So...ho with its louche club vibe; Buzzy O'Keefe's casually elegant River Café (the only outer-borough establishment desirable enough to be included in this roster), from Keith McNally's Minetta Tavern to Nolita's Le Coucou, possibly the most beautiful room in New York City in 2018, with its French Country Auberge-meets-winery look and the most exquisite and enormous stands of flowers, changed every three days. From his early career serving theater stars like Tennessee Williams and Dustin Hoffman at La Rousse right through to the last pre-pandemic-shutdown full houses at Le Coucou, Cecchi-Azzolina has seen it all. In Your Table Is Ready, he breaks down how restaurants really run (and don't), and how the economics work for owners and overworked staff alike. The professionals who gravitate to the business are a special, tougher breed, practiced in dealing with the demanding patrons and with each other, in a very distinctive ecosystem that's somewhere between a George Orwell "down and out in...." dungeon and a sleek showman's smoke-and-mirrors palace. Your Table Is Ready is a rollicking, raunchy, revelatory memoir"--

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Subjects
Cecchi-Azzolina, Michael.
Restaurateurs > United States > Biography.
Restaurants > New York (State) > New York.
HOUSE & HOME / General.
Restaurants.
Restaurateurs.
New York (State) > New York.
United States.
Biographies.
Autobiographies.
Genres
Biographies
Autobiographies
Published
New York : St. Martin's Press 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Michael Cecchi-Azzolina (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xvi, 288 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9781250281982
  • Introduction
  • Part I. The James Beard Awards, Civic Opera House, Chicago, May 1, 2017
  • Brooklyn
  • Fran and Lou's
  • Part II. Back to the City
  • Playwrights Horizons
  • Restaurant 101
  • So This Is What It's Like
  • A Kick in the Dick
  • Althea
  • All Good Things Must Pass
  • Part III. Life on the Water
  • Another World
  • Partners in Servitude
  • How Soft Is an Opening?
  • Success
  • And They Came ...
  • Mimi
  • Extracurricular Activities
  • The All-Star
  • The River Café
  • The Call
  • It Begins
  • The Family That Dines Together ...
  • The Trail
  • "Do Not Fuck Zees Up!"
  • Guilty
  • Jumpers
  • The Door
  • Mr. Debonair
  • The Donald
  • "Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Pull Me Back In!"
  • Acting Proceeds Apace
  • Part IV. Raoul's
  • The Meet
  • Another Beginning
  • The Raoul's Brothers
  • Service
  • Celebrity
  • Drag
  • Harvard
  • 9/11/2001
  • The Mob Redux
  • Crushed
  • Part V. Unwanted
  • Minetta Tavern
  • Hope
  • "Failure Is Simply the Opportunity to Begin Again, This Time More Intelligently"-Henry Ford
  • The Resurrection
  • Bobo
  • Part VI. Starr Ship Coucou
  • Le Chef
  • Starr Man
  • Le Coucou
  • Iron Bottoms
  • Soufflé
  • The Arrival
  • Gone at Last
  • The Shah
  • Fashionistas
  • Mr. James Beard
  • The Awards
  • Epilogue
  • Author's Note
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Booklist Review

When Cecchi-Azzolina was a young actor sorely in need of steady income, a sympathetic director walked him across a Manhattan street and finagled him a restaurant job. Cecchi-Azzolina dealt with a host of dysfunctional chefs, managers, and waiters while learning to serve an ever-hungry and demanding public. Thanks to this restaurant's location, he got to wait on the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Tennessee Williams. The restaurant shuttered after a brief run, and he found himself scrounging for another job. He worked his way up to maître d'hôtel at a succession of Manhattan's fine dining establishments, where he witnessed the full range of human behaviors from temperamental chefs to the the daily parade of patrons. Cecchi-Azzolina quickly learned the valuable lesson that no matter how skilled the chef, service ultimately trumps food, and what people truly value and remember is how they were treated and made to feel important. Fans of the late Anthony Bourdain will here find similar tales of restaurant life, this time from the perspective of the front of the house.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"A well-run dining room is an art, a ballet," according to this riveting debut from Cecchi-Azzolina, a veteran of New York City's restaurant industry. The author, who grew up in 1960s Brooklyn, landed a postcollege job as a server at the theater district restaurant La Rousse, where writer Tennessee Williams drank to excess. La Rousse closed because of mismanagement, and Cecchi-Azzolina went on to work at the Water Club (where he served actor and comedian Jackie Gleason, who requested off-menu hash browns); acted as maître d' at Brooklyn's top-rated River Café ("The lure for me was both egoistic and monetary"); and performed stints at "failing restaurant" Bobo, reliable date spot Raoul's, and the small but gorgeous Minetta Tavern. The narrative provides plenty of celebrity encounters, but also reveals how restaurants work. Bribery for a coveted table? Sometimes. The main reason for delayed seating? Diners who wouldn't leave the table. Even when Cecchi-Azzolina thinks he's had enough of the industry, he's soon reminded of its ability to "give one another life." Readers will gobble up the juicy gossip and decadent stories from a man who has seen it all. Agent: Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Dec.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An industry veteran dishes on more than three decades of service in New York City's hottest restaurants. "The restaurant industry is not just about truffles and sweetbreads, caviar and cream, a prime fillet of beef or a freshly caught Dover sole. It's also about sex, drugs, and an array of misbehaviors perpetrated by both staff and guests." So writes Cecchi-Azzolina in the introduction, highlighting the reality that intertwined with the glamour of fine dining is plenty of bad behavior. The author grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and started working at a local luncheonette while in high school, where he learned the basics of the business. He moved to Florida and attended college, then back to the city to pursue his master's degree in theater at NYU. After a stint at La Rousse, the author went to "Michael 'Buzzy' O'Keeffe's soon-to-be-mecca to WASP cuisine and the yacht-club lifestyle, the Water Club." Then it was on to the River Café, an even hotter venture, where Cecchi-Azzolina was named captain of the front of the house. He eventually became the maître d'hôtel at Le Coucou, which won a James Beard Award during his tenure. The author's account of life in the restaurant industry is fast-paced, long on the meticulous details of service, unsparing of the salacious tales of sex, drugs, alcohol, run-ins with the mob, "jumpers" within view of the River Café, and much more. Readers interested in the who's who of the NYC celebrity world will not be disappointed, as the high-profile clientele the author mentions runs the gamut from actors and musicians to international ambassadors to "the absolutely horrid Anna Wintour." Cecchi-Azzolina's prose can border on abrasive and overly detailed, but at its best, his tales are entertaining and affecting, as when he describes the toll the AIDS epidemic took on his colleagues in the industry. His honesty in acknowledging the many ills of the industry's past and its continued long journey to legitimacy is enlightening and refreshing. An overlong yet vivid, candid account of an admirable restaurant career. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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