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Your table is ready : tales of a New York City maître d' / Michael Cecchi-Azzolina.

by Cecchi-Azzolina, Michael, author.

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New York : St. Martin's Press, 2022.

Cecchi-Azzolina, Michael.

Restaurateurs -- United States -- Biography.

Restaurants -- New York (State) -- New York.

9781250281982 (hardcover)

1250281989 (hardcover)

xvi, 288 pages ; 25 cm

The James Beard Awards, Civic Opera House, Chicago, May 1, 2017 -- Brooklyn -- Fran and Lou's -- 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 -- 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 -- Raoul's -- The meet -- Another beginning -- The Raoul's brothers -- Service -- Celebrity -- Drag -- Harvard -- 9/11/2001 -- The mob redux -- Crushed -- Unwanted -- Minetta tavern -- Hope -- "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently"-Henry Ford -- The resurrection -- Bobo -- 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.

"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 Soho 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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