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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cecchi-Azzolina, Michael, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cecchi-Azzolina, Michael.

Restaurateurs--United States--Biography.

Restaurateurs.

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

Restaurants.

New York (State)--New York.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

xvi, 288 pages ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

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

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: pt. I The James Beard Awards, Civic Opera House, Chicago, May 1, 2017

Brooklyn

Fran and Lou's

pt. II Backto the City

Playwrights Horizons

Restaurant 101

So This Is What It's Like

A Kick in the Dick

Althea

All Good Things Must Pass

pt. 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 Cafe

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

pt. IV Raouls

The Meet

Another Beginning

The Raoul's Brothers

Service

Celebrity

Drag

Harvard

9/11/2001

The Mob Redux

Crushed

pt. V Unwanted

Minetta Tavern

Hope

"Failure Is Simply the Opportunity to Begin Again, This Time More Intelligently"

Henry Ford

The Resurrection

Bobo

pt. VI Starr Ship Coucou

Le Chef

Starr Man

Le Coucou

Iron Bottoms

Souffle

The Arrival

Gone at Last

The Shah

Fashionistas

Mr. James Beard

The Awards.

ISBN:

9781250281982

1250281989

OCLC:

1289233899