Thanks for the Tip

“All of us want to be made to feel special, to be known and acknowledged,” Michael Cecchi Azzolina is a restaurant industry veteran. His dishy memoir, Your Table Is Ready, declares him. “This is where the power of the great maîtres d’hotel comes from.”

It is but one of the book’s theories that ring true even for those who seldom fine-dine but understand human nature and/or have an inkling of what a maître d’hotel job entails (“hotel master,” A title that was popular in the 1700s but was shortened by Americans around 1940. A maître d’ is no mere greeter at the Gap; that almost-always male professional sets the tone at point of entry, takes reservations, dispenses tables and favors, trains staff, monitors service, alerts staff to incoming critics and health inspectors, knows when to disappear (such as an impending disaster of overbooking), and has the cojones to direct a different performance every night.

Cecchi-Azzolina has more than 30 years of theater experience, and he rose through the ranks to become a general manager. If you know your heyday New York restaurants, be impressed: He served in various capacities at the Water Club, the River Café, La Rousse, Minetta Tavern, Bobo, Raoul’s, and Le CouCou. That he was the first real maître d’ at any of Stephen Starr’s dozens of restaurants is a laurel he figures he deserved. He explains: “I know New York and New Yorkers. I know what they want. … I don’t bullshit. I know the downtown dining scene.” He also knew the rules and broke them—chatting, drinking, and sitting with guests.

Oh, he was also misbehaving in other ways. Drugs, shift drinking, and debauchery were the norm in the 1980s and ’90s, no matter how high-falutin’ the establishment. Cecchi-Azzolina refers to his cohorts as mentors and sex addicts. They also describe survivors of abuse as perfectionists and ragers. He uses monikers like The Ex-Mormon and Mr. Debonair. He says that these were, and remain, his people because they were his people. “addictive-personality” Misfits who came together to help each other when it was needed.

You don’t have to be worried. The author includes many celebrity names and their doings throughout the chapters. Calvin Klein snubs with Roy Cohn and Malcolm Forbes “boys du jour.” Brooke Shields blurbed the book for Brooke Shields. She celebrated her 18th birthday with restaurant workers on the dance floor. Harvey Keitel, post Pulp Fiction premiere