Editorial Content for Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D'
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
I was a busboy at a Wisconsin resort one summer. Every day I worked two shifts in the dining room, serving breakfast/lunch and then dinner. My tasks were supposed to be keeping the guests satisfied with coffee, water and other liquids, as well as clearing the dishes off the tables and transporting them to the kitchen. I also worked with two waiters to make sure that the food was delivered to the proper tables. Nearly 60 years later, I can still recall the kitchen, the staff and how the food was prepared. As a person very low in the chain of command, I was not totally immersed in the operation. But I did see enough to decide that the restaurant business was not for me.
"YOUR TABLE IS READY is a boisterous memoir.... [T]his is an informative and entertaining book for anyone interested in the restaurant business."
Now, decades later, YOUR TABLE IS READY by Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, a veteran of 35 years in the New York City restaurant industry, has filled in many more details about how it all operates. I never had the opportunity to serve Tennessee Williams, Dustin Hoffman or any other celebrity. Nor did I ever find myself recruited by the Trump family to run one of their hotel restaurants. I also never needed to navigate the theater rush or worry about how restaurant critics would view my work. All of these experiences fill the pages of this book with vivid, detailed, bawdy and sometimes disturbing recollections of the New York dining culture from Cecchi-Azzolina’s decades of work as a server, maître d’ and manager.
Before we visit a restaurant, quite a bit has occurred behind the scenes. Getting it open is on everyone from owners and contractors to managers and servers. They are all involved in some fashion before any customers and food are in the establishment. And often the opening is frustrated by delays in receiving parts and equipment and workers’ inability to finish something before they can move on to the next step in completing the restaurant. There is constant frustration, and the kitchen has yet to even think about preparing a meal.
Once the doors are open to guests, management’s goal is for the operation to be run with military precision. But just as in war, when the battle plan goes awry after the first shots are fired, the serving strategy sometimes goes out the window the moment the first customers arrive. Reservations become confused, regulars come without reserving a table, and staff members get sick or sometimes show up to work drunk.
Cecchi-Azzolina’s New York career began in the 1980s when the industry had a drug problem and before fine dining became an obsession. He provides readers with fascinating details about how restaurants are really run and how the economics work for owners and overworked staff. It is a tough and demanding enterprise for everyone involved.
YOUR TABLE IS READY is a boisterous memoir. Cecchi-Azzolina came to New York to become an actor. His dramatic flair may lead him to embellish his stories just a bit in an effort to spice them up for readers. Regardless, this is an informative and entertaining book for anyone interested in the restaurant business.
Teaser
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, Michel 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.
Promo
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, Michel 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.
About the Book
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.
Audiobook available, read by Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
