Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maitre’ D by Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
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.
This book was recommended to me in my Scirbd app after I finished “Anon Pls.”
Which makes sense.
And I WAS still kinda in a gossipy, tell-all kind of mood still after indulging in that book.
I also saw it was on a whole bunch of “Must Read” lists from last year too so I thought “Okay Scribd algorithm…sounds like a great choice, let’s DO IT.”
This was a behind the scenes, down low look at the NY restaurant industry from the eyes and ears and hearts of the people who tirelessly work and serve in it.
The author’s voice is quite lively and entertaining…he has that strong Italian Brooklyn accent that is PERFECT for giving the New York vibe and feels.
But IDK…..this wasn’t the most interesting thing to read for me…and I kept drifting off with my attention span.
Some of his stories grabbed my attention more than others—like the time he almost got killed or severely injured from an active member of the “Gotti boys”—but I just thought most of them were just okay.
And some were hella inappropriate.
I DO give the author massive props for acknowledging MULTIPLE times in his retellings that some of the things that happened were a product of the time…but were not okay then OR now, and he admits his complicity in some real toxic shitty masculine behaviors. He tried to keep it as honest as possible, cringe inducing as it is.
There was LOTS of juicy recollecting of wild nights, misbehaviors, and celebrity run ins…but also lots of remembering horrible co workers, nasty bosses and shitty work enviornments.
I do think he was VERY honest and real in this memoir…I definitely found it to be authentic and genuine, even if I didn’t find it super duper interesting.
I think for those people who frequent the NY dining scene or have served in it (or somewhere similar), this would probably be a more engaging, relatable and enjoyable read.
I didn’t think it was an AWFUL book…I just found it to be a shoulder shrugging “A’ight.”
A 50/50, “Meh” kinda read.