Book : Your Table Is Ready Tales Of A New York City Maitre D

-Titulo Original : Your Table Is Ready Tales Of A New York City Maitre D

-Fabricante :

St. Martins Press

-Descripcion Original:

Review An Amazon Best Book of December 2022:Your Table Is Ready is wildly inappropriate-and great fun. Michael Cecchi-Azzolina spent decades as a maitre d’ overseeing New York City’s hottest dining rooms, from the rollicking, greed-is-good 1980s to today’s post-COVID world. In his hilariously jaunty (and at times contrite) voice, he takes readers on a ribald romp through this drug-fueled, sex, grit, and glam industry, spilling every detail: which iconic singer is a chronically terrible tipper, which beloved TV comedian was also beloved by servers, which teen star got every staffer dancing, which now-famous chef is kind of a monster, which mobster threatened his life. It’s the real-life version of Jay McInerney’s bawdy Bright Lights, Big City, a front-of-the-house report in the vein of Anthony Bourdain’s best-selling Kitchen Confidential. Cecchi-Azzolina’s experience wasn’t all fun and games: some scenes are nowhere near kosher in a post #MeToo world, which he fully admits. Eye-popping, raunchy, boisterous, indecorous at times-you’ll read it in a day (just not out loud to your grandma, or your kids).-Lindsay Powers, Amazon Editor A front-of-the-house Kitchen Confidential from a career maitre d’hotel who manned the front of the room in New York Citys 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: Raouls in Soho with its louche club vibe; Buzzy O’Keefe’s casually elegant River Cafe (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. Review For more than three decades I’ve known Michael Cecchi-Azzolina as a great and gracious Maitre d’ at some of New York’s hottest restaurants. Who knew he was such a talented writer, or that he was having more fun behind the scenes than most of his guests? Your Table is Ready is the Front of House Kitchen Confidential--a funny, raunchy, savvy and hugely entertaining book. --Jay McInerney This peek behind the curtain reveals how a master restaurateur creates a scene so magical that big spenders, delicate egos and the eternally entitled will do almost anything to be in one of the seats at showtime. YOUR TABLE IS READY is required reading for anyone who wants to crack the code on how to get a coveted reservation in the see-and-be-seen restaurants of the moment in New York--or anywhere in the world!--Michael Fazio, author of Concierge Confidential This book is funny, nostalgic, and fascinating, an insiders peek into New York Citys most iconic r