Your Table is Ready

As y’all now I don’t “review” memoirs, because I don’t really feel comfortable critiquing somebody’s memories and experiences. So instead, you’re getting the parts of the memoir that really spoke to me without spoilers.

Your Table is Ready is an enlightening, intriguing, and eye-opening look at the restaurant world in New York City spanning over the past 30 years. This memoir gives a delicious peek into the untamed world of front-of-house restaurant work, and features all the good, the bad, and the norms.

I really found myself connecting with Cecchi-Azzolina’s story when he told savory anecdotes about the entitled, strange, and nerve-wracking requests he has seen over the years. There were a few jaw-dropping moments that had me doing a double take! The final few chapters, set at Le Coucou, were the more entertaining and interesting chapters for me, along with the name dropping--some I recognized, many I didn't (obviously I had fun going down the Google rabbit hole looking them up).

I am just so truly impressed with how Cecchi-Azzolina and others who endure what seems to be quite the hard and thankless job.

Synopsis: 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.

Thank you, St. Martin’s Press, for this gifted copy in exchange for my honest review.

Yesterday

I finally made it to town yesterday! The roads still had done icy sections, but they were a lot better. It was just so nice to go somewhere, even if it was to just run errands.