Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D'

by Michael Cecchi-Azzolina

Lear’s line “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” were words to heed.

We take our significant other there to celebrate, get a bit liquored up, then go home and hopefully fuck. The meal is not the main course. The possibility of sex is.

now-iconic photograph of a nude woman, created by the artist Martin Schreiber, famous for his book of nudes featuring a very young Madonna.

The model was a young Puerto Rican girl from Alphabet City. The original was later destroyed during the filming of Martin Scorsese’s Departed, and what hangs there now is a digital facsimile of the original photo.

He was renowned for walking the neighborhood and spray-painting in gold the dog shit that littered the sidewalk. He

This table is one of the best in the restaurant. It’s where Tarantino, Travolta, his wife (Kelly Preston), Harvey Keitel, Uma Thurman, and the producer of the film, Lawrence Bender (who once waited tables here), sat the evening after the showing of Pulp Fiction at the New York Film Festival. It’s the table where J.Lo and Marc Anthony sat for their first date after the birth of their twins, the street out front having to be closed due to the number of paparazzi that were waiting for them. It’s where U2 would sit, and where Depeche Mode still sits today. As

recruited a former chef from Raoul’s, Thomas Keller.

Julia Roberts met Benjamin Bratt here, introduced to her by longtime maître d’hôtel Eddie Hudson.