Michael Cecchi-Azzolina

Decades of New York dining rooms sit behind Your Table Is Ready, published by St. Martin's in 2022. Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, a Brooklyn native, took a waiting job at La Rousse to pay for a theatre career, studied dramaturgy at New York University and earned an MFA through Harvard and the American Repertory Theater, and never got out of restaurants. He served Tennessee Williams and Dustin Hoffman early on, then ran the front of house at The Water Club, the River Cafe, Raoul's, Minetta Tavern and Le Coucou. The memoir is about the door: who gets the good table, what a regular is worth, how a reservation book turns into currency, and how staff in the 1980s and 1990s worked and fought through long shifts fuelled by drink and drugs. Reviewers reached for Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential as the comparison, with the vantage moved from the kitchen to the podium. It closes on the empty rooms of 2020.