Your Table Is Ready

Tales of a New York City Maître D'

By: Michael Cecchi-Azzolina

Narrated by: Michael Cecchi-Azzolina

"Trained in acting and a lifer in the restaurant business, Michael Cecchi-Azzolina doles out opinions in the tone of an authentic New Yorker. He narrates with a good pace and rhythm. The inner workings of the restaurant world as revealed are exhilarating but often sordid and salacious....this is an entertaining and insightful audiobook."- AudioFile

This program is read by the author.

A front-of-the-house Kitchen Confidential from a career maître d’hotel who manned the front of the room in New York City's 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: 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

©2022 Michael Cecchi-Azzolina (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"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

"Michael Cecchi-Azzolina saw it all: the adrenaline-fueled days that built toward the mayhem of a dinner service, the juggling act that conjured a last-minute table when a billionaire showed up on a whim at the hottest restaurant in town. YOUR TABLE IS READY is an uproarious and ultimately endearing look into the personalities and pressures of the dining room in the rough-and-tumble New York City restaurant world of the 1980s and 1990s. Full of tasty bits!" —Andrew Friedman, author of Chefs, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

Like sitting at the bar hearing these stories

Informative and entertaining, like sitting at the bar with him hearing these stories. Reliving a NYC past and world I’ve only previously experienced as a restaurant guest. And I think I’ll forever be kinder to the restaurant staff.

Fantastic Read!!

An unvarnished look at the hospitality industry from a true insider. Quite entertaining and colorful!!!

True Life!

As restaurant owners, we KNOW this book is true. Enjoyed it more than I thought I would. The book has the peculiar quality of being somewhat predictable yet thoroughly delightful. What made it special was the personality and back story who, wonder if wonders, was actually the best choice for narrator. Well done.

Won one of the most engaging audiobooks this year

The stories, as they are told, are just as colorful, as perhaps the food in which we served him any of these restaurants mentioned in the story. In my younger days, I worked in restaurants, not in New York, but in Oklahoma, and met many characters similar to those described in the story. An amazing account of a life that was finally fulfilled with a James Beard award. Job well done Michael. I highly recommend this, not for the faint of heart in some of the language, but necessary to give a full scope of the characters.

Wonderfully read. Easy to follow. Very real and interesting stories. Definitely recommend for anyone who worked in the industry

Wonderfully read. Easy to follow. Very real and interesting stories. Definitely recommend for anyone who worked in the industry