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Event Series Event Series: DPL Book Club

DPL Book Club: Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D’

06/21/2023 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

Please note that the previous selection for June, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, has been delayed until August’s meeting due to high demand for the title across the county. We apologize for any inconvenience. 

June’s selection is Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D’, by Michael Cecchi-Azzolina.

From the publisher:

“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.”

 

As of May’s meeting, the DPL Book Club is now meeting at Dormont Public Library on the third Wednesday of each month from 6:30 to 8:00 PM. There is no longer a beverage charge. Adults 21 and over are welcome to BYOB.

Registration is requested for the Book Club; to register, please call 412-531-8754 or email dormont@dormontlibrary.org.

Copies of the book will be available at Dormont Public Library. eBook and eAudio copies of the title are available to request on Libby. 

Details

Date:
06/21/2023
Time:
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Series:
Event Categories:
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Venue

Dormont Public Library
2950 W Liberty Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15216 United States
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Click the LibraryCalendar link above for online registration.
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