Posted on August 2, 2007 in
Articles The Article: Fine Diner to Riffraff: Tipsy Tales of 4-Star Benders by Frank Bruni in today’s New York Times.
The Text: THE Bordeaux was flowing, the foie gras abundant and the well-heeled epicures at Daniel were having a refined old time when suddenly all eyes turned toward a table against one wall and all conversation ceased.
Jean-Luc Le Dû, a sommelier in the restaurant, looked in that direction, too. And he saw her: the woman making like a dancer on a pole at Scores.
She stood facing the rest of the dining room. First she took off a vest or a jacket, as best Mr. Le Dû remembers. Then she went to work on her blouse.
Just as she was getting to her bra, the maître d’hôtel got to her. Thus her drunken, wobbly stint as a stripper ended, and so did her dinner. She and her date, a smiling, sloshed man who had seemingly egged her on, were escorted to the door.
“She was not necessarily attractive or young, so it was disruptive,” complained Mr. Le Dû, who left Daniel several years ago and now owns a wine shop in Greenwich Village. “If she were beautiful, it might have been different. People might have been cheering her on.”
At Daniel? Hard to believe. But then Mr. Le Dû’s story provides a reminder that a 1985 Burgundy casts the same dark spell as a 2007 peppermint schnapps. That in a four-star temple as surely as a starless dive, some diners drink too much: way, way too much.
And that when they do, they act in all the expansive, untamed and humiliating ways you might expect, transplanted to settings in which you don’t expect them. The inebriation comes at a higher price, but it looks much the same. It looks randy. Sloppy. And — how best to put this? — sickly.
That’s one of the most striking lessons in a book about the restaurant Per Se to be published by William Morrow in the fall.
In “Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter,” Phoebe Damrosch recounts the years she spent hustling through the restaurant’s gilded corridors above Columbus Circle, and she writes that “more people throw up in the dining room of Per Se than your average college bar.”
She hadn’t exactly foreseen that, she said in a recent telephone interview. “You’d think that people would be on better behavior at a restaurant like Per Se,” she said.
“What you end up realizing,” she added, “is that people are the same everywhere.”
Others who have tended to the tipsy masters and mistresses of the universe agree.
“If anything, a large bank account enables one to forgo normal levels of decorum, because you don’t have consequences,” said Rocky Cirino, a manager at the restaurant Cru, who previously worked at Daniel. “I’m thinking of several people whose station in life has enabled them to bypass normal civility and caution.”
I should note that I am mentioned frequently in Ms. Damrosch’s memoir but that I keep my dinner down. I should also note that Per Se is by no means the only celebrated restaurant where, thanks to the torrent of spirits and the indulgence of the moment, very fine food tends not to stay put.
“Happens all the time,” said Joseph Bastianich, one of the principal owners of the Italian restaurants Del Posto, Babbo and Felidia, among others. His voice had the bored, blasé tone of someone stating the patently obvious.
It happens even outside the confines and privacy of the restrooms?
“Oh, yeah, in the dining room, all over the table, on their dinner companions,” Mr. Bastianich said. “You’ve never seen that?”
Um, no.
“Well, you go out to restaurants a lot,” he said. “Maybe you’ll run into it before you’re done. Hopefully, you won’t get splashed.”
Hopefully.
Other scenes would be more amusing to witness — like a rather famous one that transpired at the Four Seasons late one afternoon many years ago.
At the end of a long lunch three well-dressed, then undressed, women in their mid-20s decided that the marble pool in the center of the main dining room looked like a nifty spot for a dip, said Julian Niccolini, one of the restaurant’s owners.
So they took one, wearing nothing more than their panties, he said.
Asked about their motivation, Mr. Niccolini answered: “I’m not going to say the word drunk. They were very happy. They were very excited.” As well they should have been. A wealthy gentleman nearby had been buying them their drinks, which included bottles of Montrachet, Cristal and Cheval Blanc. The total bill came to more than $7,000, Mr. Niccolini said.
He said the incident, which ended when a maître d’hôtel rushed over with tablecloths to cover the women up, was one of about a dozen times over the years when happy, excited customers at the Four Seasons took happy, excited splashes in the pool. The spectacles seldom elicit protest, he said.
Neither do the annual bacchanals of one of Le Bernardin’s most loyal patrons.
Eric Ripert, Le Bernardin’s chef, said that this regular celebrated his birthday there every year, renting out a private room with an adjoining kitchen upstairs and donning chef’s whites to cook alongside Mr. Ripert. He has his first glass of his beloved Montrachet sometime between 4 and 5 p.m.
It’s never his last.
“During the course of the night he drinks maybe five or six bottles,” Mr. Ripert said, explaining that the man nonetheless manages to remain vertical because he is “probably 6-foot-5, and he’s probably 400 pounds. I mean, he’s a monster. He’s huge.”
And on his most recent birthday, after many of those bottles had been drained, he teetered downstairs in his chef’s whites, commenced a showy promenade through the main dining room and accepted compliments from the people there, who understandably took him for one of the kitchen staff.
This much he’d done before, but he broke new ground with his next trick, which was to instruct servers to bring caviar over to this table, Champagne over to that one. And Mr. Ripert said that Le Bernardin ate the cost of these haute freebies, because the tanked titan is such a good customer, and his heart is as big as the rest of him.
Besides, he wasn’t flashing or fondling anyone around him, as many an intoxicated omnivore apparently does. Chefs, sommeliers, managers and servers at New York’s finest restaurants all have their sex stories, all of which they attribute to the loss of inhibition with the advent of inebriation.
There were the man and woman at Bouley who kept the staff at the restaurant past 2 a.m. because they had locked themselves in a bathroom, where the sounds they made over the course of more than 30 minutes at least let the staff know that they hadn’t passed out.
At Cru one night several diners complained that the door to one of the two small restrooms must be broken, because it hadn’t budged in more than 15 minutes.
“We kept knocking and knocking and getting no answer,” recalled Robert Bohr, the wine director, in a telephone interview. “So we put the key in.”
And as the door opened, a young man and woman hastily gathered themselves together and just as hastily zipped back to their table. “The guy had a self-satisfied look on his face,” Mr. Bohr said. “The woman kept her eyes lowered.”
Sometimes drunken diners don’t even bother to seek a private sanctuary for their libidos.
“People are often doing things underneath the table,” said a veteran server who has worked in many of Manhattan’s premier restaurants, including Gotham Bar & Grill and Fleur de Sel. The server asked not to be named for fear of angering past or future employers.
“The darker the restaurant, the more romantic the restaurant — there’s going to be some activity,” she said.
Ms. Damrosch said that at Lever House, where she worked before Per Se, she learned, “There’s always the Janet Jackson moment, when things pop out of dresses.”
Accidentally?
“You never know,” she said.
New York may be a better theater for this sort of thing than most other big cities in this country. Restaurateurs said that diners here often drink more heavily than diners elsewhere, because they’re more likely to be taking a taxi or the subway home.
And for the same reason, servers don’t have to be as vigilant about cutting a customer off.
“I just notice that people seem freer,” said Stephen Starr, who opened Manhattan offshoots of his hit Philadelphia restaurants Morimoto and Buddakan early last year. “In Philadelphia people are very careful not to go too far. It’s a car city. I mean, we drive five blocks.”
That’s not to say Philadelphia can’t compete. According to news reports, it was there, at Le Bec-Fin, that a well-lubricated, pot-bellied patron traded taunts with foie gras protesters on the sidewalk outside by leaping up and down, which presumably caused considerable jiggling, and bellowing, “This is what foie gras did to me!”
He then went inside the restaurant, pulled down his pants, exposed himself and pressed himself against a glass door, so the protesters could see.
Getting naked, or trying to get naked, or getting partly naked, or encouraging the companion on the far side of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape to get naked: these are some of the most common effects of a goblet or snifter too many.
The others?
Belting is big. At Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., and Picholine, chefs or managers had stories about diners who stood up, reared back, and broke into song, loudly and long enough for all the dining room to hear and all the diners in it to be transfixed.
Sleeping is popular. Karen Waltuck, one of the owners of Chanterelle, remembers that she was closing up one night and minutes away from leaving when two lingering lawyers informed her that they hadn’t seen one of their friends for hours.
Ms. Waltuck found the errant friend, but only after jimmying the lock on a restroom door. There he was, sprawled across the floor in his suit and tie.
“He’d probably been that way for an hour and a half,” she marveled. She roused him, and off he went. “I don’t remember him being embarrassed,” she said.
Mr. Bohr and Terrance Brennan, the chef at Picholine, described an elderly woman famous at top-tier restaurants around the city for her habit of dozing off during long dinners with her husband, a fanatic for Montrachet and Bordeaux.
“They’re super-old blue bloods and they drink only expensive wine and eat only in expensive restaurants,” Mr. Bohr said. “She sleeps through the intermission between each course, and then her husband wakes her up. She gets woken up to take bites.”
Mr. Bohr cast alcohol as the quintessence of a gateway drug, saying it’s usually the smashed diners who smoke marijuana in the restrooms at Cru — this has happened a half-dozen times, he said — or come back from the restrooms with a case of the sniffles and a much diminished appetite.
But sometimes the doings of the four-star drunk are less brazen, more poignant.
Workers at Jean Georges still wince at the memory of the gentle, sweet woman who made the journey from the restroom, through a vestibule, across the breadth of the adjoining restaurant Nougatine and back to her table with the entire back of her dress tucked into her pantyhose.
“The walk of shame,” recalled Lois Freedman, director of operations for Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurants.
It was nothing compared with the walk of a woozy diner elsewhere. A manager privy to the incident recounted it on condition the restaurant not be identified, because it’s a very nice restaurant.
And at this very nice restaurant, earlier this year, a regular sat at the bar — first with just one companion, then with several more — and ordered thousands of dollars worth of red wine. There was a $400 bottle of Rioja. There was a $3,500 magnum of Burgundy.
At a certain point he had to go. So he stumbled to a restroom, where he stumbled into a vase, knocking it over and shattering it. Surveying the wreckage, he apparently decided he should use a different commode. Sadly, he didn’t get to it in time.
He soon returned to his perch at the bar and to his companions, but in a more pungent condition. They had the good sense to persuade him to call it a night.
He had some good sense, too.
He didn’t set foot in the restaurant again.
The Analysis: Smushing one’s genitals against a window so a crowd of protesters can enjoy the view is the new it for insters.
