Don’t You Know Who I Am?

Now that they don’t have to worry about black people, restauranteurs are discovering new ways to accommodate everyone’s inflated ego:

For there to be good seats, there must, after all, also be bad seats. These days, however, even the most au courant restaurateurs have a good reason to avoid that toxic combustion of self-important diner and questionable seat: money. Faced with an increasingly competitive marketplace and ever-savvier diners, the owners of many new restaurants have taken pains to maximize the number of appealing seats.

“We just try to seat everybody in the way we feel will make the maximum numbers in the dining room,” said Amy Sacco, the owner of Bette, who has built a groovy reputation as the impresario of places like Bungalow 8.

An optimist might call this quest quixotic; a realist might call it mendacity. Human nature being what it is, you can put three tables in a room and one – the closest to the window or the one where Nicole Kidman sat last week – will become more desirable.

Restaurateurs, then, must figure out how to cultivate the glow of celebrity without alienating the bulk of their paying clientele. This is easier to do at small places (merely getting into Serge Becker’s La Esquina is enough), and the exhaustive focus on food at places like Per Se can effectively sublimate status anxiety.