Ah, the drama of being a hungry celebrity! Just this week Serena Williams and her daughter Olympia Phanian arrived at the Peninsula Hotel in Paris and, she told the press, she was refused a table at its Michelin-starred rooftop restaurant, which she insisted was “empty.” That is what the French would call a huge faux pas, and of course, the incident became a scandale international.
Immediately the hotel management issued an apology, insisting that the rooftop restaurant—The Peninsula has five —during the Olympics was “complet” (fully booked). “When she came, there were only two tables available and they had been reserved by clients of the hotel,” Peninsula employee Maxine Mannevy, who was not working when Williams visited the rooftop restaurant told Variety, “My colleague didn’t recognize her and feels terrible, but he told her what he would have told any other client, which is to wait downstairs in the bar for a table to become available. That was absolutely nothing personal.”
The response seems disingenuous simply because, without being pushy, à la “Do you know who I am?” Serena might have mentioned her name and gotten somewhere. Had that been the case, I’m pretty sure management would have given her a table ASAP.
In restaurant lingo it’s called “build a table” if necessary when a celeb shows up.
“Some restaurants market themselves to bring in celebrities,” says August Ceradini, owner of mid-town Manhattan’s glamorous Cucina 8 1/2. “Remember the scene in the movie Goodfellas at the Copacabana when they bring in another table when a big shot shows up? That was true and many restaurants still have tables in the back for that reason.”
I’ve seen it myself on occasion, once at the posh (now closed) Le Cirque, where tables were spaced so that another could be put in place on a moment’s notice, as when a fashion designer arrived with model Elle MacPherson on his arm. When someone complained about a table being too close to another, owner Sirio Maccioni would ask, “I’m sorry, madame, but would you rather sit this close or this far from Sophia Loren?” as she swept into the room.
“It’s a headache in general,” says Ceradini. “Especially if they bring an entourage, Madonna will arrive with body guards and demand that they don’t want anyone sitting next to them.”
There is nothing new about the treatment celebs get at restaurants, even if they don’t make a reservation. As Truman Capote depicted in his notorious story “La Cote Basque, 1964,” New York’s society ladies claimed their table whenever they wished to dine there; to be just a regular person risked being sent to “Siberia,” a term for an out-of-the-way, least desirable table, a term coined in the 1930s, when a society woman named Peggy Hopkins Joyce entered the class-conscious El Morocco nightclub in New York and found herself being led to less than an “A” table. “Where are you taking me?” she asked the maître d’hôtel, “Siberia?” At The Colony that section was called by the management the “doghouse.”
