Feeding Frenzy

An off-Broadway hit about the restaurant biz comes to Philadelphia -- and hits close to home.

The above is a true story from Stephane Castera (he of the divine French accent), maitre d' at the zillion-star Fountain Restaurant at the Four Seasons.

Meg Trottnow, the "gatekeeper" at the legendary Le Bec-Fin restaurant, did not, of course, allow herself to speak that snarky second line -- her restraint, like that of all the reservationists we talked to in some of the city's top restaurants, is superhuman.

And the stories they can tell -- about pleadings ("my mother is dying of cancer -- this will be her last supper"), bribings ("I'll make it worth your while when I get there"), and general foot-stamping fit-throwing are hilarious -- so funny, in fact, they could come right out of Becky Mode's play, Fully Committed, the surprise off-Broadway hit about a reservationist at one of New York's ultra-ultra restaurants. "Fully committed" is the phrase used to mean that the restaurant is totally booked. The playwright clearly speaks with an insider's voice (she was a cocktail waitress at the old Bouley back when it was the restaurant in New York).

Philadelphia Theatre Company will open their season with this one-person, 40-character show, in which a frantic reservationist, holed up in a windowless basement, answers calls from stars and sheiks and name-droppers and little old ladies who all want to book a table. In between these calls, there are personal calls: to his agent (he's an out-of-work actor -- what else?), to his father who wants to know if he's coming home for Christmas. Meanwhile, on another line, Chef, all genius and temperament, makes demands, while on yet another line, the maitre d' exerts outrageous power. One actor plays all these roles, so it is a tip-top virtuosic op. Act II Playhouse in Ambler is co-producing the PTC production, directed by Gus Kaikkonen. Kaikkonen is bringing in actor Kraig Swartz, who has also performed the show in New Hampshire.

Turns out that real life in the trenches of the glam food industry is also full of drama. Trottnow tells me that in 13 years at her job, with seven lines ringing all day long, there's never been a dull moment. Chef (Georges Perrier, noted for his combustibility -- "he can be terrifying") fires Meg Trottnow all the time (once he fired her twice in one day) and Max, who runs the bar downstairs at Le Bec-Fin, gets fired once a week -- he goes out one door and comes back in another, knowing that Chef will forget a moment later. Hostesses quit all the time.

At Le Bec-Fin, Saturday night reservations run four to five months in advance; at Django, the tiny newest Philly hotspot, they will book only a month in advance, so the likelihood of your catching the right moment to call is remote -- which, of course, makes it all the more desirable. Django's Amy Olexy, who used to be with Stephen Starr's restaurant empire, has stories of people who called five times in a half-hour, using a disguised voice every time -- trying to book a table -- and although there are only 16 to 20 tables, they get 700 to 1,000 calls a day. Talk about fully committed.

At Morimoto, the year-old, high-hype Iron Chef restaurant, Jennifer Chaefsky tells me there's only a seven- to eight-week wait for a Saturday night table. Men sometimes ask if Chef will put an engagement ring in the sushi (Morimoto prefers, she tells me, to make sure the prospective fiancee will not eat the diamond), although once when a spectacular chocolate and spun-sugar dessert held the ring, the woman complained for a while that she hadn't ordered it, that she wasn't in the mood for chocolate, etc, etc. People lie about who they know, lie about making reservations, name-drop, threaten and generally behave badly. Chaefsky is polite and diplomatic to everyone, but "once we hang up the phone, restraints are gone."

Top restaurants get calls from everywhere: Chaefsky, no mean deliverer of lines herself, says dryly, "We get calls from London frequently, and Japan, of course, and Switzerland. [beat] Ohio calls a lot."

The international clientele poses its own problems: Castera laughs about cheap customers who suddenly switch to speaking French to avoid leaving a tip (service is included in the bill in France) or, the opposite pretense, when Americans will pretend to be knowledgeable about French wine to the sommelier and make preposterous errors ("Excellent choice, monsieur").

Famous people call and arrive: Meg Trottnow tells me about princes from Saudi Arabia and about Bruce Willis stopping in to book a table, still wearing his costume and makeup from Twelve Monkeys and looking like a problem; Robert Goulet sends Chef the same Christmas card every year, Oprah and Brad Pitt dine at Le Bec-Fin regularly, and the governor is coming next month -- well, enough name-dropping. Sometimes there has to be a separate table for the secret service. President Bush, she notes, "isn't into our cuisine."

The most bizarre calls Trottnow received were from a woman who wanted to talk to Chef to find out if she could keep lobsters fresh for two days in her bathtub, and another from a woman who spoke no French and whose French houseguest was having a problem breast-feeding; the "Breast Feeding Hotline" as it was instantly dubbed, manned by French waiter Yves, saved the day.

Reservationists tell me the most frequent request they get is for "special treatment." So it was no surprise when Sara Garonzik, artistic producing director of Philadelphia Theatre Company, explained why she'd chosen this play: "People in the play are symptomatic of all of us -- it's a play about status and the need to be served." Although she didn't see it in New York (talk about fully committed -- now that was a tough ticket), Garonzik loved the script and thought it "seemed right for us now. Philadelphia has become such a restaurant city, and restaurants have become our chief form of entertainment."

Fully Committed, Oct. 11-Nov. 17, Plays & Players Theater, 1714 Delancey St., 215-569-9700; Nov. 20-Dec. 15, Act II Playhouse, 56 E. Butler Pike, Ambler, 215-654-0200.