Table d'Hot

Tables are apportioned using some vague calculation involving status and number of visits. The more you come, and the brighter your star, the better your perch. Alice Mayhew, ubereditor at Simon & Schuster, dines here five days a week, for weeks on end, says Millington, which all but ensures her a regular date with Table 14. Robert Friedman, president of Classic Media: Harvey & Golden Books Entertainment -- home to "Underdog," "Lassie" and other TV properties -- hunkers at Table 11.

"It's as though Michael's anticipated the integration of media," Friedman says, "because people from every part of the business come."

Synergy ought to be on the menu. While sitting at Michael's, and working at the time for New Line Cinema, Friedman inked deals to promote the "Austin Powers" movies with companies such as Virgin Atlantic. "It was there," Friedman says, "that I first heard the phrase 'Urgin' for a Virgin,' " which the airline used for its tie-in promotion.

"A casual conversation can be very productive," says Wayne Kabak, an agent at the William Morris Agency. "You never know what comes from saying hello and being out there."

Each day as diners arrive, a line of waiters and waitresses stands a few feet from the maitre d' station, hands behind their backs, ready to whisk patrons to their appointed tables. It's like that moment in every beauty pageant when men in uniform queue up to chaperon contestants to center stage, where the ladies then spin in their evening gowns. Except instead of Miss Texas it's, say, David Corvo, the executive producer of "Dateline," and he's headed for Table 11.

"In most clubs, you act like you're not at a club, even if it's very exclusive," says Michael Wolff, a Vanity Fair writer who was a fixture at Michael's until he called it quits in a huff, about which more in a moment. "But everybody at Michael's acts like they are at Michael's. Quite literally, the point of being there is to be there. There's no pretense about it, which is part of the fun."

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The founder and owner of this place is Michael McCarty, a hearty, pink-faced man with a booming voice. Last Wednesday at lunchtime he was eating at the bar with some friends, shouting for more oysters and greeting everyone who caught his eye. He wore a dark blue Zegna suit and gave the impression of a man in a huge rush.

"Good show, good show," he said a few times during an interview, words that roughly translated into "Let's get this over with." He opened his first restaurant in Santa Monica in 1979, when he was 25 years old. It was seized upon by a new generation of Hollywood moguls then on the rise -- Steven Spielberg, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg.

"There weren't a lot of great restaurants in L.A. back then," McCarty says. "The place was one of the founding spots for new American food."

In 1989, he opened here at 24 W. 55th St., a space that previously housed a restaurant called the Italian Pavilion. McCarty coveted the spot for the garden room, but he knew also that he was moving into an ideal neighborhood:

"William Morris was next door, you had the MGM building nearby, you had ICM, that was a block away, all the publishing houses."