Table d'Hot

Location is just part of it. McCarty seems to understand intuitively how to feed and flatter the elites. His stock in trade is non-celebrity celebrities -- the rich and/or powerful who aren't recognized by the masses and therefore crave recognition by the few, which is to say, each other. He gives these people the feeling that they are exactly where they ought to be.

Especially on Wednesdays. That's when Laurel Touby shows up to report on who is eating at Michael's for the Web site FishbowlNY.com. Her dispatches come complete with a schematic drawing of the restaurant's tables, helpfully numbered.

"We started doing this in July after we asked [Spy magazine founder and New York magazine columnist] Kurt Andersen how we could get readers at, you know, the highest level to go to the site," says Touby, who is the co-founder of Mediabistro.com, which owns and operates FishbowlNY. "And he said: 'Just go to Michael's and report on who is eating there. That would be interesting.' " Initially, Touby was intimidated by the place and unable to identify anyone except the TV talent. But as the weeks went by, the sightings got easier, in part because the Michael's regulars started visiting FishbowlNY, and when she misidentified someone, or left a name out of the mix, an e-mail would arrive setting the record straight.

"Sometimes I get people e-mailing in the morning telling me they are on their way to Michael's," she says.

The management's response?

"If the activity of our clients is reported with discretion, and as long as it doesn't affect anyone's dining experience, Michael and I will turn a blind eye," Millington says. "The second we get complaints about it, we'll call it a day."

The unwritten ground rules are that Touby is not allowed to embarrass any patrons -- no mistress sightings, no bad-outfit alerts, no hissy-fit reports. She's also not allowed to wander around the room, notebook in hand, taking down names, which she did for a while.

"The place is sort of like a terrarium with a very fragile ecosystem," Touby explains, "and it needs just enough buzz, but not too much or it'll break down."

That terrarium can get a little claustrophobic. Vanity Fair's Wolff abruptly abandoned his regular table (No. 5) and swore off Michael's about a month ago, after the restaurant told him one day that his usual table had already been booked. (Millington says that Wolff simply called late that particular day and the table was taken.) Livid, Wolff called the New York Post and tattled to a gossip columnist, who ran an item announcing that Wolff and Michael's were kaput.

This seems a tad petulant even to Wolff, who says he mostly was looking to sever his ties after dining at Michael's about a thousand times.

Initially, he ate there with a sort of ironic detachment, back when he started to cover the media for New York magazine in 1998 and wanted to poke some fun at the cool kids. But the plan backfired.

"As soon as you start to write about Michael's they want you there, so the price of my making Michael's a kind of a comic shtick was that I became part of Michael's, and no matter how much I protested that this was just a joke, no one really took me seriously. At the same time, it became completely enjoyable."

Then it became suffocating. When he didn't take a friend to Michael's, the person felt slighted, since the decision seemed to imply that the friend wasn't Michael's-worthy. He sounds, these days, liberated.

But he also remembers the place fondly. So is he ever going back?

"They immediately sent me all kinds of flowers," he says. "Which I coldly ignored."