Two and a half years ago, I wrote a rave review for David McBean's performance in the absolutely hilarious Becky Mode play, fully committed [sic]. It would be just too easy to go into my files and lift that earlier review. McBean stars as Sam, a reservation operator for a trendy Manhattan restaurant. Often these restaurants give one the impressing they are doing you a favor to reserve a table for you and then relieve you of $150 to $500 per person. Sam not only is responsible for answering the reservation phone, he also has a private line to the chef and a squawk box to the front office.
His digs are in the basement, a repository for anything from mop buckets to selected VIP customer eating history files. It is also a storage area for everything nobody else wants, including Christmas-light strings and back-stocked wine glasses. (One must go out and find a copy of Debra Ginsberg's "Waiting" to verify the veracity of the play.)
The lower-case title, "fully committed," is the chef's euphemism for totally booked. A stereotypical tyrant (this can be confirmed by Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" and "A Cook's Tour") the chef has a huge ego, which eventually proves to be his Achilles' heel.
Name dropping is all part of running a high-end New York eatery. We meet Tim Zagat, publisher of Zagat Survey (there's a San Diego edition) of restaurants; Diane Sawyer of TV fame; lovely fashion guru Naomi Campbell; Lincoln Center Executive Producer Bernie Gerten; financial wizard Henry Kravis; and many others -- some not so well-known.
