Back in the day, on a Friday or Saturday night, Maggiano’s at The Grove was a poppin, poppin place. I worked the host stand for the first year or so that I was employed there, and it was madness. We were in a tiny little cubby that looked like it should have been a coat closet, right underneath the stairs and next to the bar, right where the entrance to the main dining room was, and it would get absolutely packed there with people putting their names down for a table. I would write everyone’s name down with their party and hand them a buzzer. The list, I kid you not, would get like 50+ deep. We’d quote people an hour and a half, two hours sometimes. Those people didn’t get buzzers. We’d just tell them to come back. And they’d be playing live music in the cocktail area, so it was so freaking loud. It was great. I loved it. We were a crew. Vanessa was the maitre’d, she ran the floor, Curtis and I were the hosts, we walked people to their tables with menus, answered the phone, etc.
I remember one particularly busy night, someone asked what the wait was and I told them it was an hour or whatever it was, and then she very slyly with a smirk on her face asked, “well, what about for my friend mister…george washington?” and a dollar bill slid onto my little sheet of names. It was Cheri O’Teri. It was perfect. It made me laugh. We found her a table.
We would legit get people who would slip us a $100 bill sometimes to get a table. It didn’t happen often, maybe…two or three times, but it did happen. That was a lot of money in 2006. But Cheri’s tip was my most memorable. I also remember Paris Hilton coming in, and how she stood in the little corner across from the stand with a menu completely hiding her face. Apparently, it’s where Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo wrote Bridesmaids, but I wasn’t working the lunch shift during that time. Drew Carey would come in once a week, and we called it the Drew Lottery or something like that because if you won it and he sat in your section, you’d get a $100 tip, every time. I remember during So You Think You Can Dance how they’d send us the dancers and their families for their after-taping meal. I was working banquets upstairs at that time. Television City, where they filmed that show, is apparently up for sale right now and might be torn down, which is shame. Maggiano’s itself doesn’t exist anymore. Not at that location, anyway. They closed it a couple years ago. The Grove wanted someone else there.
That was an era of my life, for sure. It was both a great job and a terrible one, as all restaurant jobs are. I remember it fondly, though, for sure. I was young. Everyone was. And we were all together, trying to figure this town out. Most of us didn’t, in the end, but some of us did.
Night night.