Glitterati Toast 15th Birthday of Michael’s

“It’s ‘Cheers’ for the Manolo-wearing, label-conscious, air-kissing media elite!” That’s how publicist Maury Rogoff describes Michael’s Restaurant on West 55th Street, which tonight will be celebrating its 15th birthday with a big party for all its regulars.The Midtown restaurant, crowded at breakfast and jammed at lunch, has become the favorite with the publishing and television “in” crowd, including Anna Wintour of Vogue, Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair, David Hirshey of Harper Collins, Pamela Fiore of Town and Country, and Joe Armstrong of ABC. Mr. Armstrong, in fact, according to Steve Millington, the restaurant’s amiable manager, is the unofficial “mayor of Michael’s.”“What do you mean ‘unofficial, honey?’ It’s official! It’s official!” the former Talk Magazine executive declares in his Texas twang. “Paula Zahn gave me a big ceramic cowboy boot at lunch one day, and they put it on my table every time I’m here. Evelyn Lauder saw it and said ‘I want a big lipstick on my table – but they haven’t given her one yet.”Yes, it is that kind of place where the regulars have their own special tables and others, less fortunate, can throw hissy fits when they are ushered through the front room and out to the more secluded back garden to chow down on their $28 cobb salad, the house specialty. One member of the kitchen staff does nothing but chop and chop for the dozens of cobbs that are served each day.“Not sitting in the front room? Well, maybe that does bother some people once in a while,” concedes owner Michael McCarthy who also runs another popular “Michael’s” restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif., “But when someone acts up, we have a ‘it’s just a meal, now get a life’ conversation.” Besides, Mr. McCarthy insists, he is sure that some people actually prefer the more secluded garden room.But it is much harder to see and be seen back there, and seeing pals, sharing the latest industry dish, and occasionally snubbing enemies is part of Michael’s buzz-filled appeal. At just one lunchtime, gossip columnist Liz Smith noted that Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters, ABC’s Cynthia McFadden, a former governor of Texas, Ann Richards, Joan Ganz Cooney, Soledad O’Brien; Ellen Levine of Good Housekeeping, Ed Koch, Maureen O’Brien of HarperCollins, Deb Shriver of Hearst, Michael Korda of Simon & Schuster, super-agents Sam Cohn and Joni Evans, Billy Norwich of the New York Times, CBS’s Gil Schwartz, and PR titan Peter Brown were all there chewing and checking each other out.Says Maury Rogoff, “During lunch I can get in an hour and a half of face time with clients, potential clients, find out what’s happening. It helps me get my work done.” And the chief executive of Court TV and another regular, Henry Schleiff, says, “Michael’s is like Rick’s in ‘Casablanca.’ Everyone you want to see shows up there eventually. I go there to see people, exchange opinions, and gossip, gossip, gossip.”Mr. McCarthy says the restaurant has been popular with high-profile media and entertainment types, as well as members of the art world, since it opened in 1989. Mr. McCarthy, whose wife is the painter Kim McCarthy, has covered the bright, airy restaurant’s walls with his collection of David Hockneys, Frank Stellas, and Jasper Johns. A moody portrait, painted by his wife, of Michael and his friend Martin Von Haselberg, Bette Midler’s husband, hangs near the front desk.“In the 1980s, publishing, television, and the movies all began to merge. People from New York went to my restaurant when they were in California and liked it. So when we opened here, they knew what to expect. I always have thought a meal in a restaurant should be an event, like a great dinner party with a wild mix of people.”And the mix can sometimes get very wild indeed. There are those much buzzed about, fraught-with-drama “Michael moments,” like the time Joe Armstrong was giving a lunch for Robin Williams with President Clinton as a guest. But, George Stephanopoulos was lunching at the restaurant that day as well. Mr. Stephanopoulos, Mr. Clinton’s former aide, had not so delicately dissed the former president and his wife in his bestseller. The two had not talked since the book’s publication. Tensions ran high but they shook hands and Mr. Clinton went back to the lunch bunch that included, besides Messrs. Armstrong and Williams, Diane Sawyer and Billy Crystal.Then there was the time Kerry Kennedy Cuomo launched a flack attack on public relations maven Dan Klores, who was lunching with actor Peter Boyle. Ms. Kennedy Cuomo allegedly did not like the way Mr. Klores had characterized the reason for the breakup of her marriage to Andrew Cuomo and told him so in the middle of the front room.Possibly Michael’s most tempestuous frequent diner is ICM agent Esther Newberg who is part of a monthly “ladies who lunch” club, who eat at the big round table near the window and include such media divas as Lesley Stahl, Anna Quindlen, and Maurie Perl, the head of public relations at Conde Nast. In a disdainful gesture, Ms. Newberg once had a waiter deliver a stack of coins on a silver platter to Adrian Zackheim, then an editor at HarperCollins, who had rushed out a book on Microsoft ahead of a book by Ken Auletta, one of Ms. Newberg’s clients.A slightly less dramatic gesture, but a considerably more pointed one, was when Ms. Newberg gave the finger, not once, but twice, to Jim Wiatt, the former co-chairman of ICM who defected to William Morris to become president and co-chief executive. “Everyone was buzzing about that. Everyone was calling each other afterwards and saying, “Did you see that? Did you see what Esther did?” remembers Mr. Armstrong.In the interest of full disclosure, I have to note that after I wrote a book, “Spin Sisters,” about women in media, some people claimed that I’d never be able to eat lunch at Michael’s again. Wrong. I never got anything worse from the women editors who claimed they were offended by my book than a few cold looks.Loreal Sherman, the soft-spoken maitre d’ who has been at the restaurant for 12 years, and general manager Steve Millington, who has been there for six, are in charge of the daily ego-juggling “You ought to see us every morning before lunch, with the seating charts, moving people around from one table to another. It’s like playing chess,” says Ms. Sherman. “Every restaurant behind the scenes is a bit like ‘Fawlty Towers,'” admits Millington, “but this restaurant, every day, is a performance as well.”The guest list at tonight’s anniversary party include all the regulars, including Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel, Ed Bradley, Norman Pearlstine, Peggy Siegal, and Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet and a longtime friend of Michael’s who, when she was a food writer, wrote the first piece about his California restaurant after it opened. With the Champagne flowing, the raw bar open, and the spirits high, nobody expects any really memorable “Michael’s moments.” But if there were, wouldn’t it be just the thing to dish about over a cobb salad tomorrow at lunch?

Glitterati Toast 15th Birthday of Michael’s

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