Dinner At Rao's!

I had an in for a reservation at Rao’s, the legendary East Harlem restaurant, which are all but impossible to get unless you know someone who owns one of the tables. Well, I met someone. And then I almost fucked it up.

In the spring of 2024, and I did a book event in Rhode Island. We sat side-by-side at the signing table after our presentation (mine for Cocktail Ratios, Ann for Fly Girl), when a gentleman named Scott approached for a signature.

He said, “If you guys ever want to go to Rao’s, I’ve got a table. Just let me know.” He wrote his name and number on a piece of paper. Ann, who has always wanted to go there, would love a December birthday dinner there, I thought.

But sometime between then and the following fall, dear reader, I managed to misplace this valuable slip of paper. I hunted through every drawer, every cranny where I might have stuffed Scott’s number. My final hope was that it would be in the pocket of the sport coat I’d worn to the book event. No dice. And no amount of favors called in to any number of chefs could do a thing to land a birthday rez at Rao’s.

There would be no Rao’s that year. Or maybe ever.

The following summer, as I tried to track how many days we’d spent in NYC for tax reasons, which I do in part through photos … there it was. Knowing I would in all likelihood lose that slip of paper—in other words, predicting my own incompetence—I had taken a picture of it. Scott’s number.

I texted him, he was good on his word, and he arranged for a late October dinner at the storied restaurant for five of us.

Rao’s opened in 1896 as a kind of bar, filling patron’s tin buckets with beer to take home, then morphed into a restaurant in the early years of the 20th century, and in the fifties, focused its menu on the southern Italian dishes it remains famous for today. (In the late 19th century, that part of East Harlem, East 114th and Pleasant St, right up against the East River, was heavily Italian-American.)

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