Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, also determines who sits where at Monkey Bar, the trendy Manhattan restaurant he co-owns.
By ALLEN SALKIN
When Graydon Carter first began visiting New York restaurants, he often mistook one celebrity for another.
That was in the 1970’s, when Mr.Carter was a new arrival from Canada. But he learned fast who was who and made a career of chronicling it, as an editor of Spy magazine, The New York Observer and, for the last 17 years, Vanity Fair.
Lately, he has been putting his knowledge to use in a different context: the restaurant seating chart. Every afternoon around 4:30, an associate editor at his magazine presents him with rough drafts of the evening’s seating plans for the two restaurants he co-owns, the Waverly Inn in Greenwich Village, which opened in 2006, and the Monkey Bar, his newest endeavor, on West 54th Street.
A Midtown fixture that opened in the 1930s, the restaurant had fallen on rough times when Mr.Carter and two partners, Jeff Klein, a hotelier, and Jeremy King, a London restaurateur, took on the project of remaking it.
Mr.Carter attracts the famous and connected, and he works some kind of special mental calculus to figure how to treat them, for their own entertainment and for the pleasure of others. “It’s like doing stories in the magazine,” he said, before putting the last touches on the night’s seatings. “It’s about coming up with a good mix and a juxtaposition of stories.”
Following the finely tuned process yields a rare look at one of the city’s most glittering little productions. Hardly any critics have reviewed the Monkey Bar yet, but prime reservations are already nearly impossible for anyone other than the famous or well connected.
There is an e-mail address, although 90 percent of reservations are made directly through the partners. On an average night, the restaurant serves 250, and the few openings not claimed through the partners go to civilians.
Each day the three partners receive a report of what happened at the restaurant the previous evening, including notes on some diners. Certain behavior - drunkenness, rudeness to an employee, demanding to be seated at a certain table - can mean the person will not be given a reservation in the future, said a source familiar with the operations.
Pinning Mr.Carter down on why he has morphed from editor to restaurateur is a challenge. He answers questions as though imagining how his words would read in his magazine. “Every man in the back of their minds would like to own a bar or a racehorse,” he said.
