This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross.

So what's the most interesting job you've ever had?

Well in his chosen career, our guest today, Michael Checky-Azzolina, says he's been threatened,

cursed at, punched, and called every ugly name imaginable.

He's also had people press a hundred dollar bill into his hand, sometimes more than one

of them.

That's because for years he controlled a very valuable commodity, a table at a high-end

Manhattan restaurant.

Checky-Azzolina has worked as matrady in several of New York's hottest restaurants, where

he's encountered celebrities, captains of finance, plenty of nice regular folks, and one bonafide

mobster who repeatedly threatened him for a perceived slight, a story that has an interesting

conclusion.

In a new book, Checky-Azzolina takes us behind the scenes of the restaurant world, where

we learn not just who gets choice tables and who doesn't, but how restaurant staff in

the 1980s and 90s worked, fought, and loved in an adrenaline-fueled workplace where booze

and cocaine were plentiful.

Michael Checky-Azzolina has worked as a server, matrady, and manager in several exclusive

restaurants.

He also pursued an acting career while working in the business and earned a master's in

fine arts from Harvard, and he'll soon be opening his own restaurant, Checky's, its

schedule to open its doors in February.

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