Long ago, in the days before TikTok and Instagram, the fate of restaurants often depended on the reviews of food critics writing for newspapers and magazines. In 1993, early in her tenure as the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times, Ruth Reichl described two dinners at Le Cirque, at the time one of the fanciest and most snobbish restaurants in New York City. 

Two dinners, because for one of them, the glamorous reviewer disguised herself as “Molly”: what a well-off but not particularly sophisticated retired school teacher from Michigan might look like. She and her female companion were shown to a dark table near the restroom and a waiter pulled the wine list out of Reichl’s hands, saying he needed it for another table. They were served mediocre food accompanied by surly and at best offhand service. On a subsequent occasion, undisguised, she received a fawning and memorable greeting from the owner, Sirio Maccioni: “the King of Spain is waiting in the bar, but your table is ready.” The dishes were fabulous, the service lavishly attentive.  

The resulting two reviews — one as Ruth Reichl, the other as Molly — graphically demonstrated the ill-kept secret of high-end exclusivity and resulted in a certain amount of humiliation for Maccioni, though the restaurant continued to flourish and lasted another twenty-five years.  The thing that strikes me about this comical and revealing episode is the notion that the pleasure of the favored is enhanced — even dependent on — the perception of others being treated contemptuously.

Of course, it is obvious and appropriate that stores and eating places should give their regular customers special attention. In Paris or Madrid, habitual patrons will receive a warm reception and perhaps an extra dish, glass of Champagne or a similar gesture of favor. New York is different, however, seeming to require a slap in the face, or at least snub, to the unrecognized or unprivileged as a complement to exaggerated deference to the privileged. Today this dichotomy is visible less in where you are seated or the quality of the food and more oriented to who gets in. 

Just try making a reservation at Charles Prime Rib, Polo Bar or Frog Club. While the difficulty is partly supply and demand, the sense of accomplishment felt by those known to the restaurant is enhanced by the exclusion of regular people. In a recent New Yorker article, Hannah Goldfield talks with a frequent customer at Charles Prime Rib identified only as “Gary” who shows up not only every Friday, but often on other days “so they don’t forget me,” an admission suggesting that even the elite have anxieties. Gary boasts that “this is the new Rao’s,” invoking an old Italian restaurant in East Harlem with perfectly nice but hardly unique Southern Italian food that functions as a private club in all but name and has been a cult object since another New York Times reviewer, Mimi Sheraton, gave it three stars in 1977.

Why not just declare Rao’s or these other inaccessible venues private clubs? Perhaps because then there would be no game, no audience, no metaphorical velvet rope. After all, New York has plenty of established clubs and you can’t just decide to dine at the Knickerbocker Club or the Cosmopolitan Club without being a member or guest of a member, but who cares?

A recent trend, however, is to take an already exclusive place and create a higher-level club.  While it is just barely possible to make a reservation at Carbone, there is, as Goldfield describes, a truly exclusive version in Hudson Yards called Carbone Privato, access to which is attained via membership in Major Food Group’s “ZZ’s Club,” which will cost you $30,000 just by way of initiation. A bargain compared to the price of joining the New York Aman Club, an offshoot of the Aman Hotel group based in Japan — $200,000.

Maybe in keeping with the twin horses of money and social prestige, the maintenance of exclusivity through clubs is an example of the waning importance of loyalty or even celebrity.  After all, these are waived upon payment of some exorbitant amount of money. Or maybe not so exorbitant to members of the new economy who have plentiful cash but fragile — or easily flattered — egos.

I did manage to be invited to dine at Rao’s twice, but got into a little trouble because in my book Ten Restaurants that Changed America I failed to feature them. In defense of high standards of admission, I have to admit that my best restaurant meal of the past, say, 10 years was very recent, jointly sponsored by Atomix — a high-end Korean place in New York; very difficult to reserve — and Kadeau, a restaurant in Copenhagen. Which shows that occasionally exclusivity is based on something tangible like truly fine food. Though usually not.

PAUL FREEDMAN is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History. He can be reached at paul.freedman@yale.edu.