The Waverly Inn may very well be the new Café Society, but we don’t see anyone lying around in settees there. Least of all its star chef John DeLucie, who likes a meal you can eat with one fork and has a story or two to tell in his upcoming memoir, The Hunger.

Nightly they come, exiting chauffeured limos and Maybachs, rushing by the paparazzi, and entering a Bilbo Baggins-sized door into the magical labyrinth called The Waverly Inn. There’s no need to name them. “They” have all been there, whether strolling from neighboring West Village brownstones (“Hey, Hah-vee! Can we get one shot?”), or “just in” from Los Angeles. Cannes. Sundance. Turks. Rehab.