For diners with money to spend on securing desirable reservations, concierge services and reservation brokers have long been a way to get tough tables, especially within the finance industry.
On Wednesday night, the CNN Grill had been the toughest table in the hemisphere.
If you want to put your hotel concierge to the test, though, ask for a table at the just-opened Shang Palace, the superb Chinese restaurant at the Shangri-La Paris hotel — it's only open from Thursday to Sunday and it's the toughest table to land this fall.
He was a compulsive name-dropper who even took time to befriend campaign workers, pulling strings to get them reservations at tough-table restaurants like Nobu in Manhattan.
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"It's disappointing to be so close, but I got really lucky to get this far, and it was a tough final table," Stephensen he said.
With just two seatings five nights a week, this is about as tough a table as exists in Las Vegas: 80 people a week experience its mash-up of gastromolecular technique and traditional Spanish cooking (think caramelized pork rinds glazed with honey and perked up with a dash of cayenne pepper, or cocoa paper with dried strawberry for dessert).
On the one hand, it's quite amusing to witness the hubris of a famous actor asking for a bailout when average Americans are having their own tough kitchen table conversations about how to survive the economic downturn and simply pay their monthly bills.
Many tough round-table meetings.
This could include moving prior preferred stock investors down to common, or, in the worst case, cramming down the preferred and common stock entirely — or it could involve adding structure to new, senior preferred stock to entice new investors into a tougher cap table (e.g. giving them seniority, multiple liquidation preferences, minimum return guarantees, dividends or redemption rights).
Finally, it is worth noting that two other species that often build long bridgelines, Gasteracantha and Verrucosa (pers. obs)., also have exceptionally tough dragline silk (Table 1, Table S1).
