Salon des Célébrités

Bono sings and Madonna works the phones at Cafe Tabac

As with any hot restaurant, Cafe Tabac is not about the food (fairly unextraordinary stuff along the lines of steak frites and glorified cheeseburgers which take a long time to get to your table). It's about the whole crazy scene— one that combusts seemingly every celebrity and power broker in town into a mad spectacle of schmoozing and boozing.

On the upper level of this ravenously descended-upon East Village establishment, practically every night is a gossip column come to life, with boldfaces acting boldly all over the room. One night, Liza Minnelli was late for her reservation and had to be squeezed into a tight comer table she wasn't thrilled with. Another evening, Madonna impulsively started answering the phone and taking reservations (though she neglected to write them down). And Bono and Paul Simon had the music turned off so they could work on a song over dinner, Bono serenading the place with the fruits of their efforts for dessert. Considering that the restaurant's music consists of loud rock tapes, including unthinkable 70s stuff by Paul McCartney's Wings, everyone was thrilled. But Cafe Tabac isn't about the music either. It's about the gossiping and the craning of your head to scream over other people screaming. It's about getting so intoxicated by the distinct aroma of power in the air that you dance on a table and fall to the floor as everyone pulls out his cellular phone and calls the press about it. It's about how the people downstairs are glad they got a table, while the people upstairs are glad they didn't get a table downstairs.

Ex-model Roy Liebenthal opened Tabac—his first restaurant—last January. The bistro-as-both-theater-and-playground concept—so popular in the 80s—is still viable, Liebenthal feels, and his incredible success bears that out. "People like to socialize," he explains, "and although that's looked at as a superficial form of human behavior, it's healthy. Everyone criticizes it, but they all do it." For their health, no doubt.

Rather than get too caught up in the glamour of the schmooze, Liebenthal tries to distance himself, coming off as more than a bit jaded. "I think that would be a fair word to use," he says. "It hasn't changed my life. My role is just to serve the room and make the payroll. It's become so expected that every star who comes in town comes in. Why is that?" Before one has time to wonder, four more celebrities traipse in, the waiter's indeterminate accent has gotten weirder, and someone has fallen off a table as Kevin Costner waits for his. Call the press? No, they've been here for hours.

MICHAEL MUSTO