Are You Sitting in Siberia? How the Social Politics of Fine Dining Seating Have Evolved

No one really knows where the term Siberia came from. They just know they don’t want to go there. The received wisdom is that it originated at Warner Le Roy’s vaunted midtown Manhattan spot, the Russian Tea Room, where the upstairs dining space was so far away from the action below as to effectively be a “Siberia” to the mainland: chilly, distant, populated with exiles and dissidents, and very likely resulting in death. Social death, sure—but then that’s so much worse than the real kind because you actually have to live through it, don’t you. 

Another source of the term is said to be the 44 Lounge and Restaurant at the Royalton Hotel, where being seated in the gusty lobby for lunch was a frost-bitten social banishment akin to Siberia. One might take to wearing a disguise. This was the restaurant, after all, that was (semi) affectionately dubbed “Café Condé” throughout the 1990s, thanks to the strict publishing pecking order that governed its tables. Dana Brown, who worked at the bar before being scooped up into the high-flying Vanity Fair orbit in the early-to-mid ‘90s, remembers how owner Brian McNally would print out the various mastheads of the reigning magazines in order to triangulate a staff member’s importance. On the four banquette booths at the back sat S.I.Newhouse (the boss of bosses, owner of Advance Publications), along with Anna Wintour (Vogue), Tina Brown (The New Yorker), and Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair). When Newhouse wasn’t there, Jackie O or Karl Lagerfeld might fill his spot.

“Then the next row was filled with deputies, the one after that for the next level on the mastheads, and so forth,” remembers Carter, now founder and co-editor of Air Mail. The tricky bit came when McNally and co. had to work out the granular hierarchy between publishing titles. Was an editorial assistant at Vanity Fair more significant than an assistant editor at GQ? One would scarcely wish to find out. It got to the point where the table numbers were so well known outside of the restaurant itself, Brown remembers, “that people would call before lunch and ask, What table did Brian put me on? And if it was an inferior table, they would cancel. It wasn’t worth being seen at a bad table. It would tarnish their reputation in the eyes of the kings and queens.”

Not that Carter was always a reigning monarch. In his upstart days at SPY magazine, he and his team once painstakingly pieced together an accurate schemata of the Russian Tea Room, the power restaurant of the day for creative types, for its June 1987 issue. (The Four Seasons formed the final part of the Manhattan troika of that time—a place for financiers, publishers, politicians, and the operators who skulked between the three.) “We sent reporters to sit at the bar for a couple of weeks to assess the seating configuration,” Carter says. “In those days, every spot was measured by its proximity to Sam Cohn, then the most powerful theatrical agent in New York. He handled Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep, and Woody Allen, among other film greats.”

Aside from Cohn, Carter explains, the other key marker of prestige was a booth—something that broadly holds true today. “They are more intimate, and yet more on display,” says Carter. “So they are generally the best.” (At his own restaurant, the beloved Waverley Inn in the West Village, where he still presides over the table plan every night, the booths are still probably seen as the most prestigious spots, he says.) Visibility here is key: a quirk of New York that differentiates it from London, where clubby discretion is often more prized than exhibitionism. “Over here [in New York] the best tables tend to be in the very front of the restaurant, with Siberia way in the back,” says Carter. “Whereas the opposite appears to be true in London.” 

Discretion has its limits, however. London’s chattering classes know that nothing is more Siberian than a secondary or separate dining room. The most egregious example was long held to be the Burne-Jones room at the back of Harry’s Bar in Mayfair. “It has four little tables, away from everyone else,” says an anonymous source who’s keen to mention that they haven’t been put there for years, thanks. “But the whole point of going to Harry’s is to look at the fantastic faces and the blow-drys and the people.”

The second dining room at White’s, perhaps the most venerable and old-fashioned members club in London, is equally chilly, but at least serves a useful social function. It’s for those who turn up for their lunch sitting at 1:10 p.m. as opposed to 1 p.m. sharp; an icy disincentive for unpunctuality. “Only in Britain would you have a room in a restaurant that punishes you for being late,” a regular tells me. At the Wolseley on Piccadilly, the famous central “horseshoe” of tables was long the place to see and be seen, with the ring around the outside edge coming a distant second. The odd little annexed sections, meanwhile (the building used to be a grand car showroom and has nooks accordingly), were always regarded as Siberian. Before this, beginning in 1981, Jeremy King and Chris Corbin ran Le Caprice, just around the corner, where the bar was fine if you were dining alone, but a cold and hurtful sanction otherwise. Le Caprice was the ultimate ‘80s power spot, and King has now triumphantly returned to the space with his new restaurant, Arlington. Sir Nicholas Coleridge once told me how the unmistakable top spot was table number seven, situated in the right-angle next to the windows in the first part of the dining room. “It used to have a very clear pecking order. Then the poor Princess of Wales died, then Jeffrey Archer disappeared off the scene for a couple of years, and then Leslie Waddington [the art dealer] ate out less, so Coleridge got it…”

These are not, you’ll have noticed, entirely up-to-date references. But Siberia, one now feels, is a much less starkly defined concept than it used to be. This is partly thanks to a new order of social politics. The power lunch has been essentially killed off by a combination of budgets, sobrieties, work-from-home days, gym sessions, Sweetgreen bowls, emails, and al-desko salads. And so there is less awareness now of which tables matter and which don’t. Or, at least, less of a professional cost to being plonked at a bad one. 

“Siberia probably exists to some extent now,” Brown says. “But I’m not sure people are so hyper-aware of it.” One factor might be that, nowadays, diners in London and New York are often thrilled to get any sort of table whatsoever. Bookings come online at midnight many months in advance, and are gone within seconds. A symptom (and probably a cause) of this scarcity is a new breed of professional digital table bookers, who work with restaurants (or, in some cases it seems, scalp their tables) to offer reservations to diners in exchange for hefty fees (often into the hundreds of dollars). Dorsia is one of them—a sleek members-only app named after the fictional restaurant in American Psycho, where a reservation, according to the monstrous yuppies in the book, was worth literally killing for. Another is called Appointment Trader, which was written up, to some controversy, in the New York Times last year. The piece references a typical tech-bro customer who had recently paid $200 to eat at Sexy Fish in Miami, a place that many people would pay $200 simply not to eat in. Which brings us to the other reason for Siberia’s modern thawing, perhaps: That the wilderness is far more subjective now. That tastes are fragmenting. That popularity is no indication of status. And that one man’s Siberia is another man’s paradise.