Ah, the drama of being a hungry celebrity! Just this week Serena Williams and her daughter Olympia Phanian arrived at the Peninsula Hotel in Paris and, she told the press, she was refused a table at its Michelin-starred rooftop restaurant, which she insisted was “empty.” That is what the French would call a huge faux pas, and of course, the incident became a scandale international.

Immediately the hotel management issued an apology, insisting that the rooftop restaurant—The Peninsula has five —during the Olympics was “complet” (fully booked). “When she came, there were only two tables available and they had been reserved by clients of the hotel,” Peninsula employee Maxine Mannevy, who was not working when Williams visited the rooftop restaurant told Variety, “My colleague didn’t recognize her and feels terrible, but he told her what he would have told any other client, which is to wait downstairs in the bar for a table to become available. That was absolutely nothing personal.”

The response seems disingenuous simply because, without being pushy, à la “Do you know who I am?” Serena might have mentioned her name and gotten somewhere. Had that been the case, I’m pretty sure management would have given her a table ASAP.

In restaurant lingo it’s called “build a table” if necessary when a celeb shows up.

“Some restaurants market themselves to bring in celebrities,” says August Ceradini, owner of mid-town Manhattan’s glamorous Cucina 8 1/2. “Remember the scene in the movie Goodfellas at the Copacabana when they bring in another table when a big shot shows up? That was true and many restaurants still have tables in the back for that reason.”

I’ve seen it myself on occasion, once at the posh (now closed) Le Cirque, where tables were spaced so that another could be put in place on a moment’s notice, as when a fashion designer arrived with model Elle MacPherson on his arm. When someone complained about a table being too close to another, owner Sirio Maccioni would ask, “I’m sorry, madame, but would you rather sit this close or this far from Sophia Loren?” as she swept into the room.

“It’s a headache in general,” says Ceradini. “Especially if they bring an entourage, Madonna will arrive with body guards and demand that they don’t want anyone sitting next to them.”

There is nothing new about the treatment celebs get at restaurants, even if they don’t make a reservation. As Truman Capote depicted in his notorious story “La Cote Basque, 1964,” New York’s society ladies claimed their table whenever they wished to dine there; to be just a regular person risked being sent to “Siberia,” a term for an out-of-the-way, least desirable table, a term coined in the 1930s, when a society woman named Peggy Hopkins Joyce entered the class-conscious El Morocco nightclub in New York and found herself being led to less than an “A” table. “Where are you taking me?” she asked the maître d’hôtel, “Siberia?” At The Colony that section was called by the management the “doghouse.”

At New York’s ‘21’ Club (now closed) famous actors like Humphrey Bogart and Orson Welles had bronze plaques above the tables they always sat at, and Sirio Maccioni, newly appointed maître d’ at The Colony, told the story of how Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra with Mia Farrow, and Aristotle Onassis were all coming in at one o’clock expecting the same table. Grant and Sinatra readily understood Maccioni’s dilemma and happily sat elsewhere. Onassis never knew.

Many celebs, on the other hand, call in advance and request a table deliberately out of the way where they will less likely be disturbed—especially if they had to go through a gamut of paparazzi at the entrance, which is standard procedure in Hollywood and Rome but not as much in New York or Paris. Sometimes they book a separate rear room.

The problem is that often a restaurant reservationist will receive a demand for a table for six people for a very prominent celebrity, then, upon arrival, five people show up and say, “Sorry, Mr. Stallone was unable to join us tonight.”

Of course, when you’re full, you’re full. Some years ago, in a well-regarded restaurant named Salerno’s in the small village of Tuckahoe, New York, the owner, George Salerno, got a call saying Frank Sinatra was going to be there with six people in 20 minutes after doing a show in a suburban theater. George answered, “We’d love to accommodate Mr. Sinatra, but we are fully booked all night.”

The guy on the other end of the line, sounding a bit more brusque than before, said, “You don’t understand. I’m talkin’ about Frank Sinatra, the singer.”

Salerno sighed and said, “Yeah, I knew who he is, but what am I supposed to do, throw one of my regular customers out? Forget about it. Maybe he can eat at the bar,” and hung up. Sinatra never showed.

For many years a mediocre Italian restaurant on New York’s upper East Side named Elaine’s, run by the judgmental Elaine Kauffman, kept its celebrity clientele of authors like Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe and regular Woody Allen in the front room, with everyone else banished to the flanking room, whose walls were decorated with the authors’ book jackets.

One of New York’s most famous restaurants, Rao’s in Harlem since 1896, has for 80 years had every one of its 14 tables booked every night by regulars, who tell the owner Frank Pellegrino only if they’re not coming. One regular is a local parish priest who sells his table (for charity) each week to people dying to eat at Rao’s. Those few tables are the most coveted in town. As a result, if you visit Rao’s for a drink at the bar (since you’ll never get a table) you might see everyone from the Mayor of New York to Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro. Of course, since opening much larger, more elegant branches of Rao’s in Miami and Los Angeles (one in Las Vegas closed), where reservations are easy to come by, the whole idea of exclusivity is moot outside of Harlem.

One would think that these people tip exorbitant amounts to the waitstaff, and every restaurateur can tell you what stars tip the least.

Then there was the late mobster John Gotti who, before going to prison for life, would double the entire amount of the bill as a tip. He always got any table he wanted, back to the wall.