Coffee Shop hired 29-year-old blond beauty Courtney Yates the minute she walked through the door five years ago. Accompanied by a pretty pal, Yates had rock-star hair, an infectious smile and confidence to spare — perfect for a serving gig at the hip Union Square spot. Never mind that she had never carried a tray in her life.
“I just walked in with no résumé and my roommate was like, ‘Can we have a job? I think we want to waitress,’ ” recalls Yates, who moved to New York from Boston to model when she was 22. Both women were hired the next day. “Every cute girl works at Coffee Shop for at least a week,” says Yates, who adds that a gig there is a rite of passage among actor/model types.
Gorgeous waiters and waitresses are a dime a dozen in New York City, filled as it is with aspiring actors, models and singers. But even in a city awash with beauty, three hot spots have emerged as the home for sexy servers: Coffee Shop, Rande Gerber’s Midtown Whiskey franchise and the newly opened Pulino’s on the Lower East Side.
PHOTOS: NYC’S HOTTEST SERVERS!
The three owners of Coffee Shop are, in fact, former models who opened their faux-retro diner in 1990. “That’s how we met,” says co-owner Charles Milite, a former Wilhelmina model. “We hired our friends as a natural thing. So all of our staff were models, and their friends would come in and they were models. Then the actor guys came to chase the models, and that’s how it all began.”
Owners of the three “hottest” spots won’t admit to hiring staff based on their looks. Vincent Mauriello, the regional manager of Gerber Group, which owns Whiskey Park, Whiskey Blue and Stone Rose, acknowledges that his employees are attractive — but that’s not the only factor. “Personality is the number one thing,” he says.
But industry experts say they’re clearly recruiting the most beautiful wait staff in town. Coffee Shop bases “60 to 70 percent” of their decision to hire based on a person’s looks, estimates Marc Levine, founder of modelbartenders.com, a service which staffs private events with sexy servers.
Coffee Shop and Gerber’s properties are both known for hiring hot servers, says Levine. “They’ve built institutions around that concept.”
It’s easy to see why the Gerber Group is staffed by lookers — the founder and CEO is Rande Gerber, whose supermodel wife, Cindy Crawford, passes him the salt at dinner.
When asked if everyone who works for Gerber’s places are good-looking, pretty 24-year-old bartender Krystel Bua and 19-year-old waiter Ashlee Montague bashfully answered, “Yeah.”
Good looks are also on the menu at Keith McNally’s newest restaurant, the two-month-old Pulino’s Bar and Pizzeria, which is now attracting customers more for the human eye candy than the panna cotta.
McNally, who also owns Pastis and Balthazar, is “a great example of a restaurateur who figures the look and sensibility of the server into his very successful formula,” says Zagat senior editor Carol Diuguid. “The people he hires look like the perfect version of the customer he’s hoping to bring into his restaurants; they’re hip, they’re attractive.”
But the pretty staffers at these hot spots are no rubes. Some admit they’re even using the restaurant floor as a personal audition space.
Sexy Tonya Charlë Webb, a 27-year-old New Yorker who bartends at Whiskey Park, met a casting director while on duty and soon found herself alongside Alec Baldwin in an episode of “30 Rock.”
“I played one of his girlfriends,” Webb says. “This is a great way to network.”
At Coffee Shop, where Taye Diggs, Jennifer Esposito and Selma Blair have all punched a timecard, a waiter handed in his apron in the middle of his shift. “It was a busy dinner, packed place, and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” co-owner Milite recalls of the incident in 1995.
“And he said, ‘I just got a phone call. I booked the Calvin Klein campaign. See you guys later. I’m out of here.’ He just walked right out and left an entire section of customers there. He didn’t even care to finish his shift.”
In fact, Calvin Klein hired almost the entire staff to model in his catwalk show that same year.
“Calvin and Kelly Klein came in here, they had dinner, and they cast their entire show from their table,” says Milite, claiming about 15 of his super-hot servers walked in Klein’s show at New York Fashion Week. “One night, none of our waiters came into work, and the bartender was like, ‘Where is everyone?’ They were at the Calvin Klein show.”
It was at Coffee Shop that Yates was discovered in 2007 and cast on the show “Survivor,” where she took second place. Yates left for China for more than a month without giving notice, then came back and still had a job. According to Milite, that’s the nature of hiring for hotness.
And good looks don’t always mean bad attitudes — at least not if you believe Yates, who says she has nothing but love for her cute co-workers. “People are going to hate me for saying this, but everyone here is cute so it takes [cattiness] out of the equation.”
A little cocky, to be sure. But who could possibly hate such a pretty face?