Table preference is often determined by features unique to a particular brasserie. At Bofinger, for example, first-time diners and habitués alike feel privileged to land any table under the brasserie’s resplendent stained-glass cupola. Sadly, reserving a table beneath the Belle Époque verrière is not always possible. You do the math: With only 74 or Bofinger’s 270 seats situated in that prized location, the directeurs (“floor managers”) cannot possibly honor all requests.

Although being cornered is the worst fear of the hunted animal, at a brasserie it is an enviable position in which to find oneself. No one can sneak up to the table from behind. The orientation of each diner is ideally divided between his or her companion and the many characters who turn the brasserie into a theatrical spectacle. Moreover, the corner configuration makes it easy to share, cold oysters as well as warm caresses. During their regular meals at the Balzar, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir always occupied the same corner table. At La Coupole the corner tables 83, 130, 141, or 152 have long been the greatest in demand. Just asking for one of them by its number wins you respect from the directeur, if not the table itself.

Some couples prefer to sit as co-conspirators on a banquette, side-by-side, in a giddy us-against-the-world posture. At the notoriously snobbish Brasserie Lipp, seating for A-list celebrities from the political, literary, and showbiz worlds is usually found on le rang de radiateur – “radiator row.” Its eight, well-heated places run along a banquette on the right side of the main dining room. The occupancy of the long table known as centre-gauche (named for its centre-left location, not its political orientation) is determined by the tastes of the headwaiters who amuse themselves with a silly nightly contest won by the one who can fill that section with the most beautiful women.