A Hollywood Anachronism, Serving Stars but Never Gossip

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Jennifer Aniston is Table 24, a coveted perch with a view of the piano yet screened from prying eyes by a bank of Casablanca lilies. Anderson Cooper is Table 11, with its panoramic view across the dining room. Sean Penn is Table 20, except on those nights when a certain agent he’s at war with is in the house. A major studio executive who dines on successive nights with his daughter, wife and mistress is guided to cozy spots at Tables 21, 22 and 12.

Johnny Depp prefers a banquette by a window in the northwest corner. That’s him now, having supper with Mom and Dad.
Los Angeles is a vast city, but Hollywood is a small town, one whose inhabitants favor familiar watering holes. Perhaps the hottest among these now is the Tower Bar at the Sunset Tower Hotel.
Although the restaurant and the refurbished Sunset Boulevard building containing it belong to the New York hotelier Jeff Klein, who rescued the hotel when it was an Art Deco dump and refashioned it as a chic haven, anyone here knows that the person who runs the place is its maître d’hôtel.
That man is Dmitri Dmitrov, a 60-year-old Macedonian immigrant with Rudolph Valentino hair, a Chiclet smile, an Eastern European accent theatrical enough to seem invented and a manner so ostentatiously courteous it conjures up a Slavic geisha scripted by Mel Brooks. Yet when Mr. Dmitrov ducks his head, bowing solicitously as he smilingly conducts guests to tables in a softly lighted room with framed photographs of vaudeville-era nobodies, his performance masks a subtle and steely power.
In a town where gossip is the coin of the realm, Mr. Dmitrov is a sphinxlike figure who knows everything and says nothing. And, like Erich von Stroheim in “Sunset Boulevard,” his loyalty to his fragile industry charges is fierce and absolute.
“He creates this little pocket of safety,” said Ms. Aniston, a Tower Bar regular, “a haven where you know you’re not getting sold out by the waiter, a patron or the valet guy.”
Nobody gets a table at the Tower Bar without a nod from Mr. Dmitrov. Nobody wanders in on those nights when famous players are parked at almost every table and secures a seat by slipping him a bribe. Nobody breaks the archly civilized tone Mr. Klein has set for his hotel by pulling out an iPhone and trying to take a picture.
And “nobody is shooting up or smoking pot in the lobby” as long as Mr. Dmitrov is in charge, Mr. Klein said.
“Dmitri is part fantasy, a throwback,” said Anjelica Huston, the Oscar-winning actress. “He claps his hands in joy at the sight of you. He practically dances you to your table. He makes you feel like he’s been waiting for you the better part of a year.”
Wranglers have always been crucial to the workings of the movie business, whether producers wrangling bankers, agents wrangling stars, stunt workers wrangling broncos or animal wranglers handling death’s-head moths in films like “The Silence of the Lambs.”
It was Mr. Dmitrov’s ability to manage both butterfly and killer egos that inspired Brad Grey, the chairman and chief executive of Paramount, to request that Mr. Klein lend him Mr. Dmitrov to help manage his all-star wedding to Cassandra Huysentruyt last spring. “He has this encyclopedia of who’s who in his head and an ability almost of casting where they belong,” Mr. Grey said.
Mr. Dmitrov explains his working methods simply. “The most important thing is placing yourself in service position, a gentle touch, a humble touch,” said the maître d’, whose grasp of English grammar remains casual even after decades in the United States. “The ultimate is when I please somebody like Sean Penn or Johnny Depp, Nancy Reagan or Betsy Bloomingdale,” he said. “I am student of these people. I am deep in their achievements because, at the end of the day, it’s not about me.”
That it is, in fact, largely about Mr. Dmitrov (starting at 5:15 each evening) is immediately evident to any visitor to the Tower Bar.
In the six years since Mr. Klein, following a suggestion from the designer Tom Ford, rescued Mr. Dmitrov from a fading career at drearily elegant places like a local Russian restaurant that featured a harpist, ice swans and a caviar menu, he has become a Hollywood institution. And there is something cinematic in his unexpected second act.