Peruse eBay, and you’ll see endless swag swiped by stylish sticky fingers: baby pink pens from the Beverly Hills Hotel, silver catchalls from the Hôtel du Cap, a leather wine-list cover from The Polo Bar.

“People convince themselves they’re preserving a memory, not committing a misdemeanor. Or, if you want to be generous, it’s ‘status archaeology’: proof that you were there and that you mattered,” Griffith hypothesizes.

Ergo, the Time cover.

Cecchi-Azzolina, who was formerly the maître d’ at Raoul’s and The River Café, gets the joke. Anyone who’s been in New York’s downtown social scene over the last fifty years gets it. Cocaine picks up in the city’s historic lineage right around the time Tammany Hall ends.

Which leads us back to the cocaine cover. When Cecchi’s opened in 2023, the editor in chief of Time magazine, Sam Jacobs, came in for dinner. He had just read Cecchi-Azzolina’s memoir Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D’, in which the restaurateur recalled reading a 1981 Time cover story about the explosive popularity of cocaine—just as Cecchi-Azzolina himself was doing a lot of cocaine.

“This wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary,” he writes of bringing a group of people from the legendary Mudd Club to his apartment at 4 a.m. with two bags of white powder. “Time magazine had recently run a cover story titled ‘High on Cocaine,’ accompanied by a photo of a martini glass filled with coke, and New Yorkers of a certain age were regularly taking ‘disco naps’ so they could go out and party all night, then show up for work in the morning.”

Jacobs introduced himself, and, not long after, sent a tear of the original cover to Cecchi-Azzolina, who had it framed and hung it in the bathroom as a playful wink. It stayed there, entertaining and unbothered, until May 2025.

Cecchi-Azzolina took to Instagram to plead for its return: “When Cecchi’s opened a little under 2 years ago, a guest gifted me this framed Time magazine cover—an iconic image that perfectly captured a certain moment I experienced in New York,” he wrote. “It hung proudly in Cecchi’s restroom… until someone decided to walk off with it. To whoever “borrowed” it: Please return it—no questions asked. This piece holds deep sentimental value. It’s not just a magazine cover. It’s a memory, a moment, a gift.”