One Saturday night last year, Noam Dworman and the comedian Chris Rock sat at the back table in the Olive Tree, a restaurant on MacDougal Street, in Manhattan, that Dworman owns. The table is permanently reserved for comedians who perform at the Comedy Cellar, a club in the Olive Tree’s basement, which is also owned by Dworman. The comedians’ table had recently been moved, to make space for a kitchen extension. Rock was not happy. Dworman recalled their conversation: “Chris said to me, ‘This is not the table where Robin Williams sat, this is not where Ray Romano sat, this is not where Jon Stewart sat.’ He rattled them off, and each one was like a punch in the gut.”

“The table” is actually two slate tables pushed together, with a banquette on one side and wooden chairs on the other. It was installed by Noam’s father, Manny, who opened the Cellar in 1981. Manny came to love the company of comedians like Dave Attell, Louis C.K., and Colin Quinn. “Once you get used to hanging out with comedians, you really can’t hang out with anybody else,” Noam said. In the late nineties, one of the regulars, Nick Di Paolo (“Louie”), lobbied Manny to give the comedians their own space. The next night, Manny left a sign on a back table: “THIS TABLE IS RESERVED FOR COMEDY CELLAR COMEDIANS ONLY.”

“Any time a civilian would come over and sit down and start talking, we would slowly push that sign in front of their face, and keep pushing it in front of them until they got the fuck up and left,” Robert Kelly (“Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll”) recalled recently. Regulars also defended the table against comedians who didn’t do standup at the Cellar, were hacks, or were dressed badly. The atmosphere was combative. “Me and Keith Robinson would start yelling and arguing about race, or whatever, and we would forget that we were in a restaurant,” Di Paolo said. Another ringleader, Rich Vos (“Women Aren’t Funny”), said, “When we left the table, we left shattered and beaten down.”

Manny loved it. He hosted fierce debates at the table, and started a book group. (He once handed out copies of Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel.”) In 2003, Manny died, of cancer. (When Di Paolo phoned Manny on his deathbed, he asked, “Who gets the Lexus?”)

After Noam took over, a new generation of comedians changed the tone at the table: less hazing and more cell phones, but the same desire for sanctuary. “It feels like a backstage area,” Michael Che (“Saturday Night Live”) said. “People will look over, and they’ll instantly know, O.K., we shouldn’t bother them.”

By April, 2016, Dworman had opened two new performance spaces, on West Third Street, and he extended the kitchen at the Olive Tree so that a proper chef could cook steak and fish rather than the usual falafel. Dworman claims that his only stipulation to the architect was “The comedian table cannot be moved at all.”

Yet the table was moved. The comedians were shifted to a temporary table, which ruffled feathers. Rachel Feinstein (“Crashing”), who often stopped by the table to see her friends Nikki Glaser and Amy Schumer, said, “That is our home. You just want it to feel just like it’s supposed to.” Mark Normand (“Inside Amy Schumer”) announced on his podcast that he’d spoken to Rock about the table’s being moved, and Rock had told him, “This place is over.”

Dworman grew worried. The renovation took about six months, and cost about three hundred thousand dollars. When it was finished, the table had been permanently relocated and extra banquette space had been added. “More comics could sit there, but it wasn’t the table,” Kelly said. Bill Burr (“The Heat”) ranted, on another podcast, “What did Noam do to the table down here? He literally fucked with the whole aura of this place!” Dworman texted Burr, “Yo, we moved the table over 4.5 ft in order to double the size of the kitchen, so the fucking comics can have steak and pasta instead of falafel every night. Lol.”

Dworman later calculated that the table had been moved thirty-three inches. But it was closer to the bar, where fans could eavesdrop on the comedians. “I think there’s just some magical distance, which is what we consider personal space, and I violated that,” he said. After his summit with Rock, Dworman got the message: he paid twenty thousand dollars to re-renovate. The kitchen became hard to access, but the table was resurrected. “Technically, it’s not the exact spot,” Quinn said. The Cellar’s general manager, Elizabeth Furiati, clarified by e-mail: “The table is MAYBE a few inches off from where it was previously.”

Rock and Dworman sat down at it again, and Rock gave his approval. “No harm, no foul” was Dworman’s assessment. Quinn offered consolation: “Noam took a chance. Everybody’s, like, ‘Whoa, whoa,’ but guess what? We do the same shit in our act, and sometimes it fails.” ♦