“An amuse bouche for you gentleman from the chef,” the waitress says as she places the bite-sized morsel of food — a potato comfit wrapped in leek topped with caviar, scallion and green apple — on the table before us. “The chef recommends eating this with your hands.”

Sebastian Maniscalco smiles, laughs and then, if only to play nice, promptly rockets it down his gullet. “It’s certainly small,” the comedian says of his underwhelming pre-lunch chow. The moment passes. Maniscalco, however, has logged it in his memory. Tonight he might retell it to his mother, see if it’s still funny, decide whether a straight-talking Italian-American like him eating a bite-sized morsel of food and, furthermore, being instructed how to consume it, is worthy of making it into his ever-hysterical stand-up set.

It’s part of Maniscalco’s routine. Having worked his way up the comedy ranks for the better part of two decades, the comedian, who last month released his fourth stand-up special on Showtime, “Why Would You Do That?” drawn from seven sold-out shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York, knows what best serves his craft. For him: intense observation.

To that end, sitting here in the posh, window-lined restaurant on the 16th floor of Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower one afternoon, clad in a black sport coat and jeans, the comedian explains how his best bits come to pass.

“It’s like telling a story to someone,” he says of his show — a hyper-physical, super-energetic endeavor (“You’re like a lion where you can roam around your territory”) in which the 43-year-old might crane his neck out, write madcap exasperation all over his face and play up his thick Italian-American accent all while railing against the absurdities of life with a mix of intense irritation and “can you believe this?” exacerbation.

“It just has to have a funny twist on it,” he says of his brand of conversational comedy inspired by the late John Ritter (“He could make you laugh just on a reaction”) and longtime inspiration and newfound friend, Jerry Seinfeld, who recently brought Maniscalco on his “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” web series and has called him his “favorite comedian these days.”

Despite being one of the hottest stand-ups, Maniscalco is constantly refining his craft.

“You don’t become a bodybuilder the first day you start lifting weights,” he says. “Same thing with comedy. You gotta flesh out your joke, your bit. You add and subtract. You see what works.”

He got his start telling jokes at the dinner table, getting in front of his classmates at every opportunity and watching Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.”

“I never thought of myself as anything but funny,” he says of other career prospects. “I had no family problems. There’s no tortured soul here.”

Despite living in what he calls “the hotbed of comedy,” 18 years ago, Maniscalco left Chicago for L.A., only to quickly realize stand-up wasn’t a top priority there.

“I’m thinking if you want to get into the entertainment business, you go to Los Angeles,” he recalls of his motivation for moving. “You go to New York City, and there’s 33 clubs. You go to L.A., and there’s, like, five. You end up doing a one-off in a dry cleaner.”

Nonetheless, the tireless worker soon made his name at the famed Comedy Store — an early home to legends such as Robin Williams and David Letterman — where he performed at every opportunity, even if that meant rushing over to the club on a break from his waiter job at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills.

“I felt if I missed an opportunity to be onstage, I missed an opportunity to somebody being in the audience and seeing me," he says.

His persistence paid off: then-massive comic Andrew Dice Clay saw him onstage one night and took a young Maniscalco on the road with him. Soon after, Vince Vaughan enlisted him for his “Wild West Comedy Show.” Says Maniscalco: “From there, things started to snowball.”

Starting off, Maniscalco’s principal goal was to convince a comedy club to give him 15 minutes onstage. His current aspirations are a bit loftier: Maniscalco says he’d love to eventually star on a TV sitcom. (NBC recently passed on a pilot he wrote, produced and acted in opposite Tony Danza, but Maniscalco remains optimistic.)

“As time progresses, your creative juices want to lead you to other avenues,” he says. “You want to do stand-up, but maybe there are other outlets there.”

Ask if he feels a profound sense of accomplishment at where this career has taken him and, like his stand-up routine, he’ll give it to you straight. As much as he loves the glitz of a massive gig, he says, failing to land a joke at an intimate club show is often more beneficial.

“It humbles you when you go up onstage, and you die,” he says with a laugh. “You go home, and you can’t wait to get back onstage the next night and erase that feeling.”

If you go

Who: Sebastian Maniscalco

Where: Foxwoods' Grand Theater

When: 8 p.m. Dec. 9, 6 and 9 p.m. Dec. 10, and 5 p.m. Dec. 11

Tickets: $50-$85

Call: 1-800-200-2882