Dining, From A to Z

My wife had a legitimate question: What was I doing one night last week having dinner with seven young women whom I'd never met before? The simple answer was because they'd invited me.

They read my column, at least one of them does, and she thought their monthly dinner club, where they select restaurants by traveling through the Zagat guide alphabetically—one restaurant per letter—would make interesting column fodder. They've been meeting since May 2010 and are nearing the end of the alphabet. Hence, that evening they were convening at a new restaurant in the West Village that started with the letter "W"—Whitehall.

I explained all this to my wife, who still didn't appreciate the novelty, or see the news value. There were probably women meeting for dinner all over town that evening, she suggested, and every evening since we were a British colony.

Perhaps so, I replied, but they weren't this organized. Didn't these ladies at least deserve some credit for endurance, for managing to meet every month, no matter the myriad distractions their careers and personal lives, and this teeming metropolis, threw in their face. I mean, they'd been gathering for 25 months straight! Indeed, this night marked their second anniversary!

Plus, we had no dinner plans ourselves that night.

I'll admit that when I arrived at the restaurant and introduced myself to the women, who range in age from 27 to 33 and were standing at the bar awaiting a table, I felt momentarily awkward. One would be—sitting down with seven strangers, let alone all of the opposite sex, and half your age.

Which, for some reason, reminds me of a story. One evening a number of years ago I was strolling down Third Avenue in the vicinity of Ninth or 10th street when I passed a restaurant with sidewalk tables. One table in particular caught my eye, because it was large and with many people seated around it—and because of the gender imbalance. The ratio was similar to the table at the Whitehall where I was being seated.

I took a closer look and recognized one of the women as a casual acquaintance of mine who worked at Vogue magazine. She was glowing abnormally, as were all the other women at the table. I realized that's what had probably caught my eye—not that the guy was so vastly outnumbered, but that each woman wore the identical hypnotized smile, an expression that I can only describe as aphrodisiacal. I finally got around to looking at the guy and realized why: It was Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones.

I'm not trying to suggest that I had the same effect on the members of the Zagat Dinner Club, as they call themselves. Only that, for some reason, the unusual circumstances roused that ancient memory from my subconscious.

The restaurant was extremely noisy, and I'm hard of hearing under such circumstances, and not very good with IDs anyway, especially when I'm introduced to seven people simultaneously. So I'd like to apologize in advance if I misattribute anything they said. I'd only planned on staying for a drink, but the women were extremely welcoming and seemed as natural and unaffected as if I wasn't there. And the food was very good.