From an article published today about the Cipriani family's troubles: 

Anecdotally, we've noticed that this general sense of shame has been descending upon New York's society for some time now. Companies and sponsors are afraid to host parties in fear of seeming insensitive. Socialites and celebrities are similarly hesitant to attend them. And for those still going out, seeming as if you might actually be having fun is absolutely, positively unacceptable. All of these factors seem to feed into each other. After all, why would you host even an intimate gathering if no one is willing to show up for the open bar? 

This is precisely why the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, investment adviser BlackRock Inc., the Montel Williams MS Foundation and the Acting Company have all pulled out of holding annual galas at the Cipriani restaurants. And we imagine that other big spring galas and balls—charity-purposed or not—will follow closely behind. (Today New York magazine announced that it is canceling its wonderfully casual Oscar viewing party at the Spotted Pig this year.) 

Bloomberg tapped New York Social Diary's David Patrick Columbia to figure out what it means to the social set for these venues to close down. Naturally, Mr. Columbia seemed most concerned for the financial futures of certain ladies who have come to rely on a money-through-marriage sort of arrangement.

“It has been a go-to place for the smart set and the jet set, for the rich, the chic and the shameless,” Mr. Columbia told Bloomberg. “You see matrons there, you see movie stars there, and you see ladies pursuing a certain matrimonial future. It’s about sex, not food.”

All this displeasure is fine for Mr. Bruni, whose myriad dining options will soon flush the taste of “arid ricotta cannelloni” and “repellently chalky hamachi” from his palatte, but what about the legion boldfaced name regulars of the cultish restaurant? How did it play with those who, for professional or personal reasons (the lines blur with this crowd), simply can’t stay away?

New York Social Diary's David Patrick Columbia, a frequent presence, took issue with the idea that Michael’s would be reviewed for the food at all. Of Mr. Bruni’s piece, he told the Daily Transom, “It’s ridiculous! People don’t go for the food—not that the food is bad—but because of what it represents to the media community and publishing community. It’s like a clubhouse. God knows who you’re gonna see there every day… It’s an extraordinary restaurant because of the clientele. It’s a very attractive restaurant, and the service is very friendly.”

What does he order when he’s there? “In the summertime, they have a wonderful gazpacho that I love. It’s very crunchy, very tasty. I often eat the appetizers because I try not to eat too much for lunch. I’ll have the crab cakes [Bruni: “Mushy texture and watery taste put me in mind of confetti after a rainstorm"], the chicken Cobb salad—today I had the cheeseburger, which I really like.”

Before hanging up, he did some philosophizing: “With Bruni going after the menu, well…I don’t eat things the way Mr. Bruni eats things. I’m incapable of criticizing it. I don’t have the palatte like he does. But, Bruni’s very bitchy--he did the same thing with Cipriani, which also attracts a very interesting clientele.”

Page Six's Liz Smith, who penned the introduction to the Michael’s cookbook, told us, “I have said from the first moment that people don’t go there for the food. They always defend their food, but that has nothing to do with Michael’s popularity.”

We wondered, then, if she could explicate Michael’s famous alchemy. “I’ve said that nobody knows--it’s just mysterious. It’s a lot of things. It’s the greeting, the organization, the physical situation. You keep going back because you see everyone you know. This is one case where a bad restaurant review means nothing.”

So what’s her superfluousness of choice? “I try to order the roast chicken--dark meat. Then, I try to get them to put it on a flat plate because they like to serve things in bowls where you can’t cut them. And I always get French fries and little spinach. Most people order the Cobb salad [“Less a salad than an entire ecosystem, vast and verdant, with enough avocado to feed three I.C.M agents or five Vogue editors,” Mr. Bruni admitted]--they don’t know what they’re eating anyway.”

Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson explained, “Anybody who goes to Michael's for the food is…from out of town. There are breakfasts that are actually fine. Lunches are fine if you know what to order. I haven’t been to dinner in a long time. I would also say if you go there for dinner, you’re from out of town. There are some tricks to know. You ask for special things so it’s not too soggy. I saw someone order a Cobb salad with iceberg lettuce so that it was less droopy. Burgers are great.”

And what does Ms. Nelson usually order? “Now that I’ve learned that a Cobb salad with any kind of lettuce is not diet food, I’ve started to try other things. I try in the warmer months to order the tuna Nicoise, which is not bad.”

And finally, Men’s Health editor-in-chief and man about town David Zinczenko cut right to the chase: “Why concentrate on the food? It’s hard enough to keep track of conversations at other tables.”

Among the guests were Governor David Paterson, Senator Chuck Schumer, Representative Charlie Rangel, Barbara Walters, Chevy Chase and Tina Brown. Inside Edition sent a crew.

After trading jokes about presidential ambitions with the mayor, Clinton told the crowd of political leaders, business tycoons and reporters that she’s happily back at her job as New York’s junior senator.

Standing at a podium beneath a white tent in the mansion’s back yard, Clinton told the crowd she’s glad to see “so many of my friends, catching up with all of you, knowing that many of you put your ideas and your requests on hold, and now, the hold is off. And I am open for business a hundred percent of the time.”

And just in time.

Kennedy Benjamin, whose husband Michael is an Assemblyman in the Bronx, said she wanted to attend because “I wanted to thank her for standing up for us women. And that was really well received between the both of us."

Benjamin said she told Clinton about a program she's organizing with German exchange students in the Bronx, and that Clinton sounded delighted at the prospect.

“As you know, most of Germany is for [Barack] Obama. But I’d like for them to meet Hillary as well, so they can see how great she is,” said Benjamin.

Others took the occasion to reflect on the Clinton experience.

“You could feel the emotion,” businessman and major Democratic money man Alan Patricof said of the event. “There’s such a strong, almost passionate feeling about her and her campaign. People are nostalgic and it takes a little while to get over it all.” He added, “I came in from the Hamptons to come and I’m very glad I did it. It was a lot better than being in my pool.”

Comedian Chevy Chase said, “I think she’s a great woman. Whatever she wants to do, she could pull it off.” Asked if she should run for another office, he said, “What do you want me to say? I’m not going to say she should run for mayor. That would be silly of me. Why should she run for mayor? She’s a great senator.”

Assemblyman Michael Benjamin, who supported Obama during the primary, said he and Clinton had a brief but good conversation at the party. And no, he said, she didn’t notice the little blue-and-white Obama pin he was wearing on his lapel.

“We want to win,” he said afterwards. “Any competition when the game is over, you’ve lost, you move forward and, you know, hail to the new king.”

Earlier in the evening, Clinton joked about her conversation with Mayor Bloomberg.

“I was very touched [by] Mike’s concern for me over these last months,” Clinton told the crowd from the podium. “You know, ever since the campaign ended, and you know, I was really moved that he wanted to talk about the campaign: what happened, how it happened, how you did it, what was the reaction that you got, what was effective and what wasn’t effective, what worked in advertising and direct mail.”

The crowd by this point was in on the joke.

“I mean, he was so interested in me, that I was just transformed. I’ve always liked him but my gosh, I felt so special.”

Ashley Dupré—when will we be done with her?—has made a very awkward social move, presenting herself at the Waverly Inn. It seemed to work! [P6]

Gossip Girl's Ed Westwick is reportedly in talks to design a clothing line! Expect to see many many shorts...[Fashionista]

Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook may soon reach a settlement, which means the crazy and mostly uninteresting details of their sordid marriage will presumably stop leaking to the press. [NY Daily News]

James Franco, of Spiderman and Freaks and Geeks, is moving to New York to attend graduate school at N.Y.U. [NY Daily News]

David Patrick Columbia of New York Social Diary is upset that his profile on Remy Stern's new Cityfile Web site identifies him as gay; also, he says, they got parts of his family background and past break-ups wrong. [P6]

Vanity Fair won't be holding its annual Oscar party at Tom Colicchio's Craft this year because Graydon Carter allegedly didn't like the restaurant's corporate feel last year. [P6]

Mary Kate Olsen's new best friend is model Jessica Stam. [The Cut]

And below for your viewing pleasure, the Observer's style desk presents Simon Doonan's latest wackness: an imprecation to shun bikinis in favor of classy one piece bathing suits!

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The society chronicler heard the co-author of "You: The Owner's Manual" speak at a benefit for City Harvest last Thursday evening—the doctor was wearing a suit for once rather than his friendly blue scrubs—and found himself absolutely smitten.

"I’d heard the name before, but knew nothing about him. In fact, I’d wondered if it were the name of a movie character. I had not been paying attention. Nor do I watch Oprah," writes Mr. Columbia. "So when I heard him speak last Thursday, for the first time, I was amazed, amused, inspired, provoked and charmed."

Mr. Columbia often writes thousand-word descriptions of New York socials he admires (it's actually riveting stuff, a compliment offered without irony), but today he devotes quite a bit of space to his musings about Dr. Oz. Here are a few pull-quotes from Mr. Columbia's poetic prose about the doc:

• "To these Amurrican eyes, he looks very Amurrican (upper-educated-privileged-energetic). Although with a name like that, not exactly the old version of Main Street."

• "He speaks at a fast clip, although clearly and distinctly so that he can be both heard and understood. Although your attention is required to get his golden gist."

• "He’s also very funny. He can produce audience guffaws and belly-laughs while talking about the most sensitive of subjects."

• "He has the ability to make light of that side of ourselves where we feel we look ridiculous -- especially the physical side. His accompanying video on the function of the body’s organs was graphic and almost gruesome but somehow palatable."

An eight-months-pregnant Nicole Richie and her friend, the society disc jockeyess Samantha Ronson, volunteered at a Hollywood soup kitchen yesterday.

Jennifer Aniston recently attended her 20th high school reunion at Rudolf Steiner on the Upper East Side.

Gallerist Larry Gagosian and collector Adam Lindemann are involved in some crack-up over a Jeff Koons which we will ask Gillian Reagan to explain to us later.

Some bloggers don't believe a National Enquirer story claiming that Jake Gyllenhaal has proposed to Reese Witherspoon, but is that because it would mean Ms. Witherspoon was rebounding too fast or because it would put Mr. Gyllenhaal out of reach for The Gays?

Social chronicler David Patrick Columbia finds Thanksgiving to be pretty on the Upper East Side, but still managed to curl up with a copy of Jeanine Basinger's Hollywood book, The Star Machine. Quiet time for D.P.C.

Soft-porn downtown-society artist (photography) Terry Richardson and soft-porn downtown-society filmmaker Vincent Gallo crashed an Upper East Side dinner. But it was only a commercial for Belvedere Vodka. Honestly, it's time to move to Maine.

In any case, Mr. Lane—who said that he’s always lived alone, but “was married for a moment”—does offer an interesting explanation for the “impulse for adornment” and its historical longevity (both of which he seems to have: expensive-looking antique chotchkes abound in chez Lane.) “Well men always like to please women. Women like to please men too—some women. Some are very good at it. A caveman took a shell and maybe it had a hole in it or maybe he put a hole in it and he put it on a piece of a tail of a donkey or a dinosaur or something and gave it to the cavewoman. She put it around her neck—the first jewel,” he explained.

Mr. Columbia writes:

The Crime of the Social Climb [NYSD]

And so the quintessential Affair Restaurant always feels comfortably familiar during a fraught, ankle-tangling supper at the bar, but then disappears immediately from the mind after the check is paid. What street was that place on? The one with the woodwork, the deep booths, the dim lighting, the mediocre steak frites? Who can remember? These are the restaurants, saloons and hotel bars whose invisibility even to regular passersby turns them, in the cinq-à-sept hours, into the sanctuaries of Manhattan’s illicit lovers.

Take Bistro 60, on 60th Street between Madison and Park avenues: It has a vaguely Euro feel and yet is strangely generic: white linen tablecloths; trout with lemon butter.

And if you’ve ever been there, you know what it means to be deafened by the white noise of secret conversations multiplied 60 times in a single, large back room. So do men lunch here with their mistresses? Cornered and asked the question directly, the restaurant’s manager broke into a wide, knowing grin.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes it happens. You see them sitting close together in the corner.”

Like any discrete tradesman on the Upper East Side, he then clammed up—but not before one got the sense the regular flow of the faithless was something of an in-house joke.

"FORGET CHECKING NEW YORK MAGAZINE and going to the new place,” said R. Couri Hay on the phone from Southampton. Mr. Hay is the society columnist for Gotham magazine; he often fills his column with lengthy, anonymous tales of musical beds. As a public-relations man, he also does crisis management, and has “handled my share of infidelities.”

“If you’re an Upper East Side person, the last place you should go is the ‘21’ Club. Forget the Four Seasons Grill or the Pool Room,” he said. Mr. Hay said that one might venture downtown to a little Italian or Chinese place, but that also this might put off the sort of well-heeled person with which one might prefer to have an affair.

Where do our adulterers go? “If you’re having an affair,” said New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni last week from his desk at West 43rd Street, “your thoughts are probably straying a bit from the quality of the food. So it opens a whole world of restaurants that are great-looking but don’t have great food. So you go to One if by Land, Two if by Sea. It’s gorgeous. You go to the Boathouse.”

At the Boathouse in Central Park on Monday, a waitress whizzed by with a plate of fried shrimp. Yes, she said. “You’re not going to just bump into someone you know.”

“I see that a lot of times,” said the Boathouse’s manager, Safet Kurtovic, when asked about extramarital meals. He pegs the cheating lovebirds by their giddy nervousness, by the lack of conversation about bank accounts, and by the way neither party looks at the check before paying by credit card.

BUT FORNICATOR, BEWARE! There are restaurants that look like Affair Restaurants but are not. Bilboquet, on 63rd between Madison and Park, is nearly invisible and marked just by a green awning. It looks just right—but step inside and you’ll find a henhouse presided over by a Parisian madame who calls everyone “darling”; each table is occupied by bottle blondes and their gal pals. “We have the ex-wives,” said the grand manageress, and: “We like to keep the paparazzi out.”

Indeed, sometimes the Affair Restaurant is hard to tell apart from the Ladies’ Lunch Restaurant or the Business Lunch Restaurant.

Restaurant 44 at the Royalton? “I don’t really know about that,” said server Camoy Cunningham. The Algonquin? “Lots of business, little pleasure,” said the maitre d’.

Once upon a time, said writer Nora Ephron, a good place was P.J. Clarke’s, the old holdout saloon that proudly sways under the skyscrapers at Third Avenue and 55th Street. The bar is dark, has red checkerboard tablecloths and a dining room set off from the street.

Jackie Singer, a pretty young manager there, pointed out two adorable and claustrophobic nooks in the dining room. Each is walled in on three sides; each has a single table that places diners at intimate quarters. “We get all kinds; we don’t judge,” Ms. Singer said.

Perhaps now a good place for a smoldering lunch is Joe Allen’s new Bar Centrale, “which is good by the way,” Ms. Ephron e-mailed from out of the country, “so shouldn’t be lumped under culinarily underperforming but seems to me very romantic and simultaneously public in the sense of if-they-were-having-an-affair-they’d-never-dare-to-be-here.”

The manager of Joe Allen’s, Gerrard Spencer, and a lunch waiter both agreed their restaurant was just a bit too busy to be a dovecote of cheating cocks—plus the square layout so enjoyed by Broadway beauties allows no secret corners.

But perhaps some brave noontime lovers pop in there. There are those sorts of exhibitionists.

“People who want to be found out,” Page Six’s Paula Froelich pointed out, are legion. “Like having lunch at the Ivy! Like having lunch at Da Silvano. Bar Pitti! It’s like going on the loudspeaker and announcing!”

NEW YORK SOCIAL DIARY CHRONICLER and bon vivant David Patrick Columbia once had dinner with a couple engaged in a very long affair at a restaurant on 63rd Street between Second and Third avenues. It was the sort of place usually referred to, correctly or not, as a Mafia Restaurant. “They always went there because everyone in the world knew them and no one would see them there,” he said.

(There is on that block of 63rd Street a restaurant called Bravo Gianni. It has one small window to the street. In the middle of a recent afternoon, during the restaurant’s three-and-a-half-hour break between lunch and dinner seatings, the only people inside were two very large men, both clad in Hawaiian shirts. They were drinking at the bar.)

Mr. Bruni suggested Casa La Femme North, at First Avenue between 58th and 59th streets; it’s an upscale Egyptian restaurant where the semi-circular booths are enveloped by tents that can be opened or closed. “It looks like they were absolutely designed for doing more than necking,” he said. “Occasionally, the belly dancer sweeps by. You’re being put in a very midriffy, loinal mood.”

One couple of Mr. Columbia’s acquaintance would meet at the Westbury Hotel, on West 57th Street, now a co-op. “That used to be a big hotel for assignations in the 1940’s and 50’s,” he said. “It was a fancy address but kind of an anonymous hotel.”

There is always the Carlyle Hotel, Mr. Hay suggested. Setting aside the matter of its grand rooms, the farther back one ventures in the hotel’s restaurant, the more romantic the mood becomes. “They don’t build them like they used to,” the Carlyle’s maitre d’ said the other day, in appreciation. And as for the rest: “Discretion is our motto.” It certainly always was when it came to John F. Kennedy and the hotel’s infamous back entrance.

Mr. Hay had some other suggestions. His top choices for adulterous meeting places were: Paris; London; Rome; Sarasota, Fla., but never Miami; a friend’s guest house or, at least, guest bedroom; a leased plane, but not one with a regular crew that might also serve a spouse; an apartment rented or purchased in a company name by an underling such as a vice president, but not a secretary, meaning a person who can never be fired and preferably one who is also an adulterer; perhaps Montauk, although it has become crowded with other marital escapees; possibly the Pierre; and “What about that dreaded place? New Jersey.”

—Edmund Glover, Samuel Jacobs, Jonathan Liu and Juliab Simon contributed reporting to this article.

The Philandering Gastronome

A Convenient Lunch

According to an editor at Quest, the restaurant of the Lowell Hotel is a favorite for men and their mistresses. Why’s that now? “Because it’s good food, no one goes there, and later you can get a room.” The favored time for such encounters, he said, is around 3 p.m., after any other lunchtime punters have dispersed. (Get a suite, cheapskate! The Garden Suite is lovely—but we prefer the sensual gravity of the Hollywood Suite.)

Slipping Downtown

“Follow the trail of alcohol. Romance is found in the bottom of a wine glass,” said Page Six’s Paula Froelich. As the liquor—and the drinker—slides to the bottom of Manhattan, the willingness to dispense with marital contracts rises exponentially. The Room, on Sullivan between Prince and Houston, certainly lives up to its name. And inside Bungalow 8, no one can see your wedding ring.

Adulterers Have Palates Too

Canaletto—60th between Second and Third avenues—has food better than the average adulterous hideaway. Better yet, eat at any spot that begins with “Le” that isn’t followed by “Bernadin.” There’s Le Perigord on far East 52nd Street; wee little Le Entrecote (ha!) at First and 57th; and, of course, to really get away, there’s Le Refuge Inn, tucked away in a Victorian in City Island. I think we’re alone now!

Two if by … Yoinks!

“Occasionally, couples sneak into the bathroom,” said One if by Land, Two if by Sea veteran waiter Brandon Spano. “We send a male manager and a female manager in there. It’s always awkward.

“I’ve been in the restroom with a customer who was in the stall on the phone with his wife—saying, ‘I’ll be home soon, honey,’ etc. Then he goes back to the table and I see him kissing his girlfriend.”

But adulterers don’t frequent the West Village carriage house year-round. Mostly, said manager Tom Kirk, they come around Valentine’s Day. Awww.

Out of Town

There’s nowhere at all to take your paramour in the Hamptons. Except maybe that pile-up on the highway! “The Hamptons!” said David Patrick Columbia. “All you have to do is get in your car and get in line. You can be doing anything you want and nobody will know.”

—Choire Sicha, Jonathan Liu, Edmund Glover