One measure of these advances is the transformation of the Willows Inn, a longstanding lodge on Lummi Island that has recently become the focus of considerable chatter among (and pilgrimages by) restaurant lovers.
It comes along amid a surge (we can still use the word in non-Iraq contexts, no?) of dining activity on the Upper West Side that's drawn the attention of restaurant lovers outside the neighborhood.
The restaurant-lover's find will be a wine-spiked stifado, or rabbit-and-pearl-onion stew, from Molyvos, the upscale New York taverna whose menu Kremezi helped develop.
According to Kafka's great friend and biographer Max Brod, there was a time in the 1920s when Kafka considered, or at least fantasized about, opening a restaurant with his lover Dora Diamant, who was apparently an excellent cook.
Attached to the lobby is the Game Bar and restaurant, a sports lover's dream with two pool tables, a shuffleboard set, big-screen TVs and stuffed antelope heads (it's still cowboy country, after all).
Peter Karas, an owner of Pasta Lovers restaurant, suggested one more reason for local opposition.
He brought in a 14-piece band, Gary Lawrence and His Sizzling Syncopators, and filled the restaurant with music lovers who dined and danced into the late hours.
'I know some animals who would give their ears to be sitting down to supper with us tonight!' ") From the time he opened Grounds for Sculpture, in 1992, Mr. Johnson spoke of including a world-class restaurant where art lovers could enjoy a fine meal in a village inspired by Monet's Giverny.
Here, four lives are about to get ruined – "It'll be hard for him to understand / I am his friend and he is your man / I wonder what my lady would say …" – but somehow you sympathise, not least because the chic uptown milieu of the restaurant where the lovers have arranged their tryst ("The bartender looks as though he knows"), all tinkling ice cubes and shimmering strings, is so seductive.
