A breakfast nook, with Willett furniture, a tiny table and red and white checkered tablecloths, has been lovingly restored and put behind glass in the cafe.
What Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana came up with in this D&G collection was a certain freshness that was expressed also in crisp white lace and red and white gingham check, as though al fresco tablecloths had been turned into summer dresses.
For years their twice-monthly tablecloth meeting has been a fixture at Fresco by Scotto, the power-lunch place on East 52nd Street in Manhattan.
That's a question I'm inclined to ask Adam Byatt, too, whose haute-ish Trinity in Clapham Old Town, all starched tablecloths and reverential sommeliers, has been delighting bourgeois south London for nearly 10 years.
To the Editor: Regarding "Four Mexico City Restaurants That Stay Close to Their Roots" (Choice Tables, April 27): As a native Mexican and resident of Mexico City for more than 30 years, I can state that its inhabitants have certainly been eating in white tablecloth establishments longer than Mark Bittman has been writing about food.
A delicate table runner with crocheted border has been unfolded over the tablecloth for the occasion, the creases carefully running toward the back of the painting, creating the illusion of perspective.
We took almost all the stuff out of the house, but he had an original tablecloth that had been left in the house, a beautiful lace tablecloth that had belonged to Mary Pickford.
Knives, forks, napkins, and tablecloths never had been permitted; a man was supposed to eat with his hands.
That there was every possibility that its first tablecloths could have been old sheets from Jon Spiteri's parents' Tunbridge Wells guest house?
And when the light faded and Mrs Ashton brought in a trolley to serve tea and homemade biscuits on a small table, having carefully laid a lace tablecloth, it could have been 1932 again.
