A New Vogue for Smoking in Manhattan

I have a friend in the restaurant business who insists that the key to a successful food service enterprise is getting the interior lighting just right. Food, service, location—these are all secondary in his experience. Restaurants are places that succeed, he told me, if they make the customers appear fuzzy and indistinct to each other. His theory is that people eat out when they’re trying to close some kind of deal—business or sexual—or stepping out of their ordinary lives and onto a more sophisticated and fantastic movie set. And as every movie star will tell you, we never look better than when we’re slightly out of focus.

No one wants to look across the table and see his or her dining companion in sharp relief. And our dining companions, I assure you, feel the same. But there needs to be enough light to read a menu and sign the check. For that reason, my friend has discovered that the ideal strategy is to bathe his restaurants in a dirty sepia glow. The walls are…