Elegy for the ideal restaurant

If I were asked to construct the ideal restaurant, I’d make sure it had the following crucial features:

In the first place, there would be a long bar just inside the door, long enough so that groups of two or three people could gather over a drink as they wait for their table, with a curve at one end so that solo drinkers and diners could sit quietly with a book and feel that gloriously metropolitan sensation of being alone in a crowd.