Don’t go out during fashion week

September 14

I mean, who are these people?
I started yesterday evening by going to the opening of Ferro’s, which apparently is a new restaurant at the Kimberly Hotel. I’d just been invited the night before; I guess they were waiting until after the Wednesday food sections’ deadlines to tell anyone but the New York Times that the restaurant was opening. That’s a common practice. The Times likes to have exclusives and restaurants like to be mentioned in the Times. It’s a symbiotic relationship that’s really annoying to everyone else.
Annoying enough that my boss, Pam Parseghian, and I were the only food media I noticed there.
I have no idea, none, who anyone else was but they were all dressed bizarrely: Shiny shirts cut like smoking jackets, Asian women wearing jean short-shorts and tight-fitting tops that for some reason reminded me of Bavarian bräuhaus waitress uniforms. Paris Hilton hair.
I really can’t do it justice, but when I asked the publicist this morning who attended I was told they were “Mostly social people” and was sent a link with captioned photos of attendees. I still didn’t know who anyone was (except for Benihana founder Rocky Aoki and an aged Gina Lollabrigida) so I forwarded it to colleagues who read Page 6 and follow who the hip DJs are and so on. They were no help.
The invitation asked me to “join Robert De Niro” and others at the party, but I guess Bob had other plans.

So 45 minutes of that was enough, even though the stuffed grape leaves and roasted vegetables were tasty, and the cheese was pretty good, too.
I hopped on the subway to SoHo to attend the opening of the Alessi store, because Joe, a coffee house I've been meaning to try, had opened an outlet in the store.
From what I learned at the party between strange conversations with an apparent coke head who claimed to have been partying for the past two days, one benefit of attending the Ferro’s opening was that I missed the long line to get into the Alessi shop earlier on.
Outside, it was a beautiful, slightly cool late summer evening. Inside it was sweltering, and Mr. Coke Head was mopping my brow with paper napkins and periodically holding my glass of Pinot Grigio for me as he insisted I sample another Parmesan crisp or piece of prosciutto wrapped around a breadstick. I tried to explain to him that I had enough experience at parties to hold a glass of wine and an hors d'oeuvre at the same time, but he was uninterested and instead chattered about the rich guy of whom he was the (or perhaps a) kept man. A billionaire, apparently. Maybe I should have accepted his invitation to dinner, but then again maybe not.