Restaurants are really about relationships, having less to do with menus than with the delight in eating out and being nourished by nights that are savored and seasoned with memories that link people with palatable food and bottles of wine and a romantic line and a waiter's wink and a chance meeting in a crowded dining room that is followed by a kiss on the cheek from an elegant middle-aged woman who 30 years before, at this very table, had sat with the young man I used to be, before things changed between us and throughout most of New York--except in this particular place where we used to meet, on Lexington Avenue south of 61st Street, this enduring and irresistible neighborhood restaurant called Gino.

It exists today, more than a half century after its founding, as a tribute to time resistance, as a success story in an industry rife with risk. The daily menu at Gino features most of the same choices offered by its opening-night chef in 1945, and the restaurant clings to an unchanging policy of no credit cards, no reservations and no waiters wearing earrings. Unchanging as well is the restaurant's decor, its preference for artificial flowers and its tomato red wallpaper pattern that exhibits several rows of jumping zebras dodging hundreds of flying arrows. Half the zebras lack a single stripe near the tail, since the neighborhood artist who designed the original wallpaper forgot to add a stripe across the rump of one of the two zebras that he drew (a sketch that would serve as the prototype for every pair of zebras vaulting the length of the walls). Still, whenever Gino is compelled to change its wallpaper, it does so with an exact replica--one that flawlessly renders every other zebra with a missing stripe.

There is not a bad table in this restaurant, and among its eclectic clientele are opera singers, manicurists, mobsters, the city's mayors and business magnates, anchormen, women of the night, fashion designers, rock stars and several generations of large and feuding Italian American families that are more compatible with the waiters than they are with one another. While I'm now too old to have a midlife crisis, I nonetheless continue to feel within Gino's friendly and familiar ambience that the world has not left me behind; that here things remain constant, comforting, welcoming, and as recognizable as any zebra with a missing stripe. (780 Lexington Ave.; 212-758-4466)

by Gay Talese