Bright Lights, Big City - I returned Saturday from NYC where I was attending the annual institute that attracts the top talent in my field (and plebes like me). Ever since my first year after graduation, regular trips to the City have been enjoyable perquisites of my career. Unfortunately, the downturn in the market has meant far fewer trips since mid-2000, so thank goodness for this program. With the boss along to pay for dinner, it is still a very nice junket.

The night after I arrived in town on Wednesday, Will and his wife had tickets to see The Producers, even though Nathan Lane is long gone and the role of David Broderick's dad is now played by Steven Weber. (He can sing? Scary.) They were in a rush to grab a pre-theatre meal but I still managed to join them at Barbetta. One of the oldest family-owned restaurants in Manhattan, this northern Italian eatery has great traditional food but the setting, a stuffy brownstone furnished like your great-grandma's parlor, leaves something to be desired. After dropping off the bossman at St. James' Theatre, I walked over to the Virgin megastore in Times Square, where I spent an hour on the hunt for hard-to-find imports. Then it was back to the conference hotel for the night. (Oh, I remember the good ole days of the 90s Boom, when the PLI institute was held at the Waldorf.)

Waking on Thursday I turned on CNN's American Morning to see what traffic was like on 6th Avenue outside, but I couldn't get excited enough to walk down the block to stare at Paula Zahn through the studio window. After a rousing session of securities law minutiae, Will and I broke from lunch at Mangia -- a rather upscale Italian-inspired cafeteria on West 57th that was inexplicably operated almost exclusively by Russians. The highlight of the meal was when an attractive 40-something woman with the dress and demeanor of an aging supermodel pulled Will aside and told him (and thus me) to share her table. She really was a fascinating personage, claiming to be a designer and author with a line of jewelry at Tiffany (and another deal in the works with Target) who dropped names like they were going out of style. Apparently her lawyer also represents Billy Joel, and she goes to weddings with Marc Anthony. Once she found out we were securities lawyers, she was very interested in knowing whether we thought it was the end of the road for her friend Martha. (Although jail was too good for that evil Sam Waksal!) After bending our ear for nearly forty minutes we bid our goodbyes to return to the afternoon conference session, scratching our heads over whether the person we had just met could be the real thing or not. It was truly an Ab Fab "Lunch with Lulu" moment.

I was especially looking forward to dinner on Thursday night, since Will had reservations for the three of us at the Mercer Kitchen. (Another French-Asian restaurant from the same chef that brought us Midtown's Vong.) Located in the basement of the swank Mercer Hotel, this establishment is definitely one of the trendier places to be spotted dining. As it was, I met my friend Michael out for drinks beforehand, so I had to rush to get to dinner and found myself without a chair at their table when I arrived. Well, for my money if you can't arrive late and make a scene being accomodated then why go out at all? Dinner was good, especially the butternut squash soup, but the atmosphere is the thing. Great scenery at the bar and surrounding tables. It also made me feel pretty tragically hip to recognize the CD playing as one from my own collection.

I made it out to no other trendy restaurants before I came home on Saturday. (Friday night's stop at L'Express doesn't count, even though it is next to Sushi Samba -- where Samantha threw her drink in Richard's face on SATC.) All in all, though, the business portion of my trip was most pleasurable. Tune in later for my review of the time I spent playing in Lower Manhattan's gay bars and the SoHo shopping district in a separate post.