Exotic hideaway overrun

Sometimes you just want to find a secret, exotic hideaway. Dark, a bit mysterious, and - let's face it -touched with a bit of the exotic Other, however cliched it might be.

So when [The Man I Love] and I thought we'd meet for a cocktail Friday night, we tried to think of a place to go.

In quiet Pacific Palisades, where we run our dry-cleaning, grocery, hardware store and pharmacy errands, there's a little place that used to be known as the only place with a license to serve hard liquor. It used to be a Chinese restaurant; now it's an Asian Fusion joint named the Pearl Dragon.

We haven't been there in a couple years, but remembered it as the kind of place where it's dark and quiet; where you can get Mai-Tais, or cocktails made with lichee juice or drinks with umbrellas in them - and maybe get some crispy egg-rolls or a flaming Pu-Pu platter to nibble on. Just the thing, we thought, for a mysterious yet sophisticated brief getaway.

Well.

This is Pacific Palisades.

When I walked in past a trickling fountain and a stone Buddha, the hostess smiled and directed me to where [The Man I Love] waited at a candle-lit table with a cold martini in front of him. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I could hear a high murmuring that wasn't from the fountain....and then I realized something.

Every single table but ours had at least one child seated at it.

There were children fiddling with chopsticks. There were children eating caterpillar rolls. There were children pouting, children precociously sitting at the sushi bar. There were children swinging their feet and kicking their siblings under the table.

The parents hovered over the childrens' menu, offering noodles and steamed broccoli and plain rice. Or indulged in the little darlings' yen for fried shrimp, eel-roll or California rolls.

Tall tumblers of cokes and cherry garnished ginger ales were festooned with paper umbrellas.

Beside us, a fourteen year old sulked with her grandparents. A studious long-haired kid in a soccer uniform expertly nibbled at maki-zushi.

What had happened? An invasion? What was this world coming to?