To "Paper or plastic?" and "Obama or McCain?" add yet another wrenching personal choice: "White napkin or black?"
Forget square plates. Small plates. Sauce-drizzled plates. Plate as a verb. The newest craze in fine dining is not on the table but on your lap: the color-coordinated serviette. The idea is to keep lint from marring the dining experience.
At the Capital Grille in downtown Baltimore and at the chain's other locations, the staff scopes out what diners are wearing and swaps out napkins accordingly.
Sometimes they ask the diner's preference - as when I arrived for lunch the other day in a gray-and-black checkered skirt. And no, I don't usually eat that well. And it showed in the puzzled look I gave the hostess who'd sized up my outfit and declared, "You could really go either way."
She then held up a white napkin and a black one - what, no houndstooth? - to clarify that she wasn't, you know, suggesting something else, not that there's anything wrong with that.
"We do get a lot of business clientele in the afternoon hours, and they are wearing dark pants," said hostess Eni Meka. "We simply don't want anyone to walk away with lint on their pants if they're coming in nicely dressed."
With all restaurateurs have to worry about these days - from the health of the economy to the health of the Chinese farmed fish they're serving - somehow they still find time to fret about lint.
Needlessly, for the most part, says Rick Sarai of Linens of the Week, a textile rental company. While 100-percent cotton napkins shed after repeated laundering, most napkins are made of more durable fabric.
"If it's a poly-blend product, you wouldn't have any lint, but I think the perception is out there," said Sarai, general manager of the firm's Baltimore plant. Nevertheless, he said, the trend is growing - and trickling down to some casual restaurants.
"If they're wearing dark colors, then they get a black napkin," says Sarah Thomerson, hostess at Macaroni Grill in Columbia.
There are some upscale holdouts. Charleston in Harbor East, a place so fancy that wait staff refold napkins every time a diner goes to the bathroom, offers only white linens, all-cotton ones at that.
Not to worry. Sarai said Charleston's napkins, made of 500-thread-count Egyptian cotton, are too primo to shed lint.
Maryland law is not allowed to be absurd. Really. A ruling says so
