Kim McCarty, co-owner of Michael’s and wife of its namesake, in the Midtown restaurant earlier this week.

H ave you been to Michael’s lately? For a place that looks like it could be in a glass vitrine, or in a dollhouse that somehow has a restaurant, or on a Hollywood-lot, it does not feel like it is trapped in amber. Service is peppy, and the dining room is full on a Wednesday afternoon. The carpet is freshly vacuumed and bears no sun stains from the restaurant’s lofty windows. But Michael’s is a living expression of life at the tail end of the 1980s. Its owners, Michael and Kim McCarty, have deigned to keep it that way, recently attracting a new clientele hoping to get a taste of that time in New York.

“Everything is so unstable right now that people are just looking for stability,” Kim McCarty, the restaurant’s discreet doyenne, tells me over Cobb salad and hot tea. “That's why it's all steak and martinis everywhere. We’ve all been hit on the heads.” She’s holding court with me at a round table near the restaurant’s lounge, across the way from where her husband, the maestro, pals around with regulars who pass by the bar, hands out business cards to folks on their way out, and consorts with his stable of pink-Polo-wearing staff.

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