WHERE Uptown Teens SPENT THEIR Parents’ Money

FOR A CERTAIN SET of private-school kids who came of age in the mid-’90s, the Serafina on 79th and Madison will always be Sofia. The restaurant opened in 1995, the same year I started high school, and quickly became our social hub. My friends and I would come for dinner, marching up the narrow steps in bulbous Steve Maddens, carrying box-cut Kate Spades, with Ricky’s glitter on our eyelids. The hostess would herd us past the main dining room (where grownups sat), up another flight to the third story, which had tented ceilings and uneven brick floors. This was the domain of teenagers. “It was the one place you’d see everyone from all the schools,” says Elana Wexler, a friend from school days. We all showed up: Riverdale, Trinity, Spence, etc. Even if you didn’t know the kids at other tables, you knew of them from promoters’ party flyers or high-school lore. We’d crowd the long banquette, eating artichoke salad, pizza margherita, and paglia e fieno, green and white pasta. (It was the ’90s; carbs were fine.) We littered tables with beepers, Parliament Lights, and bullet-shaped tubes of M.A.C lipstick. Sofia was where we celebrated birthdays and AP tests, nursed crushes and broken hearts. It managed to feel adult and aspirational while still comfortable for someone using a fake ID to order a glass of Pinot Grigio. Of course, as adult as we thought we were being, the restaurant was an entirely sponsored experience. We paid with our parents’ cash. Sofia was the first place I felt part of a scene. I learned about the magic of bumping into people and the specific energy of a New York evening that could go in an infinite number of directions—even if those nights mostly petered out into loitering on brownstone stoops. In late 1998, following a dispute with a restaurant of the same name, Sofia was renamed Serafina. Now there are ten Serafinas in the city, along with outposts in White Plains, Scarsdale—even Tokyo and Kolkata. Where Sofia felt singular, Serafina has the whiff of a chain. My meals there now happen at 5 p.m. with crayons and kids’ menus. I still spot people from the Sofia days. We give weary smiles over tennisracquet pasta or, in the spirit of high school, pretend we don’t know each other at all.