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50-something vegetarian Susan Wahl looks to meet a beefcake at the Arlington. (Anne Wermiel/NY Post)
Shari Reimer stays away from married men at the bar looking for play. (Mark Von Holden/NY Post)
It’s a Thursday night at the bar of Arlington Club, the recently opened Upper East Side steakhouse, and Susan Wahl is licking her lips. Not for the slabs of meat — Wahl, a 50-something sales rep who lives in Midtown, is a vegetarian. No, she’s watching the gentlemen chowing down on cuts of porterhouse and Wagyu beef.
“I’m single and looking for a man — the men are the meat,” says Wahl.
Wahl comes here often for the scenery — even the bartender knows her.
It’s her kind of crowd; 40- and 50-somethings with cash to spare and numbers to exchange.
“It’s a total divorce place,” one patron is overheard saying. That, or quite possibly the classiest frat party on the Upper East Side.
The small, U-shaped bar is teeming with buttoned-down businessmen drinking $17 martinis, and svelte designer-label-clad women sipping white wine, most nights after 7 p.m.
“It’s sophisticated and mature — I don’t think there are [people in their] 20s and 30s here,” says Wahl, pointing her steak knife straight at Spencer Geissinger, a 51-year-old Washington, DC, transplant who moved here last summer.
“It’s a great place to meet single women,” admits the single hedge-fund CEO. “The Upper East Side needed a place like this.”
OK, but it’s still a steakhouse. Why the flirtatious vibe?
“There are a lot of successful businessmen who are no longer clubbing, but looking for an established woman. They know this is a successful crowd,” says Kevin Sweeney, the general manager of the cavernous double-vaulted Beaux-Arts space on Lexington Avenue, near 74th Street.
That’s what comely divorcees Melissa Kraut and Carri Becker, both 45, are banking on when they arrive for their cattle call, hoping for romance or maybe just a fling.
Kraut displays abundant cleavage beneath her reversible mink, and boasts a glowing spray tan and long locks, all glossy and straight from a recent blowout.
“It’s the new spot. You get our age here,” says Kraut, a sex therapist.
“It’s a major hookup scene.”
And a successful one for Becker, who winds up giving her number to three guys.
“It’s a good ego boost,” Becker says.
Likewise, femme fatale and twice-divorced grandma Jane Scher, 58, has a pretty good batting average during her four times per week visits here; she’s met three guys she’s dated “but no one I fell in love with. All my friends mingle here, but the girls — I’m talking women in their 50s — are loose.”
Scher’s playing cat and mouse with apparel exec Peter Clark, 56, another regular who enjoys the eye candy — so much so that he and his ex-wife alternate nights at the Arlington.
“We don’t go on the same night,” he explains.
And sometimes they take home more than a phone number.
“People get talking and go home together,” says Peter Marion-Crawford, the 26-year-old bartender who’s worked at Arlington since its November opening.
“I’ve seen people come solo and go home with someone, and come back again with that person they went home with.”
That includes people like John V., a 60-year-old twice-divorced telecommunications broker, who’s met “three or four women” at the bar.
“It’s an older crowd — that’s the reason I come here,” says the dashing elder statesman, who didn’t want his last name used. ‘‘I shy away from too young. Forties is a good age to meet — at least she can have a sophisticated conversation.”
But it’s not just divorced people having all the fun — on a recent visit to the steakhouse, one man’s wedding band fell out of his pocket and bounced onto the brick floor at Shari Reimer’s feet.
“There are married guys looking for a bad situation here,” warns Reimer, a real estate broker who declined to give her age.
As for Kraut and her coterie, they’re already booking their next jaunt, planning to rendezvous with the married Lothario they met on their last visit.
“He says he’s in the process of a divorce, just not there yet. It’s up to her,” Kraut says, nodding to Carri Becker, “to make the call on that one.”
