Central Perk

Gone are the ladies who lunch and the women who lampooned them — Elaine Stritch, Joan Rivers — but the girls who get coffee soldier on. There's already a small infantry forming at Ralph's, a white-tiled cafe on the second floor of Ralph Lauren's new Polo flagship. The communal table in the next room might have been wrested from Le Pain Quotidien, if not Central Perk, where the fictional Rachel Green on "Friends" worked two decades ago before being hired by Ralph Lauren, playing himself on the show in the spirit of good sport that oxygenates his entire enormous enterprise.