DINING OUT IN the early days of the new Millennium is an experience best left to those with backbones of reinforced steel and nerves of carbon fiber. It is definitely not for the faint of heart or the short of shekel, as I discovered upon coming face to face with a sliver of liver that was about to cost me $38.95.

Correction. Make that $77.90, since my wife Elizabeth was also about to partake of the pate de foie gras on offer at Claridge's restaurant in London. The stuff is made from the liver of a fatted goose which, judging from the price, must have been a kissing cousin of the one that deposited the golden egg. Now this was all at a celebration of our last wedding anniversary.

Claridge's, let it be said, is a nirvana of eateries that is to the common garden potato variety of local greasy spoon or Ptomaine Charlie's about what the Taj Mahal is to a pup tent. It is luxury dining in a Thirties Art Deco setting with service, style and gustatorial quality so redolent of that glamorous pre-war period.

Which is why Elizabeth and I decided it would be the venue for our wedding anniversary dinner. Now she is a native Londoner, and this city has been my home for more than 30 years, so we are well aware that it is the fourth most expensive burg on this or any other three planets of your choice.

Or maybe not so well aware. The bill eventually scaled to an Everestian 363 bucks - plus another half-century to thank the waiters for holding our chairs for us, and yet another $30 for a taxi back home. I quickly checked our National Lottery tickets for the evening. No such luck - so there was another 6 bucks down Dranoland.

The MasterCard bill was rolled up via wheelbarrow two or three weeks later, and it took a couple more months to scrape the last of the scarlet off the keel of the family exchequer.

It is not as if the cost should have come as a surprise. London is notorious for the prices its restaurants charge for their overdone steaks and underdone service by wretched waiters noted for their linguistic abilities in any one of three languages - usually Swahili, Bantu or Latin as spoken in northeast Finland.

Such are the tariffs at many top London eateries that when the head waiter hands out the menus, the prices are included in only that for the prospective payee - the one who looks as if he has already made his peace with his bank manager. The other guests are spared, presumably on grounds that one case of apoplexy or coronary attack per table is adjudged to be sufficient.

If you are nevertheless still intent on hosting a dinner at one of London's finest, you would be wise to keep your wits about you and not muddle them with too much preprandial partaking of the old and rare. An editor at the news agency I once labored for is a case in point.

This editor took a client, the client's daughter and a staffer from the Paris bureau to lunch at one of London's most exclusive club restaurants. After a few lubricative Scotches, he summoned a waiter for the wine list. With quivering index finger he pointed to a Chateauneuf du Pape which, at $70 a bottle, he figured would be suitably impressive without wrecking the divisional budget for the next three months.

Our Man was still compos mentis enough to realize something was definitely amiss when, rather than the usual waiter with a bottle of plonk and a corkscrew in his grip, the sommelier arrived with the wine bottle perched on a pillow in a silver basket, rather in the style of the presentation of the Imperial Crown to Queen Elizabeth II.

It seems that, as he went to indicate the $70 bottle, the editor's unsteady finger slipped a notch and landed one line lower - on a Bordeaux that tipped the register at 700-plus bucks. He spent the next five months paying it off, the client's daughter sipped one sip and made an awful face (well, she was from Miami), and the Paris reporter, who was quite able to tell Medoc from muck, cheerfully knocked back the remainder.

Going out to a restaurant can be a path full of other pitfalls for the unwary. At some London eateries, a snobby dress code that demands that men wear ties still exists. Which is why Simpson's on the Strand, a fancy steak joint, frowned on the turtle-neck shirt and natty sports jacket I was wearing but was perfectly happy to lend me a dingy green shirt and a pink and yellow tie that left me looking like Coco the Clown on a bad-hair day.

Also high up on the average restaurateur's social lepers list is the single diner. Having spent many a bachelor evening fleeing to the nearest food hall to escape the botulism-inspired effects of my own cooking, I fully subscribe to the philosophy of one lone gourmet: "The best number for a dinner party is two - myself and a damned good head waiter."

Alas, to order a "table for one" these days is to advertise that you have been stood up, are a bachelor with the culinary skills of a duck-billed platypus, are a self-indulgent glutton or are victim to some horribly indescribable disease. You will generally be landed at a table downwind of the kitchen smells of garlic and boiled onions or within sniffing distance of the crapper - and then be ignored for the next 45 minutes or so.

(Happily, there is a tried and sometimes proven true solution to the latter, as developed by one irate single diner. Simply put on your cheapest clothes, bring along a notebook and scribble away in it between bouts of pen-in-mouth pondering. With luck, the owner will mistake you for a Michelin guide food inspector, and the world's your oyster, or caviar or lamb and truffles.)

Still, Elizabeth and I are undaunted, and in fact have just returned from another anniversary celebration at Claridge's. So what if her glass of pink champagne cost $15.70? This time the pate de foie gras was 7 bucks cheaper.

I figure if this keeps up, by the year 2015 dinner may be affordable.

Thought for the Week: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.

"Notes From A Tangled Webb" is syndicated by: