Dining With Others Is This Club’s Main Course : The Single Gourmet now has a chapter in Orange County for unmarried people who want to eat well and share the experience with other singles.

“Table for one.”

Loaded words. Let a maitre d’ speak them and every ear within the sound of his voice pricks up and every eye subtly shifts. Who is the “one”? And why?

A single person in a restaurant, particularly in one with a star or two next to its name, continues to be a social curiosity. In the culinary world, in which the basic unit is the pair, the single diner still is the exception, and single diners know it. Those who can screw up their courage to make a reservation for themselves at Chez Folding Green often prepare themselves for sidelong looks, whispered comments and, possibly, a table near the dish sterilizer.

So, instead of dining on the prime chow atop a starched white tablecloth, many singles end up with the take-out du jour on the coffee table.

Irene McCarthy and Kim Hurst have been there, and haven’t liked it much. So, they reasoned, the best way to conquer the stigma of single dining is to gang up on it.

The two women are the movers behind the newest international chapter of the Single Gourmet, a dining club for single people with a taste for top-flight grub in the company of a roomful of other unmarried gastronomes. It is part dining club, part social club and, say the two women, not even one part lonely hearts club.

“It’s not a dating service,” McCarthy said. “We aren’t matchmakers. We don’t want people to come here with the idea that they’re going to meet Prince Charming. They may, but that’s not the primary purpose. The purpose is for single people to be able to enjoy very nice restaurants. It’s OK to go to Coco’s by yourself, but most people wouldn’t come to a Pascal , a John Dominis or a Chanteclair by themselves.”

But they just might if they were surrounded by a crowd of diners like themselves. Those upscale eateries will be visited by the 30 or so singles who are expected to get in their reservations for the Single Gourmet’s twice-monthly forays into the lands where lone appetites usually fear to go.

Pascal, a French Provencal restaurant in Newport Beach, served as the site for the group’s inaugural event last week and, McCarthy said, the club did turn-away business.

“People have been calling in droves the last couple of days just wanting to show up at the door,” she said as the first guests arrived. “We’ve gotten so many phone calls in response to our advertisements, and we’ve talked to the people and found that they’ve had the same experience alone in restaurants, and often that experience hasn’t been pleasurable.

“At times the restaurant wants to shove you over in a corner by the kitchen or the bathroom and they don’t pay very much attention to you, probably because the tip isn’t going to be that big.”

That doesn’t happen, however, when singles dine in force. It works like this:

Prospective members of the Single Gourmet pay a $65 membership fee (which will rise to $85 after Sept. 1) and a single charge (tax and tip included) for each event--between $25 and $65 depending on the lavishness of the meal, which is usually four courses. Wine may be included in the price of some meals, but guests generally are free to order their own liquor or wine.

The groups at each event are expected to be large enough to command respect but small enough to allow for a good amount of socializing. No-host cocktail hours are planned before each meal, McCarthy said, and guests--who are assigned seating during dinner--often will have opportunities to change seats at the dessert course.

The only hint at social engineering is the boy-girl-boy-girl seating arrangements and the seating together of people of similar ages.

All this is just fine with Mike Wong of Irvine, who showed up at Pascal for the inaugural dinner.

“I like to cook, and I’ve taken a cooking class for 2 1/2 years,” he said. “I like to try new things and this seems like a good way to meet people who like food.

“Nothing’s forced on you. At the very least you can have a wonderful meal and interact. You may not meet the right person, but maybe you can find a good business partner. Maybe a good chiropractor or doctor.”

And, says Bob Bragassa of San Clemente, “if nothing else, anybody can talk about food.”

Occasionally, the conversation gets a bit more personal. McCarthy said that since the first chapter of the Single Gourmet was founded in Montreal nine years ago (there are now 20 clubs, including the Orange County chapter, all over the world), “there have been a number of marriages as a result of the group. The only negative thing about that is that when you get married, you can’t belong anymore.”

However, she said, the club is primarily a kind of social lever and icebreaker--a way to get good food, good service and good company in a single package.

“I think that communal eating is very important to relationships and that a lot of important things can be discussed immediately after a meal,” McCarthy said.

“It’s about getting to know one another, enjoying food, talking about food and wine and discovering similar interests in the course of an evening.

“I suppose the same thing can be done playing a game of poker or Monopoly, but I’m not sure how much of a draw you’d get if you said, ‘Hey, everybody come over for a game of Monopoly tomorrow.’

“There’s a very comfortable, non-threatening feeling about sitting down and sharing a meal and getting to know one another.”

That’s why Tina Schneider of Laguna Niguel signed up--not, she said, because of the safety in numbers. Restaurants are not high on her list of intimidating places.

“For some people maybe, but not for me,” she said. “I eat out quite a bit on my own. Sometimes I get good service and sometimes I don’t, but if I don’t like my table I ask for another one if it’s available. And the company’s always reliable.

“But I love to eat and I love good restaurants and I thought this might be a nice way to meet people and also have a nice meal.”

Pam Gallacher of Costa Mesa said she saw her membership in the club as an entree into a higher echelon of dining.

“I go out to eat a lot,” she said, “but mostly with friends or a date. This is a wonderful way to experience restaurants that you may have read about but never gone to, places I wouldn’t normally go to because the people I go with might not be able to afford them or a date might not suggest them.”

And, Gallacher said, it doesn’t hurt to be in the company of a roomful of single people.

“Singles are always looking,” she said, laughing. “But this is a good way to socialize generally, and not just with people of the opposite sex. To sit at a table and have food and drink, people just let down their inhibitions and it’s not like a matchmaking thing. Even if you don’t meet someone, you get to experience the ambience.”

As promising as the response to the first dinner appeared, McCarthy said, there is still at least one bug in the system, and it’s a perennial: the search for the legendary “extra man.”

“We try very hard to keep it 50-50 men and women,” she said. “But the response from women has been overwhelmingly more than that of men. I’m not sure what the issue is there. But, yes, it seems like there’s always that need for the extra man.”