Who Had the Happy Meal?

We thought we’d seen it all on our banquet rounds, but we found out otherwise. Those charity dinners known as the rubber chicken circuit are only rubber chicken up to a point.

At a recent fund-raiser at the Beverly Hilton, we were eating the usual pasta and chicken. But we noticed the folks around us were dining on quite another menu. To our left, Mogul A ordered steak sandwiches for everyone at his table. On our right, Mogul B went with the pasta and chicken, but embellished the meal with a rather enormous, well, tub of Russian caviar for his table companions. They also had imported vodka and finished off with Dom Perignon.

While we brooded about Mogul A and Mogul B in first class while we were back in coach, Tom Kostoff, the hotel’s director of catering, assured us that special food and drink beyond the normal requests for vegetable or fish plates are once-in-a-blue-moon occurrences. If super heavy hitters come to a banquet and want luxury food and drink, and the charity organizers will permit it, the hotel will accommodate them, he said. Maybe next time we’ll get a table together and ask for a vegetarian, egg-free, wheat-free, dairy-free casserole and see what happens.

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Collector Invitations: Before you toss your old party invitations in the dumpster, don’t say we didn’t warn you. The 1,000 special people out there who received a 9-by-12-inch invite to last Thursday’s opening of the new Chanel boutique (as in “Chanel and Ms. Sherry Lansing salute the American Film Institute . . . “) might want to know that people are calling Chanel requesting extras.

The invitation is one of the most elaborate we’ve seen, involving a sheet of parchment on which the time, date and place are printed and a shiny black folio tied with embossed satin ribbon containing a color print of a drawing of the new shop by Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld. If downscaling was going to be the trend of the ‘90s, it’s obvious the concept only goes so far.

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Single Guy Watch: Single women of Los Angeles, has “Where are all the good men?” become your mantra? Then listen up. Soon there will be yet another way to meet available dudes in this town.

Starting next spring, L.A. bachelorettes will have “L.A.’s Eligible” to pore over--a quarterly magazine about single guys.

“I wanted to highlight eligible bachelors without doing a singles magazine,” said publisher Kathy Duliakas, who’s 34 and not married. “We’ll be doing three- to four-page spreads on the guys, talking about what are their contributions to society, their ambitions. There are a lot of interesting men out there, and unless they’re celebrities, they’re not getting the attention they deserve.”

Just to be on the safe side, we asked Duliakas what constitutes eligible .

“They might be dating somebody, but they can’t be dating someone seriously or living with a romantic interest.”