Here’s to the ladies who lunch very loudly

Her cellphone bleated insistently, interrupting the quiet calm on the terrace of the Huntington Ritz-Carlton for the seventh time. We could have been enjoying the moonlight, the wine, the food. Instead, we were all hostage to a thirtysomething businesswoman as she ignored her dinner companion to boss around her underlings on the phone. OK, we get it. You’re an important person.

Just when we thought it couldn’t possibly go on any longer, she’d take another call, in a grating, honking voice projected with the lungs of an opera diva.

I wanted to lunge at her and throw the offensive phone over the balcony. She kept it up, cutting nothing short, making no attempt to get up and excuse herself and finish the conversation outside. Her companion looked as if he wanted to crawl under the table. Or commit hara-kiri.

I knew I was losing it when I started muttering, “Fascinating! We’re all riveted!” But no, she was utterly oblivious.

We’ve all been there, our evening ruined by someone acting as if the rest of the dining room, or the world, existed only as background to their own personal drama. That oblivious cellphone talker was the worst stripe, but there are so many others.

Who hasn’t been jammed on a banquette next to someone recounting in full voice the most intimate, horrible details of their last affair? Or been seated next to a table of young financial hotshots, fondling fat cigars (blessedly, unlit) and getting drunk on $300 bottles of Bordeaux as they shout down each other over an excruciatingly long evening?

And it always happens that the service is extra slow when you’re seated next to a particularly odious table.

How did people get so rude?

Not long ago there was the couple in Patina making out, not in some dark corner, but under the full glare of the dining room. It was hilarious, really. Could it have been the truffles? As bad behavior goes, preposterous, but somehow innocent, swept away by desire.

But there was no forgiving the hothead who pulled the tablecloth out from under a platoon of Riedel wineglasses, sending them crashing, because of some imagined or real snub by a waiter at one of L.A.’s top restaurants. Since when did restaurants become places to act out?

You expect the bawling babies, but don’t you wish the parents would take them outside when they hit that decibel that shatters glass?

But why would they? Restaurants are full of adult babies. Who hasn’t witnessed a self-important restaurant-goer throw a hissy fit when he or she was not ushered to a choice table?

And now, there’s a new phenomenon -- tables of shrieking women.

Lately, everywhere I go, restaurants seem to be full of them. I’m not talking hysterics, but women eating and drinking and having fun, which is what they’re supposed to be doing.

But something else happens when a bunch of women get together at a restaurant and start ordering colored drinks and telling stories. There’s a point at which high-pitched voices and shrieks reach critical mass. They start clapping like seals before the next wave of laughter hits. Soon, there’s no relief: You’re trapped for the evening at the next table. The sound gathers strength and bounces off the walls, becoming so piercing that it stuns you into some kind of frozen state.

Sort of like when an air horn goes off at close range.

Who knew anyone had voices like that?

It’s interesting that women don’t tend to shriek like that when they’re with dates. They tend to go all quiet and demure.

But this is not about men.

These women out on the town have spent hours shopping and dressing to come up with the cutting-edge outfit, the look of the moment -- all for their girlfriends’ scrutiny. For the evening, all constraints are off and there’s no holding back those voices. Or those appetites. This is one night when they eat and drink with abandon.

No shushing mothers. No guy to impress. No disapproving boss. It’s girls’ night out and who’d presume to dampen their spirits, to ask, nicely, for them to button it up? I don’t have the heart.

S. Irene Virbila, The Times’ restaurant critic, can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.