Jonah at la.foodblogging got invited to the private club on a corner of the Caltech campus in Pasadena. The first formal dinner at The Athenaeum, in February 1931, celebrated the arrival of Albert Einstein for a two-month visit at Caltech.

I usually wouldn’t review a place that required membership, or accompanying a member, to get in, but I had such a nice lunch that I figured I would drop a few notes about it. Walking into the building, which looks like it would blend in on an Ivy League campus, I hear a string quartet playing in one room before veering left into the main dining room. How civilized....

This is one tasty spread. I dive into the ceviche, pile a little arugala salad (with pomegranate seeds), skip the risotto, pick up some poached salmon appetizer, ladel a cup of Boston clam chowder (passing over the vegetable lentil), attack the plump asparagus (which are topped with roasted red and yellow peppers) and finally, I choose a few slices of roast lamb leg over the stuffed chicken breasts.

More over there. The building, by the way, was designed by Gordon Kaufmann, architect for the L.A. Times building and, improbably, Hoover Dam.