Which comes first—wanting to commit adultery, or a taste for the cold butter, cumbersome menus, and slippery leather seating of overpriced midtown restaurants? Who is to know if one prompted the other, but the two are related.

According to a survey from Ashley Madison, a website that helps people meet other people to cheat with, adulterers in New York have a taste for upscale chain restaurants in midtown as their choice dining locations for affairs. (Ashley Madison also released preferred restaurant choices for major American cities.)

Most choose business-like settings with the equally bland time of 6:30 PM on Wednesday as their preferred hour. Also, 40 percent of the top ten restaurants have apostrophes in the name (significant? These are people having a crisis about who they belong to).

CEO Noel Biderman of Ashley Madison said this makes it easy to pass off these restaurants as a business meeting. “You can put it on your credit card and not worry about your partner finding out that you went somewhere romantic like Per Se,” Biderman told the NY Post.

So here they are, in order, mostly boring New York restaurants that now seem skeevy:

  • Blue Fin
  • Morton's
  • Cipriani
  • Ruth's Chris
  • Del Frisco's
  • Momofuku
  • The Palm
  • Beauty & Essex
  • Houston's
  • Blue Water

Though most of these are midtown chains, two Lower East Side eateries made the list. One of LES spots is a speakeasy style bar/restaurant where you have to walk through an antique consignment store in order to go in. Also it has sex in the title so good job with the subtlety with that one, cheater.

[NY Post | Gothamist, image via Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock]