Restaurant Shopping

NYC has a gazillion restaurants - cheap restaurants, expensive restaurants, themed restaurants, ambient restaurants, small restaurants, large restaurants fill-in adjective here restaurants. I've never had trouble finding a restaurant to eat in the city until I started to look for a place to have dinner with 20 of my closest friends. I, without exaggeration, probably have a menu from a third of the restaurants in Manhattan. Apparently, when you hit anything above 8-10 people you're in the prix-fixe category and that usually sucks. Some places wanted as much as $5,000 (in addition to food), some offerred a terrible menu and some wanted to seat an extra five people at my table. I settled on Japonais with a prix-fixe dinner menu in a semi-private lounge area with open bar, good company and a great time!
Thank you!