POACHED.(The Talk of the Town)(Paul Stuart)

A decent midtown lunch spot--not the expense-account sort but a good, clean sandwich shop, with a fresh salad bar, and maybe some seafood tom yum, if that's your thing--can be hard to come by. Once you find one, you tend to stick with it. You learn the hourly cycles, in terms of both customer flow (twelve-forty-five equals chaos) and servers' shifts, and you begin to time your visits accordingly. You avoid the guy at the soup station who holds up the line by flirting with all the girls, and you always pick the front-most register, where the cheerful woman moves everyone along with unflagging efficiency. For the staff at Paul Stuart, the tweedy clothier on East Forty-fifth Street, from the president and the salespeople to Myra, the seventy-eight-year-old receptionist, that trusted lunch spot is Dishes, a sleek, vaguely Asian-themed cafeteria that's conveniently situated next door.

For years, the Paul Stuart employees were especially charmed by a couple of Dishes cashiers named Avalon and Salma. Then, last fall, a position opened up at one of the downstairs registers at Paul Stuart. Someone in-house recommended Avalon. She applied, and got the job. A few months later, another opening, and Salma was hired. "Same capacity, different environment," Craig Smith, an assistant director of human resources at Paul Stuart, said recently. (Smith left the company last week.) "It was a smooth transition for both of them, seeing that they already knew everybody. I didn't even need to give them a tour." Avalon and Salma turned out to be as good at ringing up paisley socks as they'd been at selling tuna wraps to secretaries.

At Paul Stuart, the personnel sharing seemed a natural extension of the neighborly rapport that had long existed between the two stores. "I mean, we went to their Christmas party," Smith said. "That's how tight the two crews are. We left our Christmas party and went over to theirs, which was more happening." (Paul Stuart, he said, tends to be "low-key," whereas the Dishes environment is "off the wall.")

To Moshe Mallul, the co-owner of Dishes, Paul Stuart's behavior seemed less that of a ...