Fresh, daring and hard (to get in). That’s how most New Yorkers like their restaurants. And their restaurant romps.

Tableside naughtiness is so widespread, the issue’s no longer whether you’ve had a dalliance at an NYC eatery; it’s when, where and how.

“Sex in restaurants is more common than most people would ever imagine,” says Joseph Couture, author of “Peek: Inside the Private World of Public Sex.”

Restaurant trysts, he claims, serve as status symbols for ambitious New Yorkers. “Hot and crazy sex is a key ingredient to the good life — the only thing people drop faster than their inhibitions after a bottle of wine is their pants.”

Indeed, Dean*, a 38-year-old academic administrator from the East Village, sheepishly admits to sliding down his slacks during a date last month at Erminia Ristorante on the Upper East Side, for a little hanky-panky under fettuccine.

“I’ve never been so grateful for a proper tablecloth,” he says.

Ivan, a 46-year-old Harlem writer, indulged in a pants-optional meal at a Tibetan restaurant in the East Village. His girlfriend surprised him with an adventurous foot under their window-side (yikes!) table.

Ivan believes urban environments like New York naturally lend themselves to les liaisons publiques. “Out in the sticks, they have haystacks and barns,” he notes.

Here in the Big Apple, randy diners are better off heading for the bathroom, advises Couture.

“The men’s room is the best option,” he says. “Taking a lady into a stall in the men’s room doesn’t generally create as much concern . . . it merely causes envy.”

Or mortification.

Brooklyn-based TV production secretary Melanie, 25, braved a blind date a few months ago at The Jane hotel in the West Village, accompanied by another couple playing matchmaker. In between supper and drinks, Melanie and her date were left alone while their frisky chaperones bolted for the restroom.

“What they didn’t realize is that we — and the other people waiting in line for the bathroom — could hear them from outside,” she remembers. “They came back looking all rumpled — awkward!”

Flirting with the dangers of getting caught infuses restaurant sex with the nostalgic flavor of frenching in your high school BF’s hatchback after curfew.

Actress Naomi Grossman had just such a flashback at the Central Park Boathouse a few years ago. She and her beau arrived early for lunch with her mother, who’d flown in for a visit.

“He was a little nervous about meeting her, so I thought I’d relieve his nerves,” recalls Grossman, who’s performing her aptly titled solo show “Carnival Knowledge: Love, Lust and Other Oddities” at the Kraine Theater in the East Village this month.

After scoping out an empty ladies’ room, she whisked her guy into a stall for some quick action. But just as things got steamy, another woman waltzed in.

“I nearly choked to death when I heard the unmistakable voice of my mom on her cellphone,” says a horrified Grossman. She and her boyfriend eventually slunk into the restaurant undetected, but she has yet to fully recover from the incident.

“Try having a normal conversation with your mother over pork loin after that,” she deadpans.

Nicole, a corporate communications exec based in the Financial District, has fond memories of late-night munching at the Pine Tree Lodge in Murray Hill. After “Caribbean-style” appetizers on a third date-disguised-as-a-meeting with a colleague, she found herself “sucking face” in a shady back room.

Despite the server’s lewd glances and a “Seinfeld” rerun for mood music, Nicole counts it as one or her most romantic encounters.

“It’s one of the greatest, craziest love stories of my life,” she raves.

Sadly, restaurant sex doesn’t always have such a, ahem, happy ending.

This April, Kim Kalish, an UES comedian and bartender, was serving a married couple at Ryan’s Daughter pub on the Upper East Side. About an hour in, the couple beckoned.

“The wife said, in a deliberately loud whisper, ‘I’ll meet you in the kitchen in five minutes, and I promise you’ll be begging to get into my bed with my husband watching,’ ” recalls a flabbergasted Kalish, 26. “She walked the full length of the bar and even did this funny little ‘come hither’ turn and wink as she went into the kitchen.”

Kalish, who insists she’s all for spicing up a marriage, politely declined to provide the cayenne pepper herself.

“Alas, I didn’t go,” she sighs. “It was just me and the husband staring awkwardly at each other while I turned down the offer. All he could say was, ‘So, um, Glenmorangie, that’s a Highland scotch, right?’ ”

Maybe Zagat needs to revise its ratings categories: Service, décor and kitchen access.

*Some last names omitted in the interest of tableside tawdriness.