Et Tu, CANASTA?

The hottest tables today aren't at restaurants. They're wherever this game is raging.

- MATTIE KAHN

In Los Angeles, women trade tips on pattern recognition in the aisles at Erewhon. In Lower Manhattan, there's an exclusive meetup that operates like Fight Club. Julia Roberts uses it to relax. Aerin Lauder designed a travel set in crocodile-embossed Italian leather. Your grandmother wouldn't believe it, but in cities across America, tiles are clacking in the well-decorated homes of the urban elite. Mahjong is having a moment.

The game looks complicated, but enthusiasts swear the rest of us could get the hang of it. It's about creating winning hands of tiles and outfoxing opponents, and it has been around for centuries. After sweeping China in the late 1800s, it traveled the world, seeding variants throughout Asia and in the United States, where the businessman Joseph Babcock simplified it for the American audience. In 1937 the National Mah Jongg League was formed, and the game has been associated ever since with strong-willed septuagenarians. That is, until the private school parents set discovered it. (Bridge—with its familiar card deck, few merch opportunities, and strict rules—never stood a chance.)

The cookbook author and chef Gaby Dalkin was introduced to mahjong last summer, less than a month after having her second child. She had heard of the game, of course. Her grandmother loved it, playing at least once a week, with pennies for winnings. But Dalkin had never tried her hand. Friends were going to a mahjong night and invited her to come. “I wanted to leave the house,” she says. “So I was like, ‘Sure, let me see what this is all about.’” She was immediately hooked. “I’ve been obsessed ever since,” she says.

So obsessed that she hosted a mahjong night of her own and chronicled it in great detail on Instagram, where it caught the attention of Holly Liss Jammet, a social media strategist who had previously known mahjong as a pastime for the aged—and from