is this a correct sentence?

Simply as a stand alone sentence I would have said: I had a wonderful dinner with some friends and the Holiday Restaurant...

We like to talk about ourselves and our adventures, and we put ourselves in the forefront... And since you are relating the story you have to remember the person you are talking to is a friend, and may feel left out, so you may say: with some of my dearest friends, because if you would advertize one single fact about yourself, it is your popularity, and I would too were I popular... I'm usually tolerated.

Yes, it is. Bubu.




The 'that', known as the zero relative pronoun, is optional, so your example is also fine. If my memory serves me right, the zero pronoun is the most common in use in spoken English.

This happens in English, as I'm sure you know, when the relative pronoun replaces the object.

It was a wonderful dinner.

[that] I had it/the dinner with my friends on my birthday at Holiday Restaurant.

The sentence sounds stiff because there is more than the usual amount of information being described.

Consider,

It was a wonderful dinner [that] I had with my friends on my birthday at Holiday Restaurant on the tenth of last month between the hours of 8 and 11PM after which we went to a nightclub where we danced 'til the wee hours of the morning which is why I'm really bagged today when I'm supposed to be alert for this meeting that is going to be held this afternoon.

It has just occurred to me that the the sentence I have asked is a cleft sentence. As far as I know, a cleft sentence is used when an emphasis is needed. Since we can not show intonation in writing, we use a different style to express what we mean.

For example if someone says: It was a cup of tea that guest was treated with.

I think in the cleft sentence above 'the cup of tea' draws the reader's attention from other possible elements to itself. perhaps we can elaborate the sentence as:

It was a cup of tea that guest was treated with [and then one of the possible allusions - even if he had been expecting home-made wine and the host was capable of serving that.]

So is it correct to use a cleft sentence even when there is no allusion from which we need to draw the reader's attention to the clefting ? For example:

When we mean to say- 1) I had a wonderful dinner last night with my friends.
How correct will it be to use cleft sentence - 2)It was a wonderful dinner that I had with my friends last night? [what is the point of clefting the sentence in sentence 2 when the emphasis on the 'dinner' is clear in sentence 1 and there is no allusion for which the use of a cleft sentence deems necessary.

I hope I have made myself clear. English is my second language. It gets the mickey out of me when I try to express complicated things. Thanks for all your help guys.