NEWS & COLUMNS

Best Escargots

Les Halles
411 Park Ave. S. (betw. 28th & 29th Sts.)
679-4111

They Hit the Snail Right on the Head. The French, for all their faults, have one endearing quality, and that’s their ability to make little garden animals taste good. Properly sauced, muddy frogs become a national delicacy. Cute ortolans are gobbled in a single bite. And of course only a Frenchman would think of taking a snail and make it walk the plank into a boiling pool of butter, leaving him to drown among a flotsam of garlic, shallots and parsley. When done right, the results are rapturous.

In New York, snails are done right rarely, except at the meat-and-french fries bistro Les Halles. Their escargots would make a believer of even the most squeamish eater. Les Halles is the flagship restaurant in the Anthony Bourdain chain of French facsimiles. Bourdain tries to keep the food and atmosphere as authentically Gallic (not galling) as possible. We come here for the steak frites, which is superb, and always order the snails to kick off the flesh-fest. Every time, the snails are reliably plump and juicy.

We’ve had disasters elsewhere. Some restaurants serve up nasty, shriveled lumps of brown boogers dunked in some flavorless grease, or else they pawn off a sanitized version of the classic that replaces the butter with something else, usually some runny coagulant that tastes like Lubriderm. Les Halles’ snails are a marvel. They’re not too chewy–we’d say they come perfectly al dente–and wear their coat of garlic with so much pride and style we half-expect them to sit up and sing the "Marseillaise." Each mouthful tastes like France itself. As a bonus, you can enjoy these sweet morsels as yellow cabs zoom past on Park Ave., reminding you it’s beautiful New York outside and not some city full of toxically annoying Parisians. Get plenty of bread to soak up the leftover butter puddles.

Best Reason To Get Out of Bed

Bright Food Shop’s Pancakes
216 8th Ave. (21st St.)
243-4433

Griddle Me This. You could stay in your cotton blanky cocoon, propped up on pillows, with the endless September Vogue and W close at hand. But if you consider the thick batter rising on Bright Food’s griddle while you lollygag, you probably won’t. Their eggy cornmeal pecan griddlecakes ($7.50) might hide hot exploded blueberries, depending on the season, and are served with pitchers of real maple syrup.

If the three huge high flapjacks are too much for you, a side of just one may be ordered. The waiters will come over and smugly ask you, "How is it?" They already know. The many coffee refills will bring you out of any residual fog. Of course there’re other generous and tasty breakfast options at this cool Mexican-Asian; we also like the smoked whitefish "maki" with wasabi cream cheese and green-chile scrambled eggs on a nori-wrapped spinach tortilla, served with black beans and cucumber salad ($8.25). And there’s a shareable bread basket ($5.50) of muffin, scone, corn bread and both flour and corn tortillas, with ancho honey butter. The hustle of the cooks seen through the open kitchen might even inspire you to actually do something with your day.

Best New Tribeca Restaurant

Fresh
105 Reade St. (W. B’way)
406-1900

Instant Institution. It’s a stark reality that any number of restaurant venues in Manhattan are haunted. Every year, a hopeful and ambitious entrepreneur tries his or her luck in a spot that’s known nothing but failure. Most don’t succeed.

On occasion, however, someone breaks the hex. People forget that before Nobu opened to instant acclaim at 105 Hudson St. several years ago, the large space had a disastrous track record, despite its prime location.

Lightning has struck again in Tribeca, this time with Martin Burge’s Fresh, an all-seafood restaurant that opened just a few months ago and has already received a glowing review in The New York Times. Burge, formerly of Gotham Bar & Grill, bravely ignored the lack of success at previous losing enterprises at 105 Reade St., fashioning a unique option for Tribecans (and "foodies," to slip into that awful cliche, throughout the city) who are already glutted with any number of two- or three-star establishments.

The menu changes weekly, according to the availability of fish, but never varies in quality. Late in the summer we had softshell crabs–which will soon disappear from the long list of selections–that approached those served in Maryland kitchens. Better yet was the box of fried Ipswich clams, fat bellies and all, that would meet approval with the most critical New Englanders. We also devoured a lobster roll–described as "a JFK favorite," which is typical of the restaurant’s preciousness, a tic that’s overcome by the sheer quality of the food.

Also recommended are the steamers, clam chowder, a sensational gazpacho with chunks of crabmeat, gravlax, roasted blue tile fish and a simple flounder with jasmine rice in a ginger soy broth.

We’ll see what winter holds for Burge, but if Fresh’s stunning opening is any indication, Tribeca has added yet another outstanding restaurant to the neighborhood.

Best British Dessert to Go

Deep Fried Toffee Crisp
"A Salt & Battery"
80 2nd Ave. (betw.4th & 5th Sts.),
254-6610

Gives Us a Shit-Eating Grin. Remember the floating log from Caddyshack? That’s exactly what this thing looks like. Disgusting? Yeah, disgusting. How disgusting? Like-it-backed-out-of-your-ass-and-turned-fuzzy disgusting. True, that doesn’t really help sell the product’s good points. But with a cheeky name like "A Salt & Battery" we can’t imagine the joint’s owners’ll mind. Besides, you could scream "dung sandwich" 10 times in a row and we’d still gobble down one of these deep-fried suckers. We’d even ask for seconds, they’re that good. Imagine a crisp, steamy hot exterior encasing rice krispies and soft melted chocolate with a stiff inner core…oops, there we go again. Suffice it to say only the Brits can invent a desert this disgustingly good. We can’t wait to try the deep-fried Mars Bar.

Best Restaurant In Which to Be Wary
Of the Term "Jumbo"

Sharaku
14 Stuyvesant St. (3rd Ave.)
598-0403

You Can’t Eat a Whale. Some, if not most, sushi bars offer what they often call a "deluxe" platter, which is the same as your generic "sushi platter," but with more pieces. Sharaku used to offer this, and it was very good. But earlier this year there were some minor changes in their menu, and suddenly when we tried to order a "sushi deluxe," we were informed it was no longer available. What they had now was something called a "jumbo sushi platter." It sounded like the same thing, pretty much, so we ordered it.

That’s why we were a bit taken aback when the waitress showed up, not with a plate, but with an entire mini-table that took two hands to carry. A mini-wooden table that just barely fit atop the table we were sitting at. And atop that wooden table sat a collection of absurdly massive cuts of sushi. Pieces a full five or six inches long–almost too large to manipulate with chopsticks, and certainly too large to fit in your mouth. What’s more–though we guess it makes sense–you don’t even get a shrimp.

It felt like we were in Land of the Giants.

In the end, after battling our way through it, there was nothing wrong with it. It was still quite tender and good. But for the unwary, it can be quite daunting (and a little messy).

Best New Mexican Restaurant

Cafe El Portal
174 Elizabeth St. (betw. Spring & Kenmare Sts.)
226-4642

Hardly Enough Room to Swing a Chihuahua. Glance into this tiny basement restaurant and you might think it’s just another Tortilla Fresca Bueno Taco Loco outpost, but look past the plain diner tables (only about 10 of them; and maybe telling you about this place is shooting ourselves in the foot) and the teeny, festive little bar–look at, and taste, what’s actually on your plate, and you’ll find that Cafe El Portal, despite appearances to the contrary, is serving up a most interesting hybrid of city Mexican styles: fancy, upscale, "real" Mexican (Zarela and Mi Cocina and the like) crossed with the fare of more typical taco/burrito shacks. So, yes, you can get burritos at El Portal, but they’ll contain roasted chili-rubbed pork (our favorite), or nopales or spinach sauteed in onion and chipotle. And, sure, they have tacos, but here they’re filled with ground chorizo, or epazote-spiced mushrooms. Quesadillas are much more than beans/rice/cheese turnovers–the Calabaza, for example, stuffed with green and yellow squash, or the Huitalcoche, with that earthy, truffly yet delicate corn fungus.

Some of the house specialties sit smack in the middle of the hybridization–chiles rellenos, chicken mole–while others tilt toward the ritzier branch, like the Adobo de Puerco–pork in guajillo pepper and roasted garlic sauce. But everything on the menu is fresh, and savory or delicate or zingy as recipes dictate. Pair your meal with a beer from El Portal’s extensive selection of Mexican brews, or one of the Jarritos sodas. Que bueno.

Best Brooklyn Restaurant

Blue Ribbon
280 5th Ave. (betw. 1st St. & Garfield Pl.)
Brooklyn, 718-840-0404

Rhapsody in Blue. There are lots of fantastic restaurant experiences to be had in Brooklyn. We greatly appreciate the borough’s ample opportunities for cheap, ethnic dining–Middle Eastern, West Indian, Italian, Russian, Latin and so on. We love the established Brooklyn greats like romantic River Cafe and reliable Peter Luger. The clam bars in Sheepshead Bay are, for us, a summertime must. We’re enamoured of the efforts young restaurateurs such as the owner-operators of Park Slope’s Convivium Osteria have made toward one-of-kind eating experiences. We feel more assured of a well-cooked meal at A Table or Rose Water than at some of Manhattan’s famous destinations. And we delight in regularly visiting neighborhood treasures like Park Slope’s Chip Shop, Red Hook’s Hope & Anchor Diner and Cobble Hill’s (or Clinton Hill’s) Zaytoons. There’s good eating from Bay Ridge to Bed-Stuy, Greenpoint to East New York. All the borough’s flavors seem to us improved by that of Brooklyn’s uniqueness.

Blue Ribbon is in many ways more like a Manhattan restaurant. It’s not as laidback as its company on 5th Ave., nor is it as quirky as the places along the Smith St. strip. It doesn’t feel very old or very new. Blue Ribbon’s busyness, classic decor, long waits for tables and occasional crowds of fabulous people dressed to be seen contribute further to the sense that the bistro is decidedly non-Brooklynesque.

Which makes rather inconvenient the facts that the restaurant has the best menu, the best service, the best hours and much of the best food in Brooklyn. All things considered, the borough’s spectacular array of old standbys and dashing up-and-comers can’t claim to top what guests get at Blue Ribbon.

The raw bar could hold its own with any in the entire country. Skipping it, now and then, in favor of one or two items off the appetizer list is also advisable. It’s win-win. But that appetizer menu is win-win-win-win-win, etc. Grilled shrimp remoulade or sweet soppressata? Pierogies or grilled sardines? One of the delectable smoked fish options or the pu-pu platter? Maybe just some perfect vegetables–asparagus vinaigrette, mixed olives, steamed artichoke or crudites? Staying the bistro course is rewarding, by way of escargots (traditional or Bourguignon), country pate, foie gras terrine or the exceptional steak tartare. But the chicken wings, garlic shrimp with chorizo and barbecued ribs also rock.

It feels fantastic to be presented with so many great choices, knowing you’re going to have a great meal no matter what. Blue Ribbon’s soup and salad list continues to pile it on. The $24 clam stew? We’ve never tried it, but we’d bet it’s worth every penny. And the fact that the place keeps excellent matzoh ball soup on hand every night somehow says it all. The smoked trout salad is another dish that could compete for all-city honors.

The restaurant’s hosts and servers are highly efficient and always make us feel comfortable. Factor in that all of the above is available until 2 in the morning and–oops, we didn’t even make it to the entrees. Superb steaks, grilled fresh fish, the lobster, the pigeon, a hummus platter with couscous, tofu ravioli, roasted duck, burgers, fried chicken, paella–you simply can’t lose. The abundance of quality astounds. Blue Ribbon Brooklyn transcends borough to evoke a sense of New York City at its peak.

Best Hetero Clergyman

The Bartender at Burp Castle
41 E. 7th St. (betw. 2nd & 3rd Aves.)
982-4576

A Hound Among the Lotus Flowers. We didn’t think much of it when we had to wait a bit to get a refill at Burp Castle. The monk behind the bar (though it was too hot for the robes that day) was out front talking to his Japanese girlfriend. We understand. But 10 minutes after that first Japanese girl left, another one showed up. In fact, every time we’ve been in that bar, he’s been chatting it up with a different Japanese girl. Beyond that, we’ve watched him stare longingly after any Japanese chick who strolls past the bar (and in that neighborhood, there are quite a few).

On the bright side, though his well-focused hormones might slow our alcohol intake, it is at least nice to know that in this day and age, where every clergyman in America is a suspected pederast, there’s at least one who still likes girls who are of age (the way God intended).

Best Place to Have a Hooker
Take a Bite Off Your Dog

Rudy’s Bar & Grill
627 9th Ave. (betw. 44th & 45th Sts.)
974-9169

Bit Off All She Could Chew. It was late and we were wandering drunk in the boondocks of Hell’s Kitchen when our drinking pal suggested we settle our stomachs with some solid nourishment from Rudy’s. We ordered a couple of beers and two of the free dogs each, both lacking in flavor (though most folks are too wasted to care). We inhaled the first dog and were attempting the same of the second when a towering black transvestite hooker, scantily clad in red patent leather, asked if she could have a taste. Before we could utter a rational response to such an irrational request, she wrapped her bony red-tipped fingers around our dog, lifted it to her who-knows-where-that’s-been mouth and took a massive bite, returning a massacred bun casually to our plate. Then she took a stranger’s arm and strolled out the front door.

Best Tapas

Allioli
291 Grand St.
(betw. Roebling & Havemeyer Sts.)
Brooklyn, 718-218-7338

Alli-olé! Sure, there are lots of tapas places around the city, and several really fine ones, some with smoky, romantic atmo, some more businesslike and elbows-to-the-counter. But none resonates the simple joie de vivre Allioli does. It’s a very warm, friendly, fun place. Everyone always seems to be having a good time at Allioli–and it’s not just because of the big pitchers of excellent sangria, though they surely help. It’s more a reflection of the good intentions of the owners and staff, who seem genuinely to care that their customers really enjoy their night out with them. We’ve been to Allioli with large, rowdy crowds or small, quiet ones, and been treated with the same good-natured grace and deference by the staff either way. That Allioli pioneered a fairly downbeat strip of South Williamsburg earns it extra credits as a beacon and destination.

Then, of course, there’s the tapas itself. No place in town does it better, or in larger portions. (Which is not quite the oxymoronic statement it might seem. Tapas is supposed to come in small bites, but some places really skimp. Not Allioli. You always leave having had your fill.) We’re completely crazy for chef Diego Gonzalez’s "dados da datil envuelto en Serrano"–fried dates wrapped in Serrano ham, a sweet-fruit-bacon combo of tastes that makes our tastebuds dance a tarantella. But we like all the usuals–the little bowls of olives, the plate of simmering chorizo, the huge helping of skewered chicken livers, the Spanish anchovies, the small toast wedges topped with artichoke and thinly sliced filet mignon... ¡O dios! And at $5 to $9 per, it’s a deal, too.

Best Great Bar
That You’d Never Suspect
Was a Great Bar

Lucille’s at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill
237 W. 42nd St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.)
997-4144

He Doesn’t Really Hang Out There, You Know. There are still a few great bars that have gone untouched in the Times Square area. You can recognize them by how full they get of people who wouldn’t be caught dead in the other bars in Times Square. But there’s one happy secret place for drinkers who want to hide out amongst all the touristy chaos. Just enter B.B. King’s Blues Club & Grill and head down the stairs.

Don’t turn to the right, though. That leads to the concert area where nobody–even someone on the list–leaves without shelling out way too much money. To the left, though, is the restaurant they call Lucille’s. You don’t want to be there between noon and 2 p.m., but the cavernous dark bar is very pleasurable at other times of the day. The drinks are pricey, but you’ll only stay an hour when you start drinking at 11 a.m. each day. Then you’ll disappear, and return to hang out between 3 p.m. and whenever people start showing up for the night’s concert. It’s cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and fans of public sex will find some very interesting niches to explore.

Best Pageantry Of the Louche

Cafe Habana
229 Elizabeth St.
(betw. Houston & Prince Sts.), 625-2002

¡Cometelo con Papas! The withering glances say it all. We’re talking about Cafe Habana’s otherwise angelic countergirls, the Latinas at the takeout annex who regard New York’s most preening with the bemused intensity of pitbulls moments before the engagement. Once, just once, it’d be cool to see them strike. As for the scene itself, we’ve given up on trying to determine what it is that draws the aggro-fey and parlor tans to this place. Yeah, Cuba’s cool and all, but like, who here is Cuban?

There’s certainly no disparaging Habana’s porkchops or Cubano sandwiches. The grilled corn on the cob is good, too, though the bench lizards who burn away the hours on the Elizabeth St. sidewalk only ever seem to go for iced coffee. So like we say, no use trying to figure it out. Better to enjoy the scene at Cafe Habana for the picture it provides of the future. Like this one day, we spotted our first sagging ass-crack tattoo. It was all wrinkled and craggy, had gotten way too much sun. The countergirls saw it too. Ay, mami! You should’ve seen the face they made.

Best Place to Stop Off When You’re on the 7 Train
Heading to Manhattan After Refusing to Eat the
Food at the U.S. Open Or Shea Stadium

Nazar Turkish Cuisine
42-03 Queens Blvd. (betw. 42nd & 43rd Sts.)
Queens, 718-786-0206

Turkish Delights. The food at those places sticks in your throat at the identical moment it empties your pocketbook. So you’re on the 7 looking longingly at the intricate ethnic mix on Queens Blvd. A good bet is to alight at the 42 block in Sunnyside and go to Nazar, which proffers delicious and soignee Turkish cuisine. Really well presented, undercurrents of riverine taste, exceptionally pleasant staff. Modest tab, luxuriously exotic grub.

Best Cafe to Ruin Your Eyesight In

Cafe Pick Me Up
145 Ave. A (9th St.)
673-7231

It’s Clear to Us. When fuzzy golden leaves begin to waft down from the oaks, we know it’s time for our fall ophthalmologic exam. Which means more bad news. Last year, on receiving our (increasingly) negative prescription, we welled up a few frustrated, blurry tears. "What about laser surgery?" The doctor glanced up, replied, "We can discuss that when your vision stabilizes," and chiseled our sentence in stone with his click-pen. "Isn’t surgery for exactly this–a condition that won’t improve? Can’t lasers, you know, uh, fix it?" We were flashed a gentle smile, but without capitulation–no lasik for us. Fuck us for going to a responsible practitioner

We stumbled down to Cafe Pick Me Up, where we took up a table in the rear of the second room. We bought a Corona and pulled out that copy of Gravity’s Rainbow we’d been lugging around like the ball on our messenger-bag chain. We like Pick Me Up for all the reasons we’ve given up on most coffee places. We don’t want to go to some chain, but we also don’t want to feel out of place without smeared kohl eyeliner, 20-grommet docs and a Leftover Crack ass-patch. We rarely want to go out of our neighborhood to skulk amongst daringly lopsided attire and strategically placed copies of Camus. We don’t want to make conversation. We want to blind ourselves.

Pick Me Up provides us with the uppers (decent coffee, bag and loose teas) or downers (both beer and wine) we need to get through the night, or the next hundred pages. The music varies from what we’d consider good–someone’s been playing Manu Chao a lot lately–to what we’d consider morally reprehensible (Seal). The art sucks, but they’ve got a laminated sign that reads "Smoking and breathing second-hand smoke is hazardous to your health. (Smoking permitted.)" The outdoor tables are great for people watching, and if reading Pynchon gets to be a pain in the ass (which it probably will), there are always the bathroom walls. But most importantly, at any hour, that back room is cozily doused in shade, with a mismatched table almost always available. We think of those extra 75 cents a cup as cover for the hours of quiet solace. And who cares if votives aren’t sufficient reading light? The world didn’t make much sense back when we could see it clearly, anyway.

Best Queens Greek Restaurant

Esperides
37-01 30th Ave. (37th St.)
718-545-1494

Light, Fantastic. Ralph Emerson once said something to the effect that great books manage to present ideas that are, at the same time, both original and instantly recognizable. Great restaurants can pull off a similar trick. At Esperides you may not be familiar with the dishes on the menu but you will take to them quickly. "We like a good taste," says owner Gregory Soldatos, "but light, not greasy." One need hardly stray past the appetizers: order two per person and share. The eggplant mousse is exquisite, as are the saganaki, the cod, the octopus and the pan-fried smelt–a small fish that is eaten whole and that tastes like a happy improvement on french fries. Esperides is good at both the simple things (excellent bread and salads) and the more complex (a roast suckling pig available on the weekends). Wash it all down with a glass of retsina, a Greek wine with the faint taste of dishwashing liquid, and you’ll leave feeling fresh as a daisy.

Best Olives for People
Who Don’t Like Olives

Garden of Eden
162 W. 23rd St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.)
675-6300

Olive Some More! For many years, we’ve watched incomprehensibly as Mrs. Baker ate around her olives or flicked them out of the way. But since we’re the type of hostess who thinks that guests should bend to our likes (that vegetarians should suddenly want sausages, that Pepsi drinkers on entering our place should now appreciate Diet Coke), we put out no crudites, only two bowls of olives to go with cocktails. Everyone else likes them, but then we see Mrs. B indulge in one. And then another. Well, she’s probably just being polite, everyone knows that Mrs. B. is a master of diplomacy (she used to teach Dale Carnegie classes), and she’s probably practicing the good-guest rule that you should always at least try what’s set before you. But then she had another. And many others. Hey Mrs. B., leave some for the rest of us. Later, she told us that she had never liked olives before that very moment. A conversion right in our humble abode.

The specimens that caused Mrs. Baker to see the light were big and green. Some were stuffed with blanched almonds and some with whole cloves of garlic (whahooowAAH). But we would expect similar results from most of the offerings at Garden of Eden’s olive bar. You could easily substitute the smaller French Niçoise olives with herbs de Provence, which are eaten as quickly and automatically as handfuls of M&M’s. Or the combo of unembellished black, purple and green ones. About 20 varieties include manzanillas, arbequinas, kalamatas and so forth. A lot easier than cutting up cauliflower.

Best Speakeasy

Siberia
356-1/2 W. 40th St. (9th Ave.)
646-674-1710

Hush Yourself. We’ll spare you the pretentious if-you-have-to-ask-you-don’t-belong snobbery that Tracy Westmoreland’s relocated bar has generated among New York Observer types. Hidden behind an unmarked black door just east of 9th Ave., facing the south wall of the Port Authority terminal, Siberia attracts as many slumming young socialites and hipster wannabes as the rest of the block does hoze and crackies. On a bad night the clientele can be unbearably In Crowd.

On a good night, however, this joint is hopping in the very best way. There may be a local rock band playing downstairs, while upstairs the hot jukebox, pinball machines and projections of sexy anime keep the drinkers and posers well entertained. The super-affable Westmoreland is one of the city’s best-loved hosts; if the party hasn’t started when he arrives, it will within five minutes. The place stays open well into the wee hours, making it the best after-hours haven within many, many blocks. For the serious drinker Siberia is kind of a joke, with its eccentrically short shelf of bottled beers and rail liquors; also, the equally oddball no-profanity rule, somberly enforced by the barkeeps, can be an annoyance. But if you want to go drink and cuss, you can do that around the corner; Siberia is as much a see-and-be-scene as a bar, and well worth the drop-by late nights to see what’s (and who’s) shaking.

Best Macaroni and Cheese

DuMont
432 Union Ave. (betw. Metropolitan Ave. & Devoe St.)
Brooklyn, 718-486-7717

Postgrad Kraft. Instead of "What’s your major?" we think a better standard college query would be, "Macaroni and cheese or ramen noodles?" Almost everyone we knew in school fell firmly into one of those groups when it came to kollege kuisine. We were a macaroni and cheese girl all the way. We can still remember excitedly telling someone we’d found it on sale, six boxes for a dollar. A friend clued us in that you could just sprinkle the orange powder on, omitting the milk and margarine, and save even more money. We also think that old saying about sex, that even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good, definitely applies to this dish.

That said, we must add that when macaroni and cheese is made well, it can be downright heavenly, and our new holy grail for this casserole is DuMont. Their version comes piping hot to the table in a ceramic ramekin or firkin or gratin dish (we’re not sure of the correct terminology), with corkscrew pasta and a lovely topping of breadcrumbs. (They will even throw in some bacon, if you ask.) We have not quizzed them on the recipe, how many cheeses are involved, where the cows were born, etc., but trust us: you will love it, no matter what you majored in.

As for the restaurant itself, it is properly cozy and has a great neon sign. Colin Devlin, the owner, said that DuMont was once a television station, and that Dr. DuMont made a picture tube. Perhaps one day devotees of macaroni and cheese will speak in reverent, hushed tones of Mr. Devlin. We, for one, think he should apply for a patent right now.

Best Kimchi

Kelly & Ping
127 Greene St.
(betw. Houston & Prince Sts.)
228-1212

Don’t Disrespect the Ping. Our visitor from Seattle wanted to eat "pan-Asian." This annoying coinage we took to mean a place that wasn’t Chinese or Japanese or Thai or Korean but that did serve something with vegetables with rice. What she probably had in mind was a place like Kelly & Ping on Greene St. in Soho, a fashionable-enough place that serves a mishmash of foods plucked from different Asian cuisines. We assume this high-concept menu is the work of a marketing-savvy Westerner; we’re waiting for payback day when some Chinese restaurateur opens a "pan-Euro" place serving paella, bangers and mash, cavatelli and wiener schnitzel.

But so what if the cuisine as presented is as culturally impure as Disney’s "Small World" animatronics? Some of Kelly & Ping’s dishes are terrific, and none of them more so than the humble Korean kimchi. This funky-smelling stuff is pickled cabbage seasoned with pepper and garlic and the like, and left to ferment. It stinks to anyone not eating it, but a dish of spicy, salty kimchi is a perfect low-fat afternoon snack. We’ve had kimchi elsewhere, and been disappointed, if not with the slime quotient then with the weird odor of cheap ingredients.

Kelly & Ping only serves kimchi twice a week during the day, on Thursdays and Saturdays, probably so the reeking garlic doesn’t turn off the clientele. The place gets a fair share of tourists and celebrities–we saw Gwyneth Paltrow, Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe there on the 4th of July last year–but don’t let that stop you from enjoying the eclectic but delicious food.

Best Feminist Burger Joint

Paul’s
131 2nd Ave. (betw. 7th St. & St. Marks Pl.)
529-3097

Grill Power. The problem with being a single gal-on-the-go in the city is this: no matter how liberated we are, or profess to be, we are still a little bit shy about eating alone in public. We don’t mean "dining" alone–nibbling salad or a sandwich and a bottle of water is not the issue here. We mean eating–gut-busting, belching, satisfying consumption. This means, to us, burgers, loaded with everything, a side of fries, a bottle of beer, an hour’s peace and quiet. This mean’s Paul’s, the best damn burger in the East Village. Our build-your-own-cheeseburger deluxe ($6.35, including pickles and onions) is brought to us by Robin, the coolest waitress in the Tri-State area. She knows what we want, she knows we need it, she doesn’t disappoint. The lettuce is crisp, the half-pound of beef is perfectly seared, the ketchup is on the table. We lift, bite–and the juices dribble down our dainty chin. She provides us with extra napkins, a little mayo on the side for dunking our fries. No one looks askance at us in our Prada knockoff and Jimmy Choo wannabe shoes, not even when we smear mustard on our cheek. No one tries to sidle up to us with a "Hey, baybee" line. Feminism is the freedom to be female. Paul’s is the most feminist burger place in the city. At Paul’s, we are all equal in our wonderful gluttony.

Best Candy Store

Economy Candy Market
108 Rivington St. (betw. Ludlow & Essex Sts.)
254-1531

Sweet Deal. Sure, there are plenty of those fancy, upscale "confectionary" shops around–those places where some snooty Frenchman will carve you an elaborately detailed iguana out of white chocolate and marzipan–but who the hell needs that? If you’re looking for candy, plain and simple, just some candy–gum drops, licorice, Turkish Delight, malted milk balls, nut clusters–the answer today is the same as it has always been: Economy.

The place just feels right. It’s cramped, and it can get awful crowded in there, but you’ll find candies you thought had disappeared 20 years ago. You can mix and match pounds of your hard candies or your chocolates. They have sampler boxes stacked to the ceiling, and dozens of flavors of jellybeans. And apart from the basics, they have novelties and weirdies galore–movie tie-in candy bars, peanut butter eyeballs, giant Pez dispensers, candy cigarettes and band-aids. And specials!

You know those chocolate covered almonds you pay $5 a box for at the movie theater? Economy had them on sale last summer–the very same brand!–for 99 cents a pop.

There simply is no other choice.

Best Brooklyn Pizza

Brick Oven Gallery
33 Havemeyer St. (betw. N. 7th & N. 8th Sts.)
Brooklyn, 718-963-0200

Pie-Eyed. We said it before, and we’ll say it again: it doesn’t get any better than this. So here’s what you do, hotpants. You call that pretty girl you met at that Williamsburg loft party and ask her to meet you for dinner at the Brick Oven Gallery, three days in the future. The night of the date, shave twice. Do not use cologne. Put on some comfortable but stylish clothes. If you’re not sure what stylish means, then just wear a simple cotton shirt and jeans. Unbutton the top two buttons–of the shirt, not the jeans. If the shirt is wrinkled buy an iron and read the directions. Do not wear "mandals," or open-toed shoes of any kind. Brush your teeth, and have at those unsightly nose hairs. Show up 10 minutes early and scope the best table you can, like that cozy one tucked behind the jukebox. When she arrives, five minutes late, looking radiant and a little nervous, stand up and take one of her hands gently from underneath and kiss her softly on the cheek, catching just a corner of her lips. If she apologizes for being late, say you just got there yourself. Thank her for meeting you, and ask how her day has been. Offer her your chair. Sit down and order a bottle of red, a salad to share and a Lizzie B pie, with the four different kinds of tomatoes, and a crust so thin and crunchy that every bite sounds like a good idea. And it is.

After espressos, casually take the check and pay with two 20s and maybe get some change. Leave a big tip. Smile at her. She loves you.

Best Place to Find Animal
Protein You Never Saw Before

Grand Sausages, Inc.
198 Grand St. (betw. Mott & Mulberry Sts.)
966-3033

A Delicious Soup of Birdies’ Feet. The average middle-class supermarket doesn’t take many chances at the meat counter. There’s chicken, chopped beef, the odd porkchop and maybe a couple of specialty meats for their "ethnic" customers, like chorizo, and that’s that. You’ll never find really interesting animal parts for dining pleasure until you make the trip to Chinatown.

The Chinese have learned from centuries of famine to not be choosy about the parts of the beast to put in the pot. At Grand Sausages, the collection of unexplored entrails, unmapped limbs, outlying organs and assorted bundles of birdie feet for sale makes the point: there is more to a chicken than the breast and thigh. While certain cuts of meat would be right at home at a squaresville suburban Tuesday-night dinner, we’re still wondering just what veggies go good with a pork stomach.

The place is pristinely clean and the food, strange though the goods may look to the average American mook, is always fresh and beautifully presented. Next time your recipe calls for preserved duck eggs, pickled mustard or pig snout, count on Grand Sausages to deliver the unusual anatomy.

Best Spot For a Family Dinner

Chameleon
125 E. 39th St.
(betw. Park & Lexington Aves.), 983-4949

True Colors. Actually, the best spot for a family dinner is our place, but if you’re not in our family, Chameleon is a very close second. Downstairs is a haphazard yet inviting lounge with puffy furniture to meet up in. Upstairs, a light-filled, white-walled, comfortable dining room with columns and paintings that is charming and lovely. There’s a biggish table for your clan by the front windows. Neighborhood patrons are friendly and low-key, the food is fancy with high-quality ingredients and each plating is artistic (some stunning), but there is no glitz to be found here. Since the patriarch is paying, we go straight to the top of the menu for the fresh papardelle with lobster, leeks and white truffle oil at $29. Our baby cousin likes the "Asian style" osso buco braised in fennel, ginger and orange-flavored broth over shiitakes and broad noodles ($24). There are no explicit options for your vegetarian sister-in-law on the "fusion" menu, but we’re told some can always be provided, that "these chefs can do anything." Of this we have no doubt.

Best Salad Bar

Whole Foods
250 7th Ave. (24th St.)
924-5969

Lunch as Hairshirt. Nobody really likes salads. People eat them, even eat a lot them, but they don’t do it from a love of lettuce. Oh, they’ll declare a love of salads, but listen closely: "We love Caesar salad" means "We love gooey dressing, parmesan cheese, croutons and anchovies"; fondness for Greek salads is a fondness for feta and olives and maybe a stuffed grape leaf. No, salads are eaten for penance–they’re the dietary Hail Marys for last night’s ninth beer, or the eggs-n-hash breakfast earlier in the day, or to unbutton the "winter coat" picked up in the offseason.

If, then, you’re paying your dues with a salad, you want a green, unshiny health bomb. Otherwise, it’s no penance at all, like giving up liver for Lent. You want that salad to come from Whole Foods’ salad bar, which is the repletest in the city with bright, unoiled, antioxidant-laden selections. Several kinds of greens (spinach, arugula, mesclun mix, other greens), then impeccably fresh: tomatoes, broccoli, green beans, carrots, artichoke hearts, cucumbers, onions, mushrooms, peas, garbanzos, various sprouts, seeds, beets, nuts, etc. etc.

For a little reprieve, they’ve got some sauteed and grilled items, but only very modestly oiled, plus colon-blowing, life-affirming grain and legume mixes, similarly minimally dressed. Load up a container and all will be forgiven. Just don’t succumb to too much dressing.

Best Rumormongering
Outer-Borough Bar

Club 23
29-23 23rd Ave. (31st St.), Astoria
718-956-1727

Try Coney. We heard the rumors, too, and not a single one of them is true. Club 23, you may have heard, is supposedly the El Dorado of deformed women. Lies, damn lies, all: in this pink-and-blue-neon Astoria dive, we did not find a waitress with a hunched back and a heart of gold, nor did a snaggletoothed lass with a heart of gold bring us a cold Corona and cheer us up with her cleavage, nor were we greeted with 60 decibels of a bass-driven number called, depending on who’s swearing to it, either "I Want to Fuck You Up the Ass" or "I’m Going to Fuck You Up the Ass." God bless it, though, we did have a beer with Irish girls falling out of tube tops, sallow-faced with necks bruised with hickeys. Dancing on the bar, slowly, is a not altogether unattractive bottle-blonde with her nipples poking out of her Yankees t-shirt–and this is Queens. A guy with gold teeth, a fist full of singles and an eye on her thong shouts to her, "Where can I put it, ma?" She giggles: "You can’t stick it in!" "Aw, that’s not fair!"

So, while the chalkboard reads "cheap drinks for wild women," this isn’t Coyote Hunchy. This is a bar that knows how to follow Ja Rule with "Piano Man." This is a bar with blood in the men’s room toilet. This is a bar where a dancer grinding against a jubilant birthday boy who tells her he wants to take her out back agrees and strokes his cheek, and then screams, "If you set me up for something, I’m-a fuck you up!" Rumors are for Fleetwood Mac. This place is for us.

Best Meatballs Without Spaghetti

Le Zie
172 7th Ave. (betw. 20th & 21st Sts.)
206-8686

Huge Balls. A few years ago we asserted that Le Zie produced the best spaghetti and meatballs in New York. But what about that third of the population no longer slurping carbohydrates? For these pathfinders the restaurant will provide the meatballs in a voraciously tangy sauce, and hold the pasta. O what a sultry taste of smoky garlic and essence of tomato!

Best Marshmallow

City Bakery
3 W. 18th St. (betw. 5th & 6th Aves.)
366-1414

We Drink Them a Lot, So We Stay Puffed. One friend is purchasing a $7000 dining room set. Another’s was $5000. We made them both shop with us at Woolworth’s for our $100 set of farmhouse table and chairs. They seriously pored over it in the store and declared it acceptable. The instructions for putting the table together were "1. Attach legs 2. Turn over." We prefer the simple things.

What is marshmallow but simple sugar and gelatin? What could be so great? Well, for one, the way it’s served over creamy hot chocolate that is so dense you almost feel you must chew it. Counterstaff prepare the beverage with single-minded focus and scientific precision. City Bakery’s marshmallows have straight edges and a powdery finish. When dropped on top of the bakery’s preeminent hot chocolate, you get a molten satiny cap to filter your heavenly beverage through. The confection turns gooey on the outside, foamy on the inside. This bakery actually had an essay contest on whether hot chocolate is better with or without marshmallows. So very silly. Everyone knows it’s better with.

Best Upscale Kid-Friendly
Tribeca Restaurant

Roc
190A Duane St. (Greenwich St.)
925-1100

Zero Attitude. No knock on Tribeca’s stellar roster of world-class restaurants–Nobu, Ecco, Duane Park Cafe, Odeon, City Hall, Danube, Montrachet, Chanterelle, Le Zinc and El Teddy’s, just for starters–but our canteen of choice is Roc. First, the cuisine: superb seafood soups, seared scallops with asparagus, an ever-changing list of pasta specials, a steak that’s the equal of Spark’s, lightly fried calamari and a terrific grilled swordfish. Then there’s the first-line squadron of waiters, men who are patient, unobtrusive and always reliable with a wine selection.

Roc draws a diverse clientele, including uptowners, neighborhood residents, company parties and tourists, and no one is given the cold shoulder. In addition, as unlikely as it may seem, this is a place where you can take your kids and not worry about scowls from the staff when your four-year-old sticks a bread stick up her nose or spills a Coke all over the table.

Just a month ago, we commanded a window table with four adults and four preteens, and predictably, it was a somewhat raucous meal. The fare is rather sophisticated to kids who are used to chicken nuggets, grilled cheese sandwiches and tacos, but our group of boisterous grade-schoolers was pleased with simple spaghetti and tomato sauce, grilled chicken with peppers, complex salads and lots of chewy Italian bread. While they talked among themselves, often at a din that required frequent hushes from the parents–although, frankly, the after-work tables of 10 are just as loud–the adults chatted about politics and baseball, greeted friends and gratefully ignored the chaos, knowing we wouldn’t be upbraided.

Mind you, Roc isn’t a haven for kids–mostly it’s a fancy downtown restaurant that’s usually filled to capacity–but if you like to expose your children to "grownup" food, it’s the perfect venue.

Best Coffeeshop We’re
Glad Is Still Serving
Cozy Soup N Burger
739 Broadway (Astor Pl.)

Phew! The idea that Starbucks is a "coffeeshop" is valid the same way that a Chrysler commercial is "cinema." It’s true that those execrable stores qualify as shops, and they do sell coffee, but the similarity to a genuine, New York coffeeshop ends there. A real coffeeshop may be one of the greatest institutions in town. A real coffeeshop is a comfortable that’s blissfully unfashionable, featuring a menu of 2000 items and pie on a pie plate at hours convenient to you, the paying customer. The best ones are 24-hour-a-day operations, staffed by Greek men in white shirts and black vests, who always perk up when you start talking about horseracing. At a real coffeeshop, a Coke in a parfait glass and a plate of eggs and hash with whiskey down is a kingly brunch for a pauper’s purse.

Downtown, our favorite place for a Saturday morning cholesterol-in-the-hay is Cozy Soup N Burger. This Astor Place standby is always first choice for a grilled ham-and-cheese on whole wheat or a cup of clam chowder or a green salad on those rare days when we’re eating like Puritans getting ready for a marathon. We’ve been coming here for years, usually in the company of our hangover, for the late (1 p.m.) breakfast that is the birthright of any city dweller. Imagine, then, just how fast our hearts sank one Saturday morning when we had planned to visit Cozy for a late-morning chowdown of Spanish omelet and discovered for the first time in years that Cozy was actually closed. Could it be? Were cheeseburger sales failing to cover the monthly nut?

A darkened Cozy was like a death in the family, assuming you come from a family with a lot of guys who can fry up a short order of fries and a Reuben. It turned out to be a false alarm, thank Zeus. Not only was Cozy not going out of business, it planned to close just long enough to expand to the joint next door. Our cardiologist will disagree, but an expanded Cozy can count on some regular customers for years to come, until Cozy’s lease actually does end.

Best Brooklyn Vegetarian Chinese

The Green’s
128 Montague St. (Henry St.)
Brooklyn, 718-246-1288

The Green’s, with Envy. The food at the Green’s is so good that the descriptions, while accurate, can’t possibly do it justice. Take the Rainbow Canyon, which is described as "Soy protein, mushroom and potato wrapped in soy bean crepes, top [sic] with hot spicy sauce." A technically accurate definition, to be sure, but sort of like calling a Ferrari "a 4-wheeled automotive device." Because what you get is a fragrant vegetable loaf, wrapped in a crispy bean curd skin, served in a hot casserole dish (ours was shaped like a fish) and covered in a deliriously piquant sauce. In other words, the Green’s is a place where everything on the menu adds up to something much greater than the sum of its descriptive parts. Even the usually mundane bean curd Szechuan-style becomes something almost otherwordly in the hands of these outstanding chefs. Other standouts include the excellent noodle soups and memorable appetizers (like the fried pineapple roll).

Forget those nasty vegetarian places where everything is made out of seitan or yams. For sheer inventiveness, we’ve yet to find a place that rivals the Green’s.

Best Oysters On the Jersey Shore

Rooney’s Ocean Crab House
100 Ocean Ave., Long Branch, NJ
732-870-1200;
www.rooneysocean.com

A Dozen More, Please. Rooney’s, in the sleepy resort-and-retirement town of Long Branch, NJ, looks like just another seaside tourist trap, where you can expect the worst in seafood and kitschy beach ambience. But here looks are very deceiving. Rooney’s is one of those rare beach joints where the fish, shellfish and bivalves are really, really fresh–where the catch of the day truly was caught that day, and somewhere not too far away. And it serves the best raw oysters on the Jersey Shore: big Chesapeakes ($1.20 each) so fresh they seem to have been harvested within the hour and shucked just before they land on your table, firm but in no way tough, with not a scintilla of that metallic undertaste or surface sliminess that suggest you’re going to become unhappily reacquainted with those ’sters in the loo before bedtime. They come with a trio of dipping sauces, among which our fave is the chipotle one that leaves a tip-of-the-tongue bite as the pulpy flesh slides down your gullet. Last time we were there, they were so good we delayed our main course for a second dozen. If there are places in New York City or out on the Island that serve fresher, more delicious raw ’sters, we haven’t eaten there.

Best Place For Posted Warning

Habanero Bin at Garden of Eden
162 W. 23rd St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.)
675-6300
And Other Locations

Take a Burn. Our world is full of warnings. "Cigarettes Cause Cancer." "Liquor Can Kill Your Fetus." "Fines Doubled in Construction Zone." "Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted." "Professional Driver, Closed Course." Our personal headset stereo is designed so that even with the volume on "10" it can’t damage our hearing, so because our hearing is already damaged the damn thing doesn’t seem to us to play loudly at all. We get used to such things in parental America. That’s why we didn’t imagine there’d be serious repercussions of dicing habaneros for this red-hot barbecue sauce we were making one summer evening. We knew people wore surgical gloves and eye protection when working with these babies. But the cookbook didn’t say they were necessary. The bin at the Garden of Eden where we bought the little orange peppers was just like any other. No skull and crossbones, no caution sign, no nothing.

Live and learn. The burn you get from handling a lot of very hot peppers is not like what happens when you overspice your mouth, or even your eyeball. First of all, it takes a long time to start hurting. The oil seeps through your skin before you feel it. Then it can’t be washed off. For the next five to eight hours your brain believes that there is a blazing fire inside your hand. Theoretically, one can ignore such a false alarm, but when it’s actually ringing through your nervous system–no. The heart pounds. The brow sweats. And the fingers might as well be pressed onto a hot stove. With our left hand still in a bucket of ice water at 3 a.m., we wondered a lot about warnings.

Best Pan-Fried Noodles

Cafe Le Wok
233 W. 35th St. (7th Ave.)
290-8918

It Woks! Why does Chinese food suck so hard? Was it always this bad, or is it because the proliferation of other Asian cuisines has rendered our former staples bland by comparison? Or is it simply that a new generation of incompetent, quick-buck Charlies has flooded the market with the disgusting, greasy, brown and tasteless slop that now passes for "Chinese food"? These are the thoughts that were running through our head when, on a rare whim, we decided to drop into Cafe Le Wok for a quick and easy lunch. Highly skeptical, and fully expecting to spend the next few hours on the company loo, cursing Confucius in Spanish, we found ourselves instead going back the next day, and the next.

Cafe Le Wok gets it right: for six bucks we can get a tasty, well-balanced, piping hot plate of crisp and airy pan-fried noodles, covered with a pleasing mix of the usual vegetables, shrimp or what have you. An order of fish and spinach over rice was not only fresh and wholesome, but it reminded us why we liked Chinese food in the first place. This is the real Chinese food, old-school style. The true Manhattan soul food. Now a new worry preoccupies us: What do all the Jews do on Christmas these days?

Best, Maybe Only,
Rabbit Salad on 7th Ave.

Le Singe Vert
160 7th Ave. (betw. 19th & 20th Sts.)
366-4100

With a Side of Bananas. You may not want to go to Le Singe Vert because you fear that it falls under Calvin Trillin’s rule: Never go to a restaurant named with a wrong-color adjective for a noun, such as the Red Blueberry. But actually there are green (vert) monkeys (singe), so you can go and get a lunch salad for $9.50 with tasty marinated rabbit. It’s deft and interesting, and probably even a monkey would love it.

Best Cappicola

Faicco’s Pork Stores, Inc.
260 Bleecker St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.)
243-1974
6511 11 Ave. (betw. 65th & 66th Sts.)
Brooklyn, 718-236-0119

It’s Our Satriale’s. We’ve been gearing up for season four of The Sopranos all summer long, watching videos of the first three seasons over and over. We found ourselves getting hungry every time we watched, since each episode seems to have at least one great meal involved. They are eating, always constantly eating. We decided to do something about it, so we ventured out to gather the goods for our own Italian feast. Most people at this point might head to Little Italy. Not us, though: we went straight to Bleecker St. and right into Faicco’s Pork Store.

Faicco’s has been serving our pork needs for years now–when their card says they have "The Finest Sausage and Italian Specialties," it’s not lying: In addition to a full line of fresh sausages made on premises, as well as pork and beef bracciole and other items, including prepared foods, brought in fresh from their main location out in Bay Ridge, Faicco’s stocks an extensive selection of canned and dry goods.

They also have one of the best cold-cut counters in the city, which is where we head, because to be truly like Tony, we have to have "gabbogool"–or cappicola as it is otherwise pronounced–a dry-cured pork product similar to prosciutto or speck–and nobody makes it like Faicco’s. They have both types of gabbogool, hot and sweet, though we like the hot (and assume the Soprano crew would too).

Once we got home and sat down with our feast, we turned The Sopranos back on. Now we were eating along with Tony, Pussy (at least for two seasons) and all the guys. Ahh, to be one of the crew.

Best Restaurant Trend

Value

Check, Please. We could hardly have been more pleased, last spring, when the triumphant debut of Lil’ Frankie’s Pizza was followed by another welcome spinoff, Cafe Lebowitz. Brian McNally, owner of Smith, situated his new restaurant at Spring and Elizabeth Sts.–smack in the middle of Manhattan’s trendiest restaurant scene. And he bucked the trends by making Lebowitz all about the food.

To diners who care about good eating, leaders like McNally and the owners of Lil’ Frankie’s are sending a very positive signal. Sure, it’s probably part of 9/11 fallout, and an idea migrating from Brooklyn to Manhattan seems weird almost to the point of perversity. On the bright side, though, the unprecedented number of New Yorkers now studying and appreciating food might evidence a mass rejection of the usual, anxiety-driven frenzy to get with the latest thing. Fine restaurants offering consistent value nurture this sprout of American refinement.

Cafe Lebowitz’s personality-driven menu–and the good taste of its worldly sandwiches–inspires idealism. High cuisine in modest settings suggests a cleavage of the two meanings of "class." The fact is, or seems to be, that we can achieve depth by dint of hard work and applied intellect. Of course idiots are still chattering all around about the silliest trifles. They bear no influence on actual taste, which, despite the beating it took in 90s Manhattan, has proven fairly durable over the ages. Eating better might prove a lasting revenge.

Best Brunch If You’re
On 7th Ave. S. Anyway

Jekyll and Hyde
91 7th Ave. S. (betw. Barrow & Grove Sts.)
989-7701

Really, We Can Stop Anytime. Sunday at noon, Cafe Milou might be open and then again it might not. Who knows? But then, who cares, because right across the street is an old reliable that we’ve been going to for years. They have the expected brunch fare (that comes with two mugs of draft) like the Jekyll fritatta of sweet red peppers, zucchini and fresh mozzarella served with an English muffin, but also offer well-liked fish and chips and a serviceable bar pizza. And they have a multitude of imports, both draft and bottled. Not being so fancy ourselves, we’re happy they have Anchor Steam and Rolling Rock on tap.

The sole male at our outdoor table of four is told by the ruffle-shirted waiter, "Old man, I like the cut of your jib." We’re reminded that we prefer pub brunches to cafes anyway. You could get your morning brew at Scratcher’s, but to go to a pure Irish pub that early, you have to admit that it’s alcohol you’re after. Happily, at this theme spot, you’ll be able to convince yourself that the pints are strictly an afterthought.

Best Sunday Brunch In DUMBO

Superfine
126 Front St. (Pearl St.), Brooklyn
718-243-9005

The Waterfront Chuck Wagon. Not like there are a lot of choices in DUMBO, its gentrification notwithstanding, but we’d patronize Superfine wherever it was located. We like its large, airy space, with its bilevel bar and the giant pool table that never seems to attract aggro sharks, just hipster duffers who won’t try to mortify us. The laidback service is pleasantly efficient, and the burgers and such are, if not superfine, good enough.

And lately, 1-4 p.m. on Sundays, the Superfine gals have been bringing in downhomey acoustic bands to serenade us while we’re struggling through the enormous "breakfast burrito" ($9) or huevos rancheros ($8). The Nieces & Nephews, who we’re told have been playing every other Sunday, are the downhomiest, and the prettiest/handsomest, bluegrass and country outfit in town. Management passes the hat, and then matches the audience’s contributions–a really nice touch. It almost feels like a Louisiana hayride–a feeling heightened a couple of Sundays ago when a Cajun outfit up from Lafayette, LA, played during N&N’s breaks. It doesn’t get much more American than that in NYC.

Best Diner for Wisecracks
And Yankees Fans

Joe Jr. Restaurant
482 6th Ave. (12th St.)
924-5220

Hey, Whattya Whattya. The first time we went in with a friend, Joe Jr.’s was about to close. We’d been working late, and were draped in our most pitiable paint-splattered attire (something we’d probably deny owning if asked–and we don’t deny much). We hadn’t slept in about 48 hours. We thought we’d have to rush through our diner food fix and head home. Miraculously, nobody prodded us to set a land-speed record for mastication. Instead, the guy who’d been serving us came over and started up a conversation. Greg was explaining that we should shave our head. Sure, we’d always considered it, but were worried that our cranium was deformed. You can palm it like a basketball. He assured us that it would be a freeing experience, and that once we’d done it, we’d never go back.

Being shy, we haven’t spoken to Greg or his family too much since. That doesn’t stop us from going to watch their antics, and those of the regulars who drop by. They’ll remember your favorite order (ours is eggs over easy, all the way), and they won’t give you shit for just taking up a cup of coffee at the counter–unless you’re a Mets fan. They’re one of the last vestiges of good, old, grungy New York. You remember, back when we weren’t afraid to give each other lip. Most important, the staff at Joe Jr. is at its best when the city is at its most absurd. Last Halloween, the Yankees scored just as a young girl sat down to eat. Diners crowded around a small set on the counter, and the detritus of the Greenwich Village parade drifted up 6th Ave. A man wearing a large foam Divine costume pressed his gargantuan breasts against the front windows. The staff, never missing a beat, immediately forced the girl to sit next to the television for the rest of the game. And ran outside for a photo op with Baltimore’s most notorious queen. As much as the Yankees’ good luck charm protested between bites, we’re sure she couldn’t think of a better place to be.

Best Sort-of New Restaurant
In Brooklyn Heights

Isobel
60 Henry St. (Cranberry St.)
Brooklyn, 718-243-2010

What’s in a Name? After its recent brief closing for a refurbish, renaming and a new menu, Isobel has been this year’s Brooklyn Heights destination for discerning foodies, packed on weekend nights despite its capacious space (no elbow-room problems here). It’s certainly the new class act among Brooklyn Heights’ often dowdy, tried-and-true-but-boring-as-hell yuppie/retiree eateries. The large rooms are candlelight-dusky yet airy, quite romantic, the decor casually fashionable (picture a nice but not piss-elegant restaurant in Madrid or an upscale trattoria in Milan), with as many couples hanging out at the bar and lounge area as at the tables and banquettes. The service was still getting its sea legs the last couple of times we were there this summer, but the desire to please more than made up for a bit of fumbling.

Call the cuisine internationalist chic. Among the appetizers, we’re very fond of the ceviche presentation, with the small bits of fish drenched in four sauces, ranging from tart to spicy (not Isobel’s invention, but deftly done). Entrees range from an all-American "double porkchop" with lentils and butternut squash ($18) to a juicily Italianate pan-seared monkfish over sweet-but-not-too beet risotto ($20). We have yet to try the Thursday-only special, "authentic bouillabaisse Marseillaise" ($35 per person, two person minimum), but our mouth’s watering at the thought. We have tried the filet mignon ($24), and it was seared to perfection, with a moist and pinkish heart inside a crunchy, pan-blackened crust. Nice wine list, thoughtfully selected desserts. Isobel also offers brunch on weekends.

Isobel is a tad pricey by Brooklyn Heighters’ plodding standards–we recently overheard one local grayhead grumbling, "Nine dollars for a tart?"–but Manhattanites who take the A train to High St. and stroll the short block there won’t even notice, and will toddle back to the train well satisfied.

Best Afternoon Bar Freebie

Rolf’s
281 3rd Ave. (22nd St.)
477-4750

Beerhall Mensch. We’re killing time on a Thursday afternoon at Rolf’s, which we usually only frequent at dinnertime for some fine German cuisine. We’re at the bar and looking at a comic character actor who’s over in the dining area. We can’t quite remember his name. That’s probably because we’re getting pretty drunk. We’re also maybe a little distracted by the bizarre group of regulars who seem to make the Rolf’s scene on afternoons. Looks like a pretty tight-knit bunch. When the tray stacked high with formidable sandwiches is brought to the bar, we simply figure somebody placed an order for the gang before we arrived.

It takes a while before we understand that the sandwiches are for everybody at the bar. It seems those crazy Germans have no interest in the wimpy goldfish crackers that lesser bars leave out for their clientele. There’re other things to recommend Rolf’s, but drunkards on a budget won’t find anything more convincing than this pleasant extravagance. Rolf’s makes sure that nobody leaves the bar sober or hungry.

Best Art Installations In a Bar

288
288 Elizabeth St. (betw. Houston & Bleecker Sts.)
260-5045

Just Don’t Move to Long Island City. We need to invent categories of praise for this place, our perennially favorite boozehall. It’s the best place on Saturday afternoons and Monday nights, it’s got dogs and superb bartenders and comfortable tables and a great happy hour and the best owners, but you already know that (because we tell you every year). So this year a toast to the big wall in the back, where the local artists can find a hospitable, albeit temporary home for their wares. 288’s art-on-the-wall policy dates from the time when the neighborhood housed more artists than stockbrokers; now that the natural downtown ratio of hipsters to squares has been inverted, it’s even better to have this wall here. Whatever is hanging there, you may not like, but we guarantee it will be interesting. Some might even say provocative.

Best Reproducible Recipe

Cupcake Cafe’s Vanilla Cake
522 9th Ave. (39th St.)
465-1530

Almost as Good as Store-Bought. We decided to make a cake for Lisa’s birthday; just a plain white-on-white "birthday" birthday cake for show, since we were providing other, more highfalutin desserts and thought revelers would just take the obligatory well-wishing slice and fill up on more interesting offerings. But something strange happened. Two and three slices were asked for. There was much clamoring, bordering on hysteria, for wedges to take home.

The recipe from the Cupcake Cafe Cookbook (available at the Cafe) resulted in a cake that actually tasted exactly like the pro version–rich, vanilla-y and not too sweet. The "9 eggs" is not a typo. We have regular home shallow cake pans, not professional pans, so we wound up with extra batter and buttercream with which to make cupcakes. Our buttercream wasn’t as white as the bakery’s; the book says to beat it longer, but we are impatient. We didn’t even attempt the gorgeous decorations depicted, but a pink rim done with a leaf tip and a piped message on top and of course candles produced sufficient oohs and ahhs.

Best Deserving Coffee Truck

The Mud Truck
(East Side of Astor Place, Next to the Uptown 6 Station)

Here’s Mud in Your Eye. You can hardly miss the lumbering bright-orange truck parked over there on Astor Place every morning, and if one of these days you decide to give it a shot, you’ll find there’s an awful lot to like about it. For the basic reasons, certainly–the Mud Truck coffee’s good, they heat the milk if you want it with milk and they offer a nice selection of baked goods. One of the best things about it is the fact that the people who work there are always friendly, which is a fine way to gear up for that trip downstairs to the 6 platform. But perhaps the best reason of all to bring your business to the Mud Truck is the fact that they are a local, independently owned, family-run operation–which just happens to be located equidistant from two Starbuckses.

Best Cocktail

Masala Mary at Tabla
11 Madison Ave. (25th St.)
889-0667

Absolut India. We’re against upscale cocktail fashion not on principle, but because the drinks tend to suck. They’re just designer Shirley Temples, for the most part. Tabla’s variation on the bloody mary, however, is the fancy-new-cocktail equivalent of an intelligent model. Except it exists.

Every spice in this concoction can be distinctly tasted with every sip. Tamarind and pepper spike the salty tomato. Sweetness and smoky clove round the vodka’s icicle edge. Purple pickled onions and cumin play off each other down the sides of the tongue. A good bloody mary is a beautiful thing. Tabla’s Masala Mary is beautiful and deep.

Best Way to Start a Saturday
With a Free Buzz

Brooklyn Brewery Tours
79 N. 11th St. (betw. Wythe Ave. & Berry St.)
718-486-7422

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines. We’ve been on this tour so often that not only do we know the schedule and a few of the guides, but we’ve also mastered the oration, down to the exciting bit on the role of hops. Every Saturday noon-5 p.m. the Brooklyn Brewery welcomes visitors to tour its 70,000-square-foot facility and sample its beers, for free. Each tour consists of a 20-minute spiel about the company’s history, commitment to better beer, origins in Utica, NY, an up-close look at its Brooklyn brew house where smaller batches are made, and, of course, two drink tickets. Picnic tables, a makeshift tap bar and a pool table give tourists and regulars a great place to kick back with a couple samples of their eight core brands, including the pilsner, lager, East India Pale Ale and Brooklyner Weisse–avoid the Blanche De Brooklyn with its hints of buttered clam broth–or seasonal brews like the Monster Ale, which touts an impressive 10.8 percent alcohol by volume. If you catch the last tour at 4, you can easily exit with a lovely buzz and get an early start on happy-hour drinking.

Best Downtown Omelet

Cafe Mogador
101 St. Marks Pl. (betw. 1st Ave. & Ave. A)
677-2226

Standing Ova-tion. It’s beyond us how the owners of the reliably good Mogador could’ve been responsible for the erstwhile Barrio disaster. But these things happen. What is exceptional about Mogador’s breakfast has to do with price and quality. In the general sense, $5.95 gets you a remarkably honest meal. By that we mean a larger than average omelet and a generous side of potatoes and rye bread. The eggs are consistently fluffy and spiced just so. Potatoes come pan-fried and delicately herbed. We prefer the Mogador omelet, which is stuffed with Moroccan spiced tomatoes and blends nicely with either feta or goat cheese. Accompanied by a side of succulent, spicy merguez sausage links and a strong cafe Americano, it’s a delicious meal done with admirable consistency, one that always leaves us feeling like we got what we paid for. And nothing less.

Best Chili Cheese Fries

Johnny Rockets
42 E. 8th St. (Greene St.)
253-8175

Burp Castle. It’s hard in a city of tasteless fast food and overpriced gourmet sprouts to stimulate our tastebuds. Even though we have become accustomed to meals that taste like paper, once in a while we need to indulge in unadulterated flavor–whether we’re PMS-ing or celebrating a weight loss. When that time comes, we treat ourselves to the chili cheese fries at Johnny Rockets.

Cholesterol abounds; the orange grease and perfectly spiced chili gently saturate the once-crispy little fries, then they’re generously sprinkled with grated cheddar cheese that melts into a golden sauce as it sits atop the chili. These fries are so damn good we don’t mind Johnny Rockets’ less than perfect service, hordes of tourists and amazingly unkempt restrooms. All we care about is the instant gratification that comes alongside complete and total sensory overload.

Next time you’re in the neighborhood, bring an antacid and order some chili cheese fries. Please also remember to leave a good tip, because you’d be miserable too if you had to wear a silly 1950s paper diner hat at work all day.

Best Duck Confit

Bistrot Margot
26 Prince St. (betw. Elizabeth & Mott Sts.)
274-1027

Born Toulouse. We’ve been planning this dream vacation for some time now: two weeks in Gascony, days spent briskly hiking through the Pyrenees foothills, evenings spent gorging like foie-gras geese on regional specialties. Until we make it over, though, we count on Bistrot Margot’s duck confit to sustain us.

To confitize a duck, the bird is ever-so-slowly cooked so as to allow the meat to give up all its fat. Then the duck is canned in that fat–to stew in its own juices, if you will–sealed up tight to last a lifetime (or at least through a rugged winter). To serve duck confit, that preserved portion is roasted to rid it of any greasiness and sogginess; the result, especially in Bistrot Margot’s case, is a magical crisp-tender entree with a little delicate crunch covering succulent meat set aside some mashed potatoes.

There are other good things on the menu like daube de boeuf, poached salmon on lentils or the charcuterie to start, but we can’t seem to not order the duck. It sends our souls to Gascony, even if our rears remain in Little Italy.

Best 24-Hour Deli Makeover
Catering to Williamsburg Hipsters

Kellogg’s
519 Metropolitan Ave. (Union Ave.)
718-782-4502

Cigs and Beer, Too. After tying one too many on, we’re usually looking, as we stumble up the stairs from the L train at Lorimer St., for something to fill our tummies–and soak up all that vodka. And since we’ve grown up a little recently, we’re looking for something a little better than, say, pork rinds and Little Debbies. So, although we’ve been patronizing Kellogg’s ever since we moved into the neighborhood, we took particular notice earlier this year of the newly installed awning–featuring the words "gourmet" and "mini market"–above a huge selection of plants and beautiful fresh flowers. Go inside these days and you’ll find a trove of delights for the health-conscious hipster, including soy milk, different types of tofu, premade hummus and sauce, soy or organic ice cream, gourmet cheese and more. These might seem like typical bodega offerings to someone living, say, on the Upper East Side. But out in Williamsburg–where there’s no real bank or movie theater–we appreciate every amenity we can get.

Best Warm-Weather Shopping Break

Milady’s
160 Prince St. (Thompson St.)
226-9340

Yes, Milady’s. There’s a number of chichi places near the Soho stores offering all manner of respites, but better to stow our shopping bags under the bar here and order that most refreshing of libations, cold Heineken on tap. The bartender will serve it up in a frosty mug from the freezer. This draft will cool you down, and soften any sticker shock or shopper’s regret you may be suffering from. There’s standard pub fare served at tables, too, if with all your trying things on you’ve worked up a need for something more substantial. No atmosphere to speak of, but it’s sunny enough and the natives are friendly. An iced keg of Genny cream ale by a lake upstate might be more restorative, but too far from the boutiques and this is Best of Manhattan after all.

Best Restaurant Trend To Avoid

English Food

Jolly Bad! Almost every national cuisine imaginable has had its day in the sun amongst New Yorkers–Thai, Ethiopian, Bangladeshi, Burmese. We guess that’s why several entrepreneurial spirits figured–almost simultaneously–that it was time for English cuisine to take the city by storm.

While it’s not rare to find fish and chips on local menus, this past year has witnessed a small explosion in British restaurants across the city–from A Salt & Battery in the East Village to Brooklyn’s Chip Shop, to a couple places uptown.

All we want to know is: Why? Maybe there are a few people out there whose mouths begin to water at the thought of Welsh rarebit, Scotch eggs, a ploughman’s lunch or beans on toast with a side of "mushy peas," but we tend to stay away from those people.

We’ve been to London. We’ve eaten authentic British food in authentic British restaurants, and we’ll tell you one thing–all the jokes were justified. Even the British admit as much.

No, we’ll sit tight through this fad, waiting patiently for all those Norwegian restaurants to start popping up in a couple of years.

Best Italian Cheese Store

DiPalo’s Fine Foods, Inc.
206 Grand St. (Mott St.)
226-1033

They Cut the Cheese. The outer boroughs still have these kind of stores, but in the ass-reaming world of Manhattan rents, a little shop specializing in Italian cheeses and meats barely stands a chance. Luckily, the DiPalo family (like the sandwich-making Parisis and the pork-store Faiccos) have braved the extortionate demands of the neighborhood landlord and still do business the way they have for decades. You don’t just get cheese from Louis DiPalo. You get the history of the cheese and a geography lesson of the Italian region it comes from. He loves the place and he loves what he sells. And what he sells is the best Italian cheese we’ve found in New York–the parmigiano reggiano is always moist and sharp with flavor, and the pecorino actually tastes like it came from a sheep.

We see types of cheeses at DiPalo’s that we’ve never found before (and it’s none of this Frenchy Camembert or flavorless Gouda). They stock the best versions of some of the world’s greatest cheeses, all of it perfectly aged. DiPalo travels to Italy frequently and is always on the lookout for a new flavor. Not that there was anything wrong with the old flavors: they’re great.

The tiny store is forever packed–with cheese, with sausages and with customers. The family is moving to larger quarters soon–across the street–and we’re hoping that the same small neighborhood feel will go with them. When you go to DiPalo’s and Louis doesn’t offer you a taste of whatever fine product he’s slicing, ask him if he’s feeling all right.

Best Place to Drink Musty
Bordeaux And Flat Kir Royales

Le Pere Pinard
175 Ludlow St. (betw. Houston & Stanton Sts.)
777-4917

Serves Us Right for Patronizing a "Bistro." We were on a first date and had a party to go to on the LES, so we thought we’d try it out. The back garden was quite romantic, our date looked lovely and we were off to a smashing start. But we were more than a little distressed when our Bordeaux was not only mustier than King Tut’s boxer shorts but practically hot, and our date’s kir royale was flat and warm. That’s a major fucking no-no, especially at nearly 10 bucks a pop. We offered to send the drinks back, worrying privately that we might wind up drinking spit–which, under the circumstances, might have tasted better–but luckily our date was classy and demurred. It didn’t spoil our evening, but it certainly soured our mood.

Which was really too bad, because the food was actually quite good. For a place that boasts such an impressive wine list, serving us the dregs, not only flat but practically hot, was inexcusable. That just pisses us off, especially when we’re trying to impress a lady. Note to Pere Pinard: In America, when somebody puts themselves politely in your hands and wishes to buy your product, it is considered impolite to shit in their mouths.

Best Full English Breakfast

Nathan Hale’s
6 Murray St. (B’way)
571-0776

For About Seven Quid, Wot? For us, it all started this summer, when we found ourselves at the mercy of those World Cup Soccer wake-up calls. There are many well-publicized spots in which to hang out and watch soccer throughout the city, each with a flavor of its own, so we spent much of the month of June hopping from place to place in search of quieter locations to enjoy (read: endure) the games, hustling across town to get closer to work without missing a minute of action.

But without fail when it came time to eat you could find us at the bar of Nathan Hale’s with our traditional breakfast–eggs, bacon, sausage, oversized tomatoes with melted cheese, potatoes–and a pint of Guinness. It was by far the most accommodating of the places we stumbled into at unearthly hours on those summer-school nights. The discovery of this English-owned establishment almost made up for the relative failure of the competition itself. No need to ask Ritchie for a menu–just tell him you want the English breakfast and then try to finish the wonderful mountain that comes your way.

Best Vegetarian Brunch

Kate’s Joint
58 Ave. B (4th St.)
777-7059

After a Night at the Meat Markets. There isn’t a better way to start off a Saturday or Sunday than with a scrumptious meal. That’s why we go to Kate’s Joint: they serve some of the finest veggie and vegan food around. For $8.95 you get a meal: eggs, tofu scramble, pancakes, huevos rancheros and the like; coffee; juice and choice of Bud or a bloody mary. For two dollars less, eggs or the tofu version thereof is served a la carte with coffee. There’s always good music playing too–our fondest memory was a hungover 3 p.m. brunch with out-of-towners listening to Danzig–alongside some of the best-looking co-diners we’ve seen during the early hours.

For those who love the idea of brunch but don’t enjoy breakfasty-type foods, Kate’s also offers their famous (and highly recommended) unturkey club and Southern-fried unchicken cutlet. If your belly has room, indulge in a piece of nondairy cheesecake or chocolate mousse cake–a sweet tooth’s wet dream. And maybe an after meal beverage, since Kate’s now features a full bar, including a nondairy white Russian!

Best New South Williamsburg Restaurant

DuMont
432 Union Ave. (betw. Metropolitan Ave. & Devoe St.)
Brooklyn, 718-486-7717

Family Fare. A few months ago we were searching for a local restaurant to take our dad and stepmother to. We wanted to show them that, even though we’re on Williamsburg’s south side, we can still get a good, affordable meal. Happily we found, tucked away on Union Ave., just steps from the Lorimer St. L train station, DuMont, serving wonderful American fare: thick, generously garnished burgers, free-range organic chicken, fresh salads and steaks. (For dessert, have the brownie smothered in whipped cream.)

The menu is small–and it’s on a clipboard–but they have daily specials. We love the old-style ceiling, the light fixtures and the wood benches; most of all, though, we appreciate the unpretentious, friendly service we’ve always encountered. Go now, while the weather’s still nice, and sit in the garden in the back.

Best Drink To Fuck Up at Home

Mojito

Lime Disease. How much citrus, oh Lord? And how much mint? And let’s not mention the rum. The mojito has become one of our favorite drinks (especially after a night of particularly tasty ones at a New Orleans bar)–so much so that we crave them at home now as well. Big mistake. We’ve gotten to the point where we can conjure up a homemade mojito now–but only after butchering massive amounts of lime and squandering a few bottles of rum to perfect it. So many things can go wrong. A few of the things that we’ve learned: 1) While there can be too much lime, there can never be too much mint. 2) If you need to add any sugar at all, less is definitively more. 3) Ice, ice and more ice. 4) There is such a thing as too much rum.

Best Cuban Lunch

Manhattan Hero
168 W. 27th St. (7th Ave.)
741-3560

Say Hey to Your Dad For Us, Willy. Another Best of Manhattan regular, and with good reason: Manhattan Hero is simply the best place for lunch on or around 7th Ave. anywhere between 23rd and 34th Sts. You wanna sandwich, they’ll make you a damn good and reasonably priced one. But the back half of the counter, where the hot Cuban meals are, is where the action is. Great rice ’n’ beans, Cuban chicken, Cuban variations on things like eggplant parmigiana and spaghetti and meatballs. And do you want a side of plantains? ¡Claro, mi vida! ¡Que rico!

Best Discount Produce

Rossman Farms of Brooklyn
770 3rd Ave. (betw. 25th & 26th Sts.)
Brooklyn, 718-788-3999

So Fresh and So Clean. Your local greenmarket offers a lot of good deals. Also, your local greenmarket has a lot of crappy deals. When we were in the habit of making our first weekly stop for produce at our local greenmarket, we found our sense of thrift too often canceled out for the sake of convenience. Now we get any organic vegetables we might want last, because we’re assured decent regular produce for our money via weekly excursions to Rossman Farms.

It’s on 3rd Ave. in Brooklyn, in the same no man’s land between the South Slope and Sunset Park where you find the borough’s Home Depot. (There’s an "R" station nearby, and the B37 bus stops directly outside the store. If you drive, there’s easy parking under the BQE.) From outside, Rossman looks like a regular grocery market–unless you note the price posters–but it’s actually more like a retail warehouse. We suspect it might be some sort of clearinghouse, because so much of what’s on the shelves is fresh. Then again, the supply is consistent, and the array quite broad.

Seven kiwis for a dollar. Seventy-nine cents per mango. Mixed red-green peppers for 49 cents per pound. Fifty cents for a bunch of pencil-thin asparagus. Those were selected at random from our last visit–it goes on and on like that. Rossman is strong on peppers, squashes and eggplants, herbs, potatoes and onions. They also carry nuts, dried fruit and a lot of packaged goods, including the least expensive tubs of hummus we’ve ever seen. If you’re strictly organic the place does you no good, but in that case you’re probably not concerned about money much, anyway.

Best New Restaurant

Lil’ Frankie’s Pizza
19 1st Ave. (betw. 1st & 2nd Sts.)
420-4900

Upper Crust. This spinoff of the East Village’s best inexpensive Italian restaurant, Frank, took the entire concept of the East Village inexpensive Italian restaurant to another level. Want to experience why Lil’ Frankie’s is our pick for "Best New Restaurant"? Pizza lovers might get it immediately, but it’ll take three visits at the most. You could sit once in the front room, once in the back room and once in the garden. Or if you live nearby, substitute delivery for one of the above.

Start with soup, salad and pizza. Frankie’s antipasti is much like what you get at Frank–carefully chosen, wonderfully fresh, treated with respect. The fava bean and dandelion-green soup is a delicious study in contrast, savory and bitter. Watch the action near the brick oven, where pizzamakers douse every hot pie with topnotch olive oil. Whether you go with little meatballs, imported anchovies, mushrooms, ricotta or no toppings at all, you’re assured a crispy thin crust and a tomato sauce balanced between sweetness and acidity. The fundamentals are in place at Frankie’s, and the special morsels added put his pizza over the top. Finish with a homemade panna cotta or tiramisu if the special Nutella piadine isn’t available, but don’t skip this mindblowing dessert if it is.

Next time start with the assorted antipasti meats and/or cheeses. Now you’ll find out exactly how tasty inexpensive dining can be. Frankie’s is a pizza parlor, sure, but its motivation extends way beyond pizza itself. What the restaurant seems to want most is a chance to share the everyday pleasures of Italian food. Give Frankie’s that chance. Continue with a piadine sandwich baked in the domed oven. There are always "La Classica" (prosciutto di Parma, arugula, fresh tomato and mozzarella) and Caprese (same as Classica except with basil instead of meat), and usually some specials as well. Finish your second meal with a second shot at the Nutella piadine (one might think one wouldn’t want a piadine dessert after a piadine meal, but actually one would).

Those two meals won’t lighten your wallet much at all, and they’ll probably have you sold on Lil’ Frankie’s. But come back and try one of the pricier pastas al forno, whole baked fishes or other special entrees just to get the complete picture. Lil’ Frankie’s entrees edge out even the home-cooked flavor of Frank–a warm and gracious restaurant that seems eclipsed on both counts by its younger sibling. But there’s no need to compare. The tough question of how many years it’s been since the East Village saw a new restaurant so like a gift is also moot. Lil’ Frankie’s is superb, and it takes the opposite of work to discover that it’s unmatched in 2002.

Best Multipurpose Restaurant

Brasserie 8 1/2
9 W. 57th St. (betw. 5th & 6th Aves.)
829-0812

Multitasking Is in These Days. You could just have a drink at the bar. Or you could meet for some office gossip in the plush lounge. Or you could have a full dinner at the long no-smoking bar that lines the large dining room. The oversized booths seat double-daters. Or, as we did, you can dine with a bunch at a big table. Each area is precisely designed; the environs are slick and luscious and could exist only in a grand city. And as a bonus, the food’s good.

While demolishing a tower of shellfish by the gorgeous Legere-esque depiction of construction workers in glass, before each discussion of business or political personalities, we are told, "This is strictly off the record." Mistakenly, we’ve been assumed to have ethics. The men at our table each say, "Oh I’m going to be good tonight." Yet each time the waitress checks in, more 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle’s are ordered. We indulge too–in a very juicy hanger steak ($19) over mashed with roasted shallots and fried onions, and merlot. Fortunately for the Bourbon-loosened-lipped, we don’t have enough of an understanding of their conversations to report on them. Check restaurantassociates.com from time to time for worthwhile discount offers for this sprawling cosmopolitan spot.

Best Chelsea Bartender

Larry Bullock at Splash, aka SBNY
50 W. 17th St. (betw. 5th & 6th Aves.)
691-0073

What More Could You Want? We hadn’t stepped into Splash since we moved here two years ago, but after hearing about a fabulous redesign that expanded their dancefloor and added three wall-size video screens, we were curious. Then we received a friendly invite from SBNY bartender Larry Bullock. Let me take care of you, he said.

Boy, did he ever. Larry stands out among the typical neighborhood bartenders because he’s a sweetheart with an uncanny ability to make every guy who walks up to his bar feel special. He’s always having a good time–singing along with the divas, doing leg kicks or just smiling and offering a sympathetic ear–so he makes us feel great after a hard day’s work. Plus, Larry gives us generous discounts on cosmos and anything else we order, which has been delightful since we’re on a tight budget. And whenever we leave the club we get a sweet goodnight kiss.

Best Neighborhood Italian

Ballato
55 E. Houston St. (betw. Mott & Mulberry Sts.)
274-8881

Come On-A Our Neighborhood. Every neighborhood should have an Italian place to go to when needed–to celebrate, commiserate, to just unwind in with a good meal. Luckily for us, we got one in ours. We think of Ballato as an offshoot of our kitchen–if our kitchen were soothing as a Tuscan farmhouse and we were steeped in ages of Italian cooking lore.

Ran into a shitstorm at the office? A plate of perfect ravioli or perhaps a savory veal scalloppine might help settle the nerves, especially in this cozy, sconce-lit room. A special someone celebrating another birthday? Bring your closest pals, order a few bottles from the exceptional wine list (offering some elusive, underappreciated Sicilians)–he’ll have the calf’s liver special, you the award-winning spaghetti with Bolognese–and Ballato is festive. And if you feel like eating out, but don’t really want to make a big production of it, then walk on over for a bowl of pasta e fagioli followed by a plate of linguine with clams.

But all we’re doing is describing a great neighborhood Italian, a restaurant that switches ambience to suit your moods, that’s dependable and wonderful and you’re thankful you’re there. Okay, we’re bragging about our neighborhood Italian and its gracious owner, Emilio, and his amiable staff. But God invented taxis, and you can be from our neighborhood, if only for the evening.

Best Hot Sauce

Sam’s Famous
Waterfront Ale House
540 2nd Ave. (30th St.)
696-4104

I Feel My Temperature Risin’. It’s not uncommon these days to find restaurants leaving a bottle of hot sauce on the table, much the same way they’d leave a bottle of ketchup. Most simply stick with good ol’ traditional Tabasco, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some (like Mexican Radio) offer a staggering array of independently produced hot sauces with funny names and labels. It takes a few visits and some experimenting to find the right one.

For our money (and what’s left of our tastebuds), none of them can touch the Waterfront Ale House home brand, Sam’s Famous. Waterfront has always been a goldmine, condiment-wise, offering both commercial and homemade ketchups as well as a windowsill full of mustard choices. But that hot sauce of theirs–mercy!

Using what tastes like habanero peppers as a base, Sam’s achieves the near impossible balance of being both quite flavorful while still boasting a heat that’ll blow through the roof of your skull. It’ll make your eyes water, your nose run, your throat close up. You’ll bang your fists on the table and gasp desperately for air. And once the pain subsides, you’ll reach for the bottle again.

As a friend of ours succinctly put it, "It’s so friggin’ good." (Especially on their waffle fries.) Fortunately, beer does a fine job of cooling things down.

Best New EV/LES Coffee Shop

Angelina’s
188 Orchard St. (betw. Houston & Stanton Sts.)
979-5564

Oh, and That Other Little Thing Last Fall. Life’s little disagreements felt a lot pricklier than normal last fall. One little biggie had to do with the fact that our regular coffee joint was no longer cutting it. First, they insisted on stocking these irritating non-enclosed to-go lids. How a tiny thing such as this could annoy so thoroughly was a mystery. But annoy it did, turning our morning java into geyser-in-a-cup and resulting in several stains and not a few painful scaldings. Adding insult to literal injury, merely pleasant service was becoming a hit-and-miss proposition thanks to a certain prodigiously angry white-Rastafarian barrista. So, fed up, we prepared ourselves to resort back to in-house brewing. Then at the last minute Angelina’s came along, packin’ strong beans, awesome gelato, a variety of delicious premise-baked confections hewing to the Umbrian end of things (the iced lemon-drop cookies being a favorite). And real friggin’ to-go lids!

Looking back, we now see it as a bonus that the two women owners should be so kind on the morning eyes (they’re quietly hot, in that homegrown Italian kind of way). And recognizing that every local business needs its resident piece-of-work, they’ve seen to this in the form of their third partner, a young Greek ex-cop who is possessed of curmudgeonly gifts. A shoe-in for the "Best Living Archetype" award if one existed, he’s what you might call a reluctant merchant, Mr. Hooper meets Serpico, but a good guy underneath it all. We look to this young man to restore Orchard St. to its former haycart-era glory.

Best Pub Food

Blarney Rock
137 W. 33rd St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.)
947-0825

God Bless Us Every One. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. Haggard salesmen in top coats and hats hunch next to rowdy welders singing songs from the aulde countree; working girls with seamed stockings fix their lipstick using silver-plated cigarette cases as mirrors; cigar smoke hangs lugubriously at chest level while floozies slip on the sawdust to Frankie and we saw happily into a chop... Oh, sorry. We were having a bit of a dream. But that’s what the Blarney Rock does to us. The seams are gone, as are the hats and cigars, but the Rock still serves up the kind of hearty, meaty fare in a gloriously working-class midtown pub atmosphere that makes us long for those days of old. Cheese-steak sandwiches dripping with onions and cheese on soft rolls; burgers hearty enough to fuel a one-man war against the Huns; mashed potatoes dimpled with some serious brown gravy. God bless America. God bless New York City. God bless the Blarney Rock.

Best East Village Refuge

Fish Bar (aka Kastro)
237 E. 5th St. (betw. 2nd &