In Tough Times, Restaurants Downsize Lobsters

The 7:30 dinner reservation that you’re always trying and failing to get will become easier pickings this fall, but it may also become a con of a sort. Restaurateurs, like airlines, are overbooking. They can’t afford to lose revenue to no-shows, not in an economy like this.

You’ll notice more special deals, more value meals: happy-hour snacks for under $4; late-night nibbles for less; Sunday promotions; lunchtime bargains. You’ll see hanger steaks where strip steaks were once ascendant, dwarf lobsters where steroidal crustaceans once reigned.

Luxury items will be scarcer, low-ticket options more ubiquitous. You’ll notice more comfort food and more straightforward food, as many restaurateurs defer to what diners are guaranteed to order, rather than what chefs are flattered to concoct.

And you’ll hear the accents and see the stamp of foreigners, who are claiming an ever greater percentage of restaurant seats, their currencies more valuable than ours. “On Tuesday a year ago the dining room would be full around 7,” said Robert Bohr, the wine director at the Greenwich Village restaurant Cru. “Now the dining room is full at 8:30 or 9.”

That’s when Europeans prefer to dine, and up to 40 percent of Cru’s diners on a given night are foreigners, he said. In 2004, when Cru opened, as few as 15 percent were. “The whole dining atmosphere has changed,” Mr. Bohr said.

In light of that, the restaurant the Modern, in Midtown, began printing prices on its wine list in Euros as well as in dollars this year so tourists did not have to do their own arithmetic to appreciate how good they have it.

As the New York restaurant world enters a characteristically busy fall season, what’s most striking aren’t the flashy openings — in New York there’s always plenty of flash and there remains a good deal of cash — but the strategic adjustments being made by restaurants that aren’t taking their success, or for that matter their survival, for granted.

Make no mistake: Per Se will still be Per Se. Babbo and Balthazar will remain mobbed. And even most of the less vaunted and less wildly popular restaurants out there should muddle along fine for now. Restaurateurs in New York say that they haven’t been hit nearly as hard as their peers in other cities.

Moreover, an economic slowdown and a weak dollar have not prevented prominent restaurateurs like Drew Nieporent and prominent chefs like David Bouley from forging ahead with ambitious projects, some hatched before times got tougher. But in this season’s crop of new restaurants, as in the changes made by old ones, it’s clear that it’s no longer business as usual.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw some places charging you if you went beyond a certain number of bread courses,” said Julie Taras Wallach, an owner of the Lower East Side restaurant Little Giant, referring acerbically to diners who camp out at tables, trying to get as much for as little as possible.

CONTINUED : Lump Crab Meat, Not Jumbo

---

1 | 2 | 3 | Next >