“That guy sort of reminded me of Ron Silver,” said men’s wear designer Billy Reid of Mr. Boal, approvingly. He termed the look “easy, but not sloppy.” Mr. Reid, who sells buttoned-up, Southern-style suiting out of a cavernous shop in Noho, himself also maintains a neat beard (reined in by an electric trimmer) and side-swept floppy hair, at least lately. He said that men’s hair and beards are becoming “more well kept. They’re paying more attention to it.”

Men’s hair trends—like men themselves—are usually more sluggish than women’s. Since men started growing their beards like unkempt hedges, for example, the fairer sex has powered through Cleopatra bangs, 1940s Veronica Lake waves, Heidi braids, the long Gwyneth bob, Alexander Wang side braids and now, this spring, pink streaks reminiscent of the Kool-Aid–colored dye you made at summer camp. But men also seem to be experimenting more! Sure, Stumptown baristas still wear mustaches to serve mochas, and full beards are common in yoga studios in Brooklyn and at the bar at Freeman’s, but the Bowie-esque long-on-top, shaved-on-the-sides look is currently in vogue at art openings and on Bedford Avenue, and many of the city’s best barbers—like its interior designers and restaurateurs—say they’re currently in the throes of Mad Men mania. Paul Andrew, an owner of Panyc Salon on 17th Street, said men are buying more product than women these days and coming in every two weeks, compared to six weeks for women. “Men are more high maintenance than ever,” he said. “I’ve been doing hair 25 years, and I’ve never seen it like this.”

SLIDESHOW: A history of floppy hair, from the Kennys (Rogers and Loggins) to the Jasons (Schwartzman and Reitman) >>

NOW, MANY ARE are turning to the blow-dryer decade for inspiration. Experts say they have sniffed the beginnings of a Jon Peters revival here in New York (he’s the hairstylist–turned–movie mogul and Barbra Streisand ex that partly inspired Shampoo), and that it’s not as low maintenance as it looks. “Actually, on Wednesday, I went to play music in Brooklyn, and I was in the subway and I saw two dudes like this,” said prominent men’s stylist and salon owner Martial Vivot. “I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s going on here?’ I was looking at them, they were very well put together, very well dressed, and I thought, Are we having a trend starting here?” He described the general vibe as “end of the ’70s. Hair parted, but not a sleek part, a part with volume. Like you blow-dried your hair.”

“A more groomed, shaggy, ’70s feel is something we’ve been venturing into in the salon already,” said Shaun Cottle, an owner of Seagull Salon on West 10th Street, which features a picture of Cat Stevens on its Web site, adding that he himself has “a medium-length blond shag with bangs. … I have exactly the ’70s haircut you’re talking about. It starts at the top of my eyes with the bangs and goes right around my face to the back of my neck.” (He admitted that he chemically straightens his pseudo-shag and has it blown out once a week.) He described the look, embodied to varying degrees by everyone from Mr. Boal and Mr. Reitman to Jason Schwartzman and Noah Baumbach to New Orleans tight end Jeremy Shockey, as “obviously very stylized, and giving a really specific projection, but that projection is, ‘I am organic.’”

Indeed, it’s a look that channels hot tubs and guitars, more ’70s porn star than grumpy Unabomber. “I’ve done a couple of really extreme bowl cuts from the ’70s on men,” said Mr. Cottle. “No part at all, kind of Peter Berlin in That Boy.”

The style’s key elements are soft, floppy, washed locks, a trimmed beard (if one is worn at all) and a creative, unfussy affect that contrasts with that of the stylized punk hairdos, uncomfortably full beards and strangulating jeans in which New York men have suffered through the past few years. It combines the relaxedness of a recession—very ’70s!—with, perhaps, a dawning optimism. “It’s getting away from the Julian Casablancas, that Williamsburg kind of look,” said Jordan M, a men’s stylist for Bumble & Bumble. “That grown-out, tendrilly, long, Jesus-looking hair that just looks like they haven’t had a hair cut in forever.”

“Before, you will have people who will ask for more hair, and then they just have the pillow hairstyle, like you are asleep, you wake up and whatever happens, happens,” said Mr. Vivot. Now, “I’m seeing kids in their 20s asking for more hair, but they want to take care of it.”

Unlike harder-to-pull-off trends like the Bowie do, the updated porn shag can work for anyone. “Just yesterday, someone got in my chair and it was exactly that,” said Jordan M. “Straight guy, Rolex, works in an art department, and he had the trimmed beard and long shaggy hair, pushed back loosely, probably doesn’t use any product. He basically told me, ‘The more you can make it look like I cut it, the better.’”

The faux–low maintenance of the look eases this transition, in some men, from Paul Bunyan to Kenny Rogers. “You got into a period where everyone was rough and rugged, and soon enough it’s going to be the complete opposite,” predicted Eddy Chai, co-owner of the popular men’s boutique Odin. Mr. Chai foresaw a welcome loosening of clothes to accompany the boyish, floppy shift in hair, democratizing men’s dressing back into a straightforward, unironic affair. After all, Mr. Boal and Mr. Reitman were hardly the best-looking men at the Oscars, but the look, inclusive with an air of historical significance, lent them a flatteringly low-key intellectual edge.

On Sunday, March 14, Gabriel Berezin, 33, the guitarist and singer for the bands Monuments and Ghost Gamblers, was weathering the rain on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint in an updated Laurel Canyon look he pegged to 1970. “You know who it was?” he said, asked to name his inspirations. “There was a picture of Paul McCartney right after the Beatles broke up, when he first started doing solo stuff. I remember being in college, saying, ‘If I could just get my beard and hair looking like that, I’d be totally psyched. Of course, I couldn’t grow a beard at that point. It took me a long time to get the beard in this condition.’ (He said he trims and clips his beard every few days with scissors or a trimmer.)

Mr. Berezin admitted he thinks about his hair “in terms of some old idea of what a musician looks like,” since “part of being artistic is not really giving a shit.” But still, he has a day job to think about these days, and a girlfriend.

“I think it’s kind of rude to have a superlong beard,” he said. “It’s hard for a girl to navigate through.” (Of course, the grizzled look poses its own perils, like a certain prickliness during one act of love.)

Meanwhile, Jordan M, from Bumble & Bumble, cautioned that the rounded shape of ’70s hair-and-beard combinations can add an unwanted fullness to the face. “When the hair’s longer on the sides, it doesn’t look like masculine or flattering to me,” he said.

But early adopters of the trend say they’re not after flattery, but comfort. Indeed, Mr. Reid, the retro-shagged designer, who said he’d been in a continuous process of growing out and shaving off a Paul Bunyan beard since college, suggested the whole thing might be accidental. “You’re probably seeing a lot of guys saying they want a change, and that’s where they’re at—in the in-between,” he said. “It’s hard just to take the full plunge of cutting [your beard] off and going back to nothing.”

mbryan@observer.com

SLIDESHOW: A history of floppy hair, from the Kennys (Rogers and Loggins) to the Jasons (Schwartzman and Reitman) >>

“None of us canceled!” cried one young attendee who had made it safely inside the mansion, to her circle of girlfriends.

“I know, I’m impressed!” said another.

Still, there had been obstacles. Redheaded socialite and model Annabelle Vartanian, lingering by the entrance to the grand old mansion museum in a black Oscar de la Renta gown, had arrived from the Lower East Side. “Getting out of the car, there was, like, a huge pool of water,” she said, “but it’s one of my favorite parties, and I love to make an appearance. We may go home soon.”

The event had 15 co-chairs, including Christie’s Lydia Fenet, who was wearing a blue Vera Wang number and Tiffany jewels. “I’m a sponsored unit,” she said. “I actually sewed a rubber band on the bottom of my dress so I could hold it up by myself on my wrist when I’m going into the snow. My friends at work were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re a Renaissance woman!’”

The Deco theme had been suggested “because it’s a year when people are coming out of a Great Depression era,” Ms. Fenet explained.
Around her, doughy, fresh-faced scions in tuxedos gave the party the innocent air of a mid-century collegiate mixer. Socialite and Vogue contributor Lauren Santo Domingo appeared for pictures, but didn’t linger.

Blond co-chair and jewelry heir Coralie Charriol Paul, wearing a bedazzled, floor-length Carlos Miele gown, dragged the Transom into one of the galleries to rest her feet after gettin’ down to “Oh What a Night.” “I love theme parties,” she sighed. “I think they’re fun.” She had on a diamond headpiece—not genuine Deco, alas. “I wish, baby. I bought it at Henri Bendel this afternoon.” The snow had posed no special obstacle to her. “If you organize yourself right, you get picked up by a car, you get a gentleman helping you with an umbrella, then your feet get wet for maybe 30 seconds and you’re inside,” she said. “I live three blocks away. I still got a car, ha-ha-ha. A hybrid car!”

The dance floor was full late into the night, presided over, somewhat unexpectedly, by downtown DJs-of-the-moment Cassie Coane and Harley Viera-Newton, who were playing Lady Gaga and Outkast. “They’re embarrassing everyone here by playing this wedding music,” hissed one young buck from Tribeca who said he worked in the tequila business. “They wouldn’t be playing this if they were at Avenue, at 1 Oak. They’re playing down to the crowd.”

The two women began to go out of their way to link to and comment on each other's writings and communicate via Twitter, and Ms. Vargas-Cooper helped Ms. Baker—who asked The Observer not to reveal her day job, where Tumbling is frowned upon—edit some of her writing. When Ms. Baker published an essay on the Duke lacrosse fiasco on the Awl in December, her new friend was one of several commenters who took the high road in defending her against a Negative Nelly in the comments section, asserting, "ELEGANT PIECE, MS. BAKER." And the negative commenter was apparently killed by kindness: he/she staked out Ms. Baker on her personal blog to apologize: "I'm the person who wrote that dick-ish 'Nope, sorry' comment on your Awl article, and it is seriously HAUNTING me! I've never been that mean to someone on the internet, I'm super anti-confrontation and you're a pro and took it pro-ishly, but uggggh I'm sorry I'm such a dick. Really."

With all due respect to the Internet, it has not often been described as a "lovefest"; indeed, it has been better known as a forum for fire-breathing, semi-literate personal attacks. But suddenly, wide swaths of the Web have become bastions of support and earnest civility, where community-members "retweet" or "reblog" each other's bon mots, promiscuously proffer thumbs-up, help sell perfect strangers' books, drive traffic to each other's blogs and real-world events and even defend one another.

"People sometimes will get bent about something and put it on Facebook or Twitter and realize that's just not the tone anymore," said literary PR consultant Lauren Cerand, who kindly posted a comment on this reporter's Facebook wall about a previous article in this newspaper (we had never met in person). "That very cynical voice worked really well from 2003 to 2006." But "really negative people, they don't have a lot of friends." (In other words, you're more likely to think before you tweet when you can actually watch yourself losing your audience with each nasty missive!)

It's not just Internet logrollers riding the wave of positivity. Conan O'Brien signed off from NBC saying, "Please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism—it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere." Quite unlike aloof Madonna or spoiled Britney, pop star of the moment Lady Gaga is constantly professing what seems to be sincere, mature gratitude to her fans and creative partners on Twitter. Tom Hanks' wife, Rita Wilson, proclaimed nice "the new black" in the March Harper's Bazaar ("How often have you yawned in boredom when someone has told you about a nice person they know? What did nice do to deserve this treatment?"). Vogue, meanwhile, put Tina Fey—not beautiful, but nice-looking—on its March cover, rather than Keira Knightly or Sienna Miller. Even Bill O'Reilly seems to be softening up. "There are two kinds of political attacks," he said recently, defending President Obama from CPAC. "The personal, meant to diminish the human being, and criticism of policy, meant to persuade people the person in power is doing a bad job… The personal stuff is cheap."

PERHAPS IT'S NOT surprising that we find ourselves softer and more empathetic when so many of us are unemployed and our city's largest moneymaking industry has been publicly dressed down. The New Nice is nibbling gently at New York, a place where it was always O.K.—nay, a matter of survival—not to be nice, a.k.a. bland, submissive and/or irrelevant.

Then again, when examined more closely, there's a reassuring venality to all this e-caring-and-sharing. "All of New York really runs from this idea of the favor economy," pointed out Ms. Cerand, the PR consultant, who recently attracted funding for Girls Write Now, a charity she's involved with, by responding to a tweet. "Can I do a favor now for this person so they'll do one for me later? Some people feel that's really stressful and that everyone's operating, but I feel like that the ambition, for most people, is to be happy and successful, and from a Buddhist perspective that's something to be supported."

And speaking of the "favor economy": Even the Oscars are becoming an inclusive, populist extravaganza this year with 10 Best Picture nominees—including Sandra Bullock's warm-fuzzy-fest The Blind Side—plus Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin sharing—sharing—host duties. Also consider the mellowing of Simon Cowell, who has recently taken to hugging deposed American Idol contestants and encouraging them to keep at it. The actress Gwyneth Paltrow neatly summed up the new outlook, responding to criticisms of her treacly weekly email newsletter, Goop, in USA Today. "I think part of the problem is people get a hit of energy when they are negative about something, and it is a very detrimental way for them to get that hit of energy," said the mother of two. "They do not understand why they do not have a happy life. … I just feel sorry for them."

While the quest for a happy life has become a bona fide intellectual project in America (see sidebar), the rare outburst of mean feels like a shock to the system. When novelist Alice Hoffman took to Twitter last June to furiously attack a reviewer in The Boston Globe as a "moron" and an "idiot," it was almost refreshing to see the medium being used to its full, uncensored communicative potential. It felt authentic. (Ms. Hoffman has since erased her account.)

Ms. Hoffman, of course, is a Bostonian; and Dan Baum, who tartly tweeted about his experiences writing for David Remnick to a collective media gasp, lives in Boulder, Colo. New Yorkers, perhaps, understand better than most the value of personal branding, which, on an ever less anonymous and more community-based Internet, means we're producing a steady stream of searchable utterances attached to our name (or avatar), that ultimately defines the size and nature of our circle of influence.

ONE MIGHT ARGUE that products like Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook are designed to manipulate us into niceness.

"There's a lot of incentive and positive reinforcement when you use Tumblr," said David Karp, proprietor of the platform. To "like" someone's post is to click on a heart-shaped symbol—an easy, "friction-less" gesture, he said—but there is no way to express the opposite if you find the post vaguely illiterate. (Similarly, on Facebook, there is no thumbs-down symbol.) There is however plenty to gain in terms of followers for your own blog if you opt to re-post people's posts and add your own witty, positive commentary. Unlike many vicious Web commenters, users of these social-media platforms can be de-friended, unfollowed, ignored and potentially silenced by the platform itself. (Internet users have taken to using these tactics on people behaving badly in real life, too: When Kanye West recently stole the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Awards to say Beyoncé should have won, Facebook news feeds exploded with tsk-tsks from New Yorkers who surely agreed with him in theory.)

"Part of what's going on is that the act of typing seems public no matter what it's going into," said David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, who tweets about the Olympics and regularly praises his colleagues' work. "So even if it's an email, you have to assume that through some circumstance, it somehow might be public."

But it's not just the fear of losing our megaphone or an electronic "paper trail" that keeps us nice: Unlike on YouTube, whose commenters are made to feel like "third-class citizens" by their position on the page, the size of their font, their alienation from the main content and the incoherence of the hundreds of their fellow commenters, Mr. Karp pointed out that Twitter and Tumblr give everyone the same chance to be heard, and to interact directly with people who, offline, have more power.

This doesn't stop provocateurs like Michael Wolff from sending out purposely mean tweets like this one, in response to a missive publicizing David Brooks' appearance on Charlie Rose: "Or, for more pleasure, kill yourself." But Mr. Wolff, a relatively new tweeter, had 1,670 followers at press time; the Times' Mr. Carr has almost 250,000.

Cultural critic Lee Siegel, a regular contributor to the Daily Beast and The New Republic, described the mutually congratulatory behavior as a "cultural style," not an empathetic shift. "The pressure to please and be popular is what I don't like about this stuff," he said. "That is more lethal to journalism than a bunch of anonymous loons screaming insults."

Later, in an email, he continued: "It's as if the gene that detects insincerity had been removed from us. Or is it that we are all playing this new complicated game of insincerity? I thought we revolted against King George so that we could stop paying taxes to England and to liberate ourselves from obnoxious British insincerity." He suggested Mr. Carr "stop following himself on Twitter and get back to work." Meow!

It's clear that Internice has its limits. "If Peggy Noonan writes something in The Wall Street Journal that's absurd, ha-ha, it's always fun to make fun of Peggy Noonan," said Ms. Baker, the blogger. "But if I know that person is someone I follow, or they follow me, or I like them, I just think twice. I'm not going to write something just to be provocative or get a cheap laugh." She did that once, she said, when she'd only been on Tumblr for two weeks and had yet to learn the customs, but her sarcastic blog post just ended up making her feel horrible. "It just made me think, O.K., I can do better than this," she said.

mbryan@observer.com

Ms. Miller is known for telling her devoted readers exactly what the planets have in store for them, good and bad. Her lengthy monthly reports on AstrologyZone.com and in Elle—she began writing for the magazine in September, demanding two full pages—are optimistic but have “no sugarcoating,” said the designer Charlotte Ronson, whose chart Ms. Miller read about a year ago. (Ms. Ronson had hoped to have her twin, Samantha, present, too, but, well, the stars weren’t aligned, schedule-wise.) “She’ll be like, ‘Don’t even leave your house in September or October!’” said Ms. Ronson.

After a year that most people, not just Pisceans, would like to forget, Ms. Miller, the current leading astrologer of the style set, is having a moment. For the first time since the late ’70s, when “what’s your sign” was a universal pickup line, astrology is almost seeming a legitimate preoccupation among otherwise sensible people. Really, when things are so bad … why not? “If I’m going through something bad in my life or I’m upset, I read it and I’m like, ‘O.K., it’s not me, it’s the stars!” said fashion publicist Mandie Erickson of Seventh House, who appreciatively calls Ms. Miller’s writings “spiritual-astrological therapy.” Mary Kate Olson, Lindsay Lohan, socialites CeCe Cord and Lauren Santo Domingo, models Molly Sims and Dree Hemingway, fashion photographer Carter Smith and designer Jeremy Scott are also fans. A friend of Cameron Diaz’s purchased a reading for the actress for her birthday last fall, and so Ms. Miller jetted up to Boston, where Ms. Diaz was filming Knight and Day with Tom Cruise. Ms. Diaz made her a delicious omelette. “She’s such a little Virgo, I love her,” said Ms. Miller affectionately.

“I’m not much of a horoscope person, but she won me over,” emailed Cindi Leive, currently the editor of Glamour, who ran Ms. Miller’s column at Self for nine years (it also enjoyed a run in InStyle). “I remember her as high-energy, very positive and startlingly sane.”

It helps that Ms. Miller’s astrology is earnest and practical, with a whiff of self-improvement. She’s a Catholic, she’ll tell you, and not a psychic. It’s not her business to predict whether you’ll get that new job; instead, “I can tell you when you’re going to be viewed most favorably,” she explained. “It’s up to you to make the argument.”

At Rouge Tomate, Ms. Miller coaxed her shiny brunet bob away from her face as she began a beet salad. “Oh my gosh, this is so good,” she said. “I can’t believe it. Mmmm!”

You’ll be heartened to hear that according to the astrologer, most signs are destined for at least a fortuitous February, and, save for an eclipse at the end of June, this year in general is going to be an improvement over last. Ms. Miller explained all these things at all-day seminars costing $125 on Jan. 30 and Feb. 6 (the second date added after the first sold out), in a grand ballroom at the 3 West Club, on 51st Street, part of her own personal plan to extend her business in tough economic times.

To the already committed fashion flock, Ms. Miller is no fly-by-night, but a trusted sage who guides fragile creative endeavors and even more fragile egos through unprecedented tumult—or, less menacingly, Saturn, which is meant to teach and challenge, and to change the established order of things. Even to nonbelievers, there is something soothing about seeing world and personal events in terms of natural cycles to be weathered and learned from, each presenting opportunities to be maximized; and New York narcissists inevitably enjoy studying the many influences that comprise their own fascinating personalities. Moon in Aquarius? Well, you are destined to speak to large numbers of people. Aries in mid-heaven? You’ll eventually be an entrepreneur.

NEW YORKERS PROVIDE the largest concentration of Ms. Miller’s roughly 18 million monthly page views (six million unique), which she garners despite updating only once a month, instead of daily like most of her competitors. There are larger astrology sites on the Internet, but Ms. Miller’s is Chanel to Astrology.com’s Abercrombie & Fitch: Her readers are educated, affluent, usually childless or with children who have left home, who appreciate her specific attention to career, creative projects, appearance and fitness, parties, home decoration and even real estate opportunities.

Last fall, when the designer Cynthia Rowley, a Leo, emailed Ms. Miller to invite her to her show, the astrologer convinced her to change the date, which was astrologically “dreadful.” (“Who can argue with Susan Miller?” Ms. Rowley emailed The Observer.) Recently, Elle creative director Joe Zee, a Sagittarius, was cautioned in his forecast to be careful about retaining flood insurance. Not long afterward, “I had a leak in my roof and my kitchen flooded,” he said. “How insane is that? Whose house floods? It’s not like, ‘Oh, you’ll meet someone, you’ll get a raise.’”

Several days ago, the young blond fashion plate Becka Diamond, also a Leo, read in her forecast that Feb. 16 was a great day for her to be in the public eye. “So I look at my calendar and it turns out I’m hosting a huge party that day!” Ms. Diamond marveled. “It’s things like that where I’m like, ‘That can’t be a coincidence’.”

Ms. Miller explained that astrology is “practically like engineering. It’s all mathematical cycles, some that will repeat and some that don’t.” For example: “Pluto has not been in Capricorn since the time of the American Revolution, and when it gets to 7 degrees”—which she predicted would happen by 2012—“it will be in the same place as it was when Britain passed the stamp act, and we got so mad we started a country! Ha-ha-ha!” Ms. Miller is an avid watcher of the television news, which she keeps on “for company” while she writes in her Upper East Side apartment. “All the people in the news right now are Capricorns or Cancers,” she said. Tiger Woods, for example, who was born Dec. 30. “I could have helped him if he would’ve seen me,” she said. “I would’ve said, ‘I’m worried about this December 31 eclipse.’ It wasn’t altogether friendly to his planets.

“The U.S. is a Cancer,” she continued, on a roll. “We absolutely have to keep the defense budget up. Especially this summer. Especially around June 26. I’m so glad we are not having those trials in Chinatown, what were they thinking? Ha-ha-ha!” Ms. Miller sometimes generates full charts for people in the news, just to better understand how events will resolve themselves. Timothy Geithner—now there was a man with an impressive chart. “He has Uranus conjunct the sun,” said the astrologer. “He’s truly a genius.” 

Ms. Miller herself was born with a “very tough” chart—the planets “all squared off”—but she feels strongly that it has made her the person she is today. “People with calm, beautiful, gorgeous charts, they don’t try as hard,” she said. She will not reveal her age, though she told The Times in 1998 that she was in her “mid-forties.” She is a third-generation Manhattanite whose grandfather came over from Sicily in 1905 and settled on Elizabeth Street with a pushcart. “But it was getting expensive, so they went uptown,” she said.

A fruit and vegetable stand begot an Italian specialty food store on 75th and Second, which Ms. Miller’s father eventually took over and ran until 1981. The store delivered prosciutto and fresh produce and olive oils to famous New Yorkers like Diane von Furstenberg, John Chancellor and Richard Rodgers, who lived outside the family’s delivery zone, at the Pierre, but got delivery anyway, because her father “was so proud that Richard Rodgers was buying from him,” said Ms. Miller. She attended P.S. 82 until internal bleeding in her leg confined her to bed for most of her teenage years. She spent one year of high school in the hospital, and two bedridden above her father’s store, receiving a tutor sent by the Board of Education for two hours a week. She described her condition as a hamartoma, a benign tumor made of “veins, arteries, nerves and muscles that totally deformed the circulatory system in my left leg from the knee to the hip.” She said that only 47 other people in medical history have suffered a similar diagnosis.

MS. MILLER FOUND comfort in her mother’s astrology books. “Nobody had a computer, so you learned to do the algorithms by hand,” she said. (Now, software engineers take the calibration of the planets, distributed by NASA, and “drop them into a program.” )

Eventually young Susan consulted Horoscope magazine via letter, asking if she’d ever walk again (her mother, skilled though she was, could never be impartial on such a question). Her letter was printed, and the answer was “Yes.” Ms. Miller was hooked. “Anything that separates you from normal society lets you look through a different window and opens your heart,” she said.

Her first career was as a photography agent, but she kept up her study of the planets and eventually started AstrologyZone on the side in 1995, after giving birth to two daughters—the eldest, Chrissie, is a fashion designer herself, of the label Sophomore; the younger daughter, Diana, is now a talent executive at The Carson Daly Show—and divorcing her husband, a Scorpio and doubting Thomas (the two are still friendly, and he lives nearby). She had 17 transfusions during a 1992 operation to insert a steel rod. The steel seems to have infused her other limbs as well: Ms Miller had gone to bed at 3 a.m. nearly every night   of late preparing for her seminars and writing February’s forecasts for AstrologyZone.com. (The site started as a licensing deal with Time Warner, gained an audience and eventually moved on to Ms. Miller’s own servers; she has hired ten people to help manage all her projects and her writing.) Her forecasts which can run 3,000 words, take her seven hours to write per sign. The Elle horoscopes take four days. And then there are her iPhone and BlackBerry apps, horoscope columns in Korean W, Japanese Vogue and a Turkish glossy called Tempo, plus horoscopes for 10 Japanese Web sites and a self-publishing division (a calendar and 4,000 to 5,000 personalized books per year).

Ms. Miller writes in her apartment or at a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week. She has so little time for private clients that she charges $500 for personalized readings. Her dream is to have a show, like her ido Martha Stewart (a Leo). “All my phone calls right now are from network TV,” she sighed. “Every single station except CBS has had an executive call me. NBC, Disney, ABC … CEOs love, love, love this!”

Ms. Miller herself said she doesn’t know why astrology works, just that it does, though she admits that she’ll always be competing with others in her field who are “not serious.” “Modern man is uncomfortable with ambiguity,” she said. “I’m completely comfortable with it. The Dalai Lama says that Western man feels they have to solve every mystery in his lifetime. That’s our nature, and it’s so sweet, because it’s what makes us study and do research. But we can’t say something doesn’t exist just because we don’t know why.”

Or, as Ms. Erickson, the fashion publicist, put it: “New Yorkers, in order to improve their quality of life, have to fill in with other things, like a great astrologer, so we don’t lose our minds. New Yorkers have Central Park, and we have Susan. It’s our escape.”

mbryan@observer.com

On his computer screen was an invitation to brunch at Sam Talbot’s Surf Lodge—not the original at Montauk, but a simulacrum at Milk to be set up during Fashion Week, joining one big noisy migration of fashion-industry coolness (from Proenza Schouler to Patti Smith) to the meatpacking district. By centralizing shows that have been happening off-site for years (and providing free BMW 740s to shuttle editors back to midtown, should they still want to go), Mr. Rassi and MAC are in effect staging a punkier, younger, more downtown Fashion Week, and challenging the sleepy Lincoln Center–bound tents, wilting in their last season in Bryant Park, as Fashion Week’s ground zero.

MAC & Milk, as it’s officially called, came together last summer when Jenne Lombardo, a MAC executive, called Mr. Rassi on his honeymoon to take him up on an idea he’d proposed about coming together to help young designers put on fashion shows in a turbulent economy. Both MAC and Milk had been involved in fashion shows for years—Milk, a year-round studio and event space since 1998, has hosted Calvin Klein’s show for 16 straight seasons—but they produced their inaugural MAC & Milk event last fall, wrangling 25 designers and giving them a free venue and plenty of free makeup (their investment is about five times Milk’s,). The idea, as Mr. Rassi described it, was populist and altruistic: to help out designers they already knew, who were part of the “family,” and to make a desirable show venue available to small companies who might not otherwise be able to afford one. But unlike the tents—which, granted, can be prohibitively expensive, starting at around $25,000—you cannot choose to show at MAC & Milk. It must choose you.

“I’m a chosen one!” exclaimed designer Tim Hamilton, who is showing his secondary Redux collection at Milk this season (he shows his primary line in Paris), when The Observer reached him by phone recently. “They approached us about doing something and were very flexible about the fees. They understand independent designers and how we need assistance. They’re very thoughtful.”

Designer Jen Kao, who is showing at Milk for the second season, put it more bluntly: “There is a giant pile of people wanting to show there because of how well they’ve produced their collaboration. It’s a hot spot to show right now.”

Sophie Buhai and Lisa Mayock of Vena Cava got the call last summer, after a meeting with Anna Wintour at Vogue. “We were discussing having a fashion show or not having a fashion show, and we were discussing if we were going to be able to make it happen, and I guess Anna passed that knowledge on to them,” said Ms. Maycock. And now: “I feel like there’s a lot of talk about it. It’s kind of a hot ticket.”

Still, Mr. Rassi (most people refer to him as just Rassi) said the idea was to make Fashion Week less, not more, exclusive. He eventually hopes to get the entire meatpacking district involved in staging complementary events, and possibly even play shows on screens facing the High Line—to “share it with the public more.”

He was vague about what makes a designer qualify, beyond a history with MAC and/or Milk. “It was really done through friendship,” he said. “Who we wanted to be represented to sort of fit the overall idea of what MAC & Milk is.”

SO WHAT is MAC & Milk? “We’re MoMA, and the tents are the Met,” suggested Mr. Rassi. “That’s the best way to put it. Or we’re like the New Museum.”

With MAC, a company whose plain black packaging and careful celebrity endorsements (RuPaul, Fergie) have helped it retained “indie” cred even after it was bought by Estee Lauder, Mr. Rassi aims to carefully curate, under one roof, a museum-like mix of the new and the established, and to increase the flow of editors and buyers to young designers’ shows and presentations. They’ve worked with the CFDA this season to group their presentations at the same time each evening, so that an editor showing up to see Alexander McQueen’s lower-priced line, McQ, could also wander in to see Gwen Stefani’s line, L.A.M.B., and a new line Mr. Rassi is particularly excited about, called LnA, which is hosting not a show but a party (Ms. Smith will play a set). “When we did Band of Outsiders last year, they brought in 10,000 pounds of sand and re-created a beach,” said Mr. Rassi proudly. “And they built a little man-made lake that had a boat in it! That’s what we want. That’s how you get into MAC & Milk. We want to create.”

For many designers, MAC & Milk has been nothing short of Fashion Week salvation. “We were looking at spaces comparable in size that were between $25,000 and $40,000,” said Joseph Altuzarra, who will stage his second runway show at MAC & Milk this February. “They contacted us at a fortuitous moment, because we were having a lot of trouble finding something in our budget range. Then you still have to invest in lighting, a sound system, benches or chairs, a backdrop, renting backstage furniture, racks; there’s a huge amount of investment that goes into a show.”

Young designer Matthew Ames is also returning to Milk for the second season. “It actually cost less than showing in my showroom because I still had to pay for production, sound, lighting, seating and all of those things that are provided by MAC and Milk,” he said.

“It’s very considerable savings—like tens of thousands,” said Ms. Kao, who showed at Milk Studios before MAC came along, when a space there would rent out for $5,000 to $10,000 for a presentation room and closer to $20,000 for a larger studio, according to Mr. Rassi. “Forget being free, even if I was paying for the space, it has just made everything so clean and easy. I’ve worked for other people who have shown at the tents and it’s better if not comparable to how fast their team is.”

Meanwhile, according to Fern Mallis, the longtime senior vice president of IMG and organizer of the official Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, it is not yet clear whether prices at the tents will remain the same after the move to Lincoln Center. “We’re hoping to keep the prices comparable to what they were in Bryant Park,” she told The Observer. “There might be some cost of living where things go up a little bit, but we’re hoping to keep it the same.”

BUT IT’S NOT just price drawing designers to Milk. Ethereal Erin Fetherston, who used to show at Bryant Park, was wooed to do her runway show at MAC & Milk last September. “I wanted to go to Milk to see what a more intimate venue was like,” she said. “I like Milk because I felt like it’s Milk Studios, it’s a permanent home for the arts instead of a tent that gets thrown up.”

BESIDES A FREE space, lighting and makeup, hip geography, creative support, a team from the publicity and management firm KCD trouble-shooting production and proximity to the Boom Boom Room, MAC & Milk offers something else: packs of editors and buyers riding the elevators up and down between shows, lingering for nightly cocktail parties thrown by the Surf Lodge, eager for the opportunity to walk a few hundred feet—rather than cabbing it or taking a Town Car to some remote warehouse—to check out the latest young designers, and basking in the bleeding-edginess of it all.

“Because there are other shows in the space, it really helps your attendance, which is always a concern,” said designer Billy Reid, who hasn’t been able to show his self-titled men’s wear collection since his label dissolved in 2002 and was revived a few years later. “The support of their credibility as a venue and the group of people already involved is great.”

“It just connects with the downtown scene because the after-parties are always there and there’s a lot going on,” added Mr. Hamilton. “Downtown West Side has become easier and more central for editors and buyers now.”

Perhaps tellingly, when the CFDA hosted a cocktail party to celebrate the new home of fashion week at Lincoln Center a few weeks ago, they did so at Diane von Furstenberg’s store … in the meatpacking district, just one block south of Milk. Even Lincoln Center’s president, Reynold Levy, trekked downtown for the toast.

“We are here tonight to celebrate a new decade, and the new decade will officially start in September of this year when we move the fashion shows to the tents [at] Lincoln Center,” Ms. von Furstenberg told an audience of designers that included those who already show off-site (Georgina Chapman, Donna Karan, Rachel Roy) and those snatched up by Milk (Ms. Fetherston, Vena Cava, Peter Som).

When The Observer asked Ms. von Furstenberg whether she hoped these designers would come over and join her at Lincoln Center eventually, she said, “Well, I hope so. I think it is very important. People like to be all around one place, so if the tents are the heart of it, it will kind of fuse everything.”

Asked about Milk’s success, CFDA executive director Steven Kolb reaffirmed IMG (and its new home at Lincoln Center) as the establishment and Milk its illegitimate sibling. “You have New York Fashion Week, and under New York Fashion Week, you have IMG, which produces Mercedes Fashion Week, which is going to Lincoln Center. And then you have Milk, which is an independent space,” Mr. Kolb said. “Everything has to start with IMG, and then that will pump blood to the other venues.”

ialeksander@observer.com, mbryan@observer.com

It’s a sentiment increasingly familiar to New York diners. In the past few years, offal—the animal parts that fall off the butcher table, like the entrails, head and feet—has progressed from a rare delicacy at risk-taking restaurants like Babbo, Prune and Michael White’s now-defunct Fiamma to a ubiquity of near–pork-belly proportions. Prime beef? Hopelessly minor league, not to mention kind of unenlightened. Call yourself a chef? Let’s see what you can do with a whole (locally raised, hormone-free, of course) carcass. Let’s see you braise a kidney.

Meanwhile, butcher shops like the Meat Hook in Williamsburg and Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market sell ambitious amateurs everything from headcheese to chorizo-stuffed duck hearts. A blog called Nose to Tail at Home chronicles the Julie Powell–like adventures of a young foodie named Ryan Adams (not the singer) attempting to cook from the British chef Fergus Henderson’s seminal 2004 offal bible, The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. And last summer’s inevitable nationally televised offal street-food competition occurred not on Fear Factor but Top Chef Masters, with Chicago’s Rick Bayless’ tongue tacos triumphing.

“It shows a level of skill and also a care and concern,” said Seamus Mullen, chef at Boqueria in Soho and on 19th Street, who regularly serves pan-roasted sweetbreads, pork liver terrines, lamb kidneys and rabbit organs. Mr. Mullen said that the dishes, while not yet blockbusters, sell well, especially when he puts them in small, cheaper appetizer portions—less of a commitment. There is an obvious spirit of daring to the entrail enterprise. “When we first opened L’Artusi and even Dell’anima, all I wanted on the menu was funky, weird shit,” said Gabe Thompson, chef at the two West Village Italian restaurants, where he cooks sweetbreads and livers and has considered adding brains. “Cooks like to eat funky, weird shit, and cooks like to send other cooks out funky, weird shit.”

High on the Hog

Cesare Casella is currently serving plenty of guanciale and Sloppy Guisseppe (a sloppy Joe made of leftover parts like oxtail and bone marrow) at Salumeria Rosi Parmacotto on the Upper West Side. He served a veal brains special at the now-shuttered Maremma, along with Granelli—“otherwise known as Rocky Mountain Oysters or cow’s balls,” Mr. Casella said, but “brains were so much harder to sell than testicles. … For some reason, diners were more comfortable with the idea of eating balls.”

Mr. Batali, the primary auteur of fine dining’s current offalmania, has had better luck with his lamb’s brain “francobolli,” a staple since he put it on Babbo’s opening menu in 1998. “I used it because it was an inexpensive way to profit,” he told The Observer, “but also because it served to distinguish my restaurants from the rest of the Italian restaurants that pretty much had veal Milanese and ricotta ravioli with tomato sauce.” He also cites “philosophical responsibility.”

For all the balls-out (sorry) nature of offal, chefs offering it still tend to traffic in euphemism. A handy glossary: guanciale (pork jowl), trotters (pig’s feet), cod milt (cod sperm, once offered at the now-shuttered John Dory on 10th Avenue), tripe (stomach, though it sounds more like a mild white fish, which perhaps helps account for its popularity), Orielles de Christ (pig skin, available at the Vanderbilt in Brooklyn) and, of course, so-called sweetbreads (thymus and pancreas, available everywhere from Babbo to Prune to Little Italy). Some offal is more straightforward in name, such as fatback (literally, back fat) and caul fat (a fatty membrane surrounding pig intestines). And organs like the liver, kidney and brains have largely evaded semantic cover, though they also sometimes escape mention in terrines around town, where they add depth of flavor if not commercial appeal.

At the new Breslin at the Ace Hotel, April Bloomfield, a Brit and offal’s reigning high priestess, has dispensed with the niceties and is serving “Stuffed Pig’s Foot (for 2),” which Times critic Sam Sifton described as “the size of a toddler’s leg.” And possibly piggybacking (sorry again) on the favor for British cooking cultivated by Ms. Bloomfield, a new Scottish gastropub in the West Village called the Highlands has begun tempting/repulsing customers with haggis, the traditional Scottish delicacy involving boiling intestines in a sheep’s stomach. Mr. Thompson said the civilian clientele for offal consists of two distinct groups: “All these people who are 20 being like, ‘I eat everything!’; and people who are 60 saying, ‘I haven’t eaten sweetbreads since I was a little kid!’” At the Spotted Pig, where crispy pig’s ear is the sixth best-selling dish, owner Ken Friedman recently observed, “These people come in, mostly older English people, and they eat [chef Bloomfield’s] liver and onions and bacon, and they like have tears in their eyes.”

Sumptuous when cooked right and revolting when botched, offal is the perfect medium for showing off. “It’s all about stimulus,” said Saul Bolton, who is currently cooking real French andouille sausage—i.e., pork stomach blanched and slow-cooked and glued together with “hog gel” before being stuffed into pork large intestine, cold-smoked and poached—at the Vanderbilt. “It’s like TV: The textures are more varied, the flavors more varied, it’s a much more interesting eating experience all-around. If you allow yourself to spend the time to really get to know feet, tail and head, they’re so much tastier than any other part!”

Undoubtedly, some chefs relish offal’s aloofness and lack of appeal to the city’s growing vegetarian, allergenic population: David Chang, for one, an innards enthusiast who once famously excised his only vegetarian dish from the menu after being chastised for being insensitive to meat-avoiders; and Gabrielle Hamilton, who has served sweetbreads and bone marrow at Prune since 1999 (she also serves veal hearts and monkfish liver, and calves’ brains every Valentine’s Day). “It was this very efficient kind of mutual interview for a date,” she said of her offal. “Like, here’s my menu and it’s very plain what’s available here. It weeded out a clientele.”

Cheek Chic

But though the snob appeal of challenging organ meats cannot be denied, “people who say we’re an elitist movement are ignoring entire cultures that are based off lesser cuts,” said Patrick Martins, owner of Heritage Foods USA, which supplies pork from small farms to Mr. Batali, Mr. Chang, Ms. Bloomfield and Daniel Boulud, among others. In certain enclaves of the city, offal isn’t back so much as it never went anywhere; it’s a staple of, say, traditional Italian, Spanish, Dominican, Puerto Rican and Greek cuisines. Mr. Mullen of Boqueria describes having Dominican tripe that, touted as a hangover cure, “really tastes like cow gut,” on the Lower East Side; Mr. Gold, the author, often treks to Yakitori Totto, in midtown, for “chicken parts”—i.e., “hearts, livers, gizzards, bones, cartilage, the tail, crispy chicken tails, which are amazing crunchy little nuggets.” (He called this restaurant his “happy place.”)

A quick glance at a Gourmet cookbook first released in 1950 reveals the extent to which we’ve become squeamish eaters in a single generation: The book boasted 51 recipes for offal, most French; the most recent Gourmet cookbook, released in 2009, had two. Ms. Hamilton grew up eating a wide variety of organs cooked by her French mother in rural New Jersey; Mr. Batali was raised in Seattle on liver slathered in ketchup. “When I landed in New York City in ’92, I thought, ‘Wow, what an interesting place filled with a lot of steaks and tuna and chicken!’” he said.

Only in Manhattan could we pay premium prices for something once considered a culinary castoff. Farmers and purveyors used to send innards in bags attached to the carcasses for free, but offal has become a specialty item that is, in some cases, more expensive than filet mignon. “The stuff’s doubled,” said Pat LaFrieda, the famed third-generation meat man who keeps 600 of Manhattan’s best restaurants stocked. Mr. LaFrieda estimates that offal currently makes up 10 percent of his business, up from 5 percent five years ago and 2 percent 10 years ago. “I’m constantly speaking to the packers when I call and ask for offal, and they say, ‘What are you guys doing with it?’” said Mr. LaFrieda, who estimated that “lamb’s brains have gone from $2.50 to $5 a pound, veal cheeks have gone from $5 to $10 a pound in the last five years; pork livers are maybe up 50 percent.” (Filet mignon, meanwhile, goes for $7 or $8 a pound.) Calf livers are up about 30 percent in the past five years, Mr. LaFrieda added, and other veal items are the same price they were 20 years ago.

The rise of guts is good news for small farmers who once gave the stuff away, but it has decreased chefs’ margins on dishes that were once moneymakers. “These used to be the ones that might buy me a Mercedes-Benz, but now I’m definitely going to be in a Volkswagen forever,” bemoaned Ms. Hamilton, who now pays upward of $8 a pound for sweetbreads and anywhere from $9 to $19 a pound for monkfish liver, an expensive delicacy in Japan.

Still, Mr. LaFrieda said that offal’s limited regional appeal (currently, the revival has not spread beyond New York and a few other urban culinary centers) means that prices will only rise so much, because the supply of animals with organs to give is “not tapped out.”

In which case: Will we eventually tire of seeing hooves and intestines alongside salt cod and rib-eyes? Cheek is hot right now, but after that, what next? What is left to eat? Former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl recently predicted via Twitter that “lamb necks might be the pork belly of 2010.” Mr. LaFrieda, for his part, is burning through 200 pounds of veal tongue a week and has been fielding requests for cock’s combs—currently on the menu at Michael White’s Alto. Mr. Martins of Heritage Foods admitted to selling the “bunghole”—that’s exactly what it sounds like—to a chef in Virginia, who uses it to make sausage casing. He also said that Mr. Batali has been recently begging him for pig’s bladder, currently banned by the U.S.D.A.

“He’s like, ‘I’ll pay you anything for pig’s bladder,’” said Mr. Martins. “I think he wants to cook stuff in it.” Ms. Hamilton, meanwhile, one of the original harbingers of the trend, is moving on, in her mind if not yet on her menu, from the modern obsession with cooking things “for the sake of being outlandish,” an attitude she described as “‘Hey, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put pork snout on top of pork belly and then I’m going to fry it, man.’” What will she do instead? Perhaps “a little crab salad and a half an avocado and a glass of Lillet,” she said.

mbryan@observer.com

The juice bar was a spare operation, offering premade juices, Thai lettuce wraps and chocolate chip cookies shaped like hearts (none heated above 118 degrees, “to preserve vital enzymes and nutrients,” advised the menu), all imported from the kitchen of Ms. Melngailis’s raw-food restaurant, Pure Food & Wine, on Irving Place. The proprietress’s image—sassy, blond, youthful—gazed down serenely from her latest cookbook, Living Raw Food, which was stacked behind the register. “Get the Glow,” promised its cover. Ms. Melngailis’ fetching visage also appears on her e-commerce site, oneluckyduck.com (in one shot, she seems to cuddle up to a bundle of cilantro), where she sells her own branded packaged snacks and blogs under the headline “Sarma Raw.”

But today, she was slumped at a table over her laptop in a ponytail, Phish baseball hat and a long-sleeved T-shirt that said “Pennsylvania Wrestling.” She’d been up until 5 a.m. writing important emails pertaining to this long-planned expansion of her raw-food empire and hadn’t even had time to wash her hair. In person, Ms. Melngailis, who is 37, can be guarded, serious and prone to long pauses while she formulates the right thought; her measured affect contrasts with the raw-food pinup image she projects on her cookbooks. She is fiercely protective of her brand, having wrestled Pure Food from the grip of Matthew Kenney, her co-founder and onetime boyfriend, in the aftermath of their public and acrimonious split four years ago. “We need more stuff in here,” she said, professing dismay at the lack of homey touches (framed pictures of ducks, a selection of organic cosmetics) that make the original One Lucky Duck juice bar, adjacent to the restaurant on 17th Street, appealing to the clientele of models constantly folded into its chairs. She felt the new space had opened before it was really ready.

A little over a week later, a visitor to Chelsea Market noticed there was even less stuff in Ms. Melngailis’ shop; in fact, there was none. “I ended up going there at night and pulling all my product and staff out, ninja style,” Ms. Melngailis said, reached by phone. She had had a kerfuffle with an investor she preferred not to name (though she did provide The Observer with his cell-phone number, calls to which were not returned). “They had more control, technically,” said Ms. Melngailis, “And I didn’t think that it was going to be the sort of control where things plow forward, and I’m sort of steamrolled over in terms of saying, ‘Wait a minute, this needs to be this way and this needs to be this way.’” Ms. Melngailis said she “felt like I was being pushed into this role of bobble-head promoter.”

IN FACT, she is a serious businesswoman who wants to bring her brand of “accessible, high-quality,” oven-free eating to the masses via a series of juice-bar takeaways in several different cities (she compared her model to Le Pain Quotidien’s). Last summer, Ms. Melngailis paved the way for this expansion by purchasing Pure Food from its original investor, Jeffrey Chodorow, and establishing an umbrella company, One Lucky Duck, LLC, owned wholly by her. She also enlisted a new investor to finance the juice-bar expansion: first in Chelsea Market, and then, if all went well, elsewhere in Manhattan and other cities. Luckily, as the larger deal hinged on the success of the Chelsea Market location, no paperwork had yet been signed; Ms. Melngailis said that to her knowledge, her investor is stuck with the lease. A representative for Chelsea Market refused to comment on the current tenant or future plans for the space, which now sits empty.

A former banker at Bear Sterns who admits to not knowing her way around Brooklyn, Ms. Melngailis is proud of the high-end, “sexy” sheen she’s put on her brand of crunch. If raw food has in the years since Pure Food’s opening ceded media ink to trends like locavorism and artisanal butchery, which she sees as complementary (Ms. Melngailis herself admits to eating fish regularly until reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent book, Eating Animals), Pure Food soldiers on, weathering a recession that has flattened more formidable enterprises, serving pricey sake drinks, zucchini lasagna and cashew-based ice creams to loyal fans like Gisele Bündchen and Woody Harrelson. (According to Page Six, Owen Wilson, a regular and a friend of Ms. Melngailis’, recently skipped the line at One Lucky Duck and wandered right into the kitchen.) When Ms. Melngailis first met Mr. Kenney, in 2003, she was a finance refugee and dedicated carnivore just out of culinary school whom he’d hired as a researcher on one of his cookbooks. He was at the time a troubled culinary superstar, beginning to close a string of New York restaurants for financial reasons. During a “grim” summer when he had no working businesses, the couple were beginning to work on a concept for an upscale burger bar (“Back then, it would have been new!” said Ms. Melngailis) when they happened upon raw food at the café Quintessence. There they struck up a conversation with a pretty girl eating alone, who told them, “I wish someone would open a cool raw-food restaurant.”

IT WAS A light-bulb moment for Ms. Melngailis, who with Mr. Kenney repaired to Maine, where they vacationed in the summers, to experiment with a raw-food diet. “I just felt like a fog had been lifted from my head, which is a really nice feeling,” she said. Mr. Chodorow came on board as a backer in what he explained recently was a conciliatory gesture after he had tried—and failed—to buy Mr. Kenney’s leasehold at Commune, on 20th Street, and wound up circumventing him to get the lease directly from the landlord. “I’d done some reading, and I thought, ‘Oh, very interesting,’ not for my lifestyle, but they were both on it and they felt great,” Mr. Chodorow said. He saw no signs of potential strife between the two. “They’d come in for a meeting and she’d have her little sneakers on that on the back said, ‘I love Matthew!’” he remembered. When they did split, he sided with Ms. Melngailis. “I thought she was fully capable culinarily, and she had the business background,” Mr. Chodorow said. “He had a lot of unsuccessful business ventures.” (Mr. Chodorow later sued Mr. Kenney for poaching staff from Pure Food for a restaurant he subsequently opened, Heirloom, which has since closed.)

Reached by email, Mr. Kenney said he was out of the country and unavailable for comment. “On a side note, I’m sure Jeffrey and I in fact do not remember things the same way,” he added.

A tabloid battle ensued, with Mr. Kenney accusing Ms. Melngailis of having an affair with one of the restaurant’s managers and of subjecting him to physical abuse, and Ms. Melngailis countering with statements like “he is reminding me of David Gest.”

“He was very clever in that everything he claimed was technically true, but was generally exaggerated so it came out sounding really dramatic, like the assault charge he filed,” said Ms. Melngailis (now cohabiting happily across the street from Pure Food with a musician who once worked in her juice bar). “Yes, I threw grapefruits at him, but I think that’s funny!”

WORSE THAN THE tabloid drama was the debt Ms. Melngailis said Mr. Kenney saddled her with after she invested in some of his failed ventures. “When I met him, I had a lot of money,” she said. “Within two years, I was in debt by the same amount, more actually. That’s a burden I’ve been carrying around for seven years now. It’s exhausting. And debilitating. It really sucks, actually. And most people have no idea, so it feels sort of lonely carrying around. Meanwhile, I’ve been building One Lucky Duck all this time with little to no investment capital, but it’s what I’m meant to do, and at some point the debt will be gone. It’s like playing a game with a big handicap. It gets in the way, but I can still win.”

“I want to build a really big business,” Ms. Melngailis said. Still: “This not a Jamba Juice—it’s a much more careful and personal kind of thing.” She admitted she’d been approached many times to do television, but “my goal isn’t to be a TV person,” she said. “I’m a little camera-shy.” She views herself as more Richard Branson than Martha Stewart: brand mastermind, not the brand itself. In addition to the juice bar and takeaways, she’s mulling a high-end dessert shop where she’d sell Pure Food’s popular array of ice creams, and a new headquarters for oneluckyduck.com, which she said does about half a million dollars in sales each year and is highly “scalable.” She’s also had meetings about a possible Pure Food outpost in Japan.

The deal for the series of juice bars and takeaways would have been a big break, but, speaking by phone several days after pulling out, Ms. Melngailis said her only regret was that “it looks like I went in there and tried to do it and it didn’t work. That place could have been awesome!” She hinted, in fact, that should her former investor give up the space, she’d be thrilled to scrounge up the money to return to Chelsea Market on her own. “What I don’t want to do is let anyone else take control.”

mbryan@observer.com

Ms. Lebenthal, clad in a flowing red Carolina Herrera skirt and massive gemstone earrings, credited a “part holistic, part traditional” doctor for the breakthrough; she has since excised the offending fruit from her diet (“except ketchup. I’m totally fine with ketchup”). Still, a new empathy had encouraged her to attend tonight’s ball, despite her three allergy-free offspring. “I’m sort of this newcomer to saying, ‘There can’t be any tomatoes, or peanuts, or whatever,’” she said. 

Around her, the food-allergy crowd nibbled fried mac-and-cheese bites prepared by this year’s guest chef and Lifetime Achievement Award Winner, Emeril Lagasse (a full list of ingredients was available on the serving platter). Mary Richardson Kennedy, wife of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—himself stuck in West Virginia—brought her allergic son, Conor; billionaires David and Julia Koch left theirs home this year; restaurateurs Drew Nieporent and Daniel Boulud gamely mingled. 

Tales of prandial woe abounded. “I’ll tell you the saddest thing,” said Ms. Koch, a tall woman with excellent posture in a floor-length white confection with matching white fur stole. “We’re at the Yankees World Series game, and [food-allergic son David Jr., age 11] is sitting there with his popcorn that we brought and he looked around and he could smell all the delicious food, and he said, ‘When am I ever going to be able to eat real food?’” Ms. Koch shook her head. “Unless I can go talk to the chef personally and verify all the ingredients, it’s just not worth it.” David Jr.’s Manhattan private school, whose name Ms. Koch requested be withheld, had been very cooperative. “He used to have to carry around his emergency kit in the school on his belt loop and in Central Park,” she said. But now, “the kitchen is aware of it, the nurse is aware of it; they have EpiPens on every floor.”

Charles Koppelman, executive (chairman of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Monday evening’s guest of honor, had two food-allergic adolescent granddaughters in tow. “When you go to a restaurant, you’re kind of interrogating everybody,” he said. “Is the waiter using peanuts? Has the chef ever had a peanut?” “What I’m going to say tonight,” he continued, referring to his planned dinner speech, “is, ‘Forget Amex, I don’t leave home without my EpiPen!’”

Friends like Mr. Koch and Mr. Koppelman helped the Food Allergy Initiative raise $3.9 million on Monday night alone (which was down from more than $5 million at 2007’s ball, but still trounced the $1.5 million New Yorkers for Children raised at its fall gala in September). As one attendee at the Transom’s table reported hearing as he entered the ballroom, “If your kid’s going to be sick with something, let’s hope they’re sick with something the rich people’s kids are sick with, because then they fix it.” Harvard medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis pointed out in the British Medical Journal last year that food allergies kill 150 people a year (some researchers put the figure at 200), as compared to bee stings (50), lightning strikes (100) and motor vehicle collisions (45,000). He argued that our inflation of the threat—many U.S. elementary schools have outlawed peanuts—bore “many of the hallmarks of mass psychogenic illness (MPI).”

The Food Allergy Initiative promptly replied, issuing a press release disputing many of Mr. Christakis’ claims. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in 2008 that the number of young people with food allergies had increased 18 percent between 1997 and 2007.

In a speech at the Waldorf, FAI board president Todd Slotkin outlined several promising treatments in the works, including a Chinese herbal therapy being developed by the prominent allergist Dr. Hugh Sampson of Mt. Sinai (ready as soon as 2011) and a parasite “similar to those found in the stomachs of most citizens in developing countries,” which could someday be introduced into imperiled Upper East Side intestines, the theory being that “in the developed world, we live in too clean of an environment, so our immune system has nothing familiar to attack.”

In the meantime, guests mulled a world in which the peanut-butter sandwich had gone the way of marbles and rotary phones. “Peanut butter and jelly is not like it was when we were growing up,” said Ms. Lebenthal, whose daughter insisted her bat mitzvah last month be peanut-free to accommodate an allergic best friend. “Tomatoes actually come from the digitalis family,” she said. “Which is foxglove, and that is poisonous. Somebody told me that when the Europeans came to the New World, the Indians came out with tomatoes, which they assumed was a welcome gift, but it wasn’t!”

“You’d better fact-check that,” piped up her husband.

The 2002 Ford Excursion in which Mr. Bastianich commutes every morning from Greenwich, Conn., has a converted diesel engine. He fills up not at Hess, but on 16th Street, where a long hose extending down a ramp from his 10th Avenue restaurant siphons filtered remnants of last night’s dinner—used fryer oils, mostly the rice oil that chef Mark Ladner prefers—into his truck. Mr. Bastianich estimates this saves him between $6,000 and $8,000 a year (the conversion itself cost about $3,000). Best of all, “these other biodiesels always smell like nasty French fries,” he told the Transom. “Mine smells like lightly fried scallops, calamari and sardines.”

Currently, Mr. Bastianich and one of his farmers are the only people filling up at Del Posto; the restaurant had converted a delivery truck, but it recently broke down in an unrelated incident. Mr. Batali, a “city boy,” as Mr. Bastianich put it, takes taxis and drives his moped.

“When it’s really cold out, it’s challenging,” Mr. Bastianich admitted. “Because the fat—it’s white and hard, you’ve seen it in the freezer. That’s basically what you have in your gas tank.” (Up in Greenwich, he plugs his truck into an extension cord at night.)

In addition to Del Posto, Mr. Bastianich co-owns seven other Manhattan restaurants, a wine shop and a soon-to-be 32,000-square-foot artisanal Italian food market called Eataly at 200 Fifth Avenue. He visits up to half a dozen of these enterprises per day, taking calls in his truck in between. He drives, by his own estimation, 100 miles before returning home around midnight.

“There was a moment when you’d get stickers on your car when you were parked in the Village,” he said. “I always get pissed off when I get the stickers: ‘Fuel pig, you’re responsible for the deaths in Iraq!’”

If only the haters knew: Del Posto also uses only recycled toilet and menu paper and shuns bottled water in favor of its own filtered water, according to Elizabeth Meltz, Messrs. Batali and Bastianich’s director of food safety and sustainability. Of course, as Ms. Meltz points out, everything can’t be eco-conscious, otherwise “all winter all you’d serve is pumpkin and apples.” But she is planning to convert a delivery truck in Vegas (where the organization owns three restaurants) to biodiesel, and Mr. Bastianich is considering converting his wife’s car and installing a biodiesel furnace in his house. Then there is his antique Dutch picnic boat—“like a floating piece of furniture”—which he drives in the summer from Chelsea Piers, near Del Posto, to the Tarry Lodge, his restaurant in Port Chester. Starting next year, it too will smell faintly of fritto misto.

Mr. Bastianich is also considering installing another “filling station” up in Port Chester, where he will open a specialty foods store called Tarry Foods in March. Interested Tarry Foods customers would get an allocation of biofuel based on what they spend in the store. “We have so much of it,” said Mr. Bastianich, who pointed out he used to pay someone to cart away Del Posto’s 100 to 150 gallons per week of excess oil, but that it is now taken by Tri-State Biodiesel for free.

“We’re not rampant hippie do-gooders,” he said. “We’re into making money.”

Upstairs, designer Narciso Rodriguez, taking refuge in an air bubble near the front of the room, said he couldn’t remember when he’d first visited the place, long popular with the fashion crowd. “I don’t know, it was a haze,” he said. “I was talking to somebody and I said, ‘You know, everything that was fun that happened in New York happened at Indochine at one point or another.’”

Recently, Mr. Rodriguez hosted another party, for the book Indochine: Stories, Shaken and Stirred (Rizzoli) at Bergdorf Goodman. The city has changed, but Indochine has not, he said. “We just grew up.”

Jean-Marc Houmard, the most visible of the restaurant’s three owners, bought and reopened Indochine immediately after Brian McNally—restaurateur and brother-of-Keith who escaped the city for a simpler life in Saigon—closed it in 1992. Mr. Houmard had been the maitre’d. He said he first visited the restaurant as a customer at age 25, after graduating from law school in Geneva and taking a law firm job in New York. “I saw Bianca, I saw Halston, I saw Jerry Hall; it was like being in a movie,” he said.

In his tenure as owner, neither the food nor the faded-wicker décor has been updated. So what’s different? “People don’t go out quite as late now,” said Mr. Houmard, who has negotiated another 15 years on Indochine’s lease, which is not yet up. “I remember we were still seating at 12:30 or 1 early on, but now after 11 or 11:30, it’s kind of the end of seating. The after-hours culture is not what it used to be.”

Slender and reserved, Mr. Houmard claims not to follow fashion. He attributes Indochine’s enduring popularity with models to its non-greasy food and flatteringly low lighting.

Onetime regulars like Calvin Klein weren’t at the party, but actors Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, Willem Dafoe—who is currently in a production across the street at the Public Theater—stylist Pat Field, and socialites Yvonne Force Villareal and Genevieve Jones made appearances. Designer Anna Sui commandeered a booth with model Carolyn Murphy. Model Julia Restoin-Roitfeld stood behind the hostess’ station. “I come here all the time, so I feel like I should be on the other side,” she said. “I’ve had my three last birthdays here, my brothers’ three last birthdays, all the big events … It’s quite a magical place, you know?”