Theater audience members are getting more annoying.

The fight broke out during the first act of Glengarry Glen Ross.

As Al Pacino and Bobby Cannavale circled each other on the boards, a well-dressed woman in the audience was noisily working her way through a cellophane package of Twizzlers. When she was shushed by a man in the next seat, her thuggish husband loudly intervened.

The exchange became more heated until the husband—who could have passed for a second-tier personal injury attorney from Planet of the Apes—ridiculously challenged his adversary to “take it outside.” The pace may have been a little slow on stage, but those of us in the mezzanine were riveted by the imminent possibility of actual violence.

For an increasing number of Broadway-goers like Our Lady of the Twizzlers, enjoying a night at the theater means behaving like they’re relaxing at home, watching the big-screen on their sofa. Such a sense of entitlement, and the push-back it provokes from touchy fellow-audience-members, means that aggressive confrontations have joined more common-place theater annoyances like texting or a ringing cell phone.

“It’s getting worse,” says theater publicist Billy Zavelson. “People seem to be unaware of the fact that even checking the time on your phone infuriates a dozen people around you, and it’s happening more and more.”

Portable technology seems to be the catalyst of many in-theater fights. Most people have been to a live performance where a ringing cell phone has interrupted the show—some even have stories in which the offender chose to take the call.

Texting or using a mobile web browser has emerged as a form of annoying audience behavior to which some people feel especially entitled. The reasoning seems to be that because such activity does not involve audio, it should be allowed. But once a sensitive fellow theatergoer catches sight of the glowing screen, it can be easy to fixate on the irritation, like a dripping faucet in the still of the night.

National Review columnist Kevin Williamson became an Internet hero today after writing about his experience seeing Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 yesterday at Kazino on West 13^th Street. After exchanging words with a woman whom he believes was using her phone to Google during the performance, he snatched it from her hand and threw it across the room, where it hit a curtain. So she slapped him, and summoned the event space’s security director.

Williamson wrote that the theater official attempted to make him stay on the premises, as the woman was considering pressing charges. He declined, and went home to pen an angry column.

“In a civilized world, I would have received a commendation of some sort,” he wrote. “To the theater-going public of New York—nay, the the world—I say: ‘You’re welcome.’”

In Mr. Zavelson’s opinion, on-demand and streaming media services have accustomed people to viewing “shows” in the casual atmosphere of their homes, and they bring those manners with them into the public space. When their behavior elicits a strong response from another typically over-wound New Yorker, even minor issues can quickly escalate.

“There are the ‘shushes’ that are louder than any cell phone ringing,” he said. “I used to be the one who was, ‘Will you please shut up!’ Then you get so embarrassed because you realize you have acted disproportionately to the original issue. You become that Upper West Side, Lincoln Plaza movie person, where there are only three people in the theater and they’re yelling, ‘Shut up, shut up’ to the person behind them who’s eating fried chicken.”

How common is it for an audience member to go from “shushing” a fellow patron to actually touching them? It seems to happen all the time.

Observer theater critic Jesse Oxfeld recalls “the time I reached across my date and grabbed an old man's arm as he started opening his second bag of M&Ms. After I'd patiently sat through him crinkling his way through the first bag."

But that was nothing compared to the recent experience of Dean Kurth. The television news producer was attending Matilda on April 19, when his companion asked the woman next to him “to stop talking and texting. “

“Apparently he brushed her arm lightly in an effort to get her attention,” Mr. Kurth related in an email. “She didn't like that and their conversation quickly became a shouting match that was audible to many over the show. The woman was yelling, ‘Don't put your hand in my face!’"

“At intermission the woman started up again as my friend and I tried to leave our row.  It got pretty ugly and this time the entire crowd in the balcony took notice.” A uniformed security guard intervened, and further confrontation was prevented thanks to the woman switching seats.

“I'd never seen anything like it,” wrote Mr. Kurth. “I guess the lesson is, don't touch anyone in a dark theater.”

Ken Davenport, a producer whose credits include Macbeth, Kinky Boots and Godspell, believes the industry needs to respond to increasingly poor behavior in the stalls.

“Theatergoing manners (like manners in general) have been on the decline over the past 20-30 years,” he wrote on his blog, the Producer’s Perspective, in April. “As our audience expanded, and our ability to sit still has waned, some manners have gone out the window.”

Mr. Davenport offered a six-point plan for improving audience behavior, including better training for theater staff and publishing a guide to etiquette in every Playbill and emailing it to customers before each performance.

Point No. 6: “Install ejector seats?”

Once, I even got into an argument at a show with a Broadway actor. It was Pacific Overtures at Studio 54, which had an ambiguous seating arrangement using four-top bar tables. The second act was in full swing as I squabbled over seats with Tony Roberts, known for playing Woody Allen’s best friend in several of his films and their stage versions.

When the usher got involved, she discovered it was the other couple at the table that was squatting. Mr. Roberts and I muttered our apologies, and years later I saw him in Xanadu.

If it happened again today, I believe the etiquette would be to hit him.

Even if we knew where David Chang partied, we wouldn't tell.

The James Beard Awards, which took place last week at Lincoln Center, have rightly been described as the “Oscars for the Food World.” But because they reward chefs and not good-looking people, and because many in the food world are functioning alcoholics, the whole point of the Beards isn’t the ceremony itself, which is boring, but the parties that follow.

This year’s circuit followed thusly: as the gala ended, the really important OGs—Thomas Keller, Jacques Pépin, Daniel Boulud—headed to Per Se, which was closed for the event. Sad people not invited learned as much from a sign on the door. And even though Mr. Boulud stopped by Per Se, he opened Boulud Sud, which is right across the street from Lincoln Center, to welcome the hoi polloi. Vive la différence!

Next, half the crowd went to Del Posto, which won a Beard Award for Outstanding Service. Lidia Bastianich stood on the stairwell and gave a speech. Bartenders were manhandled and the place was packed. The other half of the revelers—the cooler half?—went to Mission Chinese. That was a hot and sweaty tangle of glory and champagne, because Danny Bowien, who had amazing multicolored hair and wore a white Dries Van Noten suit, had won Rising Star Chef.

Across town, the third floor at The Spotted Pig—yes, there’s a third floor; it’s where Jay-Z eats gnudi—was essentially a hot box, packed with chefs like Ignacio Mattos, formerly of Isa, Frank Falcinelli, one of the Prime Meats Franks, and Michael Schwartz of Michael’s Genuine in Miami. A bunch of Mission Chinese people were there too, somewhere.

David Chang was almost certainly getting drunk somewhere as well, and likely encouraging others to do the same, having won yet another Beard Award (this year, it was for Outstanding Chef). A few years ago he had a party bus with a stripper pole and a nondisclosure form. That’s all we’ll say about that.

On this night, all roads eventually led to a Garment District loft where Will Guidara and Daniel Humm of The NoMad and Eleven Madison Park were throwing an invitation-only rager. By invitation-only, of course, we mean there was an invitation that said “invitation only,” but anyone could show up, and everyone did. GM Jeffrey Tascalrella stood at the door on a deserted stretch of 27th Street. “We have Manhattans on tap,” he said excitedly. “It’s an experiment.”

Anxious not to trash their very nice restaurants, Mr. Guidara et al. had hired out a Spartan flat, filled it with Christmas lights, bottles of Maker’s, kegs of Manhattans and a deejay and opened the doors. I saw Andrew Zimmern, not drinking but wearing Stubbs & Wooten slippers. Brian Canlis of Canlis, the best restaurant in Seattle, exuded a combination of excitement and sweat. Even though Mr. Canlis had lost, he said, “This is the best weekend ever. I never get to see all these guys.”

More and more people showed up until you couldn’t move or breathe, but you were so drunk it didn’t matter. Was it the disco ball that spun, or did everything spin? Was there even a disco ball? Was that Jacques Pépin dancing dirty with Stephanie Izzard? (No, he wasn’t there.) Did we get into an hour-long conversation about Tumblr with someone who works at Tumblr? (Yes.) Was it time to go? (Certainly.)

In the elevator, Paul Bartolotta congratulated the Transom on our Beard Award, which is something he made up, while his wife complained that she was hungry.

But even as we left, more arrived. Kate Krader, restaurant editor of Food + Wine, was there with an entourage that included Sang Yoon from Los Angeles’s Lukshon and Chris Cosentino from San Francisco’s Incanto. Around 2 a.m., some more people showed up who weren’t dressed in tuxedos at all but in NYPD uniforms.

That’s when the party ended and a yearlong hangover began.

Apparently not. Here’s the latest—you may recall that last year four women filed sexual-harassment allegations against Brooklyn Assemblyman Vito Lopez. There was some question about how Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s office handled the complaints. A full and impartial investigation was ordered, and rightly so.

Now legislators are demanding the opportunity to edit the results of the full and impartial investigation conducted by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, a state agency. Apparently, the lawmakers fear that the investigation was just a little too full and impartial.

Here’s the worst part: the co-chairs of the bipartisan Legislative Ethics Commission are behind the effort to edit—some might say “censor”—the as-yet-unreleased report about the Lopez scandal. Reports indicate that lawmakers object to any discussion of how the Lopez matter was handled, even though that was the impetus for the investigation in the first place.

All of this is unfolding in the midst of a corruption scandal that has led to the arrest of several top-ranking legislators in recent weeks. If legislators are worried about public perception, they have an odd way of showing it.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, an old Albany hand, knows that legislators are not keen about outsiders snooping around the Capitol. As The Observer reported, the governor doesn’t want what he dubbed “Scandalmania” hijacking his agenda. That’s why his recent threat to empanel a Moreland Commission—an independent investigative body that could look into broad ethics complaints—was a shrewd one.

If lawmakers can’t be shamed into getting serious about ethics reform, the governor’s threat may simply force the issue.

Sadly, it may be the only way to change the culture in Albany.

A gaggle of candidates seeking to succeed Mr. Bloomberg turned up at a forum the other day that was sponsored by the biggest obstacle to fundamental school reform, the United Federation of Teachers. Sadly but not surprisingly, it turned out to be a pander-fest that bordered on the pathetic.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio set the tone by pouring praise on the UFT’s resoundingly mediocre leader, Michael Mulgrew, comparing him to one of his most notable predecessors, Albert Shanker, who led not one but two illegal teachers’ strikes in the 1960s. (Some will recall that when Woody Allen’s character in the movie Sleeper is awakened in the distant future, he is told that the world was destroyed because Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear weapon. The joke may have required some explanation west of the Hudson River.)

Several of the candidates eagerly noted that family members or friends or friends of family members or family members of friends are teachers or union members or know somebody who is. All in attendance—there were five Democrats and an independent candidate—maintained that Mike Bloomberg’s 12 years as mayor have been a disaster for the city’s schools. Coincidentally, that’s precisely how the UFT regards the Bloomberg era.

But Mr. Bloomberg wasn’t the event’s only tackling dummy. The candidates did their best to prove that they despise former Councilmember Eva Moskowitz even more than the UFT does. Eva Moskowitz? She’s been out of politics for years.

Of course, Ms. Moskowitz has gone on to become one of the city’s most effective voices for authentic education reform. In fact, she’s more than an advocate—she’s an activist. She is the head of an extraordinary organization, Success Academy Charter Schools, which is bringing quality education to poorly served neighborhoods—and doing it without the UFT.

Few people inspire greater loathing among the UFT’s leaders than Ms. Moskowitz. And so Council Speaker Christine Quinn singled out her former colleague for criticism, charging that Ms. Moskowitz’s anti-UFT rhetoric has “ripped us apart.” The teachers in attendance loved it. Parents, however, should be concerned. There is no reason to think that any of the candidates at the UFT forum intend to build on the successes of the last 12 years.

The issue, of course, goes deeper than cheap criticism of Ms. Moskowitz and the schools with which she is associated. It’s about one union’s refusal to recognize the need for change, and it’s about candidates who seem more than happy to indulge the union’s retrograde views.

From charter schools to teacher evaluations, the UFT has fought every attempt to fix what is so obviously broken. It claims to act on behalf of children, but seriously—does anybody really believe that? This is a union that has protected incompetence for decades. Whose interests have been served by unacceptably high dropout rates and archaic work rules? Whose interests have been served by the UFT’s costly refusal to implement a new evaluation system?

Only the naive would expect a mayoral candidate to challenge the union directly in such a setting. So a certain degree of pandering to Mr. Mulgrew and his members was to be expected.

But the candidates’ hyperbole was so over-the-top—even Mr. Mulgrew must have been just a little embarrassed— that voters are left to conclude that post-Bloomberg school policy is destined to go back to the bad old days, when the UFT essentially ran the system for the benefit of its members.

New Yorkers have good reason to be anxious about the arrival of January 1, 2014.

Designer Kelechi Odu trades jabs with model Charlie Himmelstein. (Photo by: Federico de Francesco)

Fashion is a knockabout business, but it’s rare for a model to actually deck the designer during a show.

The mannequin was “Rockstar” Charlie Himmelstein, a 6’4” sapling grown in Brooklyn, unusual among the model-slash crowd for his participation in the city’s underground fight scene. He sent menswear designer Kelechi Odu to the mat in round three of a boxing match staged while both were wearing Mr. Odu’s latest collection, Gilded Beast, which debuted on Sunday.

Eleven other male models, who had just “walked” in Jimmy Fusaro’s tiny 12^th-floor boxing gym on W. 27^th Street, stood by the ring, cheering. The competitors went four rounds, their suits being artfully snipped away with dress shears during the breaks, so that both admirably toned men finished the match, sweating, in their gloves and trousers. A referee generously declared the contest a draw.

Mr. Odu, 35, said his inspiration was to unify Edwardian, Jekyll-and-Hyde ideas of masculine brute force and respectability. A Nigerian partially educated at Eton in the United Kingdom, his collection featured wing collars under lapel-less suit coats with strips of bear fur down the spine and sleeves. Other shirts were beaded in patterns meant to represent male chest chair.

“This show was more a performance piece, closer to the art shows that are coming up than a fashion show,” Mr. Odu said, his chest heaving after the match. “It was more for my buyers and customers in Africa, since they know me as a New York designer, and want to see what I do here.”

The intimate invited audience of around 30 downtown types contained one slender man wearing a woman’s fox fur shrug over a camouflage shirt and two with their hair in samurai-style top-knots. Wan-looking girls posed for pouty pictures next to the boxing ropes, as a small-boned woman recorded it all on a Super 8 camera.

But who wore it best? (Photo by: Federico de Francesco)

Mr. Fusaro, the bluff 51-year-old proprietor of the X-Fit gym (“that’s Ex-Fit, not Cross Fit,” he stressed) seemed delighted by the spectacle. “I’ve been here 13 years, and I don’t want to say it’s ‘refurbished,’” he said, indicating the somewhat rag-tag collection of weight benches, heavy bags and martial arts equipment that had been moved aside for the show, “but someone threw this stuff out, and I found it.”

He watched the hipster crowd stream to toward the elevators and the promise of an after-party at the Hudson Clearwater.

“My wife hates me,” he said. “I mend everything with duct tape.”

Natalie Ross and Michelle-Marie Heinemann.

On the first Wednesday in May, a rather large tent pops up behind the Vanderbilt Gate on Fifth Avenue between 104th and 105th Streets with the sole purpose of shielding the over-the-top headgear of 1,300 ladies who lunch, a handful of men and one Martha Stewart from the elements as they duke it out for millinery supremacy at the Frederick Law Olmsted Awards Luncheon—or, as anybody who’s anybody calls it, The Hat Luncheon. At this year’s event, the tent proved unnecessary, as honorees Jenny and John Paulson had pledged a cool $100 million to The Conservancy Fund, the exact dollar figure necessary to ensure perfect weather.

Arriving on the scene, the Transom quickly sussed out an early front-runner in the hat arms race: Carole McDermott, a sprightly darling decked out in heritage pearls and a Chanel suit. She skipped the small-time weaponry and went straight for the nuclear option with a towering scale replica of Central Park strapped to her dome, complete with an adoptable bench.

“I have every year gone a bit bigger, and I’ve never once regretted it,” said Ms. McDermott, who stands at 5-foot-3 sans heels but checked in at close to 7 feet with her choice chapeau, which she said took an estimated three months to put together.

We then found the gorgeous Lizzie Tisch standing contrapposto, surrounded by an iPhoned throng. She was wearing an anatomically correct garden snake made entirely from mother-of-pearl. The “hat” was apparently the handiwork of Aaron Keppel, an artist who, Ms. Tisch was quick to note, is not to be confused with “your grandmother’s milliner,” a sentiment echoed by gal pal Amy Fine Collins, who was wearing a snow-white barn owl on her forehead, precariously perched.

“He’s just the most incredible artist. Look at the detail—the wings were made from tearing up thick stock paper and putting it back together,” Ms. Fine Collins said of Mr. Keppel’s handiwork. “The eyes! Look at the eyes! They’re perfect replicas of the real thing. He even constructs them as they would be found in nature. Breathtaking.”

The Transom had only a moment to acknowledge the breathtakingness of the owl peering over her forehead before Ms. Tisch and Ms. Fine Collins continued almost in unison: “Our park is truly our city’s greatest gift. What better way to tip our hat to it than to literally tip our hats to it?”

Making our way into the tent for lunch, we found Gillian Miniter, former president of the Conservancy’s women’s committee, wearing a fluorescent firecracker above her head. We asked her about the logistics of something so delightfully impractical.

“The real art is getting past your doorman in one of these things without him making some slick remark,” she said, gesturing toward the large group of gathered women who would help raise $3.3 million while nibbling on avocado lobster salad. “People fly in from around the world for this lunch,” she continued. “People slave for months getting their hats ready; people open their checkbooks and really have a chance to make a lasting gesture to the city they love. One hundred percent of the money raised here will go to park programs and initiatives, and I think that’s just great.”

As we eventually teetered out of the tent after one too many white wines, clutching a Tiffany tote bag (the perfect Mother’s Day re-gift) stuffed with Estée Lauder’s finest, the Transom had a hard time disagreeing.

“Do you come to these parties often?” asked my companion, her lips at my ear.

Jay-Z was now bouncing to “Who Gon Stop Me,” as Jake Gyllenhaal and Florence Welch rapped along, standing on a table, towering above Carey Mulligan, Tom Hardy, Jamie Foxx and other Hollywood royalty.

Perhaps I do go to a lot of parties, but I had not been invited to this one. In school at Duke, I became close with a man who had gone into film and went on to work on The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And just as Fitzgerald got a lot of leverage from his Princeton chums, my friend had smuggled me into The Darby, which came after the film’s world premiere, earlier that night at Lincoln Center, and the official after-party, in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel.

No, I don’t often come to parties like this, I told my companion.

Corks popped from the flaming bottles, champagne spilled into glasses and the glasses overflowed. I approached Leo in his little nook.

“We spoke earlier, on the red carpet,” Mr. DiCaprio said, his oceans of blue eyes twinkling at me.

“And there are more events to come,” I responded.

And what a string of events it was: a spree of cocktail functions, high-fashion fetes at fancy boutiques, exclusive screenings in secret locations, a sprawling red-carpet premiere that attracted crowds for blocks, a boozy lunch at the New York Public Library, a boozy lunch at the Fitzgerald Suite at the Plaza Hotel, a boozy dinner at the ballroom in the Plaza Hotel, a breakfast at Tiffany, a champagne supper at Brooks Brothers, a star-studded bash at Prada, a Peggy Siegal screening at MoMA followed by a giant bash at the Boom Boom Room, and a Cinema Society screening at HBO headquarters followed by a giant bash at The Lambs Club.

The parties seemingly never ended, as Warner Bros.—thanks to an unimaginable promotional budget (though representatives would not disclose an exact figure) and countless corporate tie-ins—managed to recreate a run of blowouts similar to those that took place on West Egg.

It made sense that they had spun off the movie’s party-heavy storyline into actual glamorous bashes. Mr. Luhrmann took 1920s New York City and made it his own, running the then-emerging skyline through his saturated filter and engineering a boisterous, three-dimensional, thoroughly vibrating version of our city (though the film was shot not on our streets but in Australia, the director’s native land).

With that same approach—one not too different from Jay Gatsby’s own Icarus-esque hubris—applied to the film’s promotion, he’s turned the actual metropolis into a Gatsby-themed pop-up, a traveling party that’s the best possible billboard for the film, a series of super-fancy luxury events that eclipses any movie’s promotional roll-out in recent history.

For two weeks, The Great Gatsby has overtaken NYC.

The first shindig was at Brooks Brothers, the store where two New Haven men in Fitzgerald’s novella May Day go shopping for Welsh Margotson collars. Mannequins bestrode the sloped plaster centerpieces and seemed to be sashaying to the music, which at the moment played Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful,” the love theme from The Great Gatsby.

After a few coupes of Moët champagne I spotted Mr. Luhrmann, looking dapper enough to have stepped off his own movie’s set. We chatted about my friend from college, and then I asked about this impressive run of Gatsby-esque parties.

“A little partying never killed anyone—or, well, maybe it did,” he said, referring to (spoiler alert!) Gatsby’s death at the end of the movie. “Immediately, the parties and the glamour is what’s attractive. But when we find out that Gatsby’s doing that for a different reason, it’s why the book is so enduring. You’re attracted to it, you’re seduced by it, but then you find yourself going on this human journey.”

This human’s journey took him next to a screening at Warner Bros. headquarters, one of a few screenings set up for those who could score seats. The film is massive, a sensory overload, a wildly kaleidoscopic spectacle that somehow manages to stay relatively faithful to the Great American Novel, all building to that monumental party scene, set to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

After the credits rolled, I raced downtown to the party at the Prada flagship.

The official premiere, the following night, engulfed the whole of Lincoln Center’s grand arcade. An army of photographers and journalists jockeyed for snaps and quotes. Attendees in black tie downed cocktails on the balcony overhead, laughing and waving to people who couldn’t see them, as a giant banner for Samsung, one of the movie’s (many) sponsors, hung below, visible to the masses. And finally the stars, each one positively gleaming, showed their famous faces.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Baz Luhrmann and Carey Mulligan.

I caught Mr. DiCaprio as he was about to go in and watch himself enthrall the audience.

“What I loved about Jay Gatsby was this idea of this iconic American dreamer,” Mr. DiCaprio told me, his eyes wandering up to the sky. “We all can identify with the American dreamer—the man coming from nothing and manifesting his own destiny.”

With no entrée into the party at the Plaza Hotel, I passed the time with cocktails at the Whitney Museum’s annual Art Party, sifting through crowds of young strivers who had purchased tickets and budding socialites with enough connections to land a spot on the host committee. It was the next generation of upper-crust New York grabbing cocktail after cocktail.

“Darby if you can swing it,” came the text message from my college friend, and I hopped in a cab that zoomed between the monolithic towers of Midtown and down into the West Village. The feverish party rang out for hours. I drank scotch from Mr. DiCaprio’s table. I dipped a girl low dancing to Roaring Twenties jazz.

Somehow, the cast (sans Mr. DiCaprio, who had hit 1OAK following The Darby) made it to a lunch the next morning at the New York Public Library, looking fresh as ever. Event host David Remnick was nice enough to take a break from editing The New Yorker to chat with Mr. Luhrmann about the research that he and his wife, Gatsby costume designer Catherine Martin, had done into the inner workings of Fitzgerald’s soul.

“C.M. and I, we imagined we were Scott and Zelda,” Mr. Luhrmann said to the room, where Anna Wintour sat with literary heavyweights like Jeffrey Eugenides, Maureen Dowd, Calvin Tomkins, Philip Gourevitch and Téa Obreht. “C.M. went a bit too far with the champagne exploration ...”

“Baz, you have a much bigger problem with the bottle than I do!” his wife said.

Everyone reached for his or her wine glass.

Then it was time for a panel discussion with the cast moderated by the biographer Dr. Amanda Foreman, who commenced perhaps history’s most glamorous book club with Ms. Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Mr. Maguire and Isla Fisher.

Not long after the movie-star book club ended, I ran into Mr. Edgerton, who plays Tom Buchanan.

“You read Fitzgerald’s letters, and it’s clear he just wanted so bad to be famous,” the actor said. “He just wanted to get laid and be famous.”

I wondered, aloud, who doesn’t want to get laid and be famous?

Jay-Z.

Mr. Edgerton shrugged.

“I haven’t met anyone.”

Mr. Luhrmann then grabbed me and walked me through the grand hallways of the New York Public Library and out the towering front entrance, where a handful of fans stood beside the two lions calling out for the director, asking for autographs.

“Wasn’t The Darby so fun last night, Nate?” Mr. Luhrmann said, walking down the massive steps. “It just felt like the Jazz Age again?”

The director bounced as if fully refreshed. He was the perfect perennial host for The Great Gatsby. On the street, a car was waiting for him. It would take him to a television interview. Before he ducked in, he went for a double-pump handshake.

“I’ll see you Sunday at the Boom Boom Room,” he said. “Another party!”

I arrived early on Sunday night only to find the space empty, devoid of famous faces. Through the Boom Boom Room’s floor-to-ceiling windows was a glittering panorama: the Empire State Building to the north, and to the south the Hudson River snaking down to lower Manhattan and the unfinished Freedom Tower.

Then things picked up. As the cast took their time to arrive from the screening at the Museum of Modern Art, Katy Perry showed up wearing a colorful outfit she claimed was inspired by Frida Kahlo. (Ms. Perry had been at the Prada event, too.)

“It’s very of Gatsby, it’s very befitting,” she told me, speaking about the run of parties.

Ms. Perry later joined Mr. DiCaprio, Ms. Mulligan, Cuba Gooding Jr. and others in a back section of the Top of the Standard, surrounded by bodyguards. I walked in and saw Baz Luhrmann, who pulled me over to his booth. The director began talking about The Great Gatsby in an intelligent way. I smiled. It was a conversation I had been searching for amid the two weeks of glad-handing, petty arguments, studio politics and celebrity publicists. Mr. Luhrmann talked with stunning earnestness about how The Great Gatsby is the American Hamlet, about how Hamlet is the Bible, about how the New Testament is the first cinematic document, and about how, in the Gospels, Jesus Christ dies at 33, much like the protagonist of his newest film.

What more could I ask of this director, after all of these events at posh places in New York City devoted to his movie, all of them masterminded on some level by Mr. Luhrmann himself, the ringleader, the puppeteer—the boy from Australia who changed his name and became famous?

It’s like you’re Gatsby yourself, I said.

“I’m not Jay Gatsby,” he said. Then he pointed to a man a booth over, a man at the center of this golden top-floor canopy above New York City, sitting with Dasha Zhukova—the partner of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich—the actress Kristen Wiig and No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani. He was pointing at Leonardo DiCaprio.

“I’m not Jay Gatsby,” Mr. Luhrmann said. “He is.”

The bar and dining room at Alder.

The chef Wylie Dufresne looks a bit like a character out of The Far Side. He is still boyish at 42, with indoor-only onionskin, anachronistic muttonchops, bookish glasses and long, side-parted hair. If you wanted to compare them side by side, however, which would be useful, that might be difficult.

In 1998, when the Internet was just a baby, Gary Larson, the creator of The Far Side, wrote a heartfelt letter to all those Far Side fans—and they are legion, because The Far Side is pure brilliance that no panel can contain, as Mr. Larson captured both a compelling misanthropic weltanschauung and tremendous tenderness—in which he asked that no Far Side comics be posted online. “These cartoons are my ‘children,’ of sorts,” he wrote, “and like a parent, I’m concerned about where they go at night without telling me.” Those who wish to join his world of perspicacious cows, disgruntled cowboys and wry aliens must buy the lavish coffee table book, The Complete Far Side, which retails for more than $100.

The work of Mr. Dufresne has proven similarly scarce and pricey. A decade ago, he opened wd~50, the brilliant beacon of modernist cuisine on the Lower East Side. Since then, he has refrained from opening what were, surely, countless other restaurants. He’s on television only rarely. He has no product line, offshoot or brand extension. For a decade, those who wished to experience Mr. Dufresne’s perspicacious, wry and heartfelt cuisine would have to travel to his 67-seat restaurant, pay $155, sit for three or four hours and, perhaps, glimpse the man, usually peering at a plate seriously or doing something with a tweezers in the kitchen.

But in March 2013, a decade after he began, Mr. Dufresne opened a new restaurant. It’s called Alder, and it was worth the wait.

Alder occupies a small space on a block of Second Avenue between East Ninth and 10th Streets long given up for dead. (After the 2nd Avenue Deli decamped to 33rd Street in 2006, the funeral home was the only building left with a soul—and that became luxury condos.) On a recent Sunday night, however, there were signs of life at Alder.

For a newly opened, long-awaited restaurant from one of New York City’s best chefs, it wasn’t nearly the rowdydow one might expect. This has something to do with the unique space Mr. Dufresne holds in the city’s culinary firmament (and something to do with it having been a Sunday). Mr. Dufresne is a chef’s chef’s chef in the same way Elizabeth Bishop was, according to John Ashbery, a writer’s writer’s writer or Les Blank was a director’s director’s director. But unlike Bishop, or Blank, who passed away last month, Mr. Dufresne isn’t deceased. He’s very much alive.

On my visit to the restaurant, he was busy in the kitchen, along with executive chef Jon Bignelli and sous-chef Ryan Henderson. The room felt breezily rustic but not slavishly so, like a farmhouse owned by Manhattanites that you’d see in Architectural Digest. Over speakers, hidden by slats of reclaimed wood on the ceiling of the dark room, Pavement played. Stephen Malkmus sang, “Ex-magician / That still knows the tricks / Tricks are everything to me.”

Tricks are also a lot to Mr. Dufresne. There is more than one thing on the pared-down 17-item menu in quotation marks. It makes one wonder how, for instance, “potato chips” differ from potato chips, “oyster crackers” from oyster crackers or “pigs in a blanket” from, you know, pigs in a blanket?

Written quotation marks should be used solely for attribution and not in the “air quotes” sense. But I’ll make an exception for Mr. Dufresne, because at Alder, without fail, the answer is that they are more delicious, more inventive, more mind-blowing than their original, impoverished, traditional selves.

On Monday, Wylie Dufresne won the James Beard Foundation's award for Best Chef: NYC.

The “pigs in a blanket” ($11) seem, on first inspection, to be standard bar mitzvah fare. Sections of dough-wrapped wieners are served on a slate dotted with artistic squirts of mustard and what looks like duck sauce. (Weirdly, neither the slate nor the artistic dots seem cliché, but maybe that’s because Mr. Dufresne was their progenitor.) But inspect closer and taste: erstwhile kosher beef is Chinese sausage; puff pastry is Pepperidge Farm hot dog bun run through a pasta machine, turned into a sort of bready fruit-leather. That mustard, laced with wasabi, is less Citi Field and more Ajinomoto Stadium. And that duck sauce is a sweet chili sauce.

Anyone who has partaken of Chinese sausage does not need an explanation. For those who have yet to do so: eating these pigs was like seeing an old friend from high school who had lost a lot of weight and now dresses well. You can still recognize them; they are just better now. It’s a sweet and piquant moment.

The menu is full of makeovers like that. The Caesar salad, the golden retriever of restaurants (friendly, good with kids, dumb), is smartly redone as Caesar nigiri ($15). Romaine, spine intact, is the canoe, laden with parmesan and egg yolk as neta. It renders faithfully unto Caesar but does so imaginatively. A plain old New England clam chowder—Mr. Dufresne was born in Rhode Island—isn’t meddled with much, save a squirt of parsley oil, a nod to Mr. Dufresne’s days at Jean-Georges. But the creamy clammy potato soup would make even the saltiest dog proud, and the “oyster crackers” that accompany it: oh my. They are actually dehydrated oysters, pureed, turned into a dough and fried. At Alder, the oyster crackers aren’t crackers that look like oysters. They are the oyster.

Mr. Dufresne’s approach isn’t based on mere wordplay, though (as so much of mine, sadly, is). It’s just really smart and really fun food. Everything I ate and everything I drank had either a turn or an expert touch or a surprise—often all three. A discus of foie gras terrine ($18) looked like a technicolor Egg McMuffin. The foie gras was tucked inside a poached apple, sat atop chartreuse yogurt and an English muffin, and tasted of fall orchards and breakfast. A slab of caramelized cauliflower, the Bob Hoskins of vegetables, was paired with a Mangalitsa lardo—made specially for Alder—and cacao nibs. It was a nutty, salty, bittersweet Blooming Onion for foodies.

Mr. Dufresne is also a neighborhood boy. He grew up in the East Village and went to Friends Seminary in Gramercy. The rye pasta ($18), served over a slice of pastrami, is a holla back to the neighborhood delicatessens of his youth (even though Mr. Dufresne said he is a Katz’s man himself). It tastes like a sandwich, looks like a pasta and embodies the best of what Alder does. It makes you smile.

The grease traps of New York kitchens are, of course, cluttered with chefs with great senses of humor, boundless ambition and unique points of view. Alas, many lack the technique to execute. And though Tragedy + Time = Comedy, Comedy - Technique = Tragedy.

Alder benefits from Mr. Dufresne’s longtime commitment to experimentation and innovation at wd~50, which has turned out to be an incubator for many of the techniques on display at his new restaurant. Over the past decade, Mr. Dufresne and his team perfected crackerizing things, yogurting things and pastasizing things. He has, he mentioned to me in passing, “a spaetzle playbook.”

It could be a line from The Far Side, but in Mr. Dufresne’s expert hands—as in Gary Larson’s—it’s a great joke in good taste.

The mayor unveiled his last budget the other day, and if he took a little extra time to sing the praises of his administration, well, fair enough. Mr. Bloomberg has presided over two very difficult recessions—the post-9/11 crash and the even more serious recession that began in 2008. He has managed to navigate bad times without resorting to dramatic service cuts or sharp tax increases—no small accomplishment.

The $70 billion budget keeps city spending flat, but many New Yorkers are rightfully anxious about a return to budgeting as usual after the mayor leaves office. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio complained that the mayor isn’t spending enough on early education, which Mr. de Blasio wishes to fund by raising taxes on high earners. City Comptroller John Liu referred to the proposal as a “holding-pattern budget.”

As usual, there will be weeks of give and take between the mayor’s office and the City Council over what amounts to a very small portion of overall city spending. The Council will very likely restore funds to prevent the closing of 20 firehouses and the elimination of thousands of day care openings. In the end, however, the budget will look very much like the one the mayor outlined as part of his yearlong farewell tour the other day.

At this time next year, a new mayor will present his or her first-ever budget. Only then will we know if 20 years of accountability and efficiency truly have taken root in City Hall.

It is springtime—hope springs eternal.