Still, not every city has the ability to cart their trash to a landfill in Pennsylvania, so what do other cities do with their waste? In 2005, some of the students in Columbia's Masters in Environmental Science and Policy Program explored alternative waste management practices around the world and identified a number of alternatives to land-filling.

My colleague Dr. Nicholas Themelis of Columbia's Engineering School has also been exploring technological options to land-filling for well over a decade. He has been particularly interested in the technological developments in waste-to-energy, particularly how to reduce emissions from garbage incineration. As my students and Dr. Themelis have observed, there are many interesting examples of sophisticated waste management outside of the United States.

A terrific example is waste management in Barcelona, Spain. In 2001, Barcelona's Metropolitan Environmental Agency initiated construction on two new integrated waste treatment facilities to manage the city's waste. The facilities, called Ecopark 1 and Ecopark 2, now process more than 40% of the waste they receive into biogas and compost, and recover an additional 5% for recycling. Ecopark 2 alone processes almost 20% of Barcelona's waste, in part by using anaerobic digestion, a system which processes biodegradable waste without oxygen. The biogas and methane produced by anaerobic digestion are used to generate electricity, a portion of which the facility uses for its own operations.

Prior to building the Ecopark facilities, Barcelona's waste agency launched an aggressive campaign to involve the community and build support for the facilities. This campaign involved everything from designing the buildings to reflect the region's legacy of world-class architects such as Antonio Gaudi to door-to-door visits to give residents kits for separating kitchen waste.

Barcelona's waste facilities are now a destination for school field trips, and the Metropolitan Environmental Agency has organized conferences, training, and other events to promote education around waste treatment. After the Ecoparks were successfully up and running the city ran a TV commercial thanking Barcelona's residents for separating their waste.

Japan is a crowded island where land is simply to valuable to use for garbage dumps. Their scarcity of land has led them to using ever-advancing technology to deal with their waste. They rely heavily on waste incineration and intensive recycling. Though recycling policies vary throughout the country, most Japanese families separate their waste into at least six recycling categories. The town of Kamikatsu in Japan has implemented a "zero waste" policy which requires residents to do their own composting. The town has a "zero waste" recycling center where residents sort their waste into 34 categories, which include categories for Styrofoam, razors, and bottle caps. The town implemented this strategy after realizing it was much cheaper than incineration. Though a recent poll showed that 40% of residents were not happy with the program, the mayor is undeterred given the good it does for the environment.

Though a portion of New York City's waste stream does get recycled, we could be diverting almost half of what we currently send to landfills without the stringent measures taken in Kamikatsu, Japan. Fifteen percent of what's put into our trash bags is actually recyclable paper which just needs to be correctly sorted. The biggest component of waste that we currently send to landfills is "organics", a category including food and yard waste, which comprises nearly half (47%) of what we send to landfills.

Large scale composting of organics is not just a foreign concept-cities and towns in the United States are doing it, and New York City has been investigating the possibility. After pilot programs asking residents and institutions to separate their food waste for curbside pick up were unsuccessful, the City began investigating municipal solid waste composting. With municipal solid waste composting, rather than having residents separate out organic waste, solid waste is transported to a central facility where the degradable portion is recovered and composted, and the non-degradable portion is separated for recycling and for disposal. This process can be combined with the type of curbside recycling program we currently have. New York City undertook a study about municipal waste composting in 2004 which involved actually sending some waste to a composting facility in Massachusetts, and developing a theoretical pilot facility for New York City.

Another study was published in 2004 for New York City which looked at a variety of waste management and recycling technologies, including the anaerobic technologies like those used in Barcelona

While the city tries to figure it out, some individuals and businesses have taken things into their own hands. More than 300 New York City restaurants have food waste picked up by a company called Action Carting Environmental for composting.

The Lower East Side Ecology Center accepts household food scraps at various Greenmarket locations. They compost 60 tons of organic materials a year using a unique closed-container composting system. The organization then sells the finished compost, which it calls "New York pay dirt".

Is any of this realistic? Can the people living in this fast-paced place do a better job of disposing their waste? Can a city struggling with a financial crisis invest in the infrastructure to do a better job of handling our waste? The real question is can we afford not to. According to a May 2007 report of the Independent Budget Office, New York City's Department of Sanitation spending for waste disposal grew from $78.88 a ton in 2005 to $92.59 in 2008. Spending for waste disposal grew from $258 million to nearly $300 million during that span of time. While the cost of recycling also went up from $29 to $40 dollars a ton, recycling still costs less than half as much as disposal. Every ton of garbage we recycle instead of dumping saves the city over $50 bucks. Additional recycling can save the city money and could actually help contribute to solving the fiscal crisis.

It makes sense that if we figure out how to reuse the stuff we would otherwise throw out, we can save money. When you give your old winter coat to Goodwill instead of tossing it in the garbage, the city saves the cost of land filling the coat and someone gets a low-cost piece of essential clothing. This may be an oversimplification, but there is no question that reducing waste reduces costs.

Click here for more information on composting in NYC.

Dear Josh:

I have been alone in Barcelona for about eight hours, the last three of which were spent sleeping in my little hotel room. It's 8:30 P.M. and the sun is still fairly high in the sky, thanks to the absence of daylight savings time. My room overlooks a paved and red-painted play yard. Right now there are several teenage girls on old-school rollerskates out there, practicing their moves and wearing identical blue skating skirts. It's really warm here. Those fleece-lined track pants felt so right in the Sam Adams bar at Newark, but became so wrong at the Barcelona taxi stand.

I was sick on the flight from Newark to Frankfurt. Which part of whiskey, Ambien, gin and red wine do you think was the problem?

Young men and women in Barcelona have made a real commitment to the mullet. It's hard to say whether they're being ironic or earnest.

I guess I'll go out and get some dinner soon. I have already had one great meal, at a nondescript tapas bar. We should serve patatas bravas, to go with the cava, at our wedding reception. We should come to Barcelona for our honeymoon.

I know I am supposed to be excited about being here, but I would like nothing better than to be sitting on the couch with you and Gilbert the cat, watching basic cable and eating falafel.

Domestic bliss.

Love,
LAURIE

In recent years, the Spanish city has restored the public use of a beach, built a highway to connect the town center with the outskirts, converted a power plant and, well, just made themselves look sexier. The urban renewal initative has even attracted a number of investors into those outskirts.

In contrast, Bloomberg News decries the lack of design, the staid towers, and the unsexy disconnect of the planned Ground Zero construction with downtown Manhattan.

"In the urban-design studies that actually excited people, way back in 2002, we saw some hints of what Lower Manhattan's commercial future could be: offices designed to recognize that business today is about interaction, not chaining people to desks; architecture that soared gloriously to take full advantage of one of the world's great harbor locations.

Learning a few lessons from Barcelona could not only dissolve the sclerosis downtown, it could create a district that truly honors the thousands who lost their lives on 9/11 just because they turned up for work."

- Riva Froymovich

- Riva Froymovich

A few days after she got here, she phoned me from work. “I have to ask you something,” she said, lowering her voice to a near whisper. “Everyone I meet asks me where I’m living. And when I tell them midtown, they all make the same face. It’s as though they know something about me, just from the neighborhood. What am I missing?”

“More than I can tell you on the phone,” I said. “Just make sure you mention the words ‘temporary corporate housing’ when they ask. It’s very important.” And we made a plan to meet later in the week. I was about to initiate a dear friend into the semiotics of New York real estate. I thought I should cushion the blow with a nice dinner and a few glasses of wine. She had no idea what she was getting into.

More than any other town I have heard about, New York revolves around real estate—not economically (though I’m sure to a certain extent that’s true) but conversationally. New Yorkers can happily spend entire evenings analyzing the delights and disappointments of one another’s apartments. No first encounter is complete without the inevitable question—“Where do you live?”—and the answer (complete with tales of the hunt, digressions into the ideal apartment that got away, and explanations and excuses about the ramifications of the apartment that stuck) can determine the speaker’s placement in the hierarchy of the listener’s esteem. All replies are scrutinized with the eagle ear of the psychoanalyst. In New York, where you live is who you are, and an apartment (like a cigar) is almost never just an apartment.

I was recently accused of being guarded when I told someone that I lived in the West Village. “But where in the West Village?” my interrogator asked. “Why are you hiding your home?” To many in this town, concealing your address is like sitting down for a conversation while sporting a ski mask—a way of stubbornly, and ostentatiously, withholding crucial clues. Because everyone has his or her own set of assumptions about what exactly it means to live where. My friends and I are very clear about the difference between a studio in the East Village and a one-bedroom in Carroll Gardens. But we’re surprisingly reluctant to state these prejudices aloud. Addresses let us say things without really saying them. “I’m not sure what I think of her,” we’ll say. “She’s a little too Lower East Side.” And the other will nod in a knowing, sympathetic way. Enough said.

Two nights later, in a little restaurant in the West Village (on Carmine Street, if you must know), I tried to explain what was going on to my friend. The city, I told her, was a little like college. Your neighborhood would become your clique. Don’t dive into anything until you know the players. But this wasn’t any help. She wanted me to be the guide, to say the things that I was most unwilling to say. She wanted me to lay bare the meanings of different neighborhoods. Was I willing, even in the name of friendship, to go this far?

I started small, trying to avoid saying anything, really. I talked about subway lines, about convenience; she looked annoyed. “One woman in my office told me she would never live on the Upper East Side,” she said plaintively. “And another one told me that’s the only place she would ever live. And I liked them both!” I felt myself raise an inner eyebrow. She liked a woman who loved living on the Upper East Side? Clearly, I was going to have to be more delicate in my discussion than I had thought.

The diners at the table next to us, unconsciously eavesdropping or by pure coincidence, launched into a discussion of cities around the world that they would never be willing to live in. “Bolinas? Never—too many hippies,” chortled the woman to my right. “Oooh, I hate Barcelona,” added her companion. This sounded like safer territory. I’ve never been to either Bolinas or Barcelona, but I suddenly longed to discuss the finer points of their real-estate markets. I dipped a conversational toe into historical demographics. This seemed safer … more quantifiable. I felt all right telling my friend that a lot of couples with young children lived on the Upper West Side, and that Union Square was home to a seemingly infinite number of N.Y.U. dorms. And surely no one would deny that the West Village had a rich gay cultural history. I actually used that phrase, “rich gay cultural history.”

Which is when I realized that I had to start over. Actually, I told her, the West Village was so expensive now that the unifying quality of most of its residents was the size of their bank accounts. Though, of course, there were holdouts from the old days, lucky enough to have long-term leases or to have invested early. But the real gay scene had moved north, to Chelsea. Except, of course, along Christopher Street, which was still showing evidence of the aforementioned “cultural history.” Everything I told her needed to be qualified and requalified; the deeper I dug, the less certain I became of anything I was saying. I was of no use at all—I couldn’t even stand behind my own cherished stereotypes. “Go to a lot of parties,” I told her weakly. “Ask everyone where they live and see who you like.” The truth is, I told myself, my stereotypes wouldn’t do her much good. Maybe this was the true sign of assimilation as a New Yorker—having your own neighborhood prejudices. And in the meantime, I did have one definitive thing that I could, with confidence, reveal.

If she could find the Holy Grail of New York real estate—the rent-controlled apartment—all bets were off. Inconvenience, a dreadful reputation (for snobbishness, or self-conscious hipsterhood)—all are trumped by the concept of a really good deal. I have another friend who endured cohabitation with her parents for two years in order to put her name on the lease. She became accustomed to watching the emotional contortions passing over new acquaintances’ faces. “I live with my parents on the Upper West Side,” she would say, watching for the mix of pity and scorn. And then she’d wait, just long enough for them to settle into it, before she dropped the bomb, the two magic words sure to create an agony of envy among even the proudest of householders: “rent-controlled.”

I didn’t know where my D.C. friend would feel most at home, or what the new home would say about her when she found it, but I could tell her that if she could use the phrase “rent-controlled” when someone asked, she would be sure to meet with universal, if grudging, respect. And all her address would really say about her was that she was lucky. Other than that, like the rest of us, she was on her own.

Sixteen years have passed since writer-director Whit Stillman dazzled Sundance audiences with this highbrow (yet awfully low-budget) comedy about a handful of wealthy college students partying over Christmas recess. Unlike Buñuel, Mr. Stillman offers a far more sympathetic take on the young, doomed and bourgeois: They’re not really so bad, once you get to know them.

While not a trilogy in the strictest sense, the director’s two later films, Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), feature several members of Metropolitan’s ensemble cast. Thematically, there is some overlap as well: A handful of twentysomething conversationalists weigh in on morality, relationships and social class while still going to plenty of parties and clubs. But Metropolitan isn’t as polished as the later films; in fact, considering the superb acting and shoestring production costs, it could almost pass as a documentary.

Together, this abbreviation-prone crew—they dub themselves either the SFRP (Sally Fowler Rat Pack) or U.H.B. (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie)—pass the early-morning hours in an Upper East Side co-op apartment following the evening’s debutante ball. And it’s the ensuing dialogue that people either love or hate about the film. Having just spent their first semester in college, the group takes any opportunity to spout big ideas about Fourier’s theory of agrarian socialism, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and whether or not a “popular imagination” exists. At the same time, they’re still 18-to-19-year-olds and not all that stodgy: They play bridge out of obligation, but strip poker for fun.

Set “not so long ago,” Metropolitan most likely occurs somewhere in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s. There are no references to current events—assassinations, protests or the Beatles—but subtleties lead to this interpretation (which may take more than one viewing). Even in this closed-off world, times are changing. Parents are scarcely around, and traditions are being tossed aside. While walking down Park Avenue in the predawn hours, Tom (Edward Clements) and Nick (Christopher Eigeman) discuss detachable collars, out of fashion but “symbolically important.” Nick believes that certain traditions, though they may not make sense, should be upheld nevertheless, especially now that “barbarism is cloaked with all sorts of self-righteousness and moral superiority.” “You’re obviously talking about a lot more than detachable collars,” says Tom. “Yeah, I am,” Nick responds gravely.

Although Mr. Stillman has only two films to his credit since Metropolitan, he’s developed a cult following that has been patiently waiting for something new. (In 2000, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his first novel, The Last Days of Disco: With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards, and Mr. Stillman had a brief stint writing for Page Six the following year.) Over the past few years, it’s been reported that he was working on a film about China’s Cultural Revolution (which seemed baffling), and later that he was combining two unfinished Jane Austen novels into a screenplay (which seemed highly plausible).

Until one of these projects comes together, fans will have to rely on the excellent Criterion release, which for real nerds offers both a director’s commentary and a booklet with a critical essay by Luc Sante on the film’s importance in the indie canon. You could probably drop references to the latter at your next deb party.

The velvet rope was lowered yesterday for some architecture writers to nosh on Nobu cod at the sales office for the much hyped 40 Bond.

Today, developers Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen, the stylish duo profiled last month by The Observer, were on hand to entertain real estate and luxury living reporters. And there was more food from Nobu for the starving scribes.

Mr. Schrager, accustomed to catering to the beautiful people, briefly ran through his resume since co-founding Studio 54. There were a few jabs at the hotel industry for stealing his ideas, whereby a Schrager project was treated like a "candy store" to grab from freely.

But that's all in the past now, right? Now, Mr. Schrager admits to "having a ball" since hooking up with Mr. Rosen on smaller scale projects, yet with big name architects like Herzog and de Meuron.

Tomorrow, the rest of a the rabble (and by rabble we mean wealthy condo buyers) can peruse models encased in glass. Or they can simply look at samples of glass--the "luminescent curved glass" that was flown in from Barcelona. It's certainly worth a peak, even if all the sushi is gone.

-Michael Calderone

One Star

225 Park Avenue South (at 18th Street)

212-533-2500

Dress: All sorts

Lighting: Low

Noise Level: High

Wine List: Mostly Spanish, around 150 bottles

Credit Cards: All major

Price Range: Main courses, $18 to $28

Lunch: Monday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday, 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Dinner: Sunday to Thursday, 5 p.m. to midnight; Friday and Saturday, to 1 a.m.

When I called Barça 18, before I even had a chance to book a table, I was asked for my telephone number. “Bergman!” exclaimed the reservationist when I gave it to her. Bergman? Then I remembered using that name at another Stephen Hanson restaurant two years ago.

Mr. Hanson’s company, B.R. Guest, has over a dozen highly successful New York restaurants, among them Fiamma, Vento, Ruby Foo’s and Blue Fin. When you book at any of these places, your name goes into the computer and your number of visits is logged.

Apart from Fiamma, an upscale Italian restaurant in Soho, Mr. Hanson specializes in big, energetic crowd-pleasers serving decent, middle-of-the-road food. But for his latest venture, he’s partnered with Eric Ripert, chef of the three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin.

Barça 18 (pronounced “Bartha,” with a Catalonian lisp) is named for Barcelona’s soccer team; the “18” is a nod to the cross street. Mr. Ripert is no stranger to Spanish cuisine: He grew up in Andorra, the mountainous principality between Spain and France, a couple of hours from Barcelona. He’s installed Brian O’Donohue, his sous-chef of eight years, in Barça 18’s kitchen. So it was with high hopes that the Bergman party arrived on a Saturday night at 10 p.m., the proper hour for dinner in Spain.

When we walked in, the hostess—straining her voice over the loud thump-thump-boom of the music—sent us to the bar to wait for our table. The bar, which has a glowing glass top lit from beneath, was packed several rows deep, and people were passing cocktails over their heads to friends behind them. It was like the meatpacking district on a weekend. Tree branches separate the bar from the dining room proper. The cocktails were good, but the swarms of people filled me with misgivings about the food. Could the kitchen turn out great Spanish cooking in a place this big?

The cavernous gray dining room is on two levels. It’s punctuated by gray industrial pillars and six immense square lampshades covered in an orange parachute-like material hanging from the ceiling. The gray walls are hung with giant tilted mirrors and lined with dark red Gaudiesque banquettes and tables Hispanicized with brown leather cloths. The staff wears black.

There are 17 kinds of hot and cold tapas on the menu. The current trend for making a whole meal out of tapas seems to me reflective of our attention-deficit-disorder age, akin to channel surfing on T.V. But I like them to start off with, and at Barça 18, we began very well. They’re simple and accessible (none of the strange concoctions or froths and foams favored by Barcelona’s cutting-edge chefs).

A plate of Spanish olives with Marcona almonds and lemon confit was being delivered to the next table and looked so good that we had to have some, too. Pimientos de Padrón, fried baby green peppers of varying degrees of spiciness, were sprinkled with Maldon salt and served in an earthenware dish. They were wonderful. Croquetas filled with mashed potatoes and Serrano ham were very light, the calamari were crisp, and the pulpo was cut in thin, tender rounds tossed in olive oil, with slivers of red pepper confit and lemon. Raw tuna en escabeche, marinated with aged sherry vinegar and olive oil, arrived in an opened can—an amusing touch. Clams were arranged on a vivid green broth laced with white beans; white anchovies marinated in white-wine vinaigrette were lined up on a slivered chunk of romaine, with a mustardy sauce. So far, I was impressed.

But in a restaurant this size, the most difficult thing to accomplish is consistency—a fact confirmed by our main courses.

Swordfish was properly cooked and prettily served with slices of chorizo, tomato and mushrooms on top. But a filet mignon à la plancha, topped with a cheese-stuffed pepper, had no taste at all and was flabby, as though it had been marked off and grilled again to order. Why filet mignon, the cut with the least flavor? The accompanying thin, parsley-garlic fries were good, though.

There are three paellas on the menu. Paella negra, flavored with squid ink, is almost jet black, and laced with pieces of seafood. The grains of rice should be at once creamy and al dente, providing a frame for the seafood. Barça 18’s paella negra, made with long-grain rice, tasted like a damp towel after a few days at the bottom of a hamper; the desultory sprinkling of seafood on top included (if you could find them) puny, shriveled mussels and some pieces of calamari and rock shrimp.

Another night, I tried a lobster paella. The rice was short-grain this time, flavored with saffron, peas and peppers. It was a world away from the paella negra, but the rice needed seasoning and was a little dry. The lobster was fresh and juicy; the mussels, however, were tiny and shriveled again, but there was a generous supply of clams, calamari, shrimp and chorizo.

The desserts of pastry chefs Elizabeth Katz and Michael Laiskonis ended the meal on a higher note. Their crème catalana was like a deconstructed ice-cream sundae: foamy vanilla custard with caramel and cinnamon ice cream under a crunchy burnt-sugar crust. Flourless chocolate cake was also excellent, dark and intense, topped with a piece of salted toast. The salt was a good idea, but the toast was thick and hard. The churros—cinnamon-dusted fritters—were terrific, served with a coffee cup of spiced chocolate. But the espresso was terrible. We sent it back because it was burned. The next cup was almost as bad.

“It’s made with a pod,” explained the waiter.

Of course. Isn’t that how they do it in Barcelona?

One Star

225 Park Avenue South (at 18th Street)

212-533-2500

Dress: All sorts

Lighting: Low

Noise Level: High

Wine List: Mostly Spanish, around 150 bottles

Credit Cards: All major

Price Range: Main courses, $18 to $28

Lunch: Monday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday, 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Dinner: Sunday to Thursday, 5 p.m. to midnight; Friday and Saturday, to 1 a.m.

When I called Barça 18, before I even had a chance to book a table, I was asked for my telephone number. “Bergman!” exclaimed the reservationist when I gave it to her. Bergman? Then I remembered using that name at another Stephen Hanson restaurant two years ago.

Mr. Hanson’s company, B.R. Guest, has over a dozen highly successful New York restaurants, among them Fiamma, Vento, Ruby Foo’s and Blue Fin. When you book at any of these places, your name goes into the computer and your number of visits is logged.

Apart from Fiamma, an upscale Italian restaurant in Soho, Mr. Hanson specializes in big, energetic crowd-pleasers serving decent, middle-of-the-road food. But for his latest venture, he’s partnered with Eric Ripert, chef of the three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin.

Barça 18 (pronounced “Bartha,” with a Catalonian lisp) is named for Barcelona’s soccer team; the “18” is a nod to the cross street. Mr. Ripert is no stranger to Spanish cuisine: He grew up in Andorra, the mountainous principality between Spain and France, a couple of hours from Barcelona. He’s installed Brian O’Donohue, his sous-chef of eight years, in Barça 18’s kitchen. So it was with high hopes that the Bergman party arrived on a Saturday night at 10 p.m., the proper hour for dinner in Spain.

When we walked in, the hostess—straining her voice over the loud thump-thump-boom of the music—sent us to the bar to wait for our table. The bar, which has a glowing glass top lit from beneath, was packed several rows deep, and people were passing cocktails over their heads to friends behind them. It was like the meatpacking district on a weekend. Tree branches separate the bar from the dining room proper. The cocktails were good, but the swarms of people filled me with misgivings about the food. Could the kitchen turn out great Spanish cooking in a place this big?

The cavernous gray dining room is on two levels. It’s punctuated by gray industrial pillars and six immense square lampshades covered in an orange parachute-like material hanging from the ceiling. The gray walls are hung with giant tilted mirrors and lined with dark red Gaudiesque banquettes and tables Hispanicized with brown leather cloths. The staff wears black.

There are 17 kinds of hot and cold tapas on the menu. The current trend for making a whole meal out of tapas seems to me reflective of our attention-deficit-disorder age, akin to channel surfing on T.V. But I like them to start off with, and at Barça 18, we began very well. They’re simple and accessible (none of the strange concoctions or froths and foams favored by Barcelona’s cutting-edge chefs).

A plate of Spanish olives with Marcona almonds and lemon confit was being delivered to the next table and looked so good that we had to have some, too. Pimientos de Padrón, fried baby green peppers of varying degrees of spiciness, were sprinkled with Maldon salt and served in an earthenware dish. They were wonderful. Croquetas filled with mashed potatoes and Serrano ham were very light, the calamari were crisp, and the pulpo was cut in thin, tender rounds tossed in olive oil, with slivers of red pepper confit and lemon. Raw tuna en escabeche, marinated with aged sherry vinegar and olive oil, arrived in an opened can—an amusing touch. Clams were arranged on a vivid green broth laced with white beans; white anchovies marinated in white-wine vinaigrette were lined up on a slivered chunk of romaine, with a mustardy sauce. So far, I was impressed.

But in a restaurant this size, the most difficult thing to accomplish is consistency—a fact confirmed by our main courses.

Swordfish was properly cooked and prettily served with slices of chorizo, tomato and mushrooms on top. But a filet mignon à la plancha, topped with a cheese-stuffed pepper, had no taste at all and was flabby, as though it had been marked off and grilled again to order. Why filet mignon, the cut with the least flavor? The accompanying thin, parsley-garlic fries were good, though.

There are three paellas on the menu. Paella negra, flavored with squid ink, is almost jet black, and laced with pieces of seafood. The grains of rice should be at once creamy and al dente, providing a frame for the seafood. Barça 18’s paella negra, made with long-grain rice, tasted like a damp towel after a few days at the bottom of a hamper; the desultory sprinkling of seafood on top included (if you could find them) puny, shriveled mussels and some pieces of calamari and rock shrimp.

Another night, I tried a lobster paella. The rice was short-grain this time, flavored with saffron, peas and peppers. It was a world away from the paella negra, but the rice needed seasoning and was a little dry. The lobster was fresh and juicy; the mussels, however, were tiny and shriveled again, but there was a generous supply of clams, calamari, shrimp and chorizo.

The desserts of pastry chefs Elizabeth Katz and Michael Laiskonis ended the meal on a higher note. Their crème catalana was like a deconstructed ice-cream sundae: foamy vanilla custard with caramel and cinnamon ice cream under a crunchy burnt-sugar crust. Flourless chocolate cake was also excellent, dark and intense, topped with a piece of salted toast. The salt was a good idea, but the toast was thick and hard. The churros—cinnamon-dusted fritters—were terrific, served with a coffee cup of spiced chocolate. But the espresso was terrible. We sent it back because it was burned. The next cup was almost as bad.

“It’s made with a pod,” explained the waiter.

Of course. Isn’t that how they do it in Barcelona?

It was in the late 40's that Kafka began to be assigned reading in certain college classes, and by the 50's the term "Kafkaesque" was commonplace among people who had never read a line by Kafka himself; they had just picked up on what people were saying about Kafka and his work. There had developed a kind of Kafka cult that looked upon his vision of the modern world-or what was said to be his vision: an Existentialist vision-as a key to life itself. If you went to a party in Greenwich Village in those days, you were certain to hear some argument about the latest article on Kafka in Partisan Review or the book pages of the liberal weeklies.

Kafka is still read, of course. It's even likely that more people read Kafka today than ever before. But the Kafka cult is long gone. Kafka is now too respectable-an established modern classic-to be the object of a cult. In any case, the kind of people who used to argue about Kafka at parties are now more likely to be heard talking about movies, television or something that caught their attention on the Internet. Something that can be looked at, sat through or listened to, not just read in a book in a room by oneself.

This being the case, it was probably inevitable that someone, somewhere, would sooner or later undertake to update Kafka by making him the subject of-what else?-a multimedia "environment." This is what has now come to the Jewish Museum, in a show called The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague , a sort of nightmare entertainment that aspires to take us inside the mind of the writer and backward in time to the Prague of his day-or rather the Prague of his nights. The City of K. is, with one exception, a very nocturnal environment: The walls of the first-floor galleries at the Jewish Museum are painted dark green, and the light levels are minimal; the single exception is a bright white space in which we are treated to the creations of what is called "a mirage-making machine," which consists of blurry film images accompanied by spooky sound effects.

In fact, The City of K. isn't a single environment, but a succession of thematic environments designed to retrace the sorrows and suffering-both real and imagined-that marked the course of Kafka's life in Prague and determined the style and content of his writings. These environments are crammed with things to look at: photographs, film clips, documents and manuscripts. They're also studded with things to read, mainly quotations from Kafka's writings translated into English. These are accompanied by a whole repertory of freaky, ominous sounds, and staged with special props that are lurid and abundant enough to furnish a couple of big-time Broadway thrillers.

There is even an elaborate maze for us to walk through so that we may have some inkling of the kind of penal colony that is the subject of a Kafka short story. Did Kafka also have a phobia about bureaucratic office work? Threatening, overscale metal filing cabinets illustrate this fear-only here the open file drawers feature illuminated passages from his writings.

This succession of gloomy environments is divided into two parts, opening with "Kafka in Prague: Existential Space," and closing with "Prague in Kafka: Imaginary Topography," which is nothing if not imaginative. Each of these is divided into sub-subsections, with titles like "The Primal Scene" and "The Constantly Postponed Marriages" in the first part, and "The Endless Office" and "In the Penal Colony" in the second. The elaborate catalog accompanying the show explores many of these themes in greater detail, with essays on "Prague as a Literary City," "Prague, Kafka, and Judaism" and "Space and Time in Kafkaesque Architecture," among others. The catalog, too, is illustrated with abundant photographs and quotations.

Oddly enough, The City of K. comes to us not from Prague itself, but from Barcelona, Spain. It was organized and designed by Juan Insua for the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona as part of a cycle of exhibitions called Cities and Their Writers . It's all brilliantly conceived and effectively produced. And yet, for all of its brilliance and its undeniable devotion to its subject, I think The City of K. is a terrible thing to do to a great writer: The show inevitably vulgarizes and simplifies the literary achievement it has been designed to celebrate. It crushes every nuance in the writings under the weight of a highly melodramatic audiovisual fiction. Everything that's left unsaid in Kafka's writings, everything that's implied but not spelled out, is transformed into a multimedia stunt. And all the humor, too-for there's plenty of macabre humor in Kafka-is gone.

As a result, this well-intended effort at exploring the mind of Franz Kafka is likely to be of more interest to people who haven't read his work than to those who have. The real horror of it all-call it Kafkaesque, if you like-is that many innocent visitors to this exhibition will leave with the impression that they know everything there is to know about this spooky character and his strange writings.

The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague remains on view at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, through Jan. 5, 2003.