The décor suffers from multiple-personality disorder. The dining rooms, on two levels connected by archways, are as visually jumbled as a dream. At the entrance, an enormous black Murano glass chandelier hangs over a floating blue mosaic-tile stairway that descends to the basement alongside a candlelit red brick wall. A white laminated-glass bar is set with white leather stools and large glass bowls of caramel-coated popcorn. Here, the dining tables are lined up against a banquette that has a padded back several feet high, like an oversized headboard in a 1930’s boudoir.

In the middle room, as we delve deeper into the unconscious, we find a vertical steel beam enclosed in Plexiglas. Seven carved wooden columns, shaped like giant banister legs as seen from the scale of a crawling child, are lined up behind a row of banquettes. They are oddly familiar, as is the blue turn-of-the-century chinoiserie wallpaper, printed with flowers and exotically plumaged birds. Look into your childhood … childhood … childhood ….

Up a set of stairs, you enter a smaller room. It has a marble fireplace and a parquet floor. Mounted to the low ceiling is a gallery of gilt-framed pictures, including portraits of Madame de Pompadour, the Spanish Infanta and swirls of half-clad figures that look like the work of Titian. You have to lean back in your swivel chair to look at them.

Amalia is owned by Greg Brier of Aspen, a restaurant and lounge in the Flatiron district, and is designed by Chris Sheffield and Steve Lewis of SLDesign (Aspen, Butter, Marquee). The décor is witty and amusing, but it doesn’t entirely work (especially the view through the kitchen door of a blue Cascade laundry bag I had one evening in the middle room).

Chef Ivy Stark worked at Dos Caminos and Rosa Mexicano and was sous chef at the Sign of the Dove and Cena. Her cooking is lively, adventurous and eclectic (which is only appropriate in this setting), and it has a modern Mediterranean slant. For a start, don’t miss the dates stuffed with duck confit and fig mostarda. They are rolled in Serrano ham and crisped in the oven, served on a bed of frisée in a sherry vinegar dressing that cuts the sweetness.

Ms. Stark’s menu is dotted with the names of unusual spices, such as Urfa chilis from Turkey, Syrian Aleppo (a chili with a cumin aftertaste), piquillo pepper and smoked paprika from Spain, and North African seasonings such as harissa, charmoula, and ras el hanout. Hamachi crudo, pristinely fresh, was garnished with red threads of Urfa chili, pieces of tangerine and crunchy vanilla-pickled onion. But what looked like four staring eyeballs were lined up at the foot of the plate, an unsettling image. They turned out to be dollops of sesame aioli mayonnaise with dots of Urfa chili purée.

Jumbo lump crab cakes were also very good, loosely packed and lightly bound with lemon Aleppo aillade.

Crisp fried tendrils of calamari were served in a bowl on a wonderful stew made with steamed white rounds of calamari, diced chorizo, piquillo peppers and white beans, garnished with a slice of grilled garlic baguette. Ms. Stark also uses chorizo as a stuffing for chicken breast that was rolled, breaded and sautéed, then crisped in the oven. It was sliced and served with a smooth red-brick-colored romesco sauce made with ancho chilis, bread, almonds and olive oil, and was sprinkled with raisins pickled in rice vinegar. It came with escarole and toasted Marcona almonds. Both these dishes were outstanding.

Fideua is a Catalan version of paella, made with thin short noodles from the region. Ms. Stark cooked it in a cast-iron pan with lime-green pointy florets of Romanesco cauliflower, San Marzano tomatoes from Italy, peas, gigante beans, mussels and clams. It was bound with a smoked paprika allioli—very good, but the sauce made it extremely rich.

Braised-beef short ribs agrodolce, marinated in tamarind, vinegar and white wine, were like butter, served with Tuscan black kale and puréed carrots seasoned a bit too heavily with vanilla. Swordfish marinated in Greek yogurt with cumin achieved a melting tenderness; it came with a hollandaise flavored with Seville orange and a pile of French fries stacked up like Lincoln Logs. The waiter set down a dish of three sea salts, one seasoned with fennel saffron citrus, another with smoked paprika and chili, all served with a tiny wooden spoon. I wonder how long those spoons will last.

Desserts by pastry chef John Miele, formerly of Aureole, include delicate kataifa-wrapped warm bananas with honey tangerine custard and caramel sauce, and a warm apple pecan crisp goosed up with a peppery Urfa chili ice cream, and Calvados sabayon. Hazelnut polenta cake with chocolate fudge sauce and ricotta gelato was a bit heavy. The bittersweet chocolate ganache with salted caramel and malted chocolate semi freddo was addictive.

Ms. Stark is a certified sommelier, and she put together the international wine list, which includes selections from Greece, Lebanon, Turkey and Morocco. It is grouped under headings: Reds are listed variously as “agile, attractive, tantalizing,” the whites as “lively, elegant, delicate.” Amalia also has a selection of about six house-made eaux de vies. The house cocktails have fittingly portentous names such as Ortensia, Demeter and Circe. Circe is made with gin and blood orange bitters, like Pink Gin. Enough of these, and as the goddess did to Freud’s beloved ancient Greeks, they will turn you into swine.

"I want it to tour like a rock band," said I.O.C.’s designer, Tara Subkoff, who has been swanning around like a bit of a rock star herself recently in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, etc. "I had an idea for a store that was completely minimalist, completely functional and completely nomadic, so that my shopkeeper could pick it up and run with it down the street if need be."

Ms. Subkoff’s "shopkeeper" is her brother’s best friend, Jed Miner. He was standing inside the Plexiglas in a pale suit and tie, with angelic golden locks, delivering a steady stream of banter. The "Imitation Store" was slated to hit 30 New York City locations in one week, Mr. Miner said, with a new item each day, and is ultimately destined for Los Angeles, Paris, London and Tokyo. "And my bedroom is an additional location, for all you groupies out there," he murmured.

But seriously, folks: "I will be doing my best to uphold the fashion-design sensibilities of Tara Subkoff," Mr. Miner said. "Rich people really do want to show the rest of the world that they can spend $7,000 right next to the hot-dog stand."

Several days later, Ms. Subkoff showed up at Bottino on 10th Avenue and 24th Street—following Daniel Subkoff, her brother and creative partner, by a few minutes—and ordered lunch (brunch was no longer available, much to her chagrin). She was wearing a one-sleeved silver-gray work shirt and suede shorts, accessorized by Roman-style sandals that came all the way up her lovely calves, and she was accompanied by a small entourage that included Mr. Miner. Her blond hair was slicked back in a bun at the nape of her neck in a Grace Kelly style. The designer said she had tried to avoid negative press by braiding her hair in cornrows for the show—"by having them put me down rather than the ideas," she said. "By having them completely make fun of me and my hair style."

After her salmon arrived, Ms. Subkoff began discussing I.O.C.’s runway show, which had begun with a small child reading the Pledge of Allegiance aloud, while photographs of women and children in Iraq were projected on the back wall and four American flags hung from above. Ms. Subkoff alleged that it wasn’t a runway show at all—despite the presence of male and female models parading up and down the catwalk in clothing of her design—but "a complicated social experiment."

And what was the outcome of this experiment?

"You saw it, you came, you were there," the designer said flatly. "I’d rather you explain it than I."

Then she relented a bit. "I think this President we have now should be impeached," Ms. Subkoff said. "He’s atrocious. The only area of influence I have is the fashion world. If I changed one person’s mind, then I think all the bad reviews would be worth it."

Of her new retail venture, Ms. Subkoff said: "I’m not trying to start a movement—I’m just trying to have a completely original branding experience. I think my store is the most democratic store that ever existed! We have no security guards, and our salesman is lovely to everyone equally." And then, with commendable exuberance: "I think we have the most American, patriotic store that ever existed on the planet!"

One of the store’s first stops had been amidst the throng on Grand and Wooster, right outside the Deitch Projects opening of Terry Richardson’s revolting Terry World. "Terry—who is a dear friend, who was such a good sport …. " Ms. Subkoff said, then trailed off. That evening, the Imitation Store sold a $400, vintage-1930’s pair of glass eyeballs, which had been worn by the same man: one in the daytime and the other at night.

With its lipstick-red booths, somber paneled walls, terrazzo floor and hanging milk-glass globes, the place is right out of an Edward Hopper painting (albeit updated with the latest 40's-inspired Prada fashions). You'd think it had been on this corner for the better part of the century. The food, however, is nothing that would have been served at any of the places Hopper painted, or even set foot inside.

On the night that I went, just a month after it opened, only a handful of the generously spaced tables were filled. Four of us settled into a comfortable round booth and ordered a bottle of dolcetto from the very reasonably priced wine list, which consists largely of vintages from lesser-known Italian boutique vineyards. There were no bottles of ketchup on the table, but as befits the setting, the bread arrived in a retro pie tin: house-made focaccia and crusty loaves served with olive oil instead of foil-wrapped pats of butter.

City Eatery was formerly the dining room of Astor Restaurant and Lounge. The upstairs restaurant was an elaborate Balthazar knockoff that failed. The new owners have kept the downstairs lounge (still a late-night hot spot) as it was, but they transformed the dining room, ripping out the fake Parisian brasserie stuff, retaining only the banquettes and floors. They hired restaurant consultant Ed Schoenfeld, who brought in chef Scott Conant–a young American who had worked at San Domenico and Il Toscanaccio–to redo the menu.

This was a clever move. I first tasted Mr. Conant's food at Chianti, an odd, 60's-style restaurant in the East 50's, and was very impressed. If the food here is Italian, it's contemporary American-Italian: stylish but simple, with bold, clean flavors. It's the sort of food I like to eat, beginning with a plate of calamari and zucchini fried in a feather-light batter of milk and flour, perfectly salted and seasoned with herbs and lemon. Juicy roasted sea scallops were crusted with potatoes and served with a sauce made with porcini mushrooms and potatoes–a wonderful play of textures and tastes. Instead of plating foie gras with the usual fruit garnishes, Mr. Conant goes out on a limb and pairs it with what he calls an autumn salad–chopped quince, potatoes, frisée, favas and chives, bound together with a splash of balsamic sauce. Poached sweetbreads, tossed in crunchy garlic bread crumbs, were teamed with a mixture of escarole, mushrooms and pancetta.

Mr. Conant's dishes manage to be both rustic and elegant at the same time. Short ribs were braised in vinegar and chicken stock and served over creamy farro risotto. One night he sent out a rich, smooth polenta topped with porcini mushrooms and white truffle shavings. I'm sure you could smell the aroma two tables away. A rather jazzy salad was made with a scoop of warm goat cheese perched like a poached egg in a nest of frisée and arugula on top of roasted sliced beets in a walnut vinaigrette. A touch of balsamic lifted it and pulled it all together. Warm lobster salad was multidimensional, its juices mixed with lemon, olive oil and chives and given a jolt from shavings of bottarga (dried mullet roe).

Halfway through dinner, I tore myself away from the table in search of a bathroom and discovered instead a small bar behind the dining room, its brightly painted ceiling shielded from nicotine stains by a layer of Plexiglas. It was full of people having a rollicking time over exotic cocktails. Down a flight of stairs was a large, dimly lit lounge decorated like a Moroccan nightclub, where a lone drinker was hunched over the bar.

Upon my return to the table, our waiter brought over the sort of dish you dream of having in some little trattoria in an Italian hillside village: baby goat roasted in an open pan so that the juices were reduced to an intense caramelized sauce, served with potatoes, fresh sweet peas, shallots and thyme with a dash of crushed red pepper. It was remarkable. And at $20, it was one of the most expensive dishes on the menu. The lamb shank was extraordinary, too: dark and burnished, its braising juices laced with red wine vinegar to cut through the fat. Mr. Conant spent time in Germany, where he learned to make the tiny, airy spätzle he serves with the shank, along with broccoli rabe and little currant tomatoes that burst in your mouth when you bite down on them. The only dish that wasn't a success was the whole roasted fish of the day, served on a cedar plank. It was tepid and tired, as though it had spent 15 minutes lying about while the rest of the main courses were being cooked. The grilled striped bass was a better fish choice, served with fava beans, truffled potatoes and corn (the same garnish, in fact, as the foie gras).

One of Mr. Conant's best dishes is spaghetti with braised octopus. The pasta was perfectly al dente, finished in the pan with the sauce for the octopus, made with capers, tomato and caramelized onions. And with all the second-rate macaroni and cheese I've been having lately (one or two bites and you can feel it going down like lead), Mr. Conant's version is a revelation. It wasn't made with heavy cheese sauce (or topped with foie gras, as I had choked down the other day at Hudson Cafeteria), but used a light, tangy ricotta salata instead, tossed with short, hand-cut macaroni, tomatoes and oregano.

Desserts include a delicate panna cotta made with coconut and served with a sharp mango compote. The chocolate cake was moist, deep and dark; apple crisp got its crunchy texture from a streusel topping. Chocolate pistachio torte arrived with a gianduja ice cream, rich with chocolate and hazelnuts.

As you eat, you can look out the dining room windows onto a row of bushes that reflect the bright blue glow of the restaurant's neon sign. The Bowery may have lost the trees that gave it its name a couple hundred years ago, but this neighborhood, which has some of the most interesting buildings in the city, is surely on its way back. With City Eatery, there's food worth contemplating, too.

City Eatery

* *

316 Bowery (at Bleecker Street)

253-8644

Dress: Casual

Noise level: Fine

Wine list: Extensive Italian selection, well priced

Credit cards: All major

Price range: Main courses $11 to $20

Brunch: Saturday to Sunday, 11:30 a.m. To 4 p.m.

Dinner: Sunday to Wednesday, 6 p.m. To midnight; Thursday, 6 p.m. To 1 a.m.; Friday and Saturday, 6 p.m. To 2 a.m.

* Good

* * Very Good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No Star: Poor

Then, too, I felt that the puppies would like to revisit their birthplace, the way so many adopted people like to do.

The pound had guessed that they were born last July, and it seemed to me their first birthday was a good time to look for these answers.

First I got papers from the pound, in Beacon, N.Y., which said that someone I'll call Rebecca Sloom had donated the puppies last October. I found one Sloom in the Beacon phone book and called her up with a sugary voice.

Mrs. Sloom coughed and acknowledged that she was indeed the puppy donor. She seemed guilty and told me what I take to be a string of lies about why she'd given the puppies up, a child's allergy, surgery, asthma and so forth. I told her what a good job she'd done training them (but not what a bad job she'd done naming them–Tabby and Toby, which we promptly changed) and said I just wanted to find more like them.

Mrs. Sloom told me she'd answered a newspaper ad in an old Hudson Valley city, call it Peekskill. Mrs. Sloom had no memory of the breeder's name, but she gave me exact directions to the house, which stuck in her mind. It was right next to the Red Cross on Pauling Avenue, had red trim, and the woman had tons of Pomeranians.

I drove up to Pauling Avenue on the Wednesday before the Fourth. Sure enough, there was a house with red trim next to the Red Cross. It was an old Victorian with giant stained-glass windows, a big creaky porch and an antique chandelier on the porch.

"You're about to see your mother!" I sang out to my dogs, trying to get them in the mood, then parked across the street. My puppies spend all day in the woods chasing deer, and only one of them, Franklin, had a collar, so I affixed the only leash I had (a 30-foot one) to him and looped the handle end of the leash around the neck of the female, Mercer. That way I could walk them both on the same long leash.

But as we came up the sidewalk, Franklin, who is the bolder of the two, suddenly balked and set his front feet on the concrete and refused to go another inch. I had to cajole him and yell at him and finally yank him. It was out of character.

We went up on the porch and I rang the bell. I heard a sharp yapping from the back of the house that I declared in a syrupy voice was their mommy; then, visoring my hand against the glass, I peered inside. The place was frozen in another time. Thick red carpeting, a Marilyn Monroe plate hanging from the wall, a sideboard covered with a lace antimacassar and dolls with little books propped in their laps.

Then I noticed that Mercer, who is high-strung, had chewed through the leash, so she was just standing there. I tied the two broken ends together and rang again.

But no one came and I wrote out a note. I wasn't sure how to address it, so I wrote simply "Hi!" and announced that my wife and I had gotten her dogs from the pound and loved them. Would she be so good as to call me?

I pushed the note under the door and noticed that Mercer had chewed through the leash again. If I were Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, I would say that Mercer was freaking out, but I've never liked people who tell you about the emotional lives of their dogs and even do voices for their dogs. I have no doubt that my dogs have an emotional life, but I don't trust most people's translation. In her latest book, The Social Lives of Dogs (our house is now littered with dog books), Thomas makes my point. Her characterizations of dogs are reminiscent of Little Women , with far less incident to back the portraits up. By the end of the book, she's describing her ESP exchanges with her mother.

I didn't hear from the dog owner. I thought maybe I'd been too breezy. So a few days later I sent a formal and fusty suck-up letter to the address, for "Resident Dogowner."

But she didn't answer that either, and on July 21 I bribed my wife to drive up there with me, by making her dinner and accepting her movie-rental choice. We set out at 6:30.

En route I described my many overtures, and my wife said, "Don't you think you're ignoring all the signals?"

"This is a campaign," I said. "This is knowable information."

We got there before sunset. The front door was open, and I left my wife with the dogs and went over, tucking my shirt in.

That wasn't necessary. When I rang the bell, an older woman with blondish-red curls and a paisley house dress came out, dangling a Kool in her left hand. She looked as if her heyday was before Jayne Mansfield. "I think I adopted your dogs," I said. "Oh, you wrote me a letter," she said. "I would have called, but I'm in bad shape. I broke my back and I got other problems I won't tell you about. I'm supposed to go to the hospital for counseling about a hysterectomy."

With that, she led the way over a rampart of stairs, and down into the little kitchen.

It was teeming with maddened dogs. There were six or seven or eight in there, and they had taken over. All were Pomeranians, or close, and the woman, who said her name was Anna, sat down on a chair and, using the Kool as a pointer, pointed out her oldest dog, Miko.

"Their mother!" I cried out. Miko was dumpy and yellow, with a long snout and none of my dogs' grace, but she had a certain devilishly dulcet look about the eyes that was unmistakably Mercer.

I told Anna to wait, then shot across the street back to the car and grabbed Franklin from the back seat. "Come with me," I hollered to my wife. "What's going on?" she said. "You'll see."

We didn't have the leashes for my dogs, so we carried them. My wife stood by the sink holding Mercer, and I sat in a chair. All the Poms were barking nuttily, but the mother came up and stared happily into Franklin's eyes. It seemed plain to me that she recognized him. He sniffed her appreciatively back, but was uncharacteristically stand-offish.

Anna said that the mother was the product of a chow and a Pomeranian, that some 18 years before a chow had jumped the fence and somehow impregnated one of her Poms.

As this tale was related, Miko turned from one of the puppies to the other with the same benign smile on her face.

And what about the puppies' daddy? From what sodden depths of Peekskill had his genome blossomed? Anna motioned at the back end of the room, a wall of Plexiglas separating the mud room from the kitchen. Two black Pomeranians were going crazy, throwing themselves against the clear wall.

"That's the father," she said. "On the right. O.J. I got him round about the time all that O.J. stuff was on television. Then the police arrested me for having too many dogs, but I have a second place, so I said half of my dogs live there.… "

I carried Franklin up to the Plexiglas, but the black dog went crazy and Franklin tightened in my arms. He was scared. That old Oedipal juice was kicking in.

At the sink my wife said, "Mercer's trembling."

Mercer's always been high-strung; now she was pressed against my wife's chest.

We stayed a couple more minutes, got Anna's phone number. Then my wife said how we'd gotten the dogs from the pound, which angered Anna, and Anna told us about some lies Mrs. Sloom had told, and after that we went back across the street. Mercer's tail was down. The dogs crept into the car.

When we got going, they both climbed into my wife's lap in the front seat. Ordinarily they fight one another over my wife's attention, but this time they were curled around one another. They looked like little puppies again, like they'd regressed. Mercer laid her head against Franklin's neck.

"They're upset," my wife said.

"Put them in the back and see how they do," I said.

"I don't believe in animal testing," she said scornfully.

But after a while she put Franklin in the back, and he laid down with a blank look. Franklin is goofy and enthusiastic; now he looked depressed. His more soulful sister stared off with a haunted, ladylike expression of deep injury.

My wife said that I'd traumatized them selfishly, that they had no desire to go back home, which turned out to be a Victorian dog hellhole. Their little lives had been dislocated several times already, they had surely feared that we were going to leave them back where they'd come from. They'd regressed, and even though we'd brought them away, they were still caught in their scary and awful childhood.

I told my wife she was anthropomorphizing, that it was just a stimulating outing, but I felt pretty guilty. I stopped at a Frosty and got the jumbo ice cream for $2.40, and when my wife and I were done, I set the rest on the bedroom floor in two containers before getting in bed to watch the movie. Then, that night, I let the puppies sleep in the bedroom. I was thinking, class is an irreducible fact of American life, even for dogs; the puppies had been horrified to revisit their past, having grown so accustomed to a kind of privilege. And this business of finding your roots is overrated. The point of reinvention is, you never have to go home again. The puppies understood that.

The next day, my wife told me that she'd lately surrendered to the same impulse I'd had and taken the puppies for a visit back to the pound, where there was what looked like a beagle mix in a cage. The puppies had sniffed him appreciatively, she said, then asked her to bring him home. Now that's crazy.

Venetian food has gotten a bad rap. Jan Morris, who lived in Venice for more than a year, called the cooking there the dullest in Europe and wrote that after trying about 30 restaurants she would not feel "intolerably misused if denied re-entry to any of them. Once upon a time the cucina Veneziana was considered the finest in the world, specializing in wild boar, peacock, venison, elaborate salads and architectural pastries. Even then, though, some perfectionists thought it was spoiled by an excessive use of Oriental spices: Aretino, the poet-wastrel, used to say that Venetians 'did not know how to eat or drink,' and another commentator reported caustically that 'the pride of Venetian cookery was the hard biscuit, which was particularly resistant to the nibblings of weevils (some left in Crete in 1669 were still edible in 1821).' "

I, however, feel considerably more charitable toward the city, since it was in Venice that I tasted my first white truffle (after my companion had grumpily piled the shavings to the side of his plate: "Awful! It tastes like dried beef!"). But among the glories of Venetian cooking are pasta e fagioli soup, calf's liver with polenta, black ink risotto and other wonderful seafood dishes. I can't imagine that Ms. Morris, who cherished an affection for the modest eating houses which sent you home "reeking of prawns and lasagna," would not like the food at Le Zie. It's straightforward, serious and good.

Le Zie has become a favorite among the artists and art dealers of Chelsea, but it's not one of those trendy over-designed restaurants with a velvet rope in front of the door, even though at 10:30 on a weeknight people are still coming in for dinner. It's a friendly, self-effacing place; if you have to wait for a table, they might bring you a drink outside, where there's even a bench for two lucky people to sit down. You could almost be in a back alley in Venice, by one of those funky neighborhood spots away from the tourists.

The restaurant is owned by Claudio Bonotto, the host in the dining room, and Francesco Antonucci, the chef at Remi in midtown. The small room has gold-beige walls decorated with stencils, pale blue light sconces, beige corduroy banquettes and tables set with brown paper on white cloths under an undulating dropped ceiling. The back of the dining room is dominated by a giant blue Plexiglas wave.

"That's what is known as a 'dunker,' " said a friend who lives in Australia. "The only way to survive a wave like that is by diving down to the bottom and lying on the sand." A metaphor for life, I guess. One of the drawbacks of Le Zie when it's full is that it is incredibly noisy. The other drawback is the infuriatingly endless list of specials. Our waiter, a sweet, doe-eyed young man from Argentina, reeled them off from memory like a schoolboy called upon to recite his lesson to the class, and the list went on and on and on. After several antipasti and pasta dishes, he kept going with fish and then chicken and then meat, and afterwards no one could remember a thing he'd said. In this age of computers, it would take five minutes to print the list and hand it out with the menus.

Because we had to wait for our table, the kitchen sent out some salads, a pleasant Caesar salad and a plate of tomatoes and arugula with feta cheese. Crusty bread was set down along with a bowl of olive oil swimming with black olives, fat cloves of garlic and sprigs of herbs. We ordered a bottle of Venetian Valpolicella and things began to look up.

There is, not surprisingly for a Venetian restaurant, a great deal of seafood at Le Zie, prepared by chef Roberto Passon. (Ms. Morris marvelously describes the fish in the Venice market as "lying aghast upon their fresh green biers.") The shrimp cakes are excellent and the crunchy fried calamari, served in a basket on brown paper, were as good as if they had been cooked on the shores of the Adriatic. Tender chunks of octopus are sautéed with celery, potatoes and tomatoes.

You can also begin with a Friulian speciality, mashed potatoes and Parmesan cheese fried in a golden pancake with brussels sprouts (in England we call this "bubble and squeak") and served on a bed of cooked radicchio and mushrooms. The Venetian bean soup, swirled with a fruity olive oil and laced with pasta, was superb, as were the whole baby artichokes with black olives (they were supposed to be spicy, but they weren't).

For a main course, a cooked fish arrived in a parchment bag; it looked like a whale. The waiter cut it open and revealed a snowy dorado with tomato and black olives. Striped bass was also very good, with a zestful sauce of olives, onions and tomatoes. The squid ink risotto was uncompromising in its shiny blackness (it turns your teeth black so you wind up looking like a kid who just ate a bar of chocolate). It was delicious, but so rich that I couldn't eat it all, and the waiter kept coming out with a look of concern on his face to check my progress.

Mr. Passon also turns out superior pasta dishes, among them a rigatoni with a sauce of ground veal and rosemary, splendid black tagliatelle tossed with mussels and clams, as well as (the menu boasts) the "best spaghetti and meatballs in New York," as voted by the New York Press . The latter was fine, but could have used more meatballs. Lamb shank, falling off the bone and served with roasted potatoes and mushrooms, was exceptional. Also good was the pink, tender calf's liver with onions and creamy polenta.

"It's suddenly quieter," someone said after we had been concentrating on our main courses for a while. There was a pause. "I guess it's just because we stopped talking."

"Only four dessert specials!" said the waiter cheerfully when he came to clear the plates. Desserts weren't as good as the rest of the food. They included a perfectly pleasant apple tart with crunchy crust, a fine crème brûlée and a so-so molten chocolate cake.

After dinner we walked out to Seventh Avenue and from the street we could see a piece of the Empire State Building all lit up. "That makes me feel good," said one of my friends. "But perhaps it was the nice dinner."

"Perhaps because it's so quiet," said someone else.

Le Zie

* *

172 Seventh Avenue near 20th Street

206-8686

Dress: Very casual

Noise level: High

Wine list: Good selection of Italian wines at reasonable prices

Credit cards: None accepted

Price range: Main courses $9.95 to $14.95; three-course prix fixe lunch $12.95

Lunch: Noon to 3:30 p.m.

Dinner: 5 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.

* Good

* * Very Good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No Star: Poor

Sunday night finally arrived–time to sit down in front of the telly and endure the four-hour ceremony. Oy ! I turned on E! just in time to see Chloë Sevigny giving Joan Rivers the skinny on her borrowed ensemble: jewelry by Bulgari, Asprey & Garrard and frock by Yves Saint Laurent. What motivates a highly-paid movie actress, not to mention a descendant of the witty and sophisticated writer, Madame de Sévigné, to allow herself to be turned into a branding puppet for a fashion house?

At the root of it all seems to be good old-fashioned tight-fistedness: Actresses are simply bending over backward not to pay for their awards drag. And then they whine to Ms. Rivers about how much they love their frock and how sad they will be to give it back. Girls ! Open your purses ! If you can't afford designer schmattes, then who can?

More stars arrived, and lo and behold, the who-will-wear-what frenzy that we had been subjected to for the last six weeks turned out to be a big dry hump. We got staid country-club glamour: simple bustiers, the occasional décolleté, tight bodices that constrict one's lymph nodes, lots of black and that old 1950's trick, the plunging back. If you half closed your eyes, Hilary Swank looked like Jane Fonda. The 1930's bias-cut Harlow glamour of recent years has been replaced by an adult chic, reminiscent of the Eisenhower-Kennedy years. But without Marilyn wriggling inside, these clothes can look dull and mumsy. E.g. Charlize Theron has the vavoom to pull it off, but Uma Thurman looks a bit like a very stylish geography teacher.

But wait. Who's that with the green Christo-wrapped factory chimney on her head? It's Erykah Badu, and her Miriam Makeba-St. Patrick's Day creation is rocking the house. It's an Afrocentric couture fantasia constructed from patches of leprechaun-green leather held together with raffia crochet and it has the refreshing whiff of amateurism. It bumps Cate Blanchett's Jean Paul Gaultier and becomes my favorite. Mazel tov !

One look at Peter Coyote, the voice of the Oscars, in front of all those yet-to-be-presented statuettes and I flipped to MTV where I found the perfect antidote to the imminent tedium–spring break 2000.

While Billy Crystal was doing his opening spiel, hunks at Fat Tuesdays in Cancun were matching water balloons to their girlfriends' cup size. Pourquoi pas ? More jolly japes followed: a bride or Barbie competition; busty, horny chicks swimming with dolphins; studs and starlets swapping minuscule swimwear in a see-through phone booth. Collegiate used to mean preppie–now it would appear to mean dressing like a lap-dancer or a male stripper-relief masseur and living your life as if you were in a Russ Meyer movie.

I flipped democratically back and forth from ABC, but as the evening wore on the battle to be king and queen of spring break 2000 seemed more culturally significant, i.e. contained more gratuitous nudity. Couples were instructed to "introduce your best body part to one another." I was rooting for couple 4, Ace and Ashley, and I wasn't going to desert them now.

While you were watching Sarah McLachlan belt out Randy Newman's theme from Toy Story 2 , I was watching the three male finalists writing words like "bootie," "crack" and "butt" on their female partners' bare derrieres with lipstick. The young "college" girls then pressed their inscribed cheek onto a sheet of Plexiglas. If she could read the imprint of what her partner had written, the two young hopefuls would win.

As predicted by moi , Ace and Ashley wiped the floor with couples 2 and 6 while Phil Collins was getting lachrymose back at the Shrine Auditorium. Ashley celebrated by streaking through the groping crowd with ersatz whipped cream on her breasts. Who can blame her?

I stuck with the Oscars for about five minutes. But Warren Beatty sent me flipping back to spring break. We were now at Las Vegas' Pink Taco restaurant where young lads were indulging in a burrito-scoffing pig-out. The first person to poo would win $180– woooo ! The camera moved between grunting contestants, stall to stall, in the Pink Taco restrooms. It forced me to watch the rest of the Oscars.

I kept tedium at bay with random speculations and fairly unanswerable questions about the on-screen proceedings:

How come nobody told me Allen Carr died?

Which films did Academy voter Buddy Hackett pick?

How many spring breakers contracted chlamydia during the Burt Bacharach memory lane Oscar medley?

Why doesn't Nicole Kidman wear a really cheap frock from Strawberry so all her fans could rush out and replicate her look?

If Kevin Spacey suddenly announced that he was gay, would he and Rupert Everett be vying for the same parts?

Did the good people at Benetton entertain ideas of dressing Ms. Swank? Teena Brandon's killer, John Lotter, is, after all, a featured model in their misguided ad campaign.

Did Randolph Duke tell Ms. Swank about his penile-enhancement surgery? Or did she have to read about it in Page Six on the day she donned his gown?

After the American Beauty triumph, I fell into bed. I found myself thinking about next year's Oscars. What a relief it would be if, in answer to Ms. Rivers' question, "Who made your dress?" Gwyneth Paltrow, Elizabeth Hurley or whoever were to reply: "Some faggot!" and keep right on walking down that red carpet?

They probably don't notice the tall, rail-thin woman with kinky brown hair exiting the crumbling stairwell or the dismissive way she says goodbye to a bespectacled middle-aged man as they head in opposite directions. They don't see the flash of disgust that crosses her face as she zips up her sweatshirt over a midriff-less spandex top.

They certainly don't know that she has played out this same scene three times in the last hour and a half. They couldn't know this unless they've been staking out the entrance of the Elk Hotel for the last six hours like I have. But had they stopped to notice, they might have recognized the significance of the building and its transient inhabitants. They'd know that the Elk, the last "no-tell hotel" in the area, represents one of the few surviving remnants of 42nd Street's seamy and seedy side, a barely living connection to the gray days when Times Square was the reigning kingdom of sex and sin.

Bugs Bunny and the Lion King now line what was once home to porn theaters and sex emporiums. The Port Authority, yesteryear's mecca of grime and crime, now attracts kiddie birthday parties to its renovated, high-tech bowling alley. Last summer, even the classic Show World , land of peep shows and strippers, fired all its exotic dancers and started pimping plastic replicas of the Statue of Liberty and crappy "I ª NY" T-shirts. Then on May 27, it was shuttered for allegedly being the site of a friendly little fencing operation.

But even before Show World, I started to wonder if there was anything left of the Times Square I grew up with. So on a sunny afternoon I said goodbye to my wife and set out on a mini-adventure-to see if I could find any establishments serving the time-compressed lascivious needs of harried and horny New Yorkers in Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's newly minted and freshly scrubbed Times Square-cum-Disneyland.

After wandering for a while, I turned to the professionals for advice: a couple of morose-looking doormen and bouncers at Show World. I inquired about the possibility of locating a room for just a couple of hours. Five minutes later-and $10 poorer-I was standing in front of the filthy plastic doors of 360 West 42nd Street.

There are no signs on the outside mentioning day rates, let alone any fraction thereof. I climbed the 12 stairs and waited to be buzzed in by a man hidden behind a Plexiglas-and undoubtedly bulletproof-separation. Finally inside, I asked the Pakistani clerk about room rates. He leaned forward, looking to see who had escorted me inside the building. As I signed the guest register (John Smith, of course), he asked me-twice-if I would be staying alone. I assured him I would. He just stared, then he shrugged and pointed me to the far end of the first floor.

A twin-size bed dominates Room 109-precisely what one would expect from a place charging $25 for a two-hour stay. The ratty, bumpy, mattress features a concave crater directly beneath the semen stains on the once white sheets. With only a little imagination, one can discern the subtle outline of the human form on its surface, where countless numbers of women must have lain, usually paid for the inconvenience of staring at the mold-covered ceiling. Pressed in one corner stands a chipped faux-wood table and underneath it a plastic container with one crumpled napkin, one crusty tissue and one used condom inside.

Out the window, I could see people walking. They would be repulsed by Room 109. But I saw something different. To me, the room and all its inert inhabitants were like a moment frozen in time. A moment, that if I had my druthers, would remain frozen precisely this way.

But rumor has it that the Elk's current owner has been slowly "assembling" the buildings along the southwest and southeast corners of Ninth Avenue in the hopes of constructing a residential high-rise similar to the wildly successful Manhattan Plaza that stands kitty-corner from the hotel.

Should we let this antique go gentle into that goody-two-shoes night? Nay, I say. The wax enthusiasts behind Madame Tussaud's will soon open a 60,000-foot facility just an avenue or so over. For a few bucks more, they could buy the Elk Hotel and memorialize the hot-wax enthusiasts who've occupied its rooms-a life-size, interactive exhibit that's one part Lower East Side Tenement Museum and five parts Sodom and Gomorrah.

Picture the themed possibilities: In one room, a 16-year-old runaway and her john are entwined on the bed, while her pimp, attired in pink mink, gold chains and feathered fedora, listens at the door, a smile covering his face as he greedily counts his cash.

On the second floor, the museum re-creates an earlier era- those special, summer nights at nightclubs like Plato's Retreat when beer guts, feathered hair and cocaine razors were the coin of the realm.

And what trip would be complete without a visit to the adultery room, replete with rendezvousing lovers caught in flagrante delicto by a jealous wife waving a kitchen knife.

Imagine the gift shop: T-shirts emblazoned with catchy slogans ("Welcome to New York. Now get the fuck out."), dildos shaped like Lady Liberty's torch and candies-in-a-crack-vial. At the register, a snippy workforce on workfare fleeces customers at three-card monte.

Then there are the expansion opportunities. A bed-and-breakfast where you can live like the addicts did-raids, deprivation and all! And a theme restaurant with out-of-work actors dressed as the homeless, directing customers to a buffet-style dumpster dinner.

On second thought, perhaps we should just leave it all alone. Sooner or later the ever-cycling city will hit another downturn and we'll need a blueprint for transforming Disney back to Deep Throat and Restaurant Row back to Crack Alley. Let the Elk Hotel remain in its present, pristine state, a repository for historical DNA from which we could clone 42nd Street the way it was meant to be.

For now, I'll just go home to my wife and wait till it happens.

So were we.

Four of us had met for lunch at Daniel Boulud's new restaurant, which has opened in the old Mayfair Hotel (now condo apartments) where Le Cirque used to be. We, too, were sitting at a big round table, but we only filled half of it, and we weren't drinking from 30 bottles of 1982 Bordeaux, as were the men, who I learned later were the wine writer Robert Parker and seven friends having what is euphemistically known in the business as a wine "tasting." Our budget permitted a chilled Sancerre, one of a few wines on Daniel's remarkable list priced in the low two figures that wasn't a half-bottle. It went very well with a couple of our first courses–pearly slices of sea scallop seviche topped with sea urchins and Sevruga caviar, and raw tuna en escabeche with pickled vegetables. The ballotine I had ordered, made with generous chunks of squab, dried fruits and foie gras, might have matched better with a buttery Sauternes, perhaps, and the sweet pepper and potato bisque laced with pesto demanded something big and red. But we weren't complaining, for the food was nothing short of wonderful.

Daniel's wine list opens encouragingly with Baudelaire's poem "L'Ami du Vin" from Les Fleurs du Mal . Yet a less decadent place than this would be hard to imagine. There is nothing here of the loucheness of the old Le Cirque (now a private dining room), with its air-kissing blondes in Chanel suits ordering chicken without the skin. Daniel is for people who take food seriously. The restaurant, designed by Patrick Naggar, is on two levels in the Mayfair's old lobby and former tearoom, a 1920's interpretation of an Italian Renaissance courtyard–complete with arches, columns and a raised gallery. The walls are now creamy yellow with a limestone finish, the coffered ceilings burnt-orange, hung with an immense iron chandelier decorated with little upturned glass lamps. The chairs are red velvet and the banquettes dark blue. The tables display elaborate flower arrangements. But intimacy is not one of the hallmarks of Renaissance architecture. This room is as cold as the Frick Collection, and the pinpoints of light coming down from the ceiling do nothing to warm it up. It may impress, but it's not the setting you'd choose for a romantic evening.

"It feels like a lobby," my companion complained over dinner one evening, as we sat down under an overhead wall lamp that threw our faces into rather too-sharp relief. "Whatever happened to the notion of romance in a grand restaurant, to dining rooms with soft peach lighting like Cafe Chauveron?"

Forget romance. Concentrate on your food. It doesn't get much better than this (nor does the service). At dinner, the chef sends out not one or two but three little freebie things to start you off, among them a plate of tuna tartare or a small silver bowl of creamy cucumber soup with salmon roe. It's hard not to fill up right away on the marvelous breads: raisin walnut, garlic focaccia and crusty sourdough rolls made in the house.

"This is genius," said my dinner companion as he tasted octopus on oiled green linguine with cilantro and fava beans. "Just four or five perfect ingredients."

Mr. Boulud, who is from Lyons, became Le Cirque's executive chef at the age of 31 in the late 80's, and in 1993 opened Restaurant Daniel, which he redecorated and reopened last fall as the less formal Cafe Boulud. From there he brought his executive chef Alex Lee (who has also worked at Le Cirque and at Alain Ducasse's Louis XV in Monte Carlo) to open the new Daniel.

Mr. Boulud is a master of all elements of French cooking, whether classical or bourgeois. He is equally at home with a complex modern dish–roasted shrimp with endives braised in tangerine juice and carrots flavored with cumin–or a deceptively simple braised beef with carrots and mashed potatoes that is like nothing you've ever had before. He also does wonderful things with game: duck that is rare but with a crisp skin, served with a spicy fruit chutney and rutabaga purée, or guinea hen with foie gras and turnips glazed in port so they take on the aspect of a fruit. His food is never overwrought or fussy, whether it's a chunk of cod with cockles and caviar floating in an emerald broth, or a pink, juicy lamb saddle stuffed with endive and squash, paired with a lamb chop crusted with black truffles and walnuts.

"I once tried writing restaurant reviews, but I was fired," said one of my lunchtime friends who was stoking up on thick slices of roast veal with artichokes while trying to figure out how she would describe it. "I simply can't find the right adjectives."

"You must never use adjectives!"

"Especially succulent."

As my friends and I ate lunch, we watched in amusement as trays of food, including whole roast fowl, were carted over to the eight plum-colored men having their mini-Satyricon. Perhaps it was the effect of all this excess, but my husband–who normally has a tunafish sandwich for lunch at his desk–asked for the cheese trolley. It was rolled in on wheels under a clear Plexiglas top, each cheese at its peak and each more exciting than the last. And there was no letdown with pastry chef Thomas Haas' desserts, which include a delicate crepe folded over a filling of fromage blanc and served with a compote of berries; a warm dark chocolate upside-down cake, light as a soufflé, with kumquat confit; and an apple tart under a dome of meringue spiked like a sea urchin.

By then, it was after 3 o'clock and we were winding up with two rounds of double espressos when Mr. Parker's table rang out with expressions of delight. For their delectation, the waiter held aloft a platter containing the whole roasted head of a pig.

At the end of the meal, along with petits fours, we were served a pile of sugar-dusted petits madeleines in a napkin, hot from the oven.

"Lest we forget," said the writer.

Somehow, I don't think that's likely.

Daniel

* * * *

60 East 65th Street

288-0033

Dress:Jacket and tie

Noise level:Fine

Wine list: More than 600 selections with many rare, expensive vintages

Credit cards:All major

Price range: Three-course prix-fixe lunch $42, five-course $69; three-course prix-fixe dinner $68, six-course $90, eight-course $120

Lunch: Monday to Saturday noon to 2:30 P.M.

Dinner: Monday to Thursday 5:45 P.M. to 11 P.M.; Friday and Saturday to 11:30 P.M.

* Good

* * Very Good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No Star: Poor