Postcard from New York

The abstract wealth of the past few years has evaporated - along with most of the tourists enjoying the exchange rate imbalance - and New Yorkers are returning to their old haunts and vices.

For some this means the restaurants of the late Eighties and early Nineties: The Odeon on West Broadway; Raoul's on Prince; Il Buco on Bond; Omen on Thompson; Via Quadronno, the panini bar, and La Goulue, a French bistro, both on the Upper East side.

For others, it means Polish food at Veselka on 3rd Avenue or cheeseburgers at the Broome Street Bar on West Broadway.

In one sense, the shock of the financial collapse has yet to fully impact on the city - property values may halve - in part because Wall Street's wealthiest never lived here anyway. No one met Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers or Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs because they live in Greenwich, Connecticut, where the really big money sleeps. But the unfinished construction projects and shuttered shops are no abstraction.

There's been a return to street politics, too. Outside Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter's ultra-fashionable The Waverly Inn recently, protestors harangued diners with complaints that two of the partners were forcing their eviction from a nearby long-stay hotel they planned to convert. At Sant Ambroeus, nearby, one yelled: 'New York trophy women! Next week, you'll be lunching at McDonald's!'

And perhaps they will. According to city arbiters of taste, the rich, austere diet of the Noughties is being replaced with comfort food --upmarket hamburgers, dessert bars, simple bowls of soba and ramen noodles. One exception, though, is April Bloomfield's John Dory on 10th Avenue and 16th Street. Bloomfield, who bought gastro-chic to the city with The Spotted Pig, opened this underwater fish-fantasy decorated restaurant in November and it's been packed ever since, proving the point that New Yorkers have not lost all their flair for experimentation.

The change in economic outlook has led to other shifts in sentiment, too. New York magazine suggests only dating or sleeping with people you already know as this requires less upfront investment. For crunch dressers it's Domsey's Warehouse Outlet in Brooklyn or Uncle Sam's surplus store on West 8th Street. 'Broke is the new black,' one style respondent told New York magazine. 'Everything is regressing. We went back to the Eighties, now we're back to the Nineties. Have you seen how people are dressing lately? Big boots, baggy flannel shirts, ripped jeans, black stockings and big silver crucifix necklaces.'

But where to wear it? In keeping with the mood of humility, New Yorkers are opting out of expensive show-palaces for late-night entertainment. The Beatrice Inn, the low-ceiling basment-club in the West Village, remains No 1, but it is under challenge from Chloe 81, an underground bar on Ludlow Street, Southside on Broome Street, Santo's Party House on Lafayette, and the ultra-fashionable BEast, a restaurant-club that holds no more than about 200 skinny, fashionable people on East Broadway.

The taste for the simpler and less extravagant extends across downtown. A new hotel, Evening Standard, in the Meatpacking District, which looks like a Vegas strip building from the Diamonds are Forever era recently opened with rooms at $300 a night; the restaurants that once promoted small, opulent meals, are now comfort food joints. In keeping with the post-boom criminality that Bernard Madoff has bought to the party, there's a stylistic emphasis on 'speakeasy chic' - small dives with low lighting, muffled sound and a covert atmosphere. After the shoppingas-life binge of the last five years, the city is on its way up again.