or months, restaurants in New York City seemed impervious to the bleak economic news, but recently their phenomenal double-digit growth in sales has come to a screeching halt.

The unluckiest have seen business drop as much as 30 percent, and the city's top restaurants, the places whose stature makes them the least vulnerable to a cooling economy, are starting to feel the chill. Even Jean Georges and its cafe Nougatine are down, according to their owner, Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

Gone are the $10,000 bottles of Bordeaux at Le Bernardin, the $4,000 dinners out of the wood-fired oven at Beacon. Now it's more modest dining, three courses of comfort food for $20 at the Metropolitan Hotel, and half-price wine with the pan-Latin fare at Chicama.

On the brink of the fall season, traditionally the time when lavish new places open and the luxury factor is pumped up on menus all over town, restaurateurs are instead worrying about filling tables in an oversaturated market. There are no splashy openings on the calendar, no new Ducasse on the horizon.

Even established restaurateurs are setting their sights lower. Danny Meyer, an owner of Eleven Madison Park and Union Square Cafe, is opening a barbecue restaurant. Drew Nieporent, an owner of Nobu and Tribeca Grill, is just sitting it out. "We probably opened two restaurants a year for the last two years," he said. "This year, I'm not opening any new stores."

It's a sea change in a food-obsessed city. Diners who were willing to endure a three-month wait for a reservation just months ago are now being courted with free meals, discounts and solicitous service.

For almost a year, sales in restaurants across the country have been steadily declining. But New York, the country's premier restaurant city, seemed to buck the trend. No more.

Most restaurateurs are not panicking, and dining rooms appear to be bustling all over town. But a growing number of owners — particularly of restaurants below the top tier — are concerned enough to change the way they do business. They are revamping menus, lowering prices, offering special prix fixe meals, even instituting frequent-diner programs. Harder times for restaurants have meant, in many cases, better times for the clientele.

"At the very best restaurants it's easier to get in," said Tim Zagat, who owns the Zagat restaurant guide with his wife, Nina. "They are politer at places like Nobu. Last year they didn't even pick up the phone. Those restaurants are a lot more accessible, but once you get there they are still full."

Signs of a slowdown are everywhere. William Troy, the owner of Cascade Linen in Brooklyn, keeps a Dow Jones of napkin rentals that includes 18 of the restaurants his company services. His napkin index has seen a drop of 5.6 percent since the beginning of the year, mostly in the last three months. At DeBragga & Spitler, suppliers of top-quality meats, Marc Sarrazin, the owner, says business is down 7 to 8 percent.

Joseph Bastianich, an owner of two respected restaurants, Babbo and Esca, said wine distributors were calling him almost daily, trying to sell him premium wines that they rationed last year. At Dairyland, which sells specialty foods to 3,000 restaurants in New York, the owner, Christopher Pappas, said restaurants that usually pay weekly are taking 30 days to pay; monthly clients are taking 50 or 80 days and longer.

Steve Hanson, who owns midpriced restaurants including Ruby Foo's and Blue Water Grill, said he was getting calls from people who wanted him to buy their restaurants. "I tell them that I buy only deeply discounted restaurants," he said, "and they may want to call me back in a couple of months."

The restaurant boom of the last 10 years appears to have produced a restaurant glut. Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant, said New York was "overbuilt and overhyped," and competition has become fierce.

"Whatever has happened in New York City has been exacerbated by the overabundance of restaurants," said Alan Stillman, chairman of the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group, which includes Manhattan Ocean Club and Park Avenue Cafe. Business is off 10 percent, Mr. Stillman said: "We see it as horrible."

Mr. Nieporent estimates that since 1995, 100,000 new restaurant seats for moderate to fine dining have become available in the city. "There are going to be a lot of closings," he said. "We hit a saturation point. We are not ready to start discounting, but we are watching very carefully."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/dining/04REST.html

Today's Special? Discounts All Around

IN the heyday of New York restaurants — which faded something like the day before yesterday — there was often that tendency to beg just a little. You might turn on your most charming telephone voice to negotiate a reservation, for instance. Or act just a little too grateful for small favors in the dining room.

Being allowed into the place at all (with just an hour's wait at the bar) was a privilege. Courteous, prompt service was a gift. A visit from the chef? Wonderful. And did that little repast cost less than a week's salary? A bargain.

Anyway, if you didn't take advantage of all this treasure, you were sure someone else was right behind you who would. And that wasn't paranoid — it was often true.

But, my fellow diners, the tables have turned. With the general economic regression, competition from new places opening on every corner and the growing fear of a catastrophic dining slump in this restaurant metropolis, many of the once confident culinary establishments are now the ones doing the pleading. To keep those tables filled, they're trying everything from newfound graciousness to gimmicks that would seem familiar on supermarket coupons.

A number of restaurants are offering special menus designed to be less expensive, there are more straightforward discounts on dinner these days, free or cheap wine is increasingly common, and as part of the meal deal there might even be savings on completely unrelated products, like 10 percent off at a music store.

Promotions are nothing new in the restaurant business, of course. What's dazzling now is the pervasiveness of the marketing ploys, the sheer creativity of some of them, and the candid admissions that they are being driven by a deepening anxiety in a city that may have opened more restaurants than it can handle, especially in the current business climate.

Alan Stillman, the chairman of the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group, never a stranger to the world of promotion, is pegging the price of Friday's lunch in all his group's restaurants to the Nasdaq close on Thursday, and offering Champagne with dinner at the Manhattan Ocean Club.

At some restaurants, the uninitiated may not immediately recognize how much the establishment is willing to sacrifice: the $65 two-course lunch at Alain Ducasse is less than half the going rate for the standard lunch. And the discount lunch includes wine.

Several months ago, Strip House began offering a low-price Sunday evening wine list. Peter Glazier, an owner, said the promotion would be introduced in his other restaurants, Monkey Bar and Michael Jordan's: The Steak House, at the end of the month.

"Restaurants are losing 12 to 15 percent right now," Mr. Glazier said. "You have to find new sources of revenue. That's why we're starting to serve breakfast at Jordan's and we're turning the retail shop into a lounge."

At Chicama in the Flatiron district, Douglas Rodriguez is setting up a frequent-diner discount and rebate program with a special membership card. At Union Pacific in the Flatiron district, where tasting dinners can cost $155, Rocco DiSpirito, the chef and co-owner, is also taking aggressive steps. "I want this place to represent more than just special-occasion dining," he said. "There are several Off Broadway theaters around here, so I'm adding a two-course pretheater dinner for $45, and I'm hoping to set a slightly less formal tone."

You could call it a classy version of the early-bird special.

Other restaurateurs, not just in New York, have joined a discount reservation service. Dinner Broker, a company that went online about a year ago (www.dinnerbroker.com) with a system of off-peak restaurant discounts (and also the flip side, surcharges for hard-to-get prime-time reservations), now has about 300 restaurant accounts in more than 36 American cities, and in Toronto, Vancouver and London.

When we started, about two- thirds of our business was for the premium reservations, but it's changed and now about 80 percent of it is discounts," said Ben Dehan, the chairman.

The special $20.01 lunches — a promotion that began in New York with $19.92 lunches in 1992 — have stretched summer-long. This year, 42 places will continue the lunches through December, double the number that offered them until the end of the year last year. Boston began a similar promotion this summer. The complete list of New York restaurants offering the lunch special is available from the Convention and Visitors Bureau, 810 Seventh Avenue, or from www.nycvisit.com. (http://www.nycvisit.com.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/05/dining/05DEAL.html

Lack of diners has even forced famed chef Alain Ducasse to offer a discount at this New York restaurant. Salad with a choise of lobster, crabmeat or roast chicken, one glass of wine, cheese or dessert and assorted little frtills, all fotr just $65.00. By ordinary standards, this may not be a bargain, but at this, perhaps the most expensive restaurant in the city, it's about half the regular tab.