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conuly
I'd love to have their problems....
It’s Not So Easy Being Less Rich
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
NANCY CHEMTOB, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, has found that her days have become crammed seeing clients, all worried about how an economic downturn will affect their marriages.
They seem to have nothing to fret about: their net worths range from $5 million to $1 billion. A blip in the markets shouldn’t send their chateau-size Park Avenue co-ops to foreclosure or exile them to Payless Shoes.
But Ms. Chemtob’s clients are concerned all the same, she said, because their incomes have shrunk, say, to $2 million a year from $8 million, and they know that their 2008 bonus checks are likely to be much less impressive.
One of her clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations.
“I literally had to sit there and tell him that he had to tell his wife that she had to stop spending,” she said. “He was actually scared she would leave him because their financial situation changed so drastically.”
The wealthy don’t generally speak publicly about their finances, in good times or bad. It’s in poor taste, for one, and their employers could fire them for talking even a little. But people who provide services to the wealthy — lawyers, art advisers, personal trainers and hairstylists — say they are getting an earful about their clients’ financial anxieties.
Interviews with the people who actually see the bank statements, like divorce lawyers and lenders, say their clients are definitely living on less than they did a year ago, regardless of how expansive the definition of “less” may be. Hairstylists and private jet rental companies say the wealthy are cutting back on luxuries like $350 highlights and $10,000-an-hour jet rentals. Even nutritionists and personal trainers notice a problem. The wealthy are eating more and gaining weight because of the stress.
These financial problems — if they can be called that — will hardly elicit tears from the rest of us. But in those gilded living rooms, there is a quiet nervousness about keeping up appearances.
“Even if they’re not in danger of not paying their mortgage, there’s still a psychological change,” said Chris Del Gatto, chief executive of Circa, which has watched its business jump by 50 percent in the last year as wealthy clients sell their spare diamonds and Rolexes. “The economy is an issue even for people who don’t need the money.”
THEIR spouses could leave them when they discover that their net worth has collapsed to eight figures from nine. Friends and business associates could avoid them as they pass their lunchtime tables at Barney’s or the Four Seasons. And these snubs could trickle down to their children.
“They fear their kids won’t get invited to the right birthday parties,” said Michele Kleier, an Upper East Side-based real estate broker. “If they have to give up things that are invisible, they’re O.K. as long as they don’t have give up things visible to the outside world.”
So New York’s very wealthy are addressing their distress in discreet and often awkward ways. They try to move their $165 sessions with personal trainers to a time slot that they know is already taken. They agree to tour multimillion-dollar apartments and then say the spaces don’t match their specifications. They apply for a line of credit before art auctions, supposedly to buy a painting or a sculpture, but use that borrowed money to pay other debts.
“Most people won’t go to their banker and say: ‘You know I’m in desperate trouble. I need funds,’ ” said Andy Augenblick, president of Emigrant Bank Fine Art Finance, which allows clients to borrow against art collections worth more than $2 million. Mr. Augenblick said that the number of requests for these types of loans is five times higher than a year ago. He said that while these borrowers claim that they don’t need the money, their latest financial statements show that their net worth has withered in the past year.
Other wealthy clients are cutting luxuries that they think their friends and relatives won’t notice, according to Mr. Del Gatto of Circa. At Circa’s midtown offices, he said, the seven consultation rooms have been busy with customers selling their precious gems. Some older couples, he said, are selling estate jewelry to help support their children who have lost Wall Street jobs. Bankers are paring down their collections of Patek Philippe watches. Wives from Greenwich and Scarsdale are selling 2-carat to 35-carat single-stone diamond rings. One recent client explained to Mr. Del Gatto that she was selling $2 million in diamonds she rarely wore, because her friends wouldn’t notice that they were gone.
“She said, ‘If I sold my Bentley or my important art, they would notice,’ ” he said. “That we hear, in differing examples, every day.”
Art consultants find that the very wealthy are more receptive to parting with their precious works. Cassie Rosenthal, an owner of the Chelsea gallery Goff & Rosenthal, said that since the subprime crisis hit in the fall, and especially since the new year, some collectors are willing to sell pieces that were off limits in the past. She said that when the deals close quickly, they’re happy.
“Most people will just sort of say: ‘Will you sell this for me? When you can get me payment?’ ” Ms. Rosenthal said. “It’s more about the urgency of getting paid.”
Justin Sullivan, managing director of Regent Jet, which leases private airplanes, said most clients in real estate and on Wall Street are switching to chartered jets over private jets, and cutting their flight budgets by about 25 percent. One New York real estate developer cut his budget to less than $250,000 a year from $1.5 million a year.
“A year ago, he would have only flown Gulfstreams,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Now it’s moving to the point where he’s flying Beech jets and Learjets.”
Some wealthy New Yorkers are even cutting back on relatively smaller things. At J Sisters, a midtown Manhattan salon where celebrities like Naomi Campbell and Gwyneth Paltrow mingle with Wall Street clients, stylists and colorists say they hear about money worries all day. On a spring afternoon, a half-dozen hairstylists to the very wealthy talked about how customers are stretching their $350 highlights and $150 haircuts to every eight weeks instead of six weeks. Some women are cutting out highlights entirely, saying they would “rather be brunettes.”
Jean-François Pilon, a stylist at J Sisters, has seen many women come less frequently and tip less generously. During the subprime crisis last summer, and the collapse of Bear Stearns last March, he said, many clients tried to stretch out their visits. He interprets these changes in behavior as signs that they need to watch their spending.
“You pick up on it very quickly,” he said. “People don’t beg.”
The drop in wealth has also exposed other personal problems, like bad marriages. Money — which bought jewelry or extravagant vacations — helped smooth over many of these difficulties, said Kenneth Mueller, a psychotherapist in the East Village who works with many Wall Street bankers and real estate developers. Now, he said, his clients “catastrophize” smaller bonuses or shriveling stock portfolios. “You have to remind them that there’s something that has always been there,” he said. “All the money helped mask the anxiety.”
The very wealthy can’t hide anything from their nutritionists and personal trainers, because they see the weight gain. Heather Bauer, a dietitian who works with many Wall Street executives who pay $600 to $800 a month for her services, says her clients have been eating and drinking more in the last six months. She sees results of this indulging each time they step on a scale, and in their journals that record what they’ve eaten.
ONE Wall Street executive, Ms. Bauer said, snacks on nuts in her office all day to manage the stress of potentially losing her position, while another confesses to inhaling four bowls of cereal at 10 p.m. Even their sex lives are suffering, Ms. Bauer said, because of the stress or because the weight gain makes them feel unattractive.
Her clients blame the economy for their out-of-control waistlines.
“The number one concern that they have is the state of the financial market,” she said. “There definitely is a correlation between the stock market and weight gain.”
Clay Burwell, a personal trainer to many Wall Street executives, said that his clients were also feeling the toll. A year of eating more, drinking more and working longer hours has started to hurt their health.
“They come into the gym with a dark storm cloud over their head,” he said. “They look like hell.”
And another article about how restaurants are doing their best to avoid raising prices even as their costs go up and up and up and up. We went out to get bagels the other day when we were out, and they had a sign up apologizing for increasing costs but saying they had no other way - everything, everything's doubled or tripled in price in the past year, and basic things, too!
As Costs Keep Rising, Restaurateurs Find Creative Ways to Cope
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
At Maple Garden, a Shanghai-style restaurant in Flushing, Queens, rice is no longer served automatically with every meal.
At Good Enough to Eat, a brunch spot on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, diners will have to pay $2 extra for the walnut and raisin topping that used to come with the cinnamon swirl French toast.
At the Catch, a year-old Barbadian restaurant in St. Albans, Queens, Vicki Cutting is hoping her customers will not notice that the portions of pudding and souse, a traditional dish, are slightly smaller than they were a few months ago.
All across New York City, cooks, chefs and restaurateurs are struggling to cope with soaring costs of many of their basic ingredients, including flour, eggs, rice and cooking oil. “Everything is going up at once” is a universal complaint among them, so they are devising all sorts of strategies to avoid having to pass the brunt of the price increases on to their customers.
Some are cutting back on waiters and kitchen help, others are staying open longer or expanding their offerings to increase sales. One sheepishly admitted that she had started adding the sales tax to customer’s bills rather than raise the prices printed on her elaborate, laminated menus.
Driven by the surging price of oil and a shift by farmers to produce corn to make ethanol, the cost of food has been rising at an exceptionally fast pace. Last month, the federal Labor Department reported that prices for food and drinks in the New York metropolitan area had risen 5.3 percent in a year, the biggest increase in any 12-month period since 1990.
“This is the worst we’ve seen in three decades,” said E. Charles Hunt, executive vice president of the New York State Restaurant Association. Mr. Hunt said he had been fielding calls from restaurant owners moaning about the pinches they feel every time a delivery truck rolls up.
Mr. Hunt said he had not seen any evidence that rising prices were driving restaurants in the city out of business at a rate faster than the norm. With the city’s economy having held up better than the nation’s, in part because of a heavy influx of foreign tourists, restaurant traffic has not declined significantly, especially on weekends, restaurant operators said.
On the expense side of the ledger, the pain is shared by operators of ethnic takeout stands and purveyors of haute cuisine alike.
Suvir Saran, the owner and a co-executive chef of Devi, an Indian restaurant in the Flatiron district, said he was weighing whether to pare down portions, because he did not think he could raise prices. Devi already charged $65 for its “chef’s tasting menu” before the cost of rice and chapati flour doubled over the past few months.
A 30-pound sack of rice has risen steadily this year to $43 from $22, while a 15-pound bag of flour has gone to $22 from $8 and a 4.6-gallon container of canola oil is up to $34, from $18 or less at the start of the year, Mr. Saran said.
“Rice is such an important part of our business,” he said. “We’ve been getting battered by these huge price increases.”
Mr. Saran said that he earned little profit on a dinner of tandoor-grilled lamb chops priced at $30, but that in the past he had been able to make up for that by selling rice dishes. No longer. “This year we’re not making as much money selling rice,” he said.
Carrie Levin, who has run Good Enough to Eat for more than 25 years, said she usually replaced potato-based dishes with rice dishes in the warm months but would do less of that this year because potato prices had been more stable.
“White rice went up, basmati went up, everything but wild rice went up,” Ms. Levin said, running through a beleaguered cook’s litany. “The dairy went up first, so all the cheeses, all of that went up. That went up because of the use of ethanol. Then the price of gas went up, so the fuel surcharges were tacked on. In a restaurant, everything affects us.”
The last delivery of 100-pound sacks of flour cost $7 more apiece than the previous load had, said Ms. Levin, whose restaurant runs through 1,000 pounds a week. Blueberries trucked down from Maine will cost $38 per flat, up from $24 last summer, she said. And a five-gallon jug of maple syrup from Canada recently leaped to $250 from $200, she said.
So, she said, the never-frozen blueberries will go only on top of the pancakes until their price came back down, while those mixed into the batter will probably be the “fresh-frozen” type. “This is how we cope,” said Ms. Levin, who added that she had already raised the price of nearly every item on her menu this year by $1.
Fortunately for restaurateurs like her, Ms. Levin said, “No one is eating less, no one is drinking less.” But the customers have become more demanding. “Since they’re paying more for everything, if they’re coming out to eat they want it to be perfect,” she said.
Owners of small restaurants are particularly worried about making changes that could scare off business. Ms. Cutting, who described the Catch as the only Barbadian restaurant for miles around, said she still feared that higher prices would prompt customers to travel to Brooklyn for their weekly tastes of home, like flying fish and cou-cou, the national dish of Barbados.
So far, Ms. Cutting, a former music teacher at Public School 38 in Rosedale, has held the line at $6 for a small plate of pudding and souse and $12 for a large one. She described the dish as a type of Caribbean sweet potato mixed with cornmeal, served with pickled pork.
“This is the big seller on Saturdays, when the Barbadians are coming,” Ms. Cutting said.
She has staved off price increases by getting more help from her family — her mother, sister and brother all pitch in — and by shopping more often but buying less each trip.
Still, she said, she doubted that she could keep her prices steady much longer.
“We were reluctant to change the prices, but now we don’t have a choice because the basic necessities have increased at such a rate,” Ms. Cutting said. On the other hand, she said: “If you raise the price, you lose the customer. The regular everyday man, now they are trying to cut back.”
Cathy Yan, who has run the Maple Garden on Flushing’s bustling Main Street for four years, said tampering with the portions was out of the question.
“Even if you change a little bit, they notice,” she said of her customers, a mix of locals and Long Island residents who drive in on weekends to shop in the Chinese markets before tucking into platters of dumplings, scallion pancakes and fried flounder with seaweed.
Rather than risk upsetting her regulars by repricing her menu or shrinking the servings, Ms. Yan said she had resorted to reducing the staff on weekdays and taking orders for rice.
“I tell the server, you have to ask the customer: How many rice?” she said. She is not rationing it. It is just that at about $1 a pound, jasmine rice is too valuable to waste. She said she assured the customers that “if you want more, I give you more.”
Down the street at No. 1 East, a Chinese restaurant that serves everything from breakfast pastries to elaborate seafood entrees, Banson Ho said he had been putting in 16-hour days trying to increase revenue enough to cover the rapidly rising costs of rent, water, waste disposal and food, tofu included.
He said the price of a cube of tofu had recently shot up to $1 from 65 cents. But that was a minor concern compared with a 15-percent rise in his water bill and the near-doubling of the prices of eggs and flour.
Like Ms. Yan, Mr. Ho ruled out taking anything off the customers’ plates or raising prices. Competition is too stiff for that, he said, gesturing toward the neon sign of a competitor directly across the street.
Instead, he said, he was adding late-night snacks, like shaved ice flavored with condensed milk, pineapple or papaya, and doing more of the work himself.
“I’m the manager. I’m the waiter. I’m the busboy,” said Mr. Ho, who is 65 and has been running No. 1 East for 18 years. He said he would try to hold on for two more years while his son, who just completed medical school at Boston University, finishes his residency and becomes a cosmetic surgeon.
It’s Not So Easy Being Less Rich
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
NANCY CHEMTOB, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, has found that her days have become crammed seeing clients, all worried about how an economic downturn will affect their marriages.
They seem to have nothing to fret about: their net worths range from $5 million to $1 billion. A blip in the markets shouldn’t send their chateau-size Park Avenue co-ops to foreclosure or exile them to Payless Shoes.
But Ms. Chemtob’s clients are concerned all the same, she said, because their incomes have shrunk, say, to $2 million a year from $8 million, and they know that their 2008 bonus checks are likely to be much less impressive.
One of her clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations.
“I literally had to sit there and tell him that he had to tell his wife that she had to stop spending,” she said. “He was actually scared she would leave him because their financial situation changed so drastically.”
The wealthy don’t generally speak publicly about their finances, in good times or bad. It’s in poor taste, for one, and their employers could fire them for talking even a little. But people who provide services to the wealthy — lawyers, art advisers, personal trainers and hairstylists — say they are getting an earful about their clients’ financial anxieties.
Interviews with the people who actually see the bank statements, like divorce lawyers and lenders, say their clients are definitely living on less than they did a year ago, regardless of how expansive the definition of “less” may be. Hairstylists and private jet rental companies say the wealthy are cutting back on luxuries like $350 highlights and $10,000-an-hour jet rentals. Even nutritionists and personal trainers notice a problem. The wealthy are eating more and gaining weight because of the stress.
These financial problems — if they can be called that — will hardly elicit tears from the rest of us. But in those gilded living rooms, there is a quiet nervousness about keeping up appearances.
“Even if they’re not in danger of not paying their mortgage, there’s still a psychological change,” said Chris Del Gatto, chief executive of Circa, which has watched its business jump by 50 percent in the last year as wealthy clients sell their spare diamonds and Rolexes. “The economy is an issue even for people who don’t need the money.”
THEIR spouses could leave them when they discover that their net worth has collapsed to eight figures from nine. Friends and business associates could avoid them as they pass their lunchtime tables at Barney’s or the Four Seasons. And these snubs could trickle down to their children.
“They fear their kids won’t get invited to the right birthday parties,” said Michele Kleier, an Upper East Side-based real estate broker. “If they have to give up things that are invisible, they’re O.K. as long as they don’t have give up things visible to the outside world.”
So New York’s very wealthy are addressing their distress in discreet and often awkward ways. They try to move their $165 sessions with personal trainers to a time slot that they know is already taken. They agree to tour multimillion-dollar apartments and then say the spaces don’t match their specifications. They apply for a line of credit before art auctions, supposedly to buy a painting or a sculpture, but use that borrowed money to pay other debts.
“Most people won’t go to their banker and say: ‘You know I’m in desperate trouble. I need funds,’ ” said Andy Augenblick, president of Emigrant Bank Fine Art Finance, which allows clients to borrow against art collections worth more than $2 million. Mr. Augenblick said that the number of requests for these types of loans is five times higher than a year ago. He said that while these borrowers claim that they don’t need the money, their latest financial statements show that their net worth has withered in the past year.
Other wealthy clients are cutting luxuries that they think their friends and relatives won’t notice, according to Mr. Del Gatto of Circa. At Circa’s midtown offices, he said, the seven consultation rooms have been busy with customers selling their precious gems. Some older couples, he said, are selling estate jewelry to help support their children who have lost Wall Street jobs. Bankers are paring down their collections of Patek Philippe watches. Wives from Greenwich and Scarsdale are selling 2-carat to 35-carat single-stone diamond rings. One recent client explained to Mr. Del Gatto that she was selling $2 million in diamonds she rarely wore, because her friends wouldn’t notice that they were gone.
“She said, ‘If I sold my Bentley or my important art, they would notice,’ ” he said. “That we hear, in differing examples, every day.”
Art consultants find that the very wealthy are more receptive to parting with their precious works. Cassie Rosenthal, an owner of the Chelsea gallery Goff & Rosenthal, said that since the subprime crisis hit in the fall, and especially since the new year, some collectors are willing to sell pieces that were off limits in the past. She said that when the deals close quickly, they’re happy.
“Most people will just sort of say: ‘Will you sell this for me? When you can get me payment?’ ” Ms. Rosenthal said. “It’s more about the urgency of getting paid.”
Justin Sullivan, managing director of Regent Jet, which leases private airplanes, said most clients in real estate and on Wall Street are switching to chartered jets over private jets, and cutting their flight budgets by about 25 percent. One New York real estate developer cut his budget to less than $250,000 a year from $1.5 million a year.
“A year ago, he would have only flown Gulfstreams,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Now it’s moving to the point where he’s flying Beech jets and Learjets.”
Some wealthy New Yorkers are even cutting back on relatively smaller things. At J Sisters, a midtown Manhattan salon where celebrities like Naomi Campbell and Gwyneth Paltrow mingle with Wall Street clients, stylists and colorists say they hear about money worries all day. On a spring afternoon, a half-dozen hairstylists to the very wealthy talked about how customers are stretching their $350 highlights and $150 haircuts to every eight weeks instead of six weeks. Some women are cutting out highlights entirely, saying they would “rather be brunettes.”
Jean-François Pilon, a stylist at J Sisters, has seen many women come less frequently and tip less generously. During the subprime crisis last summer, and the collapse of Bear Stearns last March, he said, many clients tried to stretch out their visits. He interprets these changes in behavior as signs that they need to watch their spending.
“You pick up on it very quickly,” he said. “People don’t beg.”
The drop in wealth has also exposed other personal problems, like bad marriages. Money — which bought jewelry or extravagant vacations — helped smooth over many of these difficulties, said Kenneth Mueller, a psychotherapist in the East Village who works with many Wall Street bankers and real estate developers. Now, he said, his clients “catastrophize” smaller bonuses or shriveling stock portfolios. “You have to remind them that there’s something that has always been there,” he said. “All the money helped mask the anxiety.”
The very wealthy can’t hide anything from their nutritionists and personal trainers, because they see the weight gain. Heather Bauer, a dietitian who works with many Wall Street executives who pay $600 to $800 a month for her services, says her clients have been eating and drinking more in the last six months. She sees results of this indulging each time they step on a scale, and in their journals that record what they’ve eaten.
ONE Wall Street executive, Ms. Bauer said, snacks on nuts in her office all day to manage the stress of potentially losing her position, while another confesses to inhaling four bowls of cereal at 10 p.m. Even their sex lives are suffering, Ms. Bauer said, because of the stress or because the weight gain makes them feel unattractive.
Her clients blame the economy for their out-of-control waistlines.
“The number one concern that they have is the state of the financial market,” she said. “There definitely is a correlation between the stock market and weight gain.”
Clay Burwell, a personal trainer to many Wall Street executives, said that his clients were also feeling the toll. A year of eating more, drinking more and working longer hours has started to hurt their health.
“They come into the gym with a dark storm cloud over their head,” he said. “They look like hell.”
And another article about how restaurants are doing their best to avoid raising prices even as their costs go up and up and up and up. We went out to get bagels the other day when we were out, and they had a sign up apologizing for increasing costs but saying they had no other way - everything, everything's doubled or tripled in price in the past year, and basic things, too!
As Costs Keep Rising, Restaurateurs Find Creative Ways to Cope
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
At Maple Garden, a Shanghai-style restaurant in Flushing, Queens, rice is no longer served automatically with every meal.
At Good Enough to Eat, a brunch spot on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, diners will have to pay $2 extra for the walnut and raisin topping that used to come with the cinnamon swirl French toast.
At the Catch, a year-old Barbadian restaurant in St. Albans, Queens, Vicki Cutting is hoping her customers will not notice that the portions of pudding and souse, a traditional dish, are slightly smaller than they were a few months ago.
All across New York City, cooks, chefs and restaurateurs are struggling to cope with soaring costs of many of their basic ingredients, including flour, eggs, rice and cooking oil. “Everything is going up at once” is a universal complaint among them, so they are devising all sorts of strategies to avoid having to pass the brunt of the price increases on to their customers.
Some are cutting back on waiters and kitchen help, others are staying open longer or expanding their offerings to increase sales. One sheepishly admitted that she had started adding the sales tax to customer’s bills rather than raise the prices printed on her elaborate, laminated menus.
Driven by the surging price of oil and a shift by farmers to produce corn to make ethanol, the cost of food has been rising at an exceptionally fast pace. Last month, the federal Labor Department reported that prices for food and drinks in the New York metropolitan area had risen 5.3 percent in a year, the biggest increase in any 12-month period since 1990.
“This is the worst we’ve seen in three decades,” said E. Charles Hunt, executive vice president of the New York State Restaurant Association. Mr. Hunt said he had been fielding calls from restaurant owners moaning about the pinches they feel every time a delivery truck rolls up.
Mr. Hunt said he had not seen any evidence that rising prices were driving restaurants in the city out of business at a rate faster than the norm. With the city’s economy having held up better than the nation’s, in part because of a heavy influx of foreign tourists, restaurant traffic has not declined significantly, especially on weekends, restaurant operators said.
On the expense side of the ledger, the pain is shared by operators of ethnic takeout stands and purveyors of haute cuisine alike.
Suvir Saran, the owner and a co-executive chef of Devi, an Indian restaurant in the Flatiron district, said he was weighing whether to pare down portions, because he did not think he could raise prices. Devi already charged $65 for its “chef’s tasting menu” before the cost of rice and chapati flour doubled over the past few months.
A 30-pound sack of rice has risen steadily this year to $43 from $22, while a 15-pound bag of flour has gone to $22 from $8 and a 4.6-gallon container of canola oil is up to $34, from $18 or less at the start of the year, Mr. Saran said.
“Rice is such an important part of our business,” he said. “We’ve been getting battered by these huge price increases.”
Mr. Saran said that he earned little profit on a dinner of tandoor-grilled lamb chops priced at $30, but that in the past he had been able to make up for that by selling rice dishes. No longer. “This year we’re not making as much money selling rice,” he said.
Carrie Levin, who has run Good Enough to Eat for more than 25 years, said she usually replaced potato-based dishes with rice dishes in the warm months but would do less of that this year because potato prices had been more stable.
“White rice went up, basmati went up, everything but wild rice went up,” Ms. Levin said, running through a beleaguered cook’s litany. “The dairy went up first, so all the cheeses, all of that went up. That went up because of the use of ethanol. Then the price of gas went up, so the fuel surcharges were tacked on. In a restaurant, everything affects us.”
The last delivery of 100-pound sacks of flour cost $7 more apiece than the previous load had, said Ms. Levin, whose restaurant runs through 1,000 pounds a week. Blueberries trucked down from Maine will cost $38 per flat, up from $24 last summer, she said. And a five-gallon jug of maple syrup from Canada recently leaped to $250 from $200, she said.
So, she said, the never-frozen blueberries will go only on top of the pancakes until their price came back down, while those mixed into the batter will probably be the “fresh-frozen” type. “This is how we cope,” said Ms. Levin, who added that she had already raised the price of nearly every item on her menu this year by $1.
Fortunately for restaurateurs like her, Ms. Levin said, “No one is eating less, no one is drinking less.” But the customers have become more demanding. “Since they’re paying more for everything, if they’re coming out to eat they want it to be perfect,” she said.
Owners of small restaurants are particularly worried about making changes that could scare off business. Ms. Cutting, who described the Catch as the only Barbadian restaurant for miles around, said she still feared that higher prices would prompt customers to travel to Brooklyn for their weekly tastes of home, like flying fish and cou-cou, the national dish of Barbados.
So far, Ms. Cutting, a former music teacher at Public School 38 in Rosedale, has held the line at $6 for a small plate of pudding and souse and $12 for a large one. She described the dish as a type of Caribbean sweet potato mixed with cornmeal, served with pickled pork.
“This is the big seller on Saturdays, when the Barbadians are coming,” Ms. Cutting said.
She has staved off price increases by getting more help from her family — her mother, sister and brother all pitch in — and by shopping more often but buying less each trip.
Still, she said, she doubted that she could keep her prices steady much longer.
“We were reluctant to change the prices, but now we don’t have a choice because the basic necessities have increased at such a rate,” Ms. Cutting said. On the other hand, she said: “If you raise the price, you lose the customer. The regular everyday man, now they are trying to cut back.”
Cathy Yan, who has run the Maple Garden on Flushing’s bustling Main Street for four years, said tampering with the portions was out of the question.
“Even if you change a little bit, they notice,” she said of her customers, a mix of locals and Long Island residents who drive in on weekends to shop in the Chinese markets before tucking into platters of dumplings, scallion pancakes and fried flounder with seaweed.
Rather than risk upsetting her regulars by repricing her menu or shrinking the servings, Ms. Yan said she had resorted to reducing the staff on weekdays and taking orders for rice.
“I tell the server, you have to ask the customer: How many rice?” she said. She is not rationing it. It is just that at about $1 a pound, jasmine rice is too valuable to waste. She said she assured the customers that “if you want more, I give you more.”
Down the street at No. 1 East, a Chinese restaurant that serves everything from breakfast pastries to elaborate seafood entrees, Banson Ho said he had been putting in 16-hour days trying to increase revenue enough to cover the rapidly rising costs of rent, water, waste disposal and food, tofu included.
He said the price of a cube of tofu had recently shot up to $1 from 65 cents. But that was a minor concern compared with a 15-percent rise in his water bill and the near-doubling of the prices of eggs and flour.
Like Ms. Yan, Mr. Ho ruled out taking anything off the customers’ plates or raising prices. Competition is too stiff for that, he said, gesturing toward the neon sign of a competitor directly across the street.
Instead, he said, he was adding late-night snacks, like shaved ice flavored with condensed milk, pineapple or papaya, and doing more of the work himself.
“I’m the manager. I’m the waiter. I’m the busboy,” said Mr. Ho, who is 65 and has been running No. 1 East for 18 years. He said he would try to hold on for two more years while his son, who just completed medical school at Boston University, finishes his residency and becomes a cosmetic surgeon.
