Rising food costs are so universal that they've jumped from the Times' "Dining" section to the "Metro" section. The paper reports today on several budgeting strategies undertaken by local restaurants, including a Chinese restaurant in Queens that makes you order rice; an Upper West Side brunch place that charges extra for walnuts and raisins on your French toast; and a Barbadian joint in Queens that now serves smaller portions of pudding and souse. How are your favorite spots cutting back to stay in business? Tell us in the comments box.

As Costs Keep Rising, Restaurateurs Find Creative Ways to Cope [NYT]

Photo Courtesy of Mister Softee and Good Humor Ice Cream

It’s Still Spring, but the Ice Cream Truck War Revs Up [NYT]
A Cease-Fire in a West Side Ice Cream War [City Room/NYT]
Related: Good Humor Man of Old Returns, Bringing…Good Humor

Both Restaurant Journal and Eater are predicting Bruni will award three stars to Momofuku Ko. Tomorrow, when his final word comes out after much hair-pulling, the armchair reviewing will be mute — but we were intrigued by a bit of trivia that New York Journal unearthed: Bruni hasn’t thrown down four stars in 175 weeks, meaning that he has exactly matched the Times’ longest stretch without a four-star rave (Bryan Miller upgraded Bouley to four stars in 1990, and Ruth Reichl did the same with Chanterelle in 1993). So where will that record stand after Ko — and will the handiwork of the Times’ photographer, who was in during the same night that Tom and Gael were, shed any light on that whole affair?

Update: Bruni’s review is up and it is, indeed, three stars— after noting the off-putting set-up and resy system, he concedes, “Ko in its early months serves a few dishes that merely intrigue along with others that utterly enrapture. It also falls prey to some inconsistency.” On Chang: “Deification may have come prematurely to Mr. Chang. But a low-key coronation makes sense.” And: “You’ll love it, provided you ever get access to it.” Well, yeah.

Rolling The Dice: Momofuku Ko [New York Journal]

BruniBetting: Ko [Eater]

As predicted here yesterday, the media is already enjoying watching customers at chain restaurants recoil in horror at seeing just how fattening their favorite foods are. The Times gets in on the action today, going to Starbucks and trolling for responses exactly like this one: “I’m surprised, especially about the Iced Lemon Loaf,” [a customer] said, referring to something that looked like a slice of lemon pound cake with frosting. “It’s 500 calories. That’s like a Big Mac. It’s like a meal.” Actually, she's right — a Big Mac is 540 calories. But who's counting?

At Fast-Food Outlets: Premature Sticker Shock for the Weight Conscious [NYT]
Related: Food Blogs Already Having Sport With Calorie Listings

Eater is reporting that Peter Meehan has resigned as the Times’ “$25 and Under” columnist. We haven’t been able to reach Meehan, but his editor, Pete Wells, told us, "Peter had a wonderful appetite and passion for the job, and we know he's going to do really well in whatever his next project is." The Times had recently cut his column to biweekly from weekly; the payday Meehan just received from Random House for selling a Momofuku book with David Chang may have been incentive to literally book it out of there. The Times will post the official story later today.

Peter Meehan Ankles NY Times $25 and Under Post [Eater]

The lead article in the Times' "Dining" section today makes so much sense intuitively, and so little sense in its particulars, that our minds are still buzzing over it. In their search to parse the identities of potential voters, various pollsters and social-science types have figured out how your palate defines your politics. That’s believable enough. Clearly, people who eat Moon Pies tend to be less vehement about the capital-gains tax than those who snack on caviar-topped blini. But “Democrats prefer Popeye's and Republicans Chick-fil-A”? Really? Then why aren’t there as many Chick-fil-A outlets as there are Popeye’s? (And, anyway, anyone who would prefer Chick-fil-A to Popeye’s doesn’t deserve the right to vote.) These kind of broad-gauge cultural generalizations are all right as knowing jokes in Vanity Fair or on The Daily Show, but when applied to the democratic process, they are grotesque. (The reflexive red state–blue state culture pairing was one of the very worst journalistic legacies of the Clinton years.) Now hand us a beet sangria — we have an Obama rally to catch.

What’s for Dinner? The Pollster Wants to Know [NYT]

Will Escoffier replace Alice Waters as the city's
food guru? Maybe not.Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

There’ll Always Be a France, Especially in New York [NYT]

David Bouley owns more restaurants than you.Photo: Patrick McMullan

Follow the Bouncing Bouley [Diner's Journal/NYT]
There’ll Always Be a France, Especially in New York [NYT]

Amanda Hesser left the Times on her own terms.Photo: Robert Maxwell/Courtesy of Amanda Hesser

For the record, I was neither fired nor quietly shown the door. I applied for the buyout — which was offered to every Times employee in the newsroom — after deciding that I wanted to do something different from editing the food section of the magazine. However, I'm going to continue writing my column Recipe Redux for the Times Magazine, I have a book ("Eat, Memory") that I edited for the Times coming out this fall, and I'll be completing a cookbook (4 years in the works) for the company.

In the 11 years that I've been at the Times, the company has been incredibly supportive of my work, and I have really loved working there. As food editor of the Times Magazine, I get to guide the coverage, work with great writers, photographers and designers, and occasionally write myself. So does that mean that I should stay there until I'm 70? Does that mean that I should have no other interests or skills?

I wanted to take a risk, and I believe that I have a very good idea. You expressed skepticism about the digital life business that I'm starting, saying it's unrelated to any of my skills or interests. Since you didn't connect the dots, let me do it for you. This may come as a surprise to you but I studied economics and finance before I began my studies of cooking. That's the business part.

I have written and edited four (the 3rd will be out this fall, the 4th is in process) books that, while focused on food, are also about history and memory. That's the life part.

I, like you, use a computer every day. That's the digital part.

As you can see, a business involving people's digital lives isn't much of a stretch. This company, which I'm starting with two partners, is called Seawinkle. We're going to help people deal with the overwhelming amount of digital information they create. (If you want to be reassured that it's not a sudden shift in professional strategy, and that I have done my homework on the industry, here's how long I've owned the domain name Seawinkle: since 2004.)

We stand corrected.

Earlier: Amanda Hesser Blows Her Own Internet Bubble

Amanda Hesser is putting the best face on her buyout from the New York Times, spinning the event, 1998-style, as a bold new leap into the electronic frontier, in the form of a digital-life aggregator. (A digital-life aggregator is an application that gathers all the content you produce — photos, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc. — and puts it all on one Web page.) The only problems are that (a) her background and reputation is based entirely on food and cookery, and this project is, by her own admission, unrelated to either; and that (b) there are already a number of digital-life aggregators out there, and they’re not exactly taking America by storm. We would still feel bad for Amanda Hesser even if she were going to move to a beach house on Martinique — no one likes to lose a job at the Times — but this new-media venture has a grimness to it we wouldn’t wish on Judith Miller.

Update: Amanda Hesser responds, and we acknowledge an error.

Hesser on Leaving NYT: 'The Economy Is Tanking — It's the Perfect Time to Start a Company' [Mediabistro]

Related: Amanda Hesser Out at the 'Times'

When Frank Bruni decided to confront Fiamma about its price increases, we knew it wouldn’t take long for Team Hanson to get on the problem. Fiamma is the group’s flagship restaurant, and the critical pile-on about high prices and missing ingredients must have stung B.R. Guest. Today, the group announced the inevitable price cuts to tasting menus. Prices are dropping from $92 to $85 for the standard prix fixe menu, and the five-course dinner has been cut to $105 from $120. Fiamma has also reintroduced its full-bore seven-course menu, which will come in at $125.