Well red: The newly refurbished Jo Jo.   (Photo: Kenneth Chen)

A Chinatown Banquet
Any fine Chinese meal is like a banquet, and Chinatown is like that, too. Being greedy, however, I'd choose to feast in several establishments instead of just one.

Breakfast: The Saint's Alp Teahouse has superior teas and lots of inventive tapioca drinks, but for neighborhood quirkiness, I'll take a paper cup of ginseng tea and honey from Dragon Land Bakery and a crumbly walnut cookie served by one of the prim cookie ladies wearing dainty stewardesslike hats. After that, a spoonful or two of nourishing breakfast congee (Cantonese rice porridge) amid the plasticated vines and bamboo bridges of Congee Village up on Allen Street -- preferably without chunks of the house specialty, sautéed frog. For a pointedly non-Western breakfast, eat what the Chinese eat: dumplings. At Dim Sum Go Go, you'll find them stuffed with wood mushrooms or mashed shark's fin or pearly bits of chives and baby shrimp.

Lunch: Stay on a little longer at Dim Sum Go Go for a platter of the fluffy seafood fried rice (with lightly whisked eggs and slivers of apple-green broccoli stems) and the thin strips of salt-baked pork, fried into crinkly shapes like some strange form of ribbon candy. Then nip across the street to the always-reliable New York Noodle Town to snack on a helping of duck rolls and a platter of cold suckling pig, before repairing to the nearby Sweet-N-Tart Café for a restorative bowl of chestnut tong shui (literal translation: "hot soup") filled with soft green lotus seeds.

Dinner: The final meal of the day means the obligatory pilgrimage to Ping's Seafood for a plate of the crispy shredded squid, shot through with scallions, jícama, and crunchy little silver fish. Follow this by leaving Chinatown proper, and travel up to the new midtown branch of Grand Sichuan International. The menu here is accompanied by a runish and amusing volume of footnotes. The hot stuff is the point, however, so go directly to No. 115, the simple braised beef fillets in chili sauce, containing shards of beef cooked to mushy softness, in a deliciously viscous sauce fierce enough to strip the bark from a thousand trees.

Haute Cuisine Makeovers
In high cuisine, as in high society, cosmetic readjustments are a fact of life. The food at Jo Jo remains generally superior (the famous chicken with green olives, fashionable offal dishes like pork cheeks and lentils), but Jean-Georges's million-dollar renovation has had a curious reverse effect. Newly hung with funereal damask curtains and clinking Victorian chandeliers, the bright, stylish space now looks frumpy and severe, like a perky young matron who suddenly decides to look 100 years old. A more successful dowager face-lift is on display at Lutèce, where André Soltner's little townhouse has been redecorated in an icy, Arctic motif. The menu has been refurbished, too, with newfangled recipes like seared foie gras smudged in marmalade and brackish dark chocolate. One seasoned foie gras hound declared the dish "just this side of perverse" but gave a thumbs-up to a marginally less strange fillet of John Dory in a rémoulade of wasabi, mustard leaf, and daikon, with a pocket of pommes soufflées on the side.

Charlie Palmer has left the kitchen at Aureole, leaving executive chef Gerry Hayden to experiment with feathery dishes like fluke marinated in citrus and Wellfleet oysters topped with little golf balls of cucumber sorbet. The chef transition has been less smooth at Le Cirque 2000, although, as usual, it's hard to notice amid all the circuslike commotion. Who cares if my duck confit was a little dry, or that a $17 crabmeat appetizer, crowned with guacamole and plantains, looked like something off a luxury liner bound for Tobago? Even from the hinterlands of deepest Siberia -- table No. 49, between the kitchen and the bar -- there's no better place to view all the characters in the strange New York zoo.

It was a pleasure to drop in at La Caravelle, where elderly "classiques" have been revamped with nouveau curry sauces (on the trio of lamb) and baby Japanese eggplants (on the pan-seared tuna). The restaurant's glimmering green murals are still intact, you can bolt down one of Alberto's vodka Mojitos at the small corner bar, and, for a sentimental fatman like me, there's no greater comfort in the world than watching spoonfuls of velvety pink lobster sauce being ladled over a helping of the kitchen's famous truffled pike quenelles.

A Trek Through the Boroughs
For the Manhattan-based restaurant critic addled by a diet of truffles and velvet slabs of foie gras, a visit to the outer boroughs is a kind of culinary palate cleanser. The following journey could be accomplished in a month, a year, or a single bilious day.

To begin, line up on Saturday morning with the diminutive neighborhood matrons at the Villabate Bakery, on Eighteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst, for sticky rice balls as big as duckpins, wheels of orange-scented ricotta cheesecake, tray upon tray of lemon-drop cookies, real Sicilian cannoli, and spumoni ice-cream cakes, all displayed on glittering silver shelves.

Proceed to Totonno Pizzeria, on Neptune Avenue in Coney Island, to dine on a simple cheese pie in one of the spare little booths, which always remind me of freshly painted, aqua-colored church pews.

Hop the 7 train to El Grano de Oro 2000, where you can sit at a sidewalk bar on Roosevelt Avenue and watch your soft-taco fillings being drawn from simmering pots of chicken, chorizo, even tripe. Quesadilla is the house speciality, however, flipped like a flapjack on the griddle with shreds of cilantro, cheese, and chicharrón (pork crackling), then served on a blue-rimmed plate with wedges of lime and some guacamole in a teacup.

Next, venture to Sripraphai, down the road, in Woodside, for a modest portion of Thai-style candied bananas, crisply fried in a light batter, with sprinklings of sesame seed and coconut.

Finally, flag a taxicab to the African Food Temple, among the auto-parts shops on Webster Avenue in the Bronx, for a bowl of flavorful Egusi stew. This Ghanaian dish comes in numerous peppery combinations (I liked beef atop a heap of tangy, fermented corn) -- but whatever you do, avoid the urge to dine with a fork and a spoon. Napkins and a big metal fingerbowl for washing your hands are provided by the waitress. For further ablutions, the bathroom is a soothing, almost pleasant place, strung with bright plastic flowers and smelling of cheap tropical perfume.

Fishing for Perfect Seafood
I didn't have the gumption to plunk down $261 for the shellfish tasting menu at Alain Ducasse (since replaced on the seasonal rotation by a six-course, $250 meal built around black truffles), but in between the operatic attentions of fifteen or so waiters, I did sneak a taste of my wife's mildly treacly mushroom-infused lobster velouté, plus a wafer-thin chip of seared halibut that, by our reckoning, cost exactly $20 per bite. Your money still travels a lot further at Le Bernardin, where Eric Ripert's new version of the baked potato contains a savory gourmet mash of dill-scented smoked salmon, potato crème fraîche, and Osetra caviar, flanked by two delicately toasted ladyfingers filled with more smoked salmon, caviar, and slips of Gruyère cheese. Sitting among all the fat cats and moguls, I tried not to make piggy noises slurping down four tastings of fluke seviche -- beginning with a simple sauce of virgin olive oil and lime juice, ending with a combination of wasabi, orange zest, and coconut milk. That was followed by two ravioli filled with mushrooms and whole Argentinian shrimp, covered in a pleasing foie gras-and- truffle sauce, and two ghostly white squares of halibut, perfectly steamed, with slivers of salsify and more black-truffle sauce ladled on top.

Similar high-pitched seafood delights were on display at Cello the evening I visited, although I'm afraid I forgot my dinner jacket and had to negotiate my teacup of lobster risotto (with little squares of foie gras folded inside) wearing a house jacket that was so small that the cuffs stopped at my elbows. Not that this seemed to faze my very proper Upper East Side guest, who leaned over her equally refined portion of potato-crusted halibut and whispered, "I don't think they're eating this in the caves of Tora Bora."

That's probably true, too, of the exemplary fish delicacies at Esca (I like the salt-baked bronzini, the nightly crudos, the linguini with mahogany clams), and the delectably salty codfish cake, with sautéed cod in a rock-shrimp chowder, at the new Citarella restaurant in Rockefeller Center. Several of Citarella's more elaborate dishes -- Chilean sea bass and parsley risotto with clunky helpings of beef short ribs, for instance -- weren't nearly as satisfying, in retrospect, as a container of the good old smoked-seafood salad, served with a paper napkin and a plastic fork, at the original mother ship uptown.

The Great Curry Ramble
My friend the Delhi connoisseur likes to consume his curries, naans, and kulchas the old-fashioned way, in a messy communal lather. No wonder he's displeased with Adä, in Murray Hill, where you can sip a glass of Chardonnay while hoity-toity fusion dishes like Goan baby back ribs (delicious) and lamb-shank vindaloo (less delicious) are brought to the table one by one. For fine dining, he prefers Tamarind, where he feasts on helpings of shrimp moiley (fresh shrimp in a cumin-spiked coconut sauce), Cornish game hen and quail roasted on a spit, and for dessert, dribbly sweet rasmalai dumplings bathed in rosewater. The elegant Flatiron-district establishment also serves a giant, moon-shaped masala dosa, plus sandwiches rolled in paratha bread -- try the lamb sholley -- designed to complement a selection of fancy designer teas available at the adjacent tea bar.

If you're in the mood for an old-school curry ramble, direct your cab to the former shoeshine parlor that houses the Lahore Deli on Crosby Street, for a shot of milky sweet chai, a restorative bag of freshly made potato samosas, and a container of curried goat, preferably to be consumed in the company of your cabbie and all his friends. For further adventure, proceed to Hampton Chutney Co. in SoHo for an array of culturally confused dosas (I actually like the one with woody portobello mushrooms and butternut squash), and then travel on to Banjara, in the East Village, to peer at Tuhin Dutta's imposing dumpakht, a strange, blimpish delicacy from the city of Lucknow. The lamb version (there's also chicken and shrimp) is slow-cooked in a creamy stew with almonds, bay leaves, and sticks of cinnamon, then sealed under a dome of pastry, like some fabulist South Asian rendition of lamb potpie.