This is the long-lost entry on the food in NYC.

First, any foodie will be horrified to know that on Friday night in NYC (November 4), our first night in the city, Holly and I ate at Chipotle (if anyone's unfamiliar, it's a fast-food Mexican place, a big step up from Taco Bell, but still owned, as far as I know, by McDonalds). You can buy a margarita at Chipotle, albeit in a plastic cup.

It seemed funny that we had flown business class and were staying in a fairly nice hotel (The Essex House, at the south edge of Central Park) but we had taken the subway in from JFK (via Queens) and there we were, drinking margaritas out of plastic cups in a fast food restaurant in perhaps the best restaurant city in the world.

Our only excuse is that we were tired and hungry and had six hours of plane grime and almost an hour of subway grime on us, and we weren't about to shower and rally. The first thing we did is have drinks with some bankers I know and afterwards, when we crossed the street, I think Holly and I practically spotted Chipotle simultaneously. It was a no-brainer.

True food fans will be crushed that we ate lunch at Whole Foods the next day, but what a Whole Foods it is. 59,000 square feet of underground supermarket extravagance in Columbus Circle. I think it is the flagship Whole Foods store, and it not only has a Jamba Juice inside, but it also has a full-fledged olive bar...spectacularly presented olives of every variety you could imagine.

We finally got down to business on Saturday night; we went to Il Mulino, an Italian restaurant (highly recommended by our friend and neighbor Ty) that has been ranked by Zagat as the #1 Italian Restaurant in NYC for the past 19 years in a row.

Great food, but the old "special surprise" hit us. It's one thing to not ask the price of a special when you’re on a date, but after you have been married six years?! A rookie mistake on my part.

The pasta dishes on the menu were generally in the range of $25-$30, so I foolishly thought that the price of non-meat pasta specials would be in that range, more or less. Wrong, try 2X. But it was my fault for not asking. We had enjoyed our appetizers quite a bit, so we weren't able to finish our pasta specials. We took the leftovers in "to go" containers and we handed it all to a homeless person. "That's about $70 worth of pasta! I hope you enjoy it," I did *not* say to the person we gave it to.

In our hotel was one of those nutty places that primarily sell high-end fixed-price multi-course meals. The one in our hotel is called Alain Ducasse and the price per person for the dinner without the wine pairing was $295. With their wine pairing, it was $470. If you look at their website, the prices are a bit lower, but the above were the numbers that were posted on the menu in front of the restaurant all weekend.

In any event, the food bill is just the tip of the iceberg for many patrons of those ultra-high end establishments. While many wines on Alain Ducasse's 42 page list are well under $1,000, if the occasion is right, you'd be a fool to pass up a bottle of 1961 Chateau D'Yquem at $10,500, or a bottle of 1982 Chateau Cheval Blanc at $9,450. What is that, about $20 per tiny sip? Just think, you could by 5,250 bottles of Two Buck Chuck instead of the Chateau D'Yquem. For a guy (me) who can't tell the difference between Two Buck Chuck and a $100 bottle of wine, let alone a $10,000 bottle, this is hard to fathom.

I was curious about tipping, and I asked a colleague who has frequented these types of establishments..."If your dinner bill for four is $5,000 (including a couple of decent bottles of wine) then do you tip the regular 15%-20%?" I asked. She told me that of course, 15%-20% would be the minimum. So if I get laid off at work, I think I know what I should shoot for in terms of my next job. When I was a waiter in college, it was a great night if I came home with $80 in tips...

My colleague also told me that places like Alain Ducasse often have four-to-six week waiting lists. This seems almost farcical, but it is true. Could it really be that good? It is really worth it to pay that much for food or wine that your body *ahem* voids itself of by the next day?

Finally, every time I see foie gras on a menu (of course it is "homemade" at Alain Ducasse), I recall my cultural ineptitude as a 22-year old new banker in Los Angeles. My boss had taken us to a nice place for lunch, and I asked her, "What's the foe-e grass?" She was very polite about it and said, "Oh you mean the fwa-gra?" and explained. I was mortified, both at my incorrect pronunciation and regarding what foie gras actually is.

And when I saw the foie gras on Alain's menu in NYC, I wondered if the "homemade" means that they jam the food down the goose's (or duck's) throat with their own fingers (as opposed to the farm kind where they jam it down with a plunger or pump it in). I guess everyone has their own lines to cross or not when it comes to food. Some people might call me a barbarian just for eating cow. But my line comes far before foie gras; I will never touch the stuff. Here is what the Humane Society has to say about foie gras.

And on that note, have a Happy Thanksgiving!