Last week's Second Annual Corned Beef Cookoff – a benefit supporting families of the Fighting 69th soldiers in Iraq – was won for the second year in a row by the Upper East Side’s Neary’s Pub. (The Irish-American dish became popular in New York around the turn of the 19th century.) Neary’s will be dishing out the corned beef tonight, as will Murphy & Gonzalez, which tied for second place with Peter McManus Café, which......

Today the Times’s Frank Bruni marvels at Manhattan’s new wave of high tone restaurant openings during a recession, and pins the trend not on entrepreneurial bravado but on the fact that it takes years to get a fancy eatery open, and most of these new places were envisioned in flusher economic times. It is true that in 2005, the top fifth of earners in Manhattan made 52 times what the lowest fifth make – $365,826......