Frank Bruni, the Times’s top restaurant critic, awards the new 2nd Avenue Deli one star today, which isn’t bad considering it is, despite all the history, still a deli. We popped in there for food and photos just before it reopened at its East 33rd Street location and found the sandwiches (pictured) as monumental as ever; a second visit turned up no sign of the free bowl of gribenes (chicken skin fried in chicken fat)......

Jenni Ferrari-Adler has held many jobs—egg-seller, literary agency assistant, reader for The Paris Review—but her latest accomplishment is as the editor of a mouth-watering anthology of essays entitled Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant. Born out of a summer spent subsisting largely on cereal and water while finishing up her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, Ferrari-Adler wanted to explore what comfort food, solo food, meant to her favorite writers. Collected here......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bank robbery on Lafayette and Broome in Manhattan, a missing child on Rochester Ave. and President St. in Brooklyn, and a shooting on East 183rd St. and Crotona Ave. in the Bronx. A self-admitted alcoholic gave shaky and erratic testimony this afternoon, but was positive that he never would have given his beneficiary a stupid name like "Rafra" in the trial of two men who were accused of......

Graphic designers tend to be an even-keeled lot, unless you mess with their precious Futura typeface plans. So at Monday night’s The Art of the Book: Covers With Dave Eggers, Chip Kidd and Milton Glaser, moderated by designer Michael Bierut at the 92nd Street Y, we weren’t surprised that book jacket designer and author Kidd made nice with Panelist Four – a man well into his senior years who boosted the show from the first......

It's not a deal of Stuy Town proportions, but the sale of the Apthorp building on Broadway between West 78th and 79ths Streets on the Upper West Side is still a big deal. According to the NY Times, Maurice Mann agreed to pay more than $425 million for the building that takes up the entire block (Broadway to West End, 78th to 79th). Mann called it "the greatest trophy building on the Upper West Side."......

Foodies attack the silver screen! In today's Times Arts & Leisure section, the long history and current feast of food in film is given another look. Would there have even been a Big Night if not for the food? In the coming months, Russell Crowe, the first person we think of when the phrase "good taste" coming up, will star as a man who inherits a vineyard and Nora Ephron is working on an adaptation......

More and more bizarre details (even more than yesterday) trickle out about suspected fake-firefighter-rapist Peter Braunstein. The freelance writer is belived to have an apartment in Harlem, watching coverage of his crime from a midtown hotel. His father, Alberto Braunstein, continues to feel guilty and apologizes to the woman who was attacked by a man disguised as a firefighter; the police believe it was Braunstein since he worked with her at Women's Wear Daily and......

The Hollywood Reporter says that Meryl Streep will be playing the Anna Wintour-inspired devilish boss in the movie of The Devil Wears Prada. Streep has already played another Conde Nast employee, New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, in Adaptation, so we can't wait until she plays Graydon Carter or Jeff Jarvis next (hey, she played a rabbi in Angels in America - she can probably do it!). We think that someone like Lara Flynn Boyle, with......

Just what the world was waiting for! The NY Times reports that Arianna Huffington is starting a celebrity group blog with people like "Walter Cronkite, David Mamet, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, James Fallows, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Maggie Gyllenhaal, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer and Mortimer B. Zuckerman." Huh. Did Huffington read the Businessweek article about blogs changing business and decide, "It's on"? It'll be called Huffington Post, the NY Times article......

The New York Times seems like a great place to work. Like, say you're a senior analyst in the corporate planning department in the NYT Company - you could be writing an article about the New York Region > The City > New York Observed: The Fate of 'the Date'" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/nyregion/thecity/19date.html?pagewanted=2">trials of celebrating New Year's with a date in New York City the way The New York Times Company corporate planning senior analyst Nancy Rosen......

Lana G, Celebrity Make-Up Artist...

Daniel Radosh, Journalist...

Answering the desperate need to see a Nora Ephron screenplay acted out live, it looks like everyone's favorite brooding bad boy (of the mid 90s), Luke Perry, and everyone's favorite lesbian witch/band camper, Alyson Hannigan, will play Harry and Sally in the London stage version of When Harry Met Sally. According to the Hollywood Reporter, previews begin Feb. 10 and the play opens officially Feb. 20 at the Theatre Royal, with a scheduled 16 week......

The tabs took single women to task this weekend: The Post talks about how there are more single women now than ever in New York (especially in 35- to 44-year-old age bracket) and the Daily News suggests that the key for the Democrats in the next presidential election might be single women. The Census Bureau says that of the 3.4 million women in the city, "1.5 million say they are married with a spouse," and......

Gothamist was walking by the uptown office's neighborhood joint, Cafe Luxembourg, when we spied writer-director Nora Ephron inside having brunch and animated conversation with tablemates (one probably being husband Nicholas Pileggi). Gothamist has literally going running on the sets of You've Got Mail during college and Nora Ephron lives at the Ansonia - a few blocks away from the uptown office - so Gothamist would like to feel she's a kindred spirit of sorts. But......