R.I.P. | Jerry Goodman, "Adam Smith"

George J. W. ("Jerry") Goodman, aka "Adam Smith"

Yesterday's vivid memorial service in New York City for George Jerome Waldo ("Jerry") Goodman will stick with me as a reminder of how such events should be conducted. Goodman died on January 3 this year at the University of Miami Hospital, after a long effort to fend off the bone-marrow disorder myelofibrosis.

Paul Krugman was one of those present to bear witness to Jerry Goodman's contributions to letting light into the closed world of Wall Street.

Goodman was elected a Rhodes Scholar from Missouri in 1952, but resigned from residence at Oxford University because of plumbing and padlocks at Brasenose College.

His moniker "Adam Smith" was reportedly given to him by Clay Felker when he was editing New York Magazine, to preserve Goodman's anonymity as he tried to stay in the business while pillorying it. Goodman said others have also claimed credit. Later, Goodman used the nom-de-plume for his wildly popular books about Wall Street and then as a trademark for a widely praised show on economics for the general public.

Goodman was born in St. Louis on August 10, 1930. He was the son of Alexander Mark Goodman, an attorney, and Viona Cremer Goodman. Jerry Goodman's officemate and friend, Craig Drill has written a testimony to the public-spiritedness of Alexander Goodman in the attached comments at the memorial service.

Jerry Goodman attended Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude in 1952, and was an editor of The Harvard Crimson. Goodman won a Rhodes Scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he studied political economy. However, he quit the college before the end of the first year of his scholarship. As his son Mark put it to me yesterday:

He liked the people at Oxford, but he did not like the facilities. He said: "I never want to take another cold shower ever again." He also didn't like the fact that the college gates were locked every night and he had to climb over to walls to get back in.

Instead of spending his time at Oxford in residence at Brasenose, he spent it writing a novel, The Bubble Makers, published in 1955, about a Harvard student in conflict with his grandfather. He wrote several other novels and a book for children.

In 1954, he joined the US Army First Special Forces (later called the "Green Berets") in the Intelligence Group known as Psywar (psychological warfare).

In 1961, Goodman married an actress from Phoenix, Sally Cullen Brophy, who had a full Broadway and television acting career in the 1950s and 1960s. When she retired from acting, they moved to Princeton and she taught theater arts at local universities. She died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2007. Their two children, Susannah and Mark, both spoke at the memorial service, with warm words for Goodman's participation in their childhood activities, and an emphasis on the music that they shared a love for.

Goodman pioneered a style of financial writing that made the language and concepts of Wall Street more understandable and accessible to the typical investor. He was founding editor of Institutional Investor in the second half of the 1960s, and in the process transformed financial writing. Michael Lewis at his best is channeling Goodman. The first non-fiction book that Goodman wrote, The Money Game, was published in 1968 when he was at Institutional Investor and was soon Number 1 on the bestseller list. A colleague who was at the Harvard Business School at the time told me after the memorial service yesterday:

It is hard to imagine the impact that Adam Smith and the book had on B School students at the time. When the first piece about "Red-Dogged Motorola" came out in New York Magazine, we rushed out to get on the phone. We got early copies of The Money Game and we couldn't get enough of Scarsdale Fats and the other characters.

In the book he memorably introduced the joke that ends with an economist on a desert island proposing to two fellow storm survivors faced with cans they can't open: "Assume a can opener". His point was to make fun of economists who make unwarranted assumptions.

His love of music, and especially opera, led him to interview Placido Domingo, during a period when he was singing in Wagner's Ring Cycle at the Met. Jerry showed him why so many Americans know the Ride of the Valkyries theme - Elmer Fudd, bedecked in a Teutonic helmet and plunging a shovel in the ground as he goes, sings it as he chases Bugs Bunny from hole to hole: "Kill Da Waabbit, Kill Da WAAAbbit, Kill Da WAAABit... etc." After they watch the clip, Jerry sings the theme again, and Placido Domingo lustily joins in. A cartoonist celebrated Jerry's 70th birthday with a picture of Lincoln Center lights advertising the duet - "Placido Domingo/Adam Smith sing KILL DA WABBIT".

I first met "Adam Smith", the late Jerry Goodman, through fellow Trinity College, Oxford alum Ham Richardson, the late Louisiana-born top-ranked tennis great who moved to New York City after his tennis career ended, to participate in the venture capital world. Jerry and I got talking about Oxford, Cecil Rhodes, the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling, and the Just-So Stories set in southern Africa that we both loved. (Postscript December 2014 - Kipling may be the only author to have two books in the Grolier Club's 100 Most Famous Children's Books - The Jungle Book, set in India and made into a Disney movie, and the Just-So Stories, set in South Africa.) We both remembered the "great grey-green greasy banks of the Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees." Jerry said offhandedly that he supposed the Limpopo River was in the Congo, and I said that didn't make sense, that Kipling was writing about South Africa, and my recollection was that the Limpopo ran through the top of the eastern end of South Africa. He was interested, and bet me $10 that I was wrong.

So we Googled it on our iPhones (actually, no, it was 1975 - it took a while for us to get an Atlas in Ham Richardson's  library, and find the river), and when he saw I was right he immediately handed over a $10 bill with no hesitation. Not as exciting a betting ranges that start Liar's Poker, but Jerry got something he seemed always willing to pay something for - good information.

During a stint in Hollywood, he wrote screenplays, including an adaption from one of his novels,  The Wheeler Dealers (still a good flick), starring James Garner and Lee Remick.

He was a member of the Editorial Board of The New York Times, an editor of Esquire Magazine, a writer for Fortune, and a founding member of New York magazine.  In 1984, PBS television launched him as the anchor and editor-in-chief of Adam Smith's Money World, which won eight Emmy nominations and five of its Awards. The program was aired in more than 40 countries and the Soviet Union ran a Russian-language-dubbed edition, doubtless watched by a young Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who was born the year that Goodman was elected a Rhodes Scholar.  Goodman interviewed, among others, Warren Buffett and (in Moscow) Mikhail Gorbachev.

The family suggests donations in memory of Jerry Goodman be sent to two research programs for the cure of Myeloproliferative Disorders: (1) Robert Rosen, Chairman, MPN Research Foundation, 180 N. Michigan Avenue, #1870, Chicago, IL 60601 (or online mpnresearchfoundation.org), or (2) The Tisch Cancer Research Institute, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, One Gustave L. Levy Place, Box 1079, New York, NY 10029.

Here are links to some memorable obituaries of Jerry Goodman:

Jason Zweig, in the Wall Street Journal, who provides some of the original comments that Goodman was most famous for.

Douglas Martin, New York Times.

Martin Sosnoff, Forbes

Other good ones? Tell me at teppermarlin@aol.com.

REMARKS BY CRAIG A. DRILL AT MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR JERRY GOODMAN

April 30, 2014

Jerry and I were friends for almost forty years. Over the last two decades, we were officemates, sharing soup and sandwiches regularly.    

Jerry was raised in St. Louis at the end of the Great Depression. He told me that his father, Alexander Goodman, a lawyer, never made much money because he chose instead to take on cases and causes that he believed in.

Alexander once represented a farmer whose dog had been killed by a train. The attorney for the railroad asserted: “The dog was on our tracks, and, anyway, what is the value of a dog?”  

Well, Alexander’s answer was one of eloquence: “What is the value of a dog?  What is the value of a dog? Who wakes with the farmer before the break of day? Who toils daily beside his master in winter’s cold and summer’s heat? And who, when the farmer has gone to his final resting place, by the grave site, sits, refusing to leave, his muzzle between his paws?”

The farmer won his case. And Jerry’s father’s words were published in the holiday card sent around by the St. Louis Bar Association.  Now we know from whence came Jerry’s story-telling ability! 

Jerry entered his early teens during World War II and always had a special interest in military history.  He rarely spoke about his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, but told many stories about his time in the US Army First Special Forces Group.  His favorite World War II hero was Ernest Evans, a mixed-blood Cherokee, who, as Captain of a destroyer in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, repeatedly attacked, against all odds, the Imperial Japanese Fleet.  

Of his time at Harvard, Jerry talked mostly about writing for The Crimson. Moreover, he was thrilled to have been accepted into a small seminar on modern poetry led by Pulitzer Prize winner Archibald MacLeish. 

He enjoyed singing in the Glee Club and had a solo in one Christmas concert, which he later sang out to our office with gusto.  But he truly “sang his song” as a writer.  

Through the prism of humor, he helped us to better understand ourselves (sort of), as well as this sport -- and addiction -- called the modern stock market.  He had an uncanny ability to tell the real from the phony, even though the phony for many of us has glittering attractions.  

Jerry was proud to have coined some memorable words and phrases.  “Gunslingers,” a term for aggressive money managers from his classic, The Money Game, was one of his favorites. Some of his unforgettable phrases have found a permanent place in Wall Street vernacular, among these: “The stock doesn’t know you own it” and “If you don’t know who you are, the stock market is an expensive place to find out.”  

And he was proud of some of the images he created, among them the partygoers at the Masque of the Red Death ball -- money managers in the frothy “go-go” years -- asking, “What time is it?  What time is it?  But the clocks had no hands.”  

And he was gratified that his pioneering “Adam Smith’s Money World” -- which ran for 13 years on PBS -- won five coveted Emmy Awards and that his popular Goodman Lectures at Princeton on Media and Global Affairs had to be moved to larger auditoriums.  At the tail end of the dot-com bubble, Jerry, Mark, and I started adamsmithtv.net, which was a tremendous success in terms of fun and for father and son to work together.

Jerry was a polymath, a Renaissance man. He would take our lunch discussions from the Coptic-language Gospel of Thomas to his meeting with Günter Schabowski, the portly spokesman for the East German Politburo whose comments on TV -- inadvertently -- helped to bring down the Berlin Wall. 

Invariably, at our lunches, Jerry could not refrain from talking about investing and stocks. “Why is John Hancock so cheap?” “Is Continental Airlines going bankrupt again?” Jerry did his homework, and to better understand the biotech stocks, he actually went back to Princeton and audited two courses.

Despite many financial successes and fame, he never changed homes. He certainly never behaved ostentatiously or arrogantly. Jerry was destined to become a carrier of our culture, not just a passive observer, articulating with grace and wit the voice within us that knows what is right…as his father had done.

Jerry often bragged about Susannah and Mark, and it was evident how much he loved them. Beaming with pride, he showed me photographs of his granddaughters, Sophie, Lily, and Leah, who brought him great joy. Buying a condo in Coconut Grove was a big step for him, and he enjoyed going down to the warmth and the sea, along with Lynda, his loving partner, and his family.  

Jerry and I fell into the habit of reciting evocative poetry. Just a few months before his own death, as he was saddened by the loss of two close friends, Jerry read aloud Stanley Kunitz’s “The Layers.” As he read it, I could see the young man in Archibald MacLeish’s poetry class and, now, the older man with the courage of Captain Ernest Evans.  He felt this poem was a spiritual testament to what it is to be human.

THE LAYERS - Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

Live in the layers,

not on the litter.

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written. 

I am not done with my changes.

SINGLE PAYER NY? | Inequality and Health Costs

NYS Assemblyman Richard
Gottfried (D-NYC, Chelsea)

In yesterday morning's edition of The NY Times, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy launch a new feature, "The Upshot", by providing new data on rising inequality of U.S. incomes in the United States.

The charts show that incomes have been falling for the lowest 5th percentile in the United States, and while rising in the other percentiles have been rising more slowly than other industrialized countries in the 10th, 20th, 30th and 40th percentiles. U.S. median income is likely to be exceeded now by Canada's.

The implications that the authors draw from the data are reasonable. Their focus on the subject is justified. Their report pushes policy in the right direction...

More Complex Than It Seems

But the chart and its meaning are more complicated than might seem at first look.

• The intervals in the table are not even. They are 5 percentage points at the top and bottom and then switch to 10 percentage points. 
• The intervals by years are foreshortened at the recent end from four to two years. 
• The key to understanding the relationship between the United States and other countries is the slope of the lines for each point in time for each percentile. This requires sophisticated thinking - it's cross-sectional trend analysis. There are pitfalls here because exchange rates are changing for independent reasons.
• The United States appears to be losing ground only for the 5th percentile. If the chart only showed the 10th percentile, none of the trend lines would point downward. 
• For the percentiles the United States is increasing but other countries are getting better faster, at least up to the median (50th percentile).
• The reporters base some of their their conclusions on data not in the chart. In a followup table published online later in the day, the reporters provide a simplified table showing clearly that Canada's median income in 2010 for the first time appears just about to equal the U.S. median income. But the evidence for the idea that Canada has bypassed the United States since 2010 comes from "other data".

These  complications don't negate the results or the headline, but they provide food for further thought. Focusing on disposable income does not provide a final answer to the question: "What goods and services can people at each level of income buy or get access to?" This may help the case for Sweden's poor, but it raises questions about a U.S. average, since states vary in what they provide. Since 1980, for example, has health care become more accessible for more Americans? Leaving Obamacare aside, drug benefits were added to Medicare.

The many online commentators on the Leonhardt-Quealy story point out the following causes of an apparent growth in U.S. income inequality relative to other countries:

• U.S. education is not maintaining its leadership in building literacy and skills.
• Government policies encourage more inequality, with a minimum wage that hasn't been raised for years, soaring increases in executive compensation, and The U.S.  

One Cause of Greater Inequality: Growing Health Care Costs

Rapid growth of U.S. health care costs over the 1980-2010 period is another reason for the decline in disposable income for the poorest Americans. Health care costs on average are a higher proportion of the incomes of people below the 50th percentile than above it, and they have been rising steadily for decades.

This reduces discretionary income, especially for the poorest people. Norway, Sweden and Canada have had a national health care system in place. This has to be a significant factor in why their poor are doing better.

An Idea from Richard Gottfried

To reduce health care costs in NY State, Assemblyman Richard N. Gottfried, Chair of the NY State Assembly Health Committee, is trying to emulate the health care systems of Europe and Canada by introducing a Single Payer Health Plan for New York. It recognizes that the national Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) is making health care more accessible and efficient, but still leaves a costly layer of administration that should eventually be unnecessary.

His “New York Health” bill (A.5389-A/S.2078-A, sponsored in the Senate by Bill Perkins) will make sure that in NY State, everyone is covered. It will also save billions through a publicly sponsored, single-payer health coverage, like Medicare or Child Health Plus for everyone.

A majority of doctors, nurses, and patients prefer a single payer system, as do many small businesses and unions. The proposed New York Health program would:

• Provide comprehensive, universal health coverage for every New Yorker and would replace private insurance company coverage.
• Cover all New Yorkers for medically necessary services, including: primary, preventive, specialists, hospital; mental health; reproductive health care; dental; vision; prescription drug; and medical supply costs - more comprehensive than most commercial health plans.
• Be funded through a graduated tax on payroll and non-payroll taxable income, based on ability to pay. Today, the same premium is paid by a CEO and a receptionist, and a successful company or a small, new business. For most people, it will be a substantial reduction in what they now spend and most people’s discretionary income will go up.

INEQUALITY | Piketty

Prof. Thomas Piketty, Paris School of
Economics, author of "Capitalism..."

Prof. Thomas Piketty (pronounced PEAK-et-tee) of the Paris School of Economics has been on a triumphal tour of the U.S. media to promote the new translation from French of his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014). What's the fuss?

The closest analogy seems to be the publication of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory, which in 1936 provided a way of thinking about monetary and fiscal policy that provided an economic rationale for the massive injection of monetary liquidity that was engineered by FDR and his first Treasury Secretary, Will Woodin, and the Federal budget deficits that followed.

Reportedly economists were awed then by the way Keynes solved several problems at once. Piketty has done the same thing for the discussion of income inequality.

But don't take my word for it. Paul Krugman has published several blogposts on Piketty's book, and his review appears in the May 8 issue of The New York Review of Books, entitled "Why We're in a New Gilded Age." Krugman sees several stages in the debate over inequality:

First, denial that rising inequality was happening on any major scale. Because of a stream of new data, sometime in the early 1990s

you could mostly say, “Oh, yeah? Guess what.” The evidence for a sharp rise in inequality [since 1975], a definitive break with the three postwar decades, was overwhelming.

Second, denial that those who were getting richer was a small group.  The whole top 20 percent, it was said, i.e., well-educated Americans, were getting richer.

But at a certain point — to a large extent thanks to Piketty and Emmanuel Saez [at Berkeley] — we got to say “Oh, yeah? Guess what.” Actually, rising inequality was in large part about the rise of a tiny elite, the one percent and within that the 0.1 percent.

Third, denial that the ones getting richest fastest were a tiny elite as in the Gilded Age.

The answer [from Piketty] was, “Oh, yeah? Guess what.” We don’t have Gilded Age* survey data, but we do have tax records back to the early 20th century, and top income shares are right back at late-Gilded-Age levels.

In his review of Piketty's book in the NY Review, Krugman gives credit to Piketty for the increased interest in income inequality and above all in the focus on the top 1 percent. He also credits Saez and Anthony Atkinson at Oxford.

Piketty's bottom-line message, says Krugman, is that the United States is on a path back to

"patrimonial capitalism" in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.

Krugman gives credit to Piketty for using tax records to go back before survey data on incomes were generated by the Census Bureau and other agencies. This takes the United States back to 1913 and Britain back to 1909. France has wealth-tax records going back to the French Revolution.

Piketty's essential theory is that if workers can be replaced easily by machines, the rate of return to capital (r) will exceed the rate of growth (g) and this will lead to greater concentration of wealth.

Krugman thinks this is a terrific theory. He and Piketty both have a nagging concern that maybe the higher inequality of income resulting from "supersalaries" could be a significant factor. But the onus for this goes back to the U.S. government for lowering the tax rate, thereby making the marginal increase in incomes worth the time of CEOs to pursue.

The drift toward oligarchy is not inevitable, but Piketty and Krugman think it is probable. This will be comforting for you, or afflicting, depending on your POV. But, Krugman says, with the publication of this book "we'll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to."

* Some writers use "Gilded Age" as largely synonymous with "Belle Epoque". The advantage of using "Gilded Age" is multiple - it doesn't require a decision and word processing technology surrounding an acute accent over the E in Epoque, it doesn't require the reader to know anything about a complicated period of European history, and it refers to American robber barons that we all know about, like Andrew Carnegie. The main difference in the timing is that the Belle Epoque starts in the early 1870s and goes all the way to World War I, whereas the Gilded Age stops with the end of the 19th Century or maybe with the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 (in those days, finance still revolved around London).

P.S. The CityEconomist Blogpost just clicked over 75,000 page views. Thank you for reading!!

FOOD BIZ | The Irony of Tasting Menus (Comment)

Dover on Court Street, Brooklyn - Battersby #2 and one
of the "Hottest 10" restaurants in NYC, spring 2014. 

The new-restaurant excitement in New York City is focused on Brooklyn, as evidenced, for example by Battersby.

The four of us (Alice and I, and Caroline and Francis) recently went for dinner to Dover, on 412 Court Street in Brooklyn.  

Dover has been open six months and is now fully staffed. It is restaurant #2 of the owners of Battersby, and it is bigger, newer and more likely to be able to seat you, although it too is getting discovered fast. Like Battersby, it is getting top reviews. It is in the "Hottest 10" NYC restaurants for the spring 2014 put out by Zagat every quarter. Can Bon Appetit be far behind?

The tasting menu looked good and I was ready to go for it. You pay a little more, and you get the deep thinking of the chef, who puts together the selections. Wines are also paired with the food. The tasting menu is certainly tailor-made for people who don’t like making a whole slew of decisions at the end of a long day and want to get an idea of what a restaurant can do, at one sitting.

But... it dawned on me... for a group of four, a tasting menu ironically gives you less to taste. The typical requirement of a tasting menu is that everyone at the table must have the same food. That rule taketh away some of the value that the number of tasting portions giveth. You end up getting less exposure to the menu than if you just pick a la carte and share some of the food that looks good.

The four of us got to taste 14 dishes on the a la carte menu. We had wine as well, for less than $100 per person before the tip. To taste seven dishes on the tasting menu we would have paid about the same and paired wines would have been extra.

My take (I'm looking for insights into the Food Biz):

• For two people, one of whom is going to get the bill and is trying to impress the other, the tasting menu is perfect!
• For four people, a tasting menu doesn't offer enough variety.  In my view, restaurants with tasting menus should require the first two at the table to get the tasting menu, but then they should relax the requirement or offer more choices.

Comment (September 8, 2014)

At dinner today at Bouley's on Duane Street, management was smart of about their tasting menu:

• They offered a choice of three items for each course.
• They did not require everyone too buy the tasting menus. 

In this environment, a tasting menu is a great deal.

Financial Advice for People Who Are Not Super-Rich

The 52-year-old Journal
 of Financial Education

In 1969 I moved to New York City with a Ph.D. in hand to be a finance professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

During the next few years I was continually surprised by the gap between the sophistication of financial theories and the primitive misunderstanding of financial markets among the general public.

In 1972 I decided to do something to help improve financial literacy and  started a new journal, the The Journal of Financial Education. I wrote a letter to members of an association of university-level finance teachers and got a response rate of about 10 percent.  Now, 52 years later, the journal is still going strong.

At that time, a popular view was the idea that the stock market was a "random walk". Princeton Professor Burton Malkiel's book with those words in the title appeared in 1973. Getting an edge on the market legally was thought to be difficult or impossible. What carried investors was a general rise in the stock market, not so much anyone's ability to predict a particular stock. Along with the potential of more return went greater risk and at the end of the day you paid for your greater potential with more volatility, and one balanced off the other.

My view today is that it is possible to do better than the average investor, through methods both legal and illegal:

• Better and faster information and execution of trades
• Smarter investment analysis.
• Activities that are illegal but are not enforced. 
• Activities that should be illegal but are not.

Michael Lewis's new book on the Flash Boys shows how front-running makes huge profits even if the advance information is only a matter of fractions of seconds. Traders make a profit by being ahead of the market. Large profits are possible at the expense of slower traders.

The problem for the small investor is figuring out how they should proceed, with questions like:

• Who are the smarter money managers?
• Are they leaving anything for their clients after they take their fees and profit shares?

People who can't beat the market when they pick stocks on their own are unlikely to be able to pick with any assurance the best money market managers, offering reasonable rates. Index funds came into fashion, led by Vanguard and its founder Jack Bogle, as a way of keeping down the cost of mutual funds. That's one option, minimize trading and money management fees.

Finding financial advisers without a stake in your decision are another alternative. But these advisers in the past have only been interested in middle-sized and large investors. Now there are new start-ups that offer financial advice for smaller investors.

Here's a description of one of them called FutureAdvisor that looks interesting.

Three cheers. It's about time that the little guys had more choices in how they are guided in making decisions.

FOOD BIZ | NYC's 10 "Hottest" Restaurants

Empire Diner in Chelsea - You Can
Be a Hot Venue with a Tiny Kitchen! 

The Spring 2014 edition of the quarterly report from Zagat, written by Kelly Dobkin, came out last month. Brooklyn (2) came in second after Greenwich Village (5) in the number of restaurants mentioned.

Chelsea, Harlem and the Lower East Side each got one restaurant. Missing boroughs: Bronx, Queens, Staten Island.

Analyzing by type of food, two were "American" and the other eight were described as: New American, Mexican, Sushi, "Diner", Italian, Mediterranean, Seafood, and French.

What interests me from the business side is that the Empire Diner has of necessity a small kitchen and it still manages to get itself into the top 10 list for hot restaurants.

1 The Cecil

American • Harlem 

2  Mission Cantina

Mexican • Lower East Side

3  Dover

New American • Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

4 Sushi Nakazawa

Sushi • West Village 

5 Empire Diner

Diner • Chelsea

6 All'onda

Italian • Greenwich Village

7 Margaux

Mediterranean • Greenwich Village

8 The Clam

Seafood • West Village

9 Narcissa Restaurant

American • East Village

10 French Louie

French • Boerum Hill, Brooklyn