Recent guests include Mick Jagger, Leonardo DiCaprio and, erm, Geri Halliwell (who, given her reputation for extreme diets, is proof positive that the menu is almost - if not quite - irrelevant in a truly hot establishment).
Scouting New York even lists the places that have sprung up where some of the once-hot establishments once stood.
Over the past six years, Ms. Cardoso, 35, along with various business partners, has created super-hot establishments like Cain, GoldBar and Lavo, as well as the Surf Lodge, the Montauk motel turned boutique hotel.
On Dec. 15, one of the hotel developers, Mitesh Patel, told several dozen residents at a community board meeting at the Bellerose Assembly of God Church that he and his partners aimed to create a reputable hotel, not a "hot sheets" establishment.
A FOLLOW-UP to "The Restaurant" would turn not on the travails of a chef but rather on the agony of middle-income New Yorkers with no fancy connections who want to dine at a reasonable hour in a hot new establishment.
There is a whole shop in the West Village dedicated to chicken fingers (Sticky's Finger Joint), a bar on Smith Street serving only wings (The Wing Bar), a critically acclaimed West Village restaurant which made its name with sliders (The Little Owl) and a farm-to-table style hot dog establishment in Park Slope (Bark), and yet the humble nacho has been left behind.
They were hot, the establishment was bothered.
The Q-Plaza Motel, at Vernon Boulevard and Queens Plaza South, became notorious as a hot-sheets establishment.
And so horribly popular, too! (As the critic Terry Castle puts it in her ace new book of essays, The Professor and Other Writings: "Until the 1990s, when the Asian-minimalist spaestheticic finally took over, there was hardly a hippy-dippy hot-tub establishment between Baja and Mendocino that didn't have an O'Keeffe poster decorating the premises").
FOR better or for worse, as New York City real-estate patterns have repeatedly shown, contemporary art galleries usually travel in packs, with other chic retail establishments in hot pursuit.
Whether or not the allegations are true, Sutton Place Restaurant and Bar now joins the ranks of other dining establishments in hot water over weight issues.
