♦ Does the financial meltdown mean the end of bottle service in New York? [DBTH, Gawker, GNML]
♦ A new study shows that Food Network hosts are pretty lousy at following food safety guidelines; Paula Deen, FYI, is the worst. [Super Chef via Eater]
♦ Death & Co.'s David Kaplan has gone to court to stop his building's landlord from evicting the bar over noise violations. [NYO]
♦ Anthony Bourdain enjoys eating "bootleg foods" like "illegal cheese." [Gothamist]
♦ Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern eats rancid cheese and fermented animal parts for a living and yet says he's never gotten sick on the job. [amNY]
♦ A new food magazine called Swallow is launching next month. [GS]
♦ Trader Joe's is opening its first Brooklyn outpost next Friday. [BP]

When Wall Street began crumbling yesterday, the rich bemoaned the loss of their money. Everybody else in New York immediately said to themselves: "Jiminy Cricket, could this be the end of mandatory bottle service in shitty clubs full of rich pricks?" I mean, it was the universal response! Bottle service rules require the purchase of a wildly overpriced bottle of liquor just to enter a club. But early indications are that Manhattan nightclubs may already be putting the $450 bottle of Grey Goose to rest. Dare we even hope?: (What I generically imagine are) Shitty one-syllable clubs Quo, Myst, and Prime didn't wait even a full day to send out this press release to Alex Geana:

• Julian Niccolini will begin serving breakfast at the Four Seasons. You'll have to wait until January, though, to pay $44 for a croissant. [NYM]

• Daniel Boulud chats about the re-opening of Daniel on Monday (photos here) and explains why he shouldn't be held responsible if you get fat from eating too much of his food. [HuffPo via GS]

• It seems The Box's Simon Hammerstein is quite the pervy, depraved boss, at least judging by all the complaints from female ex-employees. [Gawker]

The Box is one of the most interesting and decadent spectacles in downtown nightlife. Owned by Simon Hammerstein, descendant of the theater scion, the jewel-box theater hosts a variety of unique and sexually-charged acts nightly. Open since 2006, it's still a pretty hot ticket—"If you're good enough to make it in, you'll make it in," Box partner Cordell Lochin told the Observer. They're able to charge over a grand for a table on certain nights. But trouble is brewing, and we're not talking about two-bit drug raids or carping scenesters. It looks like the club's sexiness has gone to one owner's head:

• George Gurley's brilliant survey of the social scenesters you'll find hanging out at the Beatrice Inn. [Gawker]

Uh oh, looks like Vincent Gallo was right—about one thing. Yesterday, the indie actor threatened to "shove [New York magazine's tape recorder] up [our] ass"—and we invited him to do so. Now he has, figuratively.The backstory: our downtown scene tipster, Molly Friedman, reported that the scruffy Republican had made comments asserting how "hot" he found Sarah Palin's teenage daughters. Gallo responded with a long screed denouncing Friedman as an "ugly cunt whore," which is wholly inaccurate. He also mentioned that a New York Magazine reporter had recorded the interview, and that he would gladly shove said microphone up our ass. Well, New York played the tape on their website and it looks like Gallo said nothing untoward during the time he was being recorded. But you're still going to hell for calling Hillary Clinton a "pig" during that same recording, Vince! [Intel]

The low-ceiling'd, tiny coke den that is the Beatrice Inn doesn't look like much. But it's become Manhattan's celeb hangout du jour, obsessively covered by blogs like this, and fetishized most recently in Fashion Week Daily's detailed map placing the regular characters of the downtown hovel. About-town writer George Gurley—the cuddliest of the nightlife denizens—compiled a "Who's Who" of the "Bea," as it's called by regs. Nothing short of hilarious, he has the juice on everyone: Mary-Kate, Josh Hartnett, Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson, and Kirsten Dunst, who perhaps explained the Bea's celeb draw better than anyone: "[She] once told a regular, 'Don't judge me, guys, don't judge me! I like to have fun too!" Click for full list and map.

• New York's Adam Platt visits Convivio and gives Michael White's kitchen three stars. [NYM]

A campaign official for Virginia's Lieutenant Governor cancelled an order for 150 tourist guides on Minneapolis-St. Paul when she discovered they included a section on gay and lesbian nightclubs. "'Having a section dedicated solely to GLBT will be a BIG problem for many of our folks. We simply can't hand them out,' wrote the aide, Melissa Busse, in an email to the guidebook publisher, Rake Publishing." However, all those God-fearing Republicans stumbling into town had Twin City's gay clubs overflowing with out-of-towners.

• Inside The Libertine (left), Todd English's latest venture, which will open next week in Jason Pomeranc's Gild Hall hotel. [Eater]

G Spa—the tiny, dank club in the basement of the Meatpacking District's Hotel Gansevoort—is closing on Saturday. It was a celeb-magnet and a dreadful place. It will not be missed. (We voted it the Worst of Nightlife back in 2006—"You'd just be drinking $15 cocktails in a sauna, crammed into an incredibly tiny space, and trying not to pass out from the smell of chlorine.") The entire Gansevoort Hotel is vulgar and gross, but G Spa actively insulted our intelligence, arrogantly testing clubgoers' patience by making them feel like they should want to party in a humid spa. As Down By the Hipster put it, the club "holds an important place in the history of the Meatpacking district, in that it proved that for a time, no matter what you opened there, people would come." Hopefully those days are waning. Check out the magic you missed out on:See you in hell.

As of this Saturday night, G Spa, the lounge in basement of the Gansevoort that was started up in 2006 by Richie Akiva and Scott Sartiano, will be a thing of the past. [DBTH]

Last year, Time Out New York had aspirations of building up its online event listings into a sort of Craigslist of North American listings. The magazine invested in its website in pursuit of this, but the project never completely panned out. But according to some tipsters, that might just be the start of TONY's problems. Could the stalwart around-town manual be in (*dramatic pause*) life-threatening financial trouble? The rumor's not a complete surprise—we were reporting last year that some freelancers were having trouble getting paid by TONY. Our tipsters, though, say that's just a symptom of more serious money problems for publisher Allison Tocci and company:

Who are the coolest kids in town that haven't been written about ad nauseum yet? The latest collection of bright young things in the creative/social scene are relatively fun—though there's still time for them to become just as annoying as their elders. Here's who you'll be seeing in Page Six in the next few years—and on New York Social Diary in about forty. An ambitious, in-the-know tipster helped compile a list of this year's upper class.


THE Flâneurs:

Just the news you wanted this lovely Friday before a holiday weekend: W reports that The Hills' Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, possibly the two most hated in the history of TV, are planning to open a bar in Murray Hill, a space formerly known as The Dip on the corner of Third Avenue 29th Street. That should be interesting. [W via Gawker]

• El Baño is either a super-exclusive club you won't be getting into beginning next week because you don't have a key, or it's a super-exclusive club you won't be getting into because it doesn't actually exist. [DBTH]

It's already easy for men to get laid at downtown Manhattan's cocaine-dusted celeb hangout Beatrice Inn because it's so hard to get into—women there assume that the guys there have to be somebody special to get past the notoriously tough door. But how to extract one of the beauties that abound in Paul Sevigny's club? Would-be womanizers would do well to learn from the Eurotrash rake in a cap he never takes off who scores about as often as he shows up at the West Village haunt.

Transgender nightlife queen Amanda Lepore is inarguably awesome in her fabulous cartoonishness. Now the "My Pussy" singer is part of a Jawbone Bluetooth advertising campaign, which isn't so surprising when you consider she's also done advertisments for M.A.C. Cosmetics, Swatch, Armani and MTV. The ad appears in this week's New Yorker—is America ready? They sure as hell better get ready. In her words: "My pussy is famous; my pussy is expensive." [Copyranter]