Another worrisome feature of what was happening on Wall Street was the little-appreciated fact that, tucked away out of view of regular customers, was an entire revenue stream of corporate customers, organized groups of high rollers, dropping big, expensable Monopoly money on a dependable basis. It had been a perfect arrangement: thousands and thousands of dollars in business from people who didn’t want to be seen spending it—conducted mostly out of view of a public for whom the sight of bankers and brokers enjoying themselves had never been attractive. Better yet, these masters of the universe usually had set or limited menus that could be cranked out relatively quickly and easily by kitchen staff. Half the work at minimal effort and premium prices. This was a blue-chip relationship for high-end restaurants, which could, around the holidays, amount to millions of dollars in revenue. Much of it conveniently spent on wine and liquor. That’s as close to free money as it gets. Though you could never tell from the dining room, many more restaurants than are ever willing to admit it were designed and built from the get-go to do this kind of two-tracked business. They simply could not survive, operating the way they had before, without it.

Suddenly, overnight, that whole economy was in doubt. What was once a gusher turned into a dribble. When your customers are getting called out in the newspapers for eating at restaurants like yours, that is not an environment conducive to your interests. If a company wasn’t currently making a profit for its shareholders, it was now a liability to be seen holding expensive corporate retreats—much less throwing a truffle dinner at Daniel. CEOs who were being vilified for flying private jets and grilled in front of congressional committees for their profligate spending and the obscene scale of their bonuses—they sure didn’t want to get busted eating at Masa.

There was panic.

In the blink of an eye, hidebound attitudes and behaviors, which had only yesterday been so deeply ingrained as to be instinctive, completely reversed overnight.

Suddenly, everywhere you went, people were uncharacteristically…polite.

Velvet ropes disappeared.

Hostesses who only last week would look right through you with blank, model stares now became as welcoming as your beloved granny: almost painfully accommodating and eager to please. Phones that used to ring forever were picked up on the first toll. A civility bordering on desperation replaced studiously affected contempt. Tables became available where once there had been no possibility of there ever being a table.

Even walk-ins were treated with courtesy in the hope that any accrued goodwill might pay off later.

“I’m so sorry we can’t accommodate you today but…how about next Thursday?” replaced the curt rebuff.

Chefs who hadn’t been near their dining rooms, much less their kitchens, in some time suddenly returned—and even made a point of cooking.

Tom Colicchio was among the fastest to grab hold of the situation. Rightly seeing his television celebrity as an asset, he quickly put it to work in the service of his restaurant and announced “Tom Tuesdays” at Craft—where he, himself, stood there for all to see and cooked a special menu.

Half-price specials, half portions, à la carte options appeared where they’d once been unthinkable. Soon, you could order off the menu—individual dishes—in the cocktail waiting area at Per Se, where, previously, the only option had been the full ride through a tasting menu—and only in the dining room. Prices dropped, specials changed to less pricey, less intimidating creations. The words “two for one,” “free bottle of wine,” “half-price,” and even “early bird dinner” began appearing on menus, signs, and Web sites. Comfort-food classics like fried chicken started appearing at weekly special-event dinners held late at night—at places where such quotidian fare would not, under ordinary circumstances, be expected.

But these were not ordinary times—and everyone knew it.

Many customers, particularly of fine-dining restaurants—the kind of people who invested in stocks and bonds—had lost as much as half their net worth in a matter of days. They could hardly be counted on to have the same priorities—to behave as before. Sure, it was not unreasonable to hope that there was still room for restaurants and menus and a level of dining directed at the luxury market—people willing to pay top dollar for the very best. They’d always be there. But there would also be, restaurateurs quickly surmised, plenty they would no longer be willing to pay for.

“I may have money to pay for this white truffle fettuccine,” one imagined them to say, “but fuck me if I’m paying for the restaurant to buy that flower arrangement over there!”

That gap would need to be filled. By ordinary customers. We’d better start being nice to them, went the feeling. Pronto.

If there’s a new and lasting credo from the Big Shakeout, it’s this: People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit. The new financial imperatives—accompanied, perhaps, by some small sense that ostentatiously throwing a lot of money around unnecessarily might not be cool right now—dovetailed perfectly with the rising hipness of the more casual Momofuku and L’Atelier fine-dining models (which had been around for some time), as well as other, more mysterious forces, long simmering under the surface and just now bubbling to the top to be acknowledged and identified. Wiser heads saw this shift as presenting opportunities.

A lot of restaurants closed. And, as always, a lot of restaurants opened to take their places. Industry boosters will point to those aggregate numbers as a means of minimizing the severity of what happened. But who among them will survive? Who will still be standing a year from now? Two?

In the middle of the worst period of crisis, when everyone was predicting the End of Opulence, Chris Cannon and Michael White bravely opened up the very opulent Marea on Central Park South. True, the room is ultra-swank. The prices for the food—which unapologetically courts (and deserves) four stars—are expensive. But what’s interesting is the wine list. It’s cheap. Or, shall we say, unusually focused on moderately priced, lesser known boutique wines and cult wines of Italy. You pay a lot of money for dinner at Marea—but, significantly, you do not get gouged on wine. In fact, if anything, you are gently steered toward more sensible choices.

As the prices of raw ingredient continued to rise—and pressure on customers tightened—chefs were caught in the middle. Even traditional “must-have” dishes like salmon and sirloin steak were becoming so expensive to serve that many couldn’t make money on them. And customers still wanted organic and sustainable—yet affordable at the same time.

David Chang suggested a way forward in an article in Esquire, predicting an inevitable move toward an entirely new expectation of the ratio between protein and vegetables or starch on plates of the future—more along the lines of the Asian model. A concentration on not only “lesser” cuts of meat, like neck, shoulder, and shank—but a lot less meat altogether. A future scenario where meat and bone would be used more as flavoring agents than as the main event, Chang proposed, would not necessarily be a bad thing. That would be more affordable, and would force chefs to be more creative and less reliant on overkill, on bulk, to make their point—and it would be better for a population increasingly at risk of growing morbidly obese.

Hard times, he seemed to be saying, might actually help push us in a direction we were already coming to think we wanted to go—or that we should be going but hadn’t yet actually gotten around to.

Belt-tightening implies a bad thing. But it also means you’re getting thinner.