The cream has been skimmed from the top of the Manhattan playground, but it has not been removed. After an unusually long and harsh Dr Zhivago-style winter, New Yorkers are coming out of hibernation. It’s an annual ritual of course: stretching out and yawning into the routine that is summer in the Big Apple: al fresco dining, weekend boozy brunches at restaurants that make you wait in line for stock-standard Eggs Benedict, and fighting traffic on alternate Friday’s to race out to your share in the Hamptons.

Normally, the process of extricating yourself from the coziness of your brownstone shell would involve the buffer that is spring, but if you’ve ever spent a spring in New York, you know that it doesn’t actually exist. That elusive rumor of a season planted somewhere between winter and fall, its existence is as mythical as a last-minute dinner reservation at one of the city’s celebrity chef restaurants.

Which brings me to my point about cream.

A few years ago, and many lifetimes past, I was riding the crest of a wave that was the peak in the global financial markets. Flush with cash and an insatiable appetite for seasonal truffle tasting menus and the complexities of a Super Tuscan, I made the arrogant assumption that I should, and could, make a reservation at one of New York’s top ten restaurants.

Restaurant reviews in the city are about as feared, lauded, and reviled as the Bible itself, and celebrity chef owners anticipate their placement in the Zagat survey with faux aloof weariness that is actually ill-disguised terror. The outcome is simple: either you’re loved, or you’re not. Restaurants receiving favorable reviews in the mighty Zagat are deemed worthy of well-heeled discerning palates; the rest are considered, well, they’re not considered at all by the owners of those palates.

So it was in a fit of arrogant naïveté that I rang up one of those restaurants to make a peak-hour dinner reservation that very weekend, all those years ago. After spending no less than two hours dialing and redialing in hopes of getting a better response than an engaged tone, I was finally put through to on-hold music. Finally, a curt receptionist employed a terse what-do-you-want tone to ask how she might help. Taking only the time to laugh at me, she quickly hung up when I made my request for a table that Saturday evening at seven o’clock.

Armed with the singular brand of creativity only brought on by vengeful irritation, I called back, spending another long period of time dialing and redialing. Pretending like I was someone new, I explained that I would like to bring the daughter of the Japanese Prime Minister to their restaurant, and could they oblige that coming Saturday for seven o’clock in their rush hour? A jubilant ‘Certainly!’ was their response. Although my claim to Japanese fame was only very, very vaguely accurate, the point was then what it’s always been in Manhattan boomtimes: this place doesn’t need you; you need it.

Fast-forward to today, years on, in a city cowed by the Great Recession, where a stroll down streets and avenues paints a picture of a city in pain. Retailers are going out of business, legendary gourmet grocer Balducci’s has closed its Manhattan doors, and apartment sales fell by more than half in the first quarter of 2009, according to Corcoran Group. In short, pretty much everyone is feeling the pinch.

So the question on the minds of some of those discerning palates as we head into a new summer season, is where will New Yorkers find the cream that’s been skimmed from the froth of their Kopi Luwak latte? The answer is…that it’s been stirred right back in.

Recycled, rebranded, and sometimes toned-down versions of what a recent New York Times article coined “raw glitz”, business owners are working with dwellers of Gotham City, responding to the upper echelon of the masses with a modicum of welcome cognizance. Open-air pubs and sidewalk cafes are extending their happy hours, wine merchants and clothing retailers both here and on the Jersey and Hamptons’ shores are offering more and better sales, and chefs like Daniel Boulud of the famed restaurant with the same first name are opening their newer, and more casual doors in just a few weeks time. It almost, almost, seems as if Manhattan needs its inhabitants as much as its inhabitants need Manhattan.

And what about those at the very tippy-top? The restaurants that, say, laughed at a patron requesting a reservation during the height of their gilded loftiness? Your correspondent happily (possibly snarkily so) reports that a fresh attempt to make another last-minute reservation was met with a completely baffling level of affability. Of course, the answer was still no, but it was a polite no. Coming from the cream of the crop, that made all the difference.