So, are restaurants really the new nightclubs? Check out these multitasking contenders.

● Minetta Tavern (Greenwich Village) - A night at Minetta, complete with Barry Diller, Diane Von Furstenberg, and Harvey Keitel sightings, spawned this thesis. Your visit will confirm all the copious booze, packed interiors, and loud soundtracks of a nightclub, but you’ll also be served top brasserie eats.
● Hotel Griffou (Greenwich Village) - Stealth-posh scene-stealer serves up vintage dishes, but the elaborate array of intimate rooms is just as big a draw. Big enough to draw Leo, Chloe, and Kanye, among a glut of bold-faced names.
● Monkey Bar (Midtown East) - Graydon Carter's latest monkeyshines lays down a hierarchical supper club scene, with banquettes for the literary elite and tables in the pit for you. Oysters named for Rockefeller, meatloaf named for Ephron. But it’s all about the scene.

Dining might be the new nightlife, so then where does that leave nightlife? Could nightlife be the new shopping? Could it be still alive and well, and hiding behind a bandolier of dusty velvet ropes? Our dear Foster's existential breakdown and subsequent pocketbook damage got me to thinking about what everyone else (re: people with jobs other than chronicling New York nightlife) is doing with their free time in Manhattan. I cornered a Wall Street Dude, a New York Newbie, a Hipster DJ, a girl-about-town Socialite, a Fashion Intern, and a Lawyer to see what's going on behind our editorial backs. Turns out actually going someplace isn't a precursor for strong opinions, pro or con. For example:

WALL STREET DUDE
So, what do you think is hot these days in nightlife?
Minetta Tavern.

Because the choice shouldn’t be between restaurants where Chipotle and Per Se, here are a few spots that have embraced the middle ground.

10. Moules-frites @ Schiller’s Liquor Bar (Lower East Side), $18 - Same Parisian-bistro vibe as at Keith McNally’s Balthazar and Pastis, but you’ll save yourself some cash, a two-hour wait, and any shame involved in being stingy with your wine selection (the list is divided into “cheap,” “decent,” and “good”).
9. Hamburger @ J.G. Melon (Upper East Side), $8.50 - Nothing can pack in hoards of NYC prepsters like this UES landmark's juicy burger.
8. Romanian skirt steak @ Delicatessen (Soho), $17 - Forget that foodies critically panned it and that a neighbor urinated on the glass roof; with nothing on the menu over $20, a lively atmosphere, and plenty of swank space, it’s little surprise that Delicatessen is almost always packed.

Hurry! Get to Buddakan asap for Domaine de Canton's 2009 Bartender of the Year semi-finals in NYC. Watch the fiercest booze givers around mix, shake, and stir their way to a chance for the $10,000 Grand Prize. The event runs until 5pm and there will be no one around to drink the feats of their labor but you. That's a good thing.

Laugh Legend Caroline Hirsch of the eponymous Caroline's on bringing the funny, luring tourists, and laughing off a recession.

Point of Origin: I was born in Brooklyn and moved to Manhattan when I was, I think, 24 years old and went to City College and FIT, which is how I ended up in retail. I was working at Gimbels, which was going out of business, so as market reps, we were out, too. Because I was collecting unemployment, I had a little time to look around. Then I kind of fell into this business, the business of comedy -- it just happened. Bob Stigley just loved to go to a comedy club called Freddy's on 49th Street, and before long, he and a couple of other friends wanted to open a cabaret. Bob decided to use a woman's name for the cabaret we planned to open in Chelsea, and that was the start of Caroline's.

It hardly need be pointed out that we pine longingly for the days when airline travel was all sexy and glamorous, and political correctness hadn’t outlawed the use of the “stewardess” (though, mind, we’d never dream of referring to her as “toots”). But those groovers over at JetBlue, apparently understanding our considerable pain over the matter, have decided to open the terminal of our dreams this fall at the interminably construction-riddled JFK International Airport. Built adjacent to the venerated but tragically moribund Earo Saarinen 1962 TWA Terminal -- perhaps trying to absorb some of the hope for the future that it once inspired -- the new Terminal 5 will be spacious, light-drenched, and a shining symbol of the once great modern ideal.