“Quattro Caviar” Has Such A Nice Ring To It

Staten Islanders are wildly uninterested in $1,000 pizza:

For $1,000, the city’s most prodigal foodies can get a lobster- and caviar-drenched pizza at Nino’s Bellisima on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

That works out to about $25 per bite of the four-slice, 12-inch pie — a price that prompted Staten Islanders interviewed yesterday to respond with “Huh?” then, incredulously, “What did they put on that pizza?” and finally the admission that they would be hard-pressed to swallow such an extravagance.

“I came up with the idea to have something the most spectacular, unique!” said Nino Selimaj, the owner of the joint where pies on the regular menu cost between $14 and $20, as well as five other restaurants in the city. “People didn’t used to think they would ever pay $300 for Asian fusion when they could get Chinese takeout and now they do it all the time.”

In his thick, Albanian accent, Selimaj boasted he had tried hundreds of different recipes before devising the dish, which he said costs about $720 in raw materials.

Served cold and compiled in about 20 minutes, the creation is crowned by creme fraiche, eight ounces of four different kinds of caviar — Petrossian, Beluga, Ossetra and Sevruga — and a two-pound Maine lobster tail sliced so thin that the glean of caviar can be seen through its translucent meat. The pieces are separated by chives and topped with a hint of wasabi and salmon roe.

. . .

Ayanna Phillip of Stapleton waxed poetic on what she would do with $1,000 instead of eating chichi pizza (“I’d pay my bills; I’d go shopping, you could buy, like, 100 outfits”) as she waited to pick up her order at one of the borough’s more economical pie emporiums, My Pizza in Concord — where a large pie goes for $8.

“I wouldn’t buy that pizza even if I was Bill Gates,” she said, scrunching up her face at the thought of a slice topped by caviar.

Meanwhile, Island pizza chefs make a good case for avoiding pretentious pie:

“One thousand is a little crazy; They’d be getting a bargain with our pie,” said Michael Costello, the chef and manager of Pizza on the Plaza, New Dorp, which sells, by all accounts the Island’s most expensive pie.

Pizza on the Plaza’s $100 dish features fontina cheese, arugula pesto, a couple ounces of shaved truffles and lobster meat. Since the item was unveiled last summer, one customer ordered a few of the pizzas for a Halloween Party; otherwise demand has been, to put it kindly, very slow.

A Man, A Plan, A Five-Story Tenement Building: The New Economakis Of The East Village

The Latter-Day Vanderbilts trying to turn an entire East Village building into their own private five-story, 15-apartment, 60-room building — or, possibly, as a ruse to evict undermarket rent-stabilized tenants — has won an appeals court ruling to go ahead with the dream:

The state Appellate Division has given Alistair and Catherine Economakis the green light to go ahead with eviction proceedings to boot the remaining low-income tenants from their five-story apartment building at 47 E. 3rd St.

“I’m disappointed,” said David Pultz, who has lived in his $625-a-month one-bedroom apartment since 1978. “My fear is I won’t be able to live in the city anymore.”

“We’re very shocked, very stunned,” said Janet Dunson, who has lived in the building for 17 years. “It looks like it’s open season on tenants.”

The Economakises say they have big plans for the five-story, 15-apartment, 60-room building.

In a letter they wrote to their tenants in 2003 explaining their plans to evict them, the couple — she’s the daughter of a Columbia University dean, and he’s the son of a Greek shipping magnate — said their current apartment in Brooklyn was too cramped and they needed more space.

Home James

The worst problem plaguing the city’s exclusive preschools is poor street access for chauffeured transportation:

The cars gather in front of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan about 8:30 a.m. In the front seats sit hired drivers (nobody uses the term chauffeur anymore). The cars are mostly big and mostly black luxury-edition sport utility vehicles like the Mercedes GL-Class or the GMC Yukon Denali. They fill the lanes in front of the Y’s entrance on Lexington Avenue, often two or three rows deep.

It looks like the outside of an arbitrage house just before trading hours, or perhaps the Knicks’ private entrance to Madison Square Garden on game day.

Until, that is, the drivers open the back-seat doors and the passengers’ feet emerge.

These are not the feet of profit-takers or N.B.A. players. These feet wear Sonnet Maryjanes and Primigi sneakers with Velcro closure straps.

These feet are only a half-foot long.

The children — ages 3 through 5 — are enrolled at the Y’s famous nursery school. The livery convention on Lexington Avenue occurs most every weekday. Neighbors of the Y and parents with children in the nursery school say they have seen the number of cars and drivers increase considerably over the past couple of years.

In exasperation, the director of the school, Nancy Schulman, drafted a letter to all families insisting that the drivers wait somewhere else while parents or baby sitters take the children in: find a legal parking space, or take their cars for a few spins around the block.

. . .

The Y is hardly the only school in the neighborhood where children get to school by car and driver. Dropoff hour at Nightingale-Bamford, on 92nd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues, and at Dalton’s lower school, on 91st between Park and Madison, is often clogged by chauffeured S.U.V.’s.

Dalton’s chief financial officer, Ned Pinger, stands outside every morning to greet students, which often involves opening doors and helping them out of the back seat. “The heads of elementary schools are often outside doing this, and it becomes a little ridiculous,” said Sandra R. Bass, who publishes Private School Insider, a newsletter for New York parents. “You can’t tell who the master is in this situation.”

. . .

A parent whom other parents identified as a chauffeur-using mother, Alison Schneider, whose husband, Jack Schneider, is a hedge fund manager, said, “I got the letter, but I don’t really have any feelings about it one way or the other. It’s kind of boring. It’s about cars and parking.”

Over the past couple of weeks, a staff member from the Y’s nursery school has been seen directing waiting cars away from the school. The chauffeurs idled in double-parked formation one block farther down Lexington, or around the corner on 91st Street. Posters to the New York bulletin board of the Web site Urbanbaby.com, which is popular with mothers of young children, have occasionally made note of the scene. “So this morning I was at the 92nd Street Y and there were 10 black Escalades and Range Rovers double-parked with huge guys in black suits,” one wrote last month.

Just How Bad Is It? New York Post Employees Are Forced To Panhandle

Upper East Siders scream at the New York Post’s Doug Montero to get a job:

The muscular store worker didn’t mince words when he told me to shoo from outside the Ralph Lauren clothing shop.

“Go stand by the church or I’m going to call the cops,” he threatened as I lowered my panhandling coffee cup.

Bumming on Madison Avenue is a tough business.

It took about an hour before the Ralph Lauren workers at the East 72nd Street store began harassing me.

The first worker, a linebacker-sized maintenance worker, told me to get off the store’s planters because my rear end was disturbing the hedge.

“You should go by the church. You’ll make more money there because people walk by and feel more spiritual,” he said, pointing toward East 71st Street.

“Get a job,” sneered one 60-something lady.

And If The Lawsuit Is Successful And The Damage Award Holds They’ll Obviously Be Garnishing Their Wages . . .

What dumb luck that the news about their $1 million lawsuit against homeless people loitering in front of their business comes out on the coldest day of the winter:

A high-end antique dealer on the Upper East Side is suing four unnamed homeless people for $1 million on the grounds that they’ve driven away customers by loitering on the sidewalk in “old, warn, and unsanitary clothing and cardboard boxes and old blankets which they convert into sleeping accommodations.”

In addition to money, Karl Kemp & Associates Antiques, located near 69th Street at 833 Madison Ave. near Gucci, Chanel, and Prada, is asking a Manhattan Supreme Court judge to force the homeless defendants to stay at least 100 feet away from the store, according to legal papers filed yesterday.

For more than two years, the papers allege, the homeless have spent “significant amounts of time” obstructing Karl Kemp’s storefront window display, “consuming alcoholic beverages from open bottles, performing various bodily functions such as urinating or spitting on the sidewalk, and . . . verbally harassing or intimidating . . . prospective customers.”