For every cutting-edge restaurant there's a neighbourhood joint serving food seemingly from an earlier era, with prices to match.

Two decades ago, when there were fewer cutting-edge restaurants in New York, foodies also made the pilgrimage to Cornelia Street and its tiny storefronts.

"Malls are very interested in having the first showing of a cutting-edge restaurant," he said.

The hotel food and beverage director, Charles Hamann, decided to move to light food and decor after a three-week foray in California during which he ate at cutting-edge restaurants.

"If you don't, you may end up eating food you don't like, especially at cutting-edge restaurants."

In a city known for cutting-edge restaurants, Tadich's is old-fashioned, a nostalgic shrine to local piscine tradition.

Its cutting-edge restaurants serve up things like barbecue duck and smoked gouda pizza and sweetbreads in lime butter with cumin, serranos and pumpkin seeds.

Here are quirky stores and specialty grocers, cutting-edge restaurants like Region and Rice Jones, and Extraordinary Desserts, a cafe of sublime indulgence with Buddhist décor, perhaps the epitome of be-here-now-ness.

And the classical entrees, many dating from Edna Lewis's tenure in the kitchen in 1989, were a world away from what any cutting-edge restaurant in Manhattan, or Brooklyn, was serving that night.

Andersonville is home to one of Chicago's most cutting-edge restaurants, Tomboy.