Lucy's started life as a specialist grocery, selling everything from farm-fresh fruit and veg to home-made chutneys and locally sourced meats, but these days the deli has expanded into this gorgeous down-home restaurant next door.

This down-home restaurant oozes charm, generated by antiques, flowers and folksy black-and-white photographs of the owners' relatives on a Long Island of long ago.

Like many down-home restaurants in North Carolina, Allen's does not serve alcohol; if you ask for iced tea they bring out a carafe that holds enough for a school picnic.

It's also possible to eat well, fairly cheaply, at down-home restaurants where the city's residents go, then take in the music.

Han II Kwan (776-3388) in Myong-dong is a down-home restaurant in the heart of town serving all types of Koprean food, including bulgogi.

El Siboney The mere 90 miles separating Cuba from Key West is a refrain echoed in shops filled with memorabilia, in the little "cigar factories," and the down-home Cuban restaurants.

At this convivial down-home restaurant, two can dine with a bottle of wine for $50; there is also a late menu, with many items under $7, from 10:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.

And that is exactly what happened on the Upper West Side when the all-American, down-home restaurant segued into this pan-Latino fantasy.

There are at least two hardy dining perennials, both quintessential down-home coastal restaurants.

THOSE unfamiliar with Harlem and its architecture may think of its streets as a maze of magnificent brownstones, interspersed with boarded-up storefronts, tenements and down-home restaurants.