First, the definition of "local food chain" for purposes of this entry. A local food chain shall be defined as a restaurant (a) with three or more locations (b) the overwhelming majority of which are in New York City.

5) Haru. This somewhat pricey but always reliable Japanese restaurant serves up fresh and flavorful sushi.

4) Empire Szechuan. Indeed a sprawling empire with highly concentrated locations in residential neighborhoods (such as one on 7th Avenue near 12th Street and another just steps away on Greenwich Ave. just west of 6th Ave.), the half-price sushi doesn't discount on quality, and the Chinese cuisine isn't bad either.

3) Patsy's Pizza. Every authentic pie features that unmistakable brick oven crust and vibrant tomato sauce.

2) Burritoville. Quirky names, innovative mixtures (such as Bob Marley's Last Burrito with jerk chicken and cinnamon), endless permutations of fillings, cheese and tortilla flavors and its famous chunky salsa make every visit worthwhile.

1) Baluchi's. From chicken tikka masala to saag panir and the richly textured aloo papri, every item at this Indian chain bursts with fresh flavor without a hint that the same food was prepared in so many other places. The ambience varies by location but is always pleasant with attentive service. The 50%-off lunch special is icing on the cake at what is unquestionably the city's best local food chain.

Exhibit A: Con Ed requesting an increase in rates.

This supposedly starved utility launched a sweeping advertising campaign last spring declaring that it was "on it." Since most people have to use Con Ed anyway, this ad campaign had nearly no tangible value except for vague notions of general goodwill.

Then the blackout. While surrounding areas such as Northern New Jersey recovered the same night, Con Ed took much longer than its counterparts to restore energy to the area it served. I don't want to hear about how complicated Manhattan is. With such a dense population here, it has that much more cash coming in.

Last summer I conducted an unscientific, anecdotal survey of what people pay for electricity each month. It turned out that people with similarly sized apartments paid the same exorbitant rates for air conditioning regardless of how many hours it was running. Whether somebody worked at home or was out all day and most of the weekend with the air conditioning off, the rate was largely equivalent.

Con Ed may in fact need more money, but before asking for it, the company should eliminate its advertising and marketing programs, both of which are basically unnecessary.

I voted for the Budget rental car bankruptcy plan.

This isn't an election most people participate in, but I have been determined to be a creditor of the company. In August 2001, I took a week-long vacation in Colorado and rented a car from Budget at Denver International Airport. After being subject to dreadful service, including the presentation of two cars whose temporary registrations were to expire during my vacation, I wrote to the company requesting compensation for this inconvenience. Shortly after, the company filed for bankruptcy.

Over the last couple of years, I have received papers from the Bankruptcy Court and various lawyers keeping me posted on the proceedings. Yesterday I finally received my ballot to vote for the plan. My claim was determined to be of an "undetermined" type, so I'm not sure what will happen. Exit polls indicate that the plan will probably be approved but that I may or may not see any part of my $50.

From an e-mail I just received:

"Please approve this delay so that we can continue processing your order."

It actually makes sense. An item I ordered from Amazon must be out of stock, and rather than simply stringing me along, they are telling me it is delayed and giving me the option to bail out of this purchase.

Despite sub-optimal phrasing--I'd rather not be perceived as approving the delay per se--this is very good service. I'm still wondering how Amazon makes money, though--this vacuum is something like 40% off the regular price with free shipping.

I'm very impressed with Time Warner's DVR service. For $7 more per month, I can record and store shows and watch them when I want. But the most impressive thing about this service seems like magic-- retroactive capturing.

Midway through any show, you can press record, and the service will record and store the entire show for you. This is perfect if, say, you flip to the Food Network and see that Alton Brown is discussing eggs, and you realize that this is a show you would have liked to see from the beginning.

The only major downside to the service is a lack of remote control letter input. The numbers 1 through 9 could easily have been assigned letters, like on a telephone, for faster searching of show names. The service only allows you to scroll or navigate through an entire list or program matrix to find the show you want to record.

These pages have criticized The New York Times for not disclosing its ownership interest in the Boston Red Sox. However, in this week's coverage of the A-Rod saga, the Times has indeed included this disclosure. Now readers can make up their own minds, on complete information, as to what to make of the coverage. (As it happens, today's article by Jack Curry is excellent.)

Hey Red Sox: stop whining. The Yankees didn't force you to skimp on a paltry $2 million per year it would have cost to sign A-Rod. And the Yankees didn't force you to keep Pedro in the game.

--

The next post will be on Monday. The Friday Top Five will return next week.

My Jabra Earwave Boom headset for my cell phone arrives today via UPS. But that's not the most exciting part. The fun part, as usual, is tracking the package using UPS's Web site. I was pleasantly surprised to see the package travel from California to New York by ground over the weekend.

However, it would have been nice to get incremental updates as to the location of the package. Activating location information for each specific package might be expensive--you'd need to make every single shipping label "live" and capable of transmitting data. However, another option would be to organize packages by the vehicle carrying them. You could enter your tracking number and get the location of the vehicle carrying your package. On the other hand, this might give away too much information.

The headline in The New York Times today says that Vodaphone is "seen" as the favorite to take over AT&T Wireless. So much for that: Cingular got it after all, for $41 billion or $15 a share.

I had never heard of Cingular until its summer 2002 marketing campaign plastered little x-person logos all over every subway platform and scaffolding in Manhattan. I'm not sure how well this campaign worked--I don't know one person here (or anywhere else) that actually uses Cingular.

In anticipation of the possible merger, last night I called Cingular to find out more about various plans and it appears one of their packages will be sufficient for my needs.

Hey, I think that UFO is actually the Zeglis golden parachute. Cingular fits you best.

5) You're almost late for a 6pm appointment, because you assume that will be some time after it gets dark, but then it's past time to leave and it's still light.

4) More and more frequently, the temperature begins with a strange number: 4.

3) Retail clothing store windows try once again to showcase a color display that is more appropriate for South Beach than for Manhattan.

2) Every other envelope in the mail says "Important Tax Information."

1) After signing yet another middle-aged star past his prime, the Rangers have yet again faded into oblivion for at least another year.

Another Arctic blast is on the way for Sunday and Monday. The good news is that this one will last only two days before temperatures moderate next week.

It's been a tough winter around here. After January 6, the temperature didn't even reach 40 again until Feburary 4 (the normal high is in the upper 30s for that period). Contrast that with January 2002, when the high temperature was below 37 on only one day between January 9 and January 31, with a string of four consecutive days with highs in the 60s.

Hopefully spring will arrive earlier than late June this year.

Cingular says an acquisition of AT&T Wireless would generate $5 billion of savings in strategic synergies--or something like that. Does that include cleaning up problems like this: last week I signed up for the "unlimited mobile-to-mobile" option. Then my voicemail stopped working. The problem was any changes made to any plan that day started a domino effect whereby the voicemail retrieval number was overwritten. Of course!

There's one sure winner in this whole AT&T Wireless saga. That's the systems integration services market. The daunting task of integrating the TDMA and GSM databases of AT&T Wireless with any other company is sure to generate millions of dollars of business and create any number of new programming jobs.

It's so nice when companies do business correctly by making things easy for customers. I needed a replacement pair of laces for my New Balance sneakers. Trained by most companies to be as cynical as possible, I figured the laces would probably cost 50 cents with a $7.95 shipping and handling fee.

But no--New Balance said they would ship new laces out today, free. No shipping, no handling, no cost, no nonsense, no hassle. Now, there's only one brand of sneaker I will consider until further notice.

Who ever thought tax return season could be such a great marketing opportunity? At Staples, not only are there huge displays of tax software and tax preparation guides, but also the hassles of tax preparation are cleverly cross-promoted for selling other items: pens, for example. A huge basket of Bic pens features a sign saying "Tax Time." What about Tylenol? That could be useful to stock up on, too.

The five most interesting business stories around the news recently:

5) The Washington Post apparently didn't know whether to assign the responsibility of renewing its domain name to the IT department or to the finance department, so the domain expired, depriving reporters of critical email service for hours. Funny how a bureaucratic slip-up can have the same effect as a blackout.

4) A current Duane Reade investor, Copper Arch LLC, is calling the $415 million takeout offer by a private equity group too low. See, those makeshift cardboard displays clogging the aisles are actually of very high quality.

3) Delta is shelving expansion of Song, its low-cost, high-character unit. This is really too bad, as my one trip on Song was such a fun experience. A lunch menu has never been so much fun to read. (The food was pretty good, too.)

2) MBNA will issue American Express cards. This is shocking, like Apple allowing other computer makers to build Mac-compatible machines (and we see how well that worked). If American Express isn't about exclusivity and prestige, what's left? This will be a story to watch.

1) The future of AT&T Wireless. Cingular, once the front runner, has now been upstaged by apparent indications of a Vodaphone bid, which in turn causes major complications in the Vodaphone-Verizon Wireless joint venture. Regardless of what happens, law school graduates of 2012 are sure to be studying the case of (any number of parties) v. AT&T Wireless.

What's the point of those American Airlines ads touting purportedly low fares? Today's ad in The New York Times mentions a one-way fare to San Francisco for $159--in other words, $320 roundtrip, which isn't a good deal at all. You can easily snag a roundtrip ticket to SFO for around $200.

Delta did the same thing last spring with advertisements about "sale" fares to Florida for $100 one-way, when the real low fares to places like FLL are around $140 roundtrip.

Are we supposed to be fooled?

Looking to torture someone or play a mean joke? Have them call 1-800-843-2489--CircuitCity.com's call center, which features the most irritating hold music in history.

A hypnotic loop of new age music plods along, with a screeching accompaniment and a melody that exudes all the comfort of a leaky faucet. The sound engineering is hopeless; the screech becomes tinny over the phone and occasionally the overall sound quality rivals that when you blast a 1970s mono tape recorder.

Too bad that the actual service is pretty good. But you better really need it.

I think DNS information is wrong somewhere on the Internet. I keep getting banner ads for home delivery of the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper, even though I'm here in New York and my IP information clearly indicates as much.

Maybe people in Atlanta are seeing banner ads for low airfares from La Guardia.

Enter to win! But first, multiply 15 by 5, then divide the result by 3, add 16 and subtract 20.

Many sweepstakes are not open to residents of Quebec. That's because Quebec sweepstakes regulations are onerous compared to those in other provinces or in most states in the U.S. But there's a loophole.

It turns out that a sweepstakes falls into a whole different body of law if you feature a math problem as a condition of entry. Then, because the contest includes a test of intelligence as well as of luck, it is actually possible to comply with the relevant (but different) regulations.

With a Stella Artois promotional scratchpiece, for example, if it yielded a winning answer, you had to fill out your name and address -- and complete the math problem above -- to win the prize. Chances of winning were calculated at 1 in 10, not accounting for people who were unable to perform basic math calculations.