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At this time of year, lawyers at the high-flying firm Dreier LLP might normally step out of their Park Avenue offices and stroll a few blocks south to the Ferrari dealership to pick up a nice set of wheels. But – to paraphrase a Christmas classic – not a creature is stirring these days at the East 55th Street car showroom.

As if Wall Street's swoon and Bernard Madoff's swindles hadn't already dulled the consumptive spirit of the season, last week more than 200 Dreier lawyers lost their jobs when the firm announced it was shutting down, all of them unwitting victims of the malfeasance of their boss, Marc Dreier, whose alleged massive fraud cheated investors out of more than $450-million.

But if times are bad at Ferrari, they may prove to be very good for the city's restaurant industry. During an appearance last week on the Leonard Lopate Show, a popular noontime radio program on the local NPR affiliate WNYC, the French Culinary Institute's founder Dorothy Hamilton said that, since the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September, admission inquiries at her school had doubled from 500 to 1,000 per week. “If you've lost your job in finance, what are you going to do? Look for another job in finance? I don't think so!” she crowed.

In the last few years especially, lawyers and finance professionals who were left unfulfilled by their white-collar jobs have been cashing out and opening up many of the city's bars and restaurants.

With that wave projected to grow, Hamilton sounded almost giddy at her good fortune. It was a little unbecoming.

It's true, many high-end dining rooms have been quiet this fall, and experts are forecasting gloom for the beginning of the year, with dozens of places closing, but foodies are licking their chops at the prospect of the falling real-estate market removing one of the major obstacles to restaurant survival. Last week, the parent company of Honey declared bankruptcy. Reports suggested the move was designed, in part, to negotiate more favourable rents.)

Like many others, Hamilton suggested that New Yorkers' definition of “tough times” tends to be relative. Sure, they'll be cutting back on their Hamptons house shares, but tight money isn't suddenly going to mend their famed estrangement with their kitchens. They'll just be looking for better value when they eat out.

Affordable is the new buzzword: Last month, when I interviewed Toronto superchef Susur Lee about his New York outpost, Shang, which he was about to open at the Thompson Hotel on the Lower East Side, he used the word about half a dozen times. Tom Valenti, a popular chef who led the charge for good restaurants on the once culinarily barren Upper West Side, is still serving entrees in the $30 to $40 range at his bistro Ouest, but his new neighbourhood place the West Branch is specializing in comfort food at about half that price. It's an instant hit: On an average weeknight, you can easily wait an hour for a table.

The co-host of the reality show Top Chef, Tom Colicchio, said on the Lopate Show that good restaurants will survive if they know how to provide value. Colicchio, a straight-shooting laser-eyed chef who runs three restaurants in town and others around the country, has apparently become an inspirational figure among those mulling a career change: Like Woodward and Bernstein in All the President's Men, who spurred thousands of American kids into making a living scribbling for newspapers, Top Chef and its cooking reality-show siblings are apparently making kitchen work look glamorous. Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant would find this hilarious, but then reality TV's grip on reality has always been tenuous.

As if to prove the point, last week's episode of Top Chef featured a Christmas-themed party in which guests and the “cheftestants” repeatedly wished each other merry Christmas and happy holidays, even though they were shooting the episode in high summer.

The same episode touched off a minor scandal among fans after the actor Cheyenne Jackson was shown calling a scallop dish cooked by one of the contestants, “too slimy.” A Top Chef fan (who, naturally, blogs) noted that episode outtakes on the website of the U.S. channel Bravo suggested producers had inverted the truth. Jackson in fact had said that, while he normally doesn't like scallops because they're, “too slimy,” he'd actually liked this dish.

That wasn't the only scandalous behaviour on the part of the producers. The show's penchant for product placement, normally merely shameless, reached into the stratosphere of immorality when one of the contestants was permitted to call his family to check on the health of his father, who has cancer. While the intimate conversation unfolded, the Top Chef camera focused sharply, and at length, on the shiny Sidekick LX cellphone in his hand. (What cancer? I want me a Sidekick!)

Still, that's nothing compared to the real-life scandals of the local restaurant industry. Earlier this month, a bitter ex-employee of Colicchio's sued him and his company for a tasting menu's worth of employee mistreatment. The waitress Nessa Rapone, who joined Craftbar in March, 2007, alleged in federal court filings that she and her co-workers were forced to share tips with supervisors, that the company didn't keep proper time records, that it failed to pay workers overtime, and that when she questioned those policies she was fired.

The company maintains that an investigation will clear it of any wrongdoing.

But Colicchio isn't the only restaurateur in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. Earlier this month Simon and Michelle Nget, the owners of Saigon Grill, were arrested and charged with more than 400 criminal counts, including failing to pay minimum wage, falsifying records and demanding illegal payments from their deliverymen. Even before those charges, a judge had ordered them to pay $4.6-million (U.S.) to compensate employees for wage violations.

Crooks and liars in the hospitality industry? After working for their disgraced boss, all those out-of-work lawyers from Dreier LLP should feel right at home.