THE GOOD SHIP dot-com may have vanished beneath the waves many months ago, but survivors continue to bob to the surface. Over at Grand Café, for instance, we find that Paul Arenstam, late of (also late) Belon, has taken up station in the kitchen. Grand Café is one of the truly splendid restaurant spaces in the city, and in such a setting (always amply stocked with tourists and suburban day-trippers) the food is always in some danger of becoming an afterthought. Arenstam's answer to that potential problem is to keep it simple in a kind of hearty-French way, with plenty of seafood: bouillabaisse, fruits de mer in various combinations, sautéed skate wing. There's also a selection of meat and poultry dishes, along with wonderfully garlicky french fries – just the thing to nibble while gazing around the ornate dining room under its high ceiling.

Out at Bruno's, meanwhile – once a major nexus of dot-commery, now a character, you might say, in search of a play – the menu is in the hands of Christopher Pastena, who cooked up a magnificent storm at Eastside West. But it isn't the food that's the issue at Bruno's; it's the live music, which attracted the hostile attention of the police April 26 and resulted in a bust that's left the restaurant in a kind of limbo.

Pastena wrote me recently to emphasize that the new ownership and management of Bruno's is "just trying to breathe life into the rich tradition of old Bruno's and keep the rich tradition of local music alive in this city." In that connection, he also forwarded a letter from saxophonist Kenny Brooks to Mayor Willie Brown, warning that renewed police pressure on venues like Bruno's is "devastating" to the city's already beleaguered cultural scene. Only too true – but, alas, this is the same Mayor Brown, our very own Nero and Mussolini rolled into one, who happily fiddled while the city's arts landscape was burning out of control just a few years ago. One cannot imagine Brooks's plea falling on a deafer set of ears.

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Blush making: A reader, Chris Ulbrich, offered, by e-mail, some gentle chastisement for my recent characterization of rosé wine as an "exoticum." He gave many examples of fine rosé wines, both from the Mediterranean and California, and I must say I was thrilled equally by his encyclopedic knowledge and his enthusiasm for blush wines, which I substantially share. But I must stand by my basic points, which are, first, that blush wines are more apt to be overlooked than their more mainstream reds and whites; and, second, that you just don't see all that many blush wines offered on restaurant wine lists. We are as one in hoping this changes.