On this Labor Day eve, we find ourselves in a melancholy mood. The summer is about to pass, and with it our tenure as editor of Grub Street. We move onward and upward, but not without regrets. And yet, while the blood still creeps through our bloated and palsied fingers, we can still peck out some suggestions for the weekend, and a rueful message of thanks to Grub Street’s readers and staff for helping make the last couple of years so memorable. It wasn’t just the parties, free liquor, and the narcotic sound of our own voice that made us so happy to be a part of Grub Street; it was having co-workers and an audience so attuned to our ardor for the inner life of the world’s greatest restaurant city. A city, we should mention, which we are hastening to leave; today is a half-day on Grub Street. But it will be back on Tuesday, under the stewardship of Daniel Maurer, and in full effect. In the meantime, take another look at all the treats available this weekend at summer's end.

The Great Grub Street Map of Sidewalk Tables
Beyond Root Beer: Cool Floats for Hot Nights
Restaurant Ice Cream to Go
Reimagining Sangria for the Summer

Gothamist points us to lobster-roll aficionado Tony Green’s map of places in New York, Maine, and Connecticut where you can score what a waiter once called the “Big Mac of the Northeast.” A noble effort, but the map is somewhat out of date (Pier 116, Crave Ceviche, and Bar Minnow are now closed) and missing many obvious choices (the city’s most expensive roll, for one). For true obsessives, we’ve expanded on the list, added prices, and ordered it accordingly for those who refuse to pay $38 (and yes, that’s despite the lowered cost of lobster) for anything that comes in a hot-dog bun (okay, fine, a brioche in some cases).

The average chef, trapped each night in a sweaty box filled with profanity, egos, screaming, and plates of food, wants to relax when he finally gets out of town. But even a cook has to eat, right? So where do chefs go during their weekend getaways? We asked a few, and here's what they told us.

Restaurant Websites don’t come much more polished than Eleven Madison Park’s. Had we not been tipped off last night, we never would have discovered the site's own Easter egg: an unmarked spot in the lower right-hand corner of the rightmost image. Put your mouse about half an inch from the corner on the bottom border, and a dark spot appears. Click on it, and a few seconds later you get treated to a secret show. Previously, it was chef Daniel Humm making lasagne. Now, it’s a slideshow of the staff Memorial Day party. What, that’s not exciting enough? Did you think you were going to get a “hot coffee”-style mini-game? This is Eleven Madison Park we’re talking about.

Eleven Madison Park [Official Site]

As Andrew Knowlton points out in his Bon Appétit blog today, luxe restaurant burgers are all the rage. Lever House introduced a new version on its lunch menu this week from Bradford Thompson, the chef who helped create the DB Burger. Franklin Becker’s Juicy Lucy debuted at Sheridan Square this week, too. How then do the two burgers stack up?

Summer allows for brief flings with childhood eating habits like ice cream from a truck or hot dogs in the backyard. But there’s no need to seclude yourself at the kids' table with this season’s batch of ice-cream floats. From a Dark and Stormy variation at Five Napkin Burger to a Green Melon–syrup concoction from Hiroko's Place, there is cold relief enough for any grown-up taste. Watch the slideshow and plan eight more summer outings.

Slide Show: Float On

A handful of sit-down restaurants hoping to cash in on summer ice-cream cravings have started selling creamy, pastry-chef-approved servings to go. They've rejected the wannaberry frozen-yogurt model in favor of local mix-ins, butterfat, and, in one successful case, soy. We sampled their results and offered our own superlatives. —Alexandra Vallis

Grub Street world headquarters was graced today with a gift from “Celebrity Natural-Food Chef” and Real Housewife Bethenny Frankel. Last month, Frankel launched a Bethenny Bakes line of vegan muffins, and today we tasted the sampler pack. What did our discerning panel of non-vegans think?

In the beginning (or around 1941), Henri Soule created Le Pavillon. Le Pavillon begat La Côte Basque … and the New York restaurant genealogy began. Ever since, every restaurant that attains prominence in New York serves as a feeder system: A chef makes his bones and leaves to open his own effort, and his chef de cuisine rises to chef; the sous becomes chef de cuisine, and so on down the ranks. In this way spreads the great New York family tree of restaurants. Some are oaks mighty enough to support several branches; others more closely resemble saplings from A Charlie Brown Christmas.

We’ve created our own set of chef family trees here, charting the stars that emerged from four of New York’s best restaurants, Le Cirque, Daniel, Jean-Georges, and Craft, plus the now-closed-but influential 71 Clinton Fresh Food. Given the popularity of cocktail bars, we also looked to see what Pegu hath wrought. Chefs (or mixologists) on the tree must be currently heading their own kitchen (or, as in the case of Johnny Iuzzini, a pastry kitchen). Welcome to the triple-canopy jungle that is the New York restaurant scene.

News on the wild-salmon front hasn’t been good: As we related in April, the Pacific coast’s salmon industry is in major peril, and there was even talk that the cost of wild Pacific salmon could reach as high as $40 a pound. But the last time we looked, there was still a lot of salmon being served in the city. So is there a salmon crisis? We asked Louis Rozzo of F. Rozzo and Sons — one of the city’s top seafood purveyors — how things stand in the salmon business.