Deal of the Day: Cheap Sidewalk Lunch at a Fancy SoHo Restaurant

Welcome to the Downtown Black Out, where the food's going bad and the prices don't matter.

This sidewalk barbecue was the scene outside restauranteur Keith McNally's Balthazar, a French restaurant and bakery in New York's SoHo neighborhood.

Generally, an entree in Balthazar's mirrored, wood-paneled dining room will run you between $30 and $40. But today, there were three charcoal grills set up on the sidewalk, with Balthazar cooks doing a short-order fire sale of what we presume was meat that would have been spoiled by the lack of electricity and refrigeration in lower Manhattan.

Eyewitnesses reported that you could get a steak sandwich for $5.

Jennifer Sage