We have been eating, of course, higher and higher on the hog, Wall Street food - 24-ounce tomahawk steaks ($68, add a fresh Maine lobster tail for $15 more) at Table 31. Three more steak houses (planned before the recent unpleasantness) soon on the way. For a total in the city alone of, let's see, eight? Ten? A dozen? Depending on how you're counting.

"We," of course, does not quite capture who's doing the eating. Maybe "they" describes it better: As in "them" vs. "us," Wall Street vs. Main Street.

In rowhouse Mayfair in the Northeast last week, the steaks (and roast pork) were running about $62 less than the Center City tomahawk at Frusco's Steak Shop, on Frankford Avenue near Cottman.

And if you had a spare hour or so, you could shop that street, pick up the rotund Italian loaves at Gino's Italian Bakery. Or a pretzel at one of the proliferating soft-pretzel places - Jim's, offering a lighter twist. Or garlic crabs at Chickie's and Pete's, the neighborhood original, not its sports-bar spawn.

You could head south toward Harrowgate, pushing toward the stretch of Frankford Avenue shadowed by the El, Rocky's old stomping ground. There is Ciabao, a Dominican cafe at Frankford and Ontario, its menu last week offering stewed goat and pig ears, fried salty pork and habichelas rojas (which is to say red beans), platters that won't have to be rejiggered, one suspects, for the recession.

Eventually, there is Ada's Cafe, and where Frankford crosses Norris, the Rocket Cafe. There's a buttoned-up joint called Bob & Lou's. And later the old-school Fishtown Tavern, and at Girard, the new-school Johnny Brenda's.

And so on until, if you jog toward Delaware Avenue, just across from Penn Treaty Park, the river a sliver in the middle distance, you encounter a low-slung bunker of a place called Johnny's Hots.

The line outside the window counter is populated with city cops and working stiffs: They order cheesesteaks and meatball sandwiches, and grilled hot sausages that have a paprika hue and taste the way chorizo would taste if it were dialed down for Philadelphia.

But it is the fishcakes that catch the eye, this still being technically within Fishtown's precincts: they are soft, browned, mostly mashed-potato cakes, the fish (is it cod?) playing a muted supporting role.

One of the sizable patties goes for $2.50, but for $4.25 you can have one on a roll stuffed on top of a split hot sausage that's dressed with the traditional mustard, raw onion and pepper hash, a vinegary-sweet slaw of shredded peppers and cabbage.

Pepper hash was once as Philadelphian as, well, pretzel mustard - a ubiquitous condiment, paired (as a lemon might be) with local fried oysters and shad fritters, Schuylkill catfish and codfish balls.

So in a sobering October, one may be forgiven for wishing retrenchment in the gilded steak-house trade - and a blessing upon the fishcake and pepper hash, stalwarts here once, ready still should the times grow ripe for an encore.