The man in the background cannot BELIEVE that Jay-Z and Beyonce just left a $500 tip on their $1,200 lunch at Nello’s. We love a good tipper, but we’re wondering just how much food the couple, who were dining alone, managed to eat? Their outrageous bill doesn’t seem to make sense for even Nello’s notoriously expensive restaurant. More»

We are unleashing the first in our series of “Where will they be? Play along.

With all the current talk about Nello’s, we have decided to profile our favorite Nello’s patron, the precocious, six and a half year old darling, Madisonne.

Madisonne is best described as a professional dress twirler and can be found parading around the upper east side’s Nello’s on Saturday afternoons in one of the hundreds of dresses she owns by Luna Luna Copenhagen. She is in fact, the favorite of Nello Balan’s little cupcakes and is usually accompanied by her no-name sister who is 2 years her junior and whom Madisonne goes back and forth with being completely supportive of and utterly disgusted with.

Madisonne’s hobbies consist of heading the Brearley after school ballet program (which she helped start last fall), shopping, collecting ponies (real ones), curling her hair into ringlets “just like the fabulous Tinsley does”, and pouting. Madisonne has recently shown an interest in fashion to her mother’s delight. She can most frequently be found in the dressing room at Berkley Girl on Madison Avenue (though lately she is beginning to think that the store that tailors to 8-12 year olds is a little too immature for her tastes and thus has branched out to the Bergdorf children’s section, Bambini for teens and Olive & Bette’s downtown.). Her favorite “dress down” item is her Pucci inspired “Flowers by Zoe” skirt. If she can’t twirl in it, she won’t buy, end of discussion.

Madisonne’s dislikes include her younger sister (half of the time), bratz dolls (“so unlady-like”), people that spell her name “Madison” or “Madisen”, Claire’s stores, lame birthday parties that she feels obliged to attend to, and her co-parts from Spence that “dress in clothes from Ibiza and Calypso and think they are “free spirits”.

Where will Madisonne be in 15 years?

Remember when we were appalled with the price tag of our brunch one Saturday at the posh Nellos resturaunt?  We couldn’t figure out why this place had stayed on the radar for so long as the go-to upper east side brunch venue.  Well today the mystery was solved.  The food and location have nothing to do with it.  It’s all about press.  The NY Times reports today on just how much $1,000 can get you.  For Nello Balan, that much in the form of a gift to a Page Six editor can get you a hell of a lot.

“A database check shows that in the two years after the gift was made, around Christmas 1997, according to The Post, Mr. Balan or his restaurant, Nello, were mentioned at least 15 times in Page Six, almost always favorably.”

Now we get it.  This also reconfirms how shitty the print journalism jobs are paying these days…These editors will do almost anything for a grand.

A recent trip to Nello’s this past Saturday with one other friend and at $333 dollars later, we realized not to order the Dover Sole. This fish, which was about the size of small child’s hand was definitely not worth the $65 dollars paid. Not even the splendid eurotrash ambience could make up for it. It would be one thing if it was Le Cirque, but Nello’s? Come on seriously! we’d rather stick a bamboo pole over Chelsea Piers and eat what we bring in.