I KNOW times are bad but I can’t quite believe it’s come to this. Eater.com, New York’s catty restaurant blog, has suspended its Deathwatch feature that picks on struggling restaurants whose days seemed to be numbered.

Eater chronicles the ups and downs of the city’s restaurant scene with all the venom of a native New Yorker with low blood sugar. Let’s take the case of Fr.Og. Yes, I know, the name alone cries out to the Gods of Closing for justice – and thankfully, Eater has been there to act as our Greek chorus and guide us through Fr.Og’s demise.

Fr.Og opened in SoHo in April 2007. The menu was predominantly French (hence the name, which stands for France Origine) but incorporated Moroccan, Lebanese and Vietnamese elements.

It might seem a little harsh – perhaps it was the name that tipped them off early – but Eater put Fr.Og on its Deathwatch list three days after it opened.

A year later and Fr.Og became FrOg, with the largest part of its space turned into a bar. Then it became a night-club/bar/lounge. Now it may/ may not close.

Then there’s this Deathwatch warning for Beer Table and Wall Street Burger Shoppe, two venues that plumped big time for the horrific fad for charging hedge fund prices for prole food: “We are just going to say right here and now that the next restaurant to come up with an outlandishly overpriced menu item as a way to ‘create buzz’ and get coverage in the Daily News and Gothamist (serial followers of this junk) will be subject to automatic Deathwatch.

“We are making an example out of Beer Table, with its $95 (€74) bottles of beer, and Wall Street Burger Shoppe, with its ridiculous $175 burger, to show that we mean business. We’re sorry, but each crossed the line. If either restaurant agrees to drop its menu item, we’ll remove both from the Deathwatch immediately. The gold-flecked desserts, the foie gras cheese steaks, and whatever else you other restaurateurs are cooking up – cease and desist.”

As a trend report, Eater was spot on. The $175 burger is now about as easy a sell as a sub-prime mortgage. It’s still on the menu at Burger Shoppe, but the people who bought it are now at Kinko’s photocopying their CVs.

Sadly, Eater has decided that Deathwatch must be a victim of the downturn. So bad has the economy become for New York’s restaurant scene that even the cats at Eater have lost their appetite for schadenfreude. In its place comes Rally Cry, spotlighting a restaurant that the website wants to exhort New York diners to rally around and save.

Just as I thought: the bitchiest people are always secretly the nicest – well, that’s my excuse. I just hope things get better soon so that Eater can get back to sticking its knife and fork in to New York’s restaurants.

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