As a New Yorker, I find it quite natuaral to be generally cynical about most things. This is perhaps why I found my adventure last night so off-putting. Everything was just a little bit too sweet.

It started with Eatery (798 Ninth Ave., at 53rd St.), one of those neon-sign-in-a-hip-way New American joints that line 9th Avenue from the mid-fifties all the way down to the Meatpacking District. When I walked in, there was just something that put me off about it. It was trying too hard. It was going for upscale, but it wasn’t quite polished. It had the legions of staff and the multi-colored drinks of somewhere more upscale, but the staff was inattentive and the menu pedestrian-in Columbia terms, it was Deluxe tries to be Community and falls flat on its face. Not surprisingly, I’ve heard it’s better for brunch.

I was with a group of girls, so we had plenty to talk about while the server disappeared for longer and longer periods as the evening went on. My fears of potential disaster were confirmed when we were brought a basket of puffed sesame rice cakes. they looked delicious, and a very interesting take on the bread basket for an American restaurant. Done right, they would have been the perfect snack. Unfortunately, they were tough, just like the Quaker rice cakes that you come back to a week later and throw out because they have absolutely no snap left. Still, the sesame lent a good flavor, so I munched on. That’s when I realized that they were lightly dusted with sugar, a questionable choice for a pre-dinner bite.

The overload on sweetness continued when the entrees arrived. My adobe salad (covered in a mess of jack cheese like this was Applebee’s or something), had both a honey chipotle and a buttermilk dressing, more or less tasted like a bowl of romaine drenched in honey. There was never any balance to the overpoweringly sweet and the buttermilk was completely overshadowed. The salmon salad across the table looked more like an appetizer, though it came from the entree salads menu as well as mine. The protein-based entrees seemed to be more palatable. Despite the problems, we cleaned our plates.

Dessert was more of the same though. Too much sweetness, nothing to balance it. Not to mention that both the red velvet cake and the molten chocolate cake were tough, just like the rice cakes from the beginning of the meal. The only saving grace was the scoop of pistachio ice cream served along side the chocolate cake. At last, a little buttery taste to balance out the sugar.

Unfortunately, the overly sweet night I was having continued far past that, as I arrived at the Angelika Theater (18 W. Houston St. at Mercer St.) to see Woody Allen’s new Whatever Works, with Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood. It started out promising, with David as his usual, New York cynical self. He, a genius Columbia professor of quantam phisics, leaves his wife after jumping out a window in an attempt to commit suicide. Their relationship is perfect on paper, but they just don’t work in real life. The movie starts to break down for me when he moves out, to a dump (that’s much larger than any apartment I’ve ever seen renting for less than $3,000/month), unemployed. How he goes from Columbia professor, presumably tenured, because he just has that attitude, to teaching kids chess a few times a week is beyond me. His personality hinges on his ego (”I was almost nominated for a Nobel!” he states more than once), and those are the kind of professors that don’t quit until they die. He’s one of those that Spec reporters automatically call when they need a quote about what Lee Bollinger is doing wrong.

Beyond that, though, the movie is enjoyable for the first 45 minutes. He takes in a runaway southern belle (Evan Rachel Wood), who is the polar opposite of David’s crochety old Jewish guy. It’s the perfect ugly duckling, beautiful swan story. And it gets repeated, twice more, when her estranged parents (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr.) show up at the door, mom first, dad a little later. Their characters are interesting at first, but it devolves into a story of New Yorkers making fun of strangers (in this case, southerners), and it starts to get the slightest bit old. I can’t imagine it even being funny to see it anywhere other than New York.

Then there is the problem of the happy ending. It’s just too easy, like the icing on a cake that comes out of a jar. Just a little too unnaturally sweet.