IF it was intended to, the announcement on Friday by New York magazine’s Insatiable Critic at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan certainly achieved the maximum frisson. Gael Greene stood at the microphone during the annual Power Lunch for Women benefiting Citymeals-on-Wheels  the nonprofit she co-founded 27 years ago to feed the city’s homebound elderly  and lamented the economic meltdown.

“I’ve just been downsized myself,” she said, and indeed, two days before, Ms. Greene had been fired after 40 years at New York. There were gasps, tsk-tsks and not a few shaken heads among the 340 leading ladies, including Nora Ephron, Martha Stewart, Kathleen Turner and Diana Taylor.

Most were unaware that the day before, Ms. Greene had sent her own news release about the sacking, referring to herself as “the brand name of restaurant journalism” at New York. But even among those who might have seen it coming, many were taken aback at the expulsion of the sensualist who influenced the way a generation of New Yorkers ate, and who served as a lusty narrator of restaurant life in New York for decades.

“It’s as if they removed the lions from the library steps,” said Michael Batterberry, editor and publisher of Food Arts magazine.