Even so, in some traditional Swiss restaurants, well-known bankers have been booed out of the house; one brasserie even turned away an illustrious banker client.

While he was chairman of the board at UBS, Marcel Ospel dined regularly on Wednesday evenings at his favorite restaurant, the Kronenhalle, an old brasserie near the opera house where paintings by Matisse, Picasso and Miró adorn the walls. Yet last year, after Mr. Ospel announced that UBS had lost more than $19 billion, the Kronenhalle made him feel he was persona non grata, according to Swiss news media reports. Only recently has he begun to visit the restaurant again.

But the restaurants that are not turning the bankers away are the Italians, which have displaced the Chinese as the largest group of restaurants in the city that do not serve up Swiss dishes. Asked where he eats when he goes out, Mr. Roth of the Bankers Association replied, “If I’m with clients, I go to local restaurants around the office; if I’m alone and just want to relax, I go to Il Giglio.”

Mr. Giglio, for one, is not mystified by the bankers’ sudden taste for Italian cuisine. Like another Italian specialty, it is soothing, he said: “Like the music of a tenor. For lots of music has been written for tenors; for Caruso, Pavarotti.”

And yet, on a recent evening when a banker and a lawyer were complaining loudly over their pasta about their banking losses, Mr. Giglio said, a diner at a neighboring table leaped to his feet and loudly upbraided them. “He told them it was not they, the bankers, who were losing money; it was paupers like him,” he said.

“Giglio’s is a place you can go to in good times and bad,” said Jan A. Bielinski, 55, of Bank Julius Bar, an exclusive private bank just off the Bahnhofstrasse. “The mood has changed,” he said over coffee. “The moods change when the market changes, and a bad market influences everybody.”

Mr. Müller of Bindella agrees with Mr. Giglio about the soothing factor in Italian food. Leisurely dining is fading in Switzerland, he said, where life is increasingly rushed. “Here you have the feeling of being on vacation,” he said, picking at calamari and polenta at the Café Terrasse, one of his group’s newest restaurants, in a hall that once housed a striptease club.