The stock market's been down and so has restaurant food.

You may have missed the latter development, as it has not been accompanied by big headlines and photographs of traders moping and gesturing like figures in a Mannerist religious painting. Restaurant food has apparently fallen from dizzying heights of plate presentation without statistical analysis or Alan Greenspan commentary, although this turn of events has been noted and perhaps over-predicted.

In 2000, New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes breathed a rhetorical sigh of relief in writing that the craze for presenting an entree as a stack of poker chips, 4, 5, 6 and more inches high, "seems to be over." Only months ago, however, Los Angeles Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila, displeased with a soaring construction of seared ahi tuna and foie gras, huffed, "Aren't we over tall food yet?"

Consider the life cycle of a food fashion.

Tall food has or has not run its course, depending on your point of view. The development in either case seems to have been driven by purely aesthetic values and the quest for novelty rather than, say, the introduction of a new ingredient or technology, significant demographic shift, developments in agriculture or international trade.

Food simply went wildly up. In certain places, so it remains.

Roy's in Inner Harbor East serves a seared tuna on a plinth of sticky rice and atop the tuna a peak of spun ponzu vegetables - a tangle of beets, carrots and sprouts. This little tower resists not only gravity but the ruthless press of time.

Whether tall food is passe "all depends on who you ask," says Bill Trevino, sous-chef at Roy's. Trevino says the tall tuna is one of Roy Yamaguchi's signature creations from the late 1980s and will continue to be offered regardless of shifting fashion.

Roy's is no haunted Haussner's, but in this respect it seems a throwback. The word in the food pages for a few years has been that the vertical entree belongs to another historic moment, along with Bill, the Blue Dress, 26-year-old dom-com millionaires and public faith in corporate earnings reports.

As the NASDAQ went in the 1990s, so went restaurant food. The sky seemed the limit as chefs built astonishing towers of meat, fish, starch and greens. Rosemary sprigs rose from the peaks of these creations like flags planted by triumphant mountaineers. Shoestring fried potatoes became frizzy wire sculpture aloft on countless edible monuments.

In those days, you could eat at the Gotham Bar & Grill in Lower Manhattan and wonder why you didn't order your meal with a stepladder on the side. The entree would make its breathtaking entrance, only to leave you to wonder: Shall I eat it? Photograph it for National Geographic? If it falls on me, can I sue?

Vertical food has been in Baltimore at least since the mid-1990s. At Corks restaurant in Federal Hill, the house salad featured sprigs of chives growing from a lettuce tower. Even more extravagant expressions could be found at the Joy America Cafe. That time roughly corresponds to the point when tall food appears to have reached its peak of popularity among New York chefs, who soon thereafter began to abandon the practice, which had appeared in Manhattan and other big cities in the late 1980s.

Food fashions move in eccentric ways and paces. Tapas, for example, arrived in Baltimore with the opening of Tapas Teatro in 2001, 18 years after the first tapas place opened in Manhattan. The trip would have been faster by covered wagon.

What a shame there's no Doppler radar tracking food fashions, as these things seem analogous to nothing so much as weather. Picture some TV forecaster with a U.S. map crisscrossed with arrows, babbling about Asian-fusion fronts emerging from Southern California, widely scattered balsamic vinegar reductions and locally heavy heirloom tomatoes.

"The food is always evolving," says Charlie Trotter, the chef-owner of the eponymous and highly touted restaurant in Chicago, which had become known for vertical presentations.

For him, food verticality was "almost an intellectual exercise, ... trying to be analytical with the food. ... In my case, vertical food was less about standing things up than layering things, more an attempt to gain texture by weaving things together."

That was in the late 1980s, though, before every other chef was doing tall food. What were these people thinking? Near as Trotter could tell, many were not thinking at all, just doing height for height's sake. The approach got a bad name. He says he hasn't done much of it in 10 years.

In the wrong hands, it's madness, says David Burke, the corporate chef of the Manhattan-based Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group.

"There is a method to it. It's not just stacking," says Burke. You take the wrong approach to combining crisp and moist elements, "the next thing you know, you're eating a soggy mess."

Burke is familiar with reports that tall food is over, but he's not convinced.

"Over is a tough word, I don't think it's over," says Burke, an unapologetic fan of properly executed tall food. "Architectural food is a style that came in, hit big, kind of faded out, but there's still traces," says Burke, who presides in the kitchen of the Park Avenue Cafe.

Chef Rick Laakkonen of the Manhattan restaurant Ilo agrees: "I would say where we are today, it has not run its course. I'm not sure it ever will."

Both men, however, agree that they're seeing and doing fewer vertical presentations than they did in the heyday of the Clinton years.

Find these dishes still prominent at the Gotham Bar & Grill, a much-touted restaurant opened by chef Alfred Portale in 1984. Portale, who was unavailable for an interview, is recognized as a vertical-food pioneer, although it's not clear exactly where the first towering entree was erected.

Who can say where these things begin?

Burke was apparently there on the ground floor, so to speak, but he's not making any big claims about it. He says he first saw tall food in 1987, while in Paris studying at a pastry school and working as a volunteer kitchen hand at Maison Blanche. Chef Jose Lampreia, known as a culinary Edison for his innovative flavor combinations, was putting one thing atop another in ways Burke had not seen before.

"He was doing it with fish," says Burke. "Fish on top of mashed potatoes on top of leeks. The texture, the height, all that, it looked pretty good."

When Burke returned to the United States that year to work at the River Cafe in Brooklyn, he started applying some of Lampreia's architectural techniques.

The Union Square Cafe in Manhattan never did tall food, but chef Michael Romano has a notion about how it all began. Near as he can tell, tall food arose from the minimalism of 1970s nouvelle cuisine, with its petite portions centered in dinner plates the size of wading pools.

"To make that small amount appear that it was doing something on the plate," the chef had to go vertical, says Romano. He recalls a salad done in the early 1970s by the renowned Michel Gerard at his restaurant outside Paris that consisted of frisee, green beans, asparagus and red oak leaf, a melange in which "everything is pointing up."

It's all in the natural course of things, says John M. Antun, director of the National Restaurant Institute, a school of restaurant and hotel management at the University of South Carolina.

In the heat of big-city competition, he says, restaurants "need to push the envelope to distinguish themselves from the competition. What are they going to do, have the waiters walk in on their hands? The reason the food got higher is it had nowhere else to go but up."

And, now, Professor Antun, is it over?

"Yes," he says, noting that prevailing winds blow in the direction of simplicity, both in presentation and preparation.

Alas, Joy America Cafe has ceased to offer tall food since the owners of Spike & Charlie took over more than three years ago. For the tastes of Baltimore, says chef Jason Horwitz, the old menu was "too high and too tall" and has since been reduced in price and assumed Latin accents. The tallest item he makes now is an appetizer built with layers of tortilla chips, tequila-cured salmon and Salvadoran cabbage. Total altitude: 3 to 4 inches.

In these leaner economic times, there's been much loose talk in the food pages about comfort food, as if the term means the same thing to all people. Items usually mentioned are meatloaf, grilled-cheese sandwiches, macaroni and cheese - anything evoking home, simplicity, warmth, etc., and certainly omitting the fussy extravagance of tall food.

Ouest restaurant, a chic spot on Manhattan's Upper West Side, has been offering meatloaf as a Sunday special and, according to general manager Todd McMullen, doing killer business with it.

Funny thing about that is the last time food fashion turned in this direction was the end of the 1980s. The Reaganomics bubble had popped, the landscape was littered with junk bonds, savings-and-loan wreckage and deflated mutual funds.

"Many of the trendiest and most expensive restaurants closed," writes Sylvia Lovegren in Fashionable Food. "Those that survived simplified their menus and lowered prices. 'If you've got it, flaunt it' food like herb-flecked pasta with two cheeses and three caviars was replaced by chicken potpie."

Go figure. At the same time, vertical food was in its American infancy in the hands of such men as Trotter, Portale and Burke, whose tall orders would come to be associated with ballooning 401K plans, easy fortunes made from initial public offerings, and vanishing unemployment.

The financial bubble has popped, but don't stick a fork in tall food just yet, as it may not be done.