A pall was cast over TONY’s postholiday four-top when, after emerging from the restroom, we spotted a pair of mice in a synchronized dance just beneath a runner’s feet. We betrayed our cool with a girlish yelp and pointed at the plague-carrying rodents as they merrily skipped into the dining room, pausing on someone’s shoe.

Disgusted, we alerted our hostess, who maintained a grotesquely inappropriate yet oddly soothing grin while deftly crossing our names off the evening’s lineup. “That’s out of hand,” we huffed. A few droppings in the pantry, maybe, but this?

Happily, Matthew Hamilton was on hand just a block away at his increasingly excellent Belcourt, to pick up the slack. In a properly run culinary culture, Hamilton’s dining room would be packed—but it never is. Good news for us: We loved our pork belly, perched over lavender-scented curls of spaetzle, with sausage, vinegary kraut and shreds of nearly molten pork cheek.

A note to Mermaid owner Danny Abrams, whose resources are likely focused on the goings-on at his recently opened UWS spin-off and West Village newcomer Smith’s: Empty the traps, old boy.