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TOKYO -- Discerning New Yorkers on a coffee break often head to the caf¨¦ at Soho's Dean & DeLuca for a $2.50 capuccino-hazelnut muffin or a $3 cup of hot chocolate. For drinks and oysters after work, it's the Grand Central Oyster Bar. For a hot poppy-seed bagel with an inch of cream cheese, it's H&H Bagels.

Now, they all can be found in what might be termed the Far East Side -- as in Tokyo, where New York food has become all the rage.

Caf¨¦s and hotels in Tokyo boast of serving "authentic" bagels from Manhattan's H&H Bagels, from sesame to blueberry to sun-dried tomato. Dean & DeLuca has opened five deluxe grocery store-caf¨¦s in Tokyo in the past three years, and the Grand Central Oyster Bar is planning its second Japanese outlet next year. Il Mulino, the old-school Italian restaurant in New York's Greenwich Village, has operated a Tokyo restaurant since 2003. Doughnut Plant, the Lower East Side shop that sells big, fluffy, hand-cut, doughnuts with glazes like lime and pistachio, has opened nine stores in Tokyo in the past two years. "They're so into food in Japan," says Mark Isreal, owner and founder of Doughnut Plant Inc. "They'll pay any price as long as it's delicious."

Even Nathan's Famous Inc., whose Coney Island hot-dog joint is a magnet for Japanese visitors (including five-time hot-dog eating champion Takeru Kobayashi), has opened nine outlets in Japan over the past three years. The all-beef hot dogs and the yellow-and-green caps are the same, but for Japanese fanatics the restaurant offers some special items, including "minced sweety pickle" topping.

"New York has a certain cachet value right now," says Wayne Norbitz, president and chief operating officer at Nathan's, which has expanded in the U.S. to 200 outlets. The company plans to open up to 12 more hot-dog locations in Japan over the next year.

One model for restaurants' surge to Japan is Starbucks Corp. Japan was the Seattle coffee chain's first international market outside North America, and the Japanese joint venture has grown to more than 600 outlets since the first shop opened in Tokyo's Ginza district in 1996.

Japanese consumers are famously brand conscious and attuned to new trends, making Tokyo an ideal launch pad for broader international expansions. In Paris and other European cities, ambivalence toward U.S. foreign policy may influence the popularity of U.S. brands, experts say, but not so in Japan.

"New York is particularly viewed as a cool place," says Hikaru Hayashi, senior research director at Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, a think tank owned by the Japanese ad agency Hakuhodo Inc.

The "Sex and the City" factor helps. The HBO series became all the rage with young Japanese in Tokyo video-rental stores a few years ago. Japanese-language packaged tours in New York take tourists to restaurants and caf¨¦s that appear in some of the episodes. A Web site for a three-hour, $38 "Sex and the City" tour declares: "You've got to eat the cupcakes at the Magnolia Bakery" in the West Village."

Japan's fascination for New York food is extending to fashion. In one Tokyo mall, an accessories store sells leather coin purses that look like the blue-and-white coffee cups New York street vendors use. Smartly-dressed women carry canvas bags with the Dean & DeLuca logo over their shoulders.

In most cases, Japanese companies have approached the New York establishments, eager for the chance to bring the restaurants back home. Looking for a high-end, New York-based food store to open in Japan, trading house Itochu Corp. five years ago sent marketers to scope out Manhattan. Hironori Tsukima, director of Dean & DeLuca Japan at Itochu, says the Soho store's sleek, white design and its artful displays of pricey housewares and produce caught his eye. "I intuitively thought, 'This is going to succeed [in Japan],'" he says.

"Tokyo was the perfect place to start," says Pat Roney, chief executive at Dean & DeLuca Inc., of New York, which oversees the look of the Japan stores and receives a royalty from them. The operation, owned by Itochu and another Japanese company, plans three more caf¨¦s in Tokyo this year and predicts its 2005 sales of $12.8 million will rise by a third in 2006. The venture now is weighing an expansion to South Korea, Singapore and possibly China.

Opening in Japan requires adjustments. To match Japanese ideas about portion-size, Dean & DeLuca's Tokyo stores offer "half size" sandwiches for $2.50, as well as a "whole size" for $5. The Tokyo stores stay away from super-sugary desserts, which usually aren't popular with Japanese. Some of the H&H bagels sold in Tokyo caf¨¦s are nearly half the size of their New York counterparts, but they cost a lot more -- a $1.70 for a bagel in Tokyo, compared with $1 in New York.

It isn't clear how much staying power the New York eateries will have in Japan. But for now, many of them have won Japanese fans whose loyalty would be unimaginable back home. Yasuko Nitta has never been to New York, but she has decorated her studio apartment with Dean & DeLuca wrapping paper, plastic cups and wooden boxes. A local home magazine recently awarded her first prize in an interior-design contest.