A week after the Food and Drug Administration lifted its nationwide ban on the sale of fresh spinach, New Yorkers have been slow to restock their fridges and indulge their palates with the produce.

Throughout the city, spinach is visibly missing from the shelves of grocery stores and markets. Even bags of mixed greens are being advertised as devoid of the once-cherished leafy delight. “We still aren’t selling spinach or putting it in our prepared meals because people don’t want it,” the manager of the Amish Market in TriBeCa, Hale Minar, said yesterday.

Many restaurants are singing the same tune. “We’ve replaced spinach with broccoli, lettuce, and carrots in our dumplings,” a cashier at a vegetarian restaurant on the Upper East Side called Good Health, Mandy Ling, said.

At the Bangal Curry Restaurant in TriBeCa, sales of vegetable curry with spinach have dropped precipitously. “Its about half and half of our customers who still ask about spinach. We are using frozen spinach from before the recall, but many people don’t want it,” the manager, Ahmed Olie, said.

While much of the food industry and its consumers are shunning spinach, some food vendors are trying to reinvigorate it. At the Park Slope Coop, produce buyer Allen Zimmerman is actually touting a comeback. “Our sales this week were exceptional,” he said. “We’re selling locally grown spinach and spinach grown in Colorado.”

Fairway Market on the Upper West Side has taken a similar approach. Instead of denying consumers the leafy greens, the city chain has removed bagged spinach from the shelves and marked the produce department with multicolored signs that explain the E. coli outbreak. “Its important to keep our customers informed,” the store manager, Peter Romano, said

Tomorrow, for the first time since the recall, Fairway will introduce bagged baby spinach manufactured by Earthbound Organic Farms, one of the companies implicated in the E. coli outbreak. To ease worries, the market will unveil strategically placed announcements informing shoppers that the baby spinach was grown outside of the infamous Salinas Valley in California, where the E. coli outbreak was traced. “I think people will be receptive,” Mr. Romano said.

That is not to say that Mr. Romano shares Mr. Zimmerman’s optimism about a spinach renaissance. “Yeah, the spinach is back in action, but people don’t trust the entire industry,” he said. He points to simple economics as proof: After the spinach recall, prices plummeted to $5 from $15 a bunch. In the past week, bunch prices have risen to about $10, but taking into consideration that less spinach is now being produced and that prices are still low, the demand just isn’t there, he said.

With recent recalls of E. coli-infested meat and lettuce, Fairway is implementing techniques it learned from the spinach epidemic to seeing a big drop in sales of those products. A sign in the butcher department will explicitly notify customers that Fairway doesn’t carry meats from the packer in Iowa that recently recalled 5,200 pounds of E. coli-infected ground beef.