You’re reading Best of New York, a monthly recap of the city’s very best restaurants, bars, arts, culture, shopping, etc. etc. It’s not necessarily the latest, greatest, newest, hottest (but those spots find their way in, too); it’s simply the places that made the city sing for us every month that we think you might like, too.
August found me in a mellow mode where I was mostly craving relaxation, exercise, reading, writing, salads and the spa. One transcendent salad came from a somewhat surprising place: the Lobby Bar at the Hotel Chelsea where I usually retreat to for a stiff martini. On a recent visit, a girlfriend and I found a spot at the bar and, in addition to our martinis, ordered matching green salads with chicken. They were things of beauty: perky, bitter greens and frisee lightly dressed in red wine vinaigrette with accompanying sliced paillard-style chicken breasts.
Back in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side, Nice Matin also makes an exceptional paillard de poulet salad with a thinly pounded chicken breast topped with frisee, green olives, grape tomatoes and parmesan, dressed in lemon and olive oil. It is so fresh and surprisingly hearty. And while Crave is typically my go-to for fish tacos and sushi, they also make a gorgeous little gem salad that satisfies any restorative greens requirement.
I stopped by neighborhood relative newcomer The Granola Bar for a couple of weekday lunches this month. A polished, yet cozy all-day bistro, I was drawn to their mile-long menu of salads and bowls. I’ve tried their spin on a Caesar with romaine, shaved brussels and cauliflower in a lemon anchovy dressing and a dusting of parmesan rosemary granola and their sesame seared tuna with baby kale, avocado, watermelon radish and miso ginger vinaigrette. But it’s not just salads here. They have a full menu of creative dishes for breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner and they’ve created an environment equally conducive to mid-morning coffee and early evening happy hour. With its original location in Westport, Connecticut, the concept started with a pair of friends creating artisanal granola and it’s grown into eight restaurants (and counting) across Connecticut and New York.
On the Upper East Side, Isle of Us is where Jessica Seinfeld, Man Repeller and I get our healthy salad and nourishing foods fix. Attached to Sage + Sound, a holistic wellness spa that I keep meaning to try for a massage or facial, I love it because it makes me feel like I’m back in Miami. Their menu, which changes with the seasons, crosses the breakfast-lunch divide (it’s also open until 9 p.m.), from their “greens, eggs & jam sandwich,” made with slow-cooked eggs, cheddar, basil, spinach and scallions with smoky tomato jam on multigrain bread, to a marinated kale and chicken salad with avocado, peaches, pickled chilis and pumpkin and sesame seed granola in preserved lemon dressing. It also has sandwiches and bowls and a little market for healthy provisioning. On top of all that, portions are shockingly generous and everything’s reasonably priced (most menu items range from $12 to $16).
But no one does vegetarian like Jean-Georges and I am obsessed with abcV in Flatiron. Part of the abc carpet & home complex, it’s J-G’s paean to fine vegetarian cuisine in an airy, white-washed, sun-drenched space off Broadway. I recently popped in at brunchtime and ordered the avocado lettuce cups, which, my waitress explained, you can eat like tacos. I love eating salad with my fingers and they were so bright and fresh and delicious. I also indulged in the cheddar and egg dosa with turmeric sambal, dill and mint—decadent! The restaurant has a full bar and serves cocktails, wine, coffee and cold-pressed juice, but I love ordering from the Tonics and Vibrations menu, which might as well be labeled, Magic Potions. On this visit, I opted for the “Elevate,” made with pomegranate, assam tea, schizandra, damiana, rhodiola, hibiscus flower and goji berry. Do I know what half of those ingredients are? No. But, effervescent and served in a champagne flute, it looked like a kir royale and tasted like nothing I imagined; perfect. If I lived in the neighborhood, I would no doubt be at abcV multiple times a week.
August even found me at the 79th Street Greenmarket on Columbus Avenue (pictured at top), adjacent to the Natural History Museum, for the first time ever, even though I’ve walked past it completely indifferent almost every Sunday for the last three years that I’ve lived in the neighborhood. As I approached the stalls, I thought to myself, is this the day I finally become mature? Well, I went for it. I scooped up all manner of farm fresh goodness: orange cherry tomatoes that tasted like candy, eggs, a giant bunch of basil just because it smelled so good, a bouquet of wild flowers, Swiss chard because it looked so pretty, a peach, a loaf of spelt multigrain bread, an apple cider donut. Who am I?
Spa Daze
Every girl remembers her first taste of luxury, the simultaneous exhilaration and terror of that precipitously slippery slope and the realization that there’s no turning back—at least, I do. For me, it was Chanel sunglasses, Coach wristlets (I swear, they were a thing!) and Exhale Spa in my early 20s during the early aughts in New York City. Exhale—formerly located on Madison Avenue and Central Park South and now within the Virgin Hotel in NoMad—was a treat during summer breaks back when I was a New York City public school teacher. A spa with elegant facilities, a yoga studio and core fusion classes (now, simply called barre), it always had a summer class pack and spa promotion that made the whole Upper East Side dream life feel accessible.
And that’s one of the things that’s kept me coming back to Exhale for 20 years now: it’s always running a promotion. In August, all spa treatments were 25 percent off, so I checked out their new location at Virgin Hotel for the first time and booked a one-two punch deep tissue massage and “lift and glow” microcurrent facial. It’s home to a halo salt therapy lounge, a steam room, sauna and ice room. Afterwards, the hotel’s third floor rooftop bar and terrace is a lovely place to cap off a spa day with food, drinks and views of the Empire State Building looking especially pretty.
Ever since my yoga studio was absorbed by Equinox, I’ve tried to make gym rat my entire personality, but it’s gotten a little tiresome. I recently returned to one of my neighborhood Pilates studios, Moving Strength, and it felt so good. Kinespirit is my other go-to and they also offers gyrotonic. Both have excellent drop-in group reformer classes around $40 led by talented teachers.
Channeling France & Italy
Even if I’ve been back from the Amalfi Coast and Paris since June, it doesn’t mean I’m done being blue about it. That’s where New York’s Parisian wine bars, Florentine sandwich shops and Sicilian cafes come in handy.
Parisian wine & cocktail culture
On my last two visits to Paris, I stayed at the Grand Pigalle Experimental (review coming soon: I loved it!), which is part of a hospitality group that started in 2007 with the Experimental Cocktail Club, largely credited with ushering in Paris’s modern day cocktail culture, where, frankly, I’ve had some shit go down. Now, the Experimental Group encompasses hotels, restaurants, wine bars and cocktail clubs spanning Paris, Menorca, Ibiza, Biarritz and beyond. New York is home to the group’s La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels in Soho and the newly opened La Compagnie Flatiron, which I visited this month in part because, rumor had it, there was an Experimental Cocktail Club hidden below.
Design is as important a pillar as food and wine for the group and Dorothée Meilichzon has created a gorgeous space in natural tones and textures that still manages to feel plush, Parisian and at home in New York. On the wine menu, I was obsessed with a funky Pét-Nat sparkling rosé and their food menu is wide-ranging (and delicious) enough for a beautiful snack or a full meal. We sampled their baby gougères au poivre with Bordier butter, melt-in-your-mouth A5 wagyu skewers and a “fairytale” eggplant with charred manzanilla and feta mousse that almost transported me back to a pink twilight dinner at Le Poulbot in Montmartre this summer where I had the most magical eggplant of my life.
And as for the Experimental Cocktail Club? It was, indeed, operating downstairs in soft launch mode and we were escorted down for a taste. Seated at the bar of the dimly lit space, all red upholstery and mirrored ceiling bedecked, I opted for the “Anse Ceron,” a rhum arrangé cocktail made with coconut oil, banana, lime and absinthe served up in a big coupe—a spin on the classic banana daiquiri, our barman told us. It tasted like candy—but in a good and complex and deeply Parisian way.
Florentine sandwich culture
On a hot, yet lovely early Sunday evening, I found myself hungry, drifting back to the westside after Bloomingdales-adjacent shopping errands, and wondering what I’d eat for dinner. That’s when, approaching Madison Avenue, All’antico Vinaio miraculously appeared beyond a windowed storefront on E. 60th Street. God, if that wasn’t exactly what I was in the mood for. What started as a now legendary sandwich shop in Florence in 1991 has spawned a handful of locations in New York, as well as in LA and Vegas. Specializing in enormous Tuscan-style schiacciata sandwiches, I opted for the first one on the menu: the Favolosa, made with freshly sliced salame toscana, pecorino cream, artichoke cream and spicy eggplant. Along with a can of A’Siciliana limonata soda, I brought my sandwich to the park for an impromptu picnic overlooking the lake to the sounds of Cuban drumming.
Sicilian coffee culture
If you’ve never had a cappuccino whose cup was lined with pistachio cream or an Italian croissant-like cornetti filled with the same confection, then you may want to join the throngs at Casasalvo, the new Italian café and marketplace on my block on the Upper West Side. Created by Sicilian-born chef Salvo Lo Castro, who’s almost always holding court on the premises, his café’s broad appeal is multi-pronged: everything is quite delicious, coffees are priced from $2.50 to $3.50 and he’s orchestrated a pleasant, densely packed sidewalk café ambiance beneath umbrellas that almost transports you to an Italian piazza, except, of course, you’re on Amsterdam Avenue.
And shout out to West Side Wine, my friendly neighborhood wine shop, whose buyer keeps my European dreams alive by deftly pointing me to rosés from Provence that make me feel like I’m still on the Mediterranean or a Spanish Tempranillo in anticipation of the Balearics.
On Broadway
As part of my personal DNC programming, I caught Suffs, the musical, on night three (if Hillary Clinton can’t be president at least she can be a Broadway producer) where I half-expected Kamala to make a surprise appearance, flown in from the loft in a pantsuit to end Act I. The show was an absolute joy, composed in the tradition of the golden age of musicals with all its pathos and comedy, while also feeling thoroughly modern in charting the oft-forgotten history of the women’s suffrage movement. Created by and starring Shaina Taub (who won the Tony Award for Best Book and Best Score), it was as inspiring to see her take the stage as it was to watch the story she conceived unfold with an all-female cast—what an artistic achievement! As we’re now on the precipice of electing the first female president of the United States, it was remarkable to sit in the audience honoring the history of the movement, while simultaneously living through its latest chapter.
And speaking of getting Kamala elected: I’ve stuck to my pledge to volunteer for at least one shift per week until election day with the DNC as my deadline to get started. I’ve already got a month’s worth of both in-person and virtual phone banking and letter writing campaigns on my calendar with the Democratic National Committee, Vote Forward and Swing Left. So why don’t you join me? Because, ya know: when we fight, we win!
And then we caught “Oh, Mary!” (through Nov. 10), which is basically a theater kid playing Barbies with presidential history and a completely accurate depiction of womanhood—another thunderous artistic achievement. Bravo Cole Escola!
And where does one go for post-matinee martinis and Caesar salads (and cheeseburgers)? Joe Allen, always.
Day Tripping
Where does one go, rudderless and adrift, upon returning to Manhattan after a day trip via Metro North to Cold Spring (brunch, cruising Main Street, kayaking with Hudson River Expeditions) and realizing Grand Central Oyster Bar is closed on Saturday nights? After passing Aidan on Madison Avenue taking a selfie with a fan (what was he doing in Midtown on a Saturday night when Carrie lives in Gramercy now?), we somehow wound our way to the golden glowing lights of Monkey Bar on E. 54th Street and proceeded to order the most expensive martinis on the menu and chat up some North Brooklynites out for dinner and drinks at the bar post-MoMA field trip who thought, by virtue of our simply being at Monkey Bar in Midtown East on a Saturday night, that we must be young Republican daughters of moguls and titans of industry (even though I was wearing Birkenstocks). The imaginations on people.
