Seen & Savored

Flynn McGarry designed his first restaurant at 19, inside his mother’s house in Los Angeles. Cove is his second, and it shows the confidence of someone who has been thinking about rooms and food for a long time.

The space is all natural timber. Douglas fir, cherry, ash. Custom cabinetry by Grainwood Studio in the Hudson Valley, HAY J42 chairs, ceramic pendant lights made by hand by Shane Gabier. The paintings on the walls depict plants and produce from Cove’s kitchen garden on Long Island. The room is as thought-through as the food.

The menu changes with the season. A four-course set menu or à la carte depending on which room you sit in. The food is California in spirit, light, local, without being precious about it. Book on Resy. Tuesday through Friday from 5:30pm, Saturday lunch and dinner.

cove-nyc.com

Most places that serve matcha in New York sell the idea of matcha. Sorate serves the real thing.

Silvia Mella opened Sorate in 2020 after time in Japan shifted the way she thought about tea. She came back to New York, looked for a place that offered that kind of stillness, found nothing, and opened her own. The tea comes from a single family farm in Kyoto, the same region where Nagatani Soen invented modern sencha production in the Edo period.

The Flatiron location earns a visit for the room alone. Low ceilings, natural materials, ceramics lining the shelves. The kind of space that slows you down before you even order.

Book a tea ceremony with Tea Master Keiko Kitazawa, or just walk in for a to-go matcha on your way somewhere else.

sorate.co

The elevator opens and the city disappears. That is the first thing you notice at Spencer’s.

Founder Ryan McCarthy kept the original floorboards when he built out the space at 550 Broadway. You hear the creak underfoot as you move through the rooms, a sound more associated with a home than a business. Sheer curtains, warm wood, chrome accents, floor-to-ceiling windows over SoHo. The design gets saved on Pinterest constantly, and you understand why the moment you walk in.

The treatment rooms are private. The therapists train in Europe and take the work seriously. Tea arrives on a tray before your appointment. When Spencer’s first opened, the foot massage was the first thing tried here. Book that first.

spencers.spa

Westmoreland is the café inside the Frick Collection on the Upper East Side. The museum reopened last April after a long renovation, and the café had already become a quiet favourite for lunch. What is less known is that they also serve afternoon tea.

The café looks over the restored 70th Street Garden. For $65 you get five tea sandwiches, a scone with butter, clotted cream and jam, and two sweets. The tea list is short, only six options, but you are really there to admire Darren Waterston's painted walls.

Delight yourself in the two murals: Fugue wraps the vestibule floor to ceiling, and Arcadia runs as a frieze around the dining room. He worked from Bellini, Whistler, Corot and Japanese screens.

Served daily from 1pm, closed Tuesdays. Book on Resy or reserve same day at the Admissions Desk. frick.org

The NY Historical Society recently opened a major new wing designed by Robert A.M. Stern. It adds 71,000 square feet to the original 1908 building, and Stern matched the granite from the same quarry in Deer Isle, Maine. The addition is so seamless it takes a moment to spot where old ends and new begins.

In the sculpture garden, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton stand facing each other at the exact distance of their 1804 duel, the one that ended Hamilton's life. Inside, the Weitzman Shoe Museum sits on the first floor and the American LGBTQ+ Museum occupies the top. All of it is worth seeing.

The building itself is the reason to go and everything else is a bonus.

Tue–Sun, 170 Central Park West. nyhistory.org

As a long time fan of Three Lives & Company, it was a delight to discover that Troy Chatterton, who ran the shop for fourteen years, had opened his own place. Wild Sorrel opened on 13th Street in April, a cookbook shop devoted to the home cook, with new books, used books, a few rare ones, some housewares and Troy's dog Olive usually somewhere underfoot.

The shop is small and carefully edited. There are browsing benches, which is rare. The selection feels personal rather than comprehensive, the kind of place where every book on the shelf has been chosen by someone who actually cooks.

wildsorrelcookbooks.com

Three years ago, on a visit to Tokyo, Kinto came as a special discovery. A Japanese lifestyle brand founded in Hikone fifty years ago, they make the kind of objects that are hard to leave behind. Insulated bottles, coffeeware, teaware, ceramic bowls and cups, all designed with the particular restraint that Japan does better than anywhere else.

The New York store opened on Elizabeth Street in Nolita in 2024, inside a Roman and Williams building, designed by Studio MAI with rough-sawn cedar fixtures, shelving that doubles as a gazebo-like structure, and enough potted plants to make you forget you’re in Manhattan. The full range is here, including the TERRA ceramic collection and the Slow Coffee Style line that is worth the trip on its own.

This is the kind of shop that makes you want to rethink everything on your kitchen shelf.

kinto-usa.com

Lilia Carrillo is not a name most New York audiences know yet. That is exactly the point of this show.

The Americas Society, a cultural institution on Park Avenue dedicated to the art and ideas of Latin America, is presenting the first major New York exhibition of her work. Carrillo (1930–1974) was the most prominent female figure of Mexico’s postwar Generación de la Ruptura, a group of painters who turned their backs on muralism and looked instead toward abstraction, entering into dialogue with what was happening in New York and Paris at the time.

The 24 paintings here span 1961 to 1974, the year before her death at 44. She built up thick surfaces and then carved or scratched into them, pressed fabric and paper fragments into the canvas, smudged and dispersed pigment with brushes of different sizes and other tools. The result is work that feels physical and mysterious at the same time.

The Americas Society has been showing underrecognized Latin American artists for fifty years. This is one of their best.

as-coa.org

There are udon restaurants in New York and then there is Raku.

Chef Norihiro Ishizuka has sixty years of culinary experience and a single focus: udon done right. The noodles are handmade, silky and chewy, with tapered ends that signal real craft. The broth is clean and deeply flavored.

The SoHo location on Macdougal Street is the one to go to. The room is small, warm, and minimal in the way that Japanese interiors do minimalism, not cold, not stark, just very much itself. Order the gyunan udon with wagyu beef, or the zaru udon cold on a bamboo tray with dipping sauce, the best remedy for the summer heat.

rakunyc.com

When it came to celebrating a milestone birthday this year, there was only one bakery that came to mind. From Lucie.

Lucie Franc de Ferriere grew up in the French countryside and brought that sensibility to a small shop on 10th Street in the East Village. The cakes here are decorated with fresh flowers and look almost too delicate to eat. Almost. The mini layer cakes at $17 are the reason most people come, but the Victoria sponge with raspberry rose jam and vanilla bean is worth asking about if they have it. The chocolate chip cookies are among the best in the city.

The shop is small, the line moves, and the outdoor seating makes it a proper stop rather than a quick errand.

fromlucie.com

Through an unmarked door on Broadway and up a staircase, there is a 4,000 square foot loft that feels like visiting the most hidden apartment in the city.

Quarters is a concept store from the founders of lighting studio In Common With. The loft is styled as a residence, with vintage furniture, rare books, specialty pantry items and the full In Common With lighting collection. Everything is for sale. There is also a bar, which shifts the energy after hours into something closer to a dinner party than a shop.

Could not leave without a set of glasses from Sophie Lou Jacobsen.

shopquarters.com

Neil and Daisy Chen started Yoseka in 2017 with a simple idea: to bring Asian stationery to New York. Neil grew up in his family’s stationery shop in Taiwan, and that upbringing shows in how the store is run. Carefully, with genuine knowledge of every product on the shelf.

The shop is in Greenpoint on West Street, small and warm, with antique furniture and a tester table in the center where you can try everything before you buy. Fountain pens, notebooks, inks, washi tape, pencils. The kind of shop where you come in for one thing and leave with five.

yosekastationery.com

50 Norman is a building on Norman Avenue in Greenpoint that houses several Tokyo-based brands across its floors. Design shop, dashi bar, hand-forged kitchen tools. Worth the trip on its own. But go to the back, past CIBONE, through the sliding wall, and you will find a counter restaurant called HOUSE Brooklyn.

Chef Yuji Tani grew up in Kyoto and cooked in Tokyo before opening here. Nine courses, Japanese-French, different every day. He cooks in front of you. The room holds eight people.

house-bk.com

Thuma is a furniture brand. Its SoHo store on Wooster Street also has a café on the ground floor, which turns out to be one of the better reasons to visit SoHo right now.

Partners Coffee, pastries from L’imprimerie, natural wood throughout, warm light, linen. The showroom runs behind the café and up to the second floor. Everything in the room is for sale. The matcha latte is worth ordering.

thuma.co

Sandeep and Carson Salter opened their East Village shop on East 2nd Street after their Brooklyn Heights original. The idea has not changed: things made well, meant to last.

Hand-painted plates, natural linen clothing, Appalachian brooms, garden clogs, goods from the Garment District. Nothing decorative. Everything chosen by people who use what they sell. There is tea, coffee, and vegan baked goods if you need a reason to stay.

salter.house

Chef Maxime Pradié grew up spending summers in the South of France, and the menu reads like those summers distilled. Pissaladière, socca, handmade pasta with fresh basil pesto, Provençal lamb. No escargot, no crème brûlée. The room is 37 seats, brown checked tablecloths, wooden banquettes, light coming in from the street. Owner Jenni Guizio designed the space with local craftspeople and it shows in the details.

The wine list runs to 100 selections by the half bottle, which is the kind of thing that makes a place a regular rather than a destination. Bar à Part, the 15-seat wine bar next door, opens after dinner and serves coffee in the morning.

zimmisnyc.com

WatchHouse started in London in 2014 and built a following on the principle that a coffee shop should be worth going to, not just stopping at. The Fifth Avenue location is the brand’s first in the United States and holds the line on that idea.

Warm wood, textured ceilings, Scandinavian-style seating, red banquettes that pop against the warm interior. The Rarities Program is the reason serious coffee drinkers make the trip: hard-to-find single-origin beans from around the world, served as pour-overs from $14 to $52. Cardamom buns and seasonal pastries baked on site daily.

watchhouse.com

Jane Mayle closed her original Nolita boutique in 2008 and the neighborhood never quite got over it. When she came back with Maison Mayle on Great Jones Street, people noticed.

The shop is small and appointment-friendly, open Tuesday through Friday from noon. The clothes are made in New York, in silk, with the kind of prints and details that look like they were designed for a woman in a novel rather than on a rack. Signature Mayle cameo buttons, handmade charm necklaces, vintage-inspired cuts that drape rather than fit. Nothing here is disposable.

maisonmayle.com

An Italian bistrot inside an illustration bookshop on Carmine Street. The shelves carry a thoughtfully curated selection of art and illustration books, and the space regularly hosts readings, talks, and events that bring the neighborhood in.

Sullaluna comes from Venice, where the original opened on a canal. The New York version brings the same sensibility: mostly vegetarian and vegan, seasonal, rooted in a genuine care for what ends up on the plate. Order the fried rice croquettes and the orecchiette. When the weather allows, the open-air dining is delightful.

sullalunanyc.com

Ned Baldwin has been running Houseman in Hudson Square for over a decade. The people who know it, love it. When the founders of Amant, the art campus on Maujer Street, asked him to open a restaurant there, he said yes. The result is Zoli.

The dining room and bar are separated by Pierre Huyghe’s artwork: three large aquariums filled with detritus from Newtown Creek. It is stranger and better than it sounds. The menu is seafood-forward and shifts with what Baldwin catches or sources. The butterflied black sea bass is the dish people talk about. The raw offerings are the reason to go on an empty stomach.

The galleries at Amant are reason enough to make the trip. Zoli makes it easy to stay for the evening.

zolirestaurant.com

The word grocery does not quite cover it. Happier is a curated food market on Canal Street that stocks the things you did not know you needed until you found them here.

Every product goes through an extensive selection process: organic, local where possible, free of the things you would rather not read about on a label. The shelves run from adaptogenic drinks and gut-health tonics to fresh produce and house-made beet hummus. The vegan baked goods are surprisingly delicious.

It is compact, deliberate, and very well-edited.

happiergrocery.com

The name works twice. Noury was the father of co-owner Lina Goujjane, a French-Moroccan restaurateur. It also sounds like nori.

Goujjane and her husband Alex Chang already run Kiko in Hudson Square. Noury opened on Sullivan Street in June. Thirty-nine seats, izakaya format, and a five-seat sake and wine counter set in the middle of the room. Joji Miwa, formerly of Sushi Noz, runs the kitchen.

Studio Tre did the interiors, and the room deserves a slow look. Ebonized oak beams hold panels of raffia and linen. Chocolate mohair banquettes. A wall of Mexican lava stone steps back to frame a niche for ikebana. A handwoven abaca tapestry from the Philippines covers the south wall.

Went this week. Order the crab futomaki, the shira-ae, the figs with marcona almonds, and the saba sando on milk bread. Every one of them landed perfectly.

nourynewyork.com

Next Thursday, on the seventh floor of the New Museum, Sami sets up a cake counter for five hours and then packs it away. She bakes as pistachiomilkmatcha, one word, named for the drink she made herself every morning behind a coffee bar.

The reason to follow her is the record she keeps. Calamansi, a small Filipino citrus, candied into translucent rings. Egg yolks cured a fortnight in salt until they come out amber. A first sourdough she calls mediocre and under-fermented. A ranked list of every apple she ate one autumn. Anyone who ranks apples can be trusted with a cake.

The sweets come themed to New Humans: Memories of the Future, the show that filled the whole building when it reopened. Two hundred artists and writers on one question: what a person is turning into.

Go up, eat cake seven floors above the Bowery, then come back down through the galleries.

While you are there: Oberon opened on the ground floor in July, the museum’s first restaurant in forty-nine years. A freestanding box wrapped in silver-leafed cork, an Ian Cheng video, furniture by Minjae Kim. Julia Sherman and Ali Ghriskey cook it. No museum ticket needed.

partiful.com · RSVP

Gabriel Cohen and Giovi Signorile met at Oberlin, the small liberal arts college in Ohio, and started working together in 2007, out of piles of feathers, thread, gold, and paper. First came wings rebuilt from parrot feathers, then arrows fletched with molted feathers and wound in silk thread. Since then: brooms, ping-pong tables, kites, incense, dice, hand-dipped tapers, and a recycled plastic cutting board flecked with confetti.

The Allen Street shop holds all of it, plus work from other independent makers. A Pomeranian named Merlin supervises.

Go for the glassware. Cobalt, amber, jade, smoke, every one finished with a hand-twisted rim of black and white glass that sits on the lip like a crooked halo. Twenty-four dollars each, cheaper by six, and no two rims come out the same.

fredericksandmae.com

Hani is pronounced honey. It was the nickname of Miro Uskokovic’s mother, who was building her own bakery on the family dairy farm in Serbia when the war stopped the work. She never finished it. Her son learned to bake while she was ill.

Her photograph sits on a shelf in the shop. Uskokovic ran pastry at Gramercy Tavern for ten years. His wife Shilpa edits food at Bon Appétit. They opened on Cooper Square in November 2024 and put out about thirty things a day.

The room stays plain on purpose. Blond wood booths, cream tile, a bright green door onto the street. Nothing competes with the counter.

Order a slice of the PB & J Crunch cake, blueberry compote layered under peanut butter buttercream. Got the triple chocolate cookie too, milk, dark and white, and it was delicious.

hanisnyc.com

Fernando Botero landed in New York in 1960 with two hundred dollars and no gallery behind him. Twenty-eight, Colombian, committed to the human figure, in a city that had decided abstraction was the only serious option. He later called it life under the dictatorship of abstract art.

Sotheby’s has given the whole period a floor. The show covers 1960 to 1973, the thirteen years before he left for Paris, drawn from the family’s holdings and private collections. Many of these paintings have never hung in public.

It is the first show Sotheby’s has built around one artist since moving into the Breuer. The building suits him. That granite fortress has held the Whitney, the Met and the Frick.

Find Mrs. Rubens #3 and stand there a while. The volume in his bodies reads as comedy across the room and as tenderness up close.

sothebys.com

Every Lindquist piece carries a small embossed code. The numbers give the edition. The letters give the artisans who cut and stitched that particular bag.

Lindy McDonough studied industrial design at RISD, drew sneakers for Adidas, then worked for Jen Mankins at Bird before starting her own studio. Her parents sold outdoor gear, so she grew up around arguments about stitching and construction.

Everything comes out of a restored mill in East Providence, on the Seekonk River. The leather is vegetable tanned and naturally dyed with a family tannery a hundred years old. Their word for it is lagom, Swedish, meaning enough and no more.

Try the Mezzo, a crossbody cut like a slice of moon on brass hardware. The shop also carries ceramics, jewellery and books from other independent makers.

lindquist-object.com

Paquita has eight seats, a tin ceiling, and a wall of tea you can smell before you order.

Mariquit Ingalla opened it on West 10th Street, where over a hundred organic loose-leaf teas and botanicals sit in burnished canisters along the shelves, the light stays low, and vintage furniture fills what little floor there is.

Smell before you choose, since the staff expect it and will walk you through the wall, and order a pot rather than a cup. Everything arrives on antique dishware, and a small selection of old tea accessories sits for sale along one side.

Ingalla also runs Rosecrans on Greenwich Avenue, a flower shop with a coffee bar at the back that pours the same tea, which makes an easy afternoon of the two.

Reserve on Resy

The Hispanic Society sits on Audubon Terrace above 155th Street, and most of the city doesn’t know about it.

Esperanza Cortés spent a fellowship there studying the collection, looking closely at Velázquez and Goya, at the metalwork, at the mantones de Manila, then made new work in response.

She comes from Colombia, holds a Guggenheim fellowship, and works across painting, sculpture, installation and video. The pieces here set her own history against the longer story of colonialism.

The show opens the morning this issue lands, and A Collection without Borders runs alongside it in the Main Court, gathering portraits and objects from the Iberian Peninsula and its diaspora.

hispanicsociety.org

Flower Girl moved from the Lower East Side to 23rd Street, a few minutes from the flower market, which shows in what’s on the shelves.

She founded it in 2004, in her mid-twenties, after studying film and working in production design, making arrangements for friends until word of mouth turned it into a business. She now does the flowers for the Guggenheim, the New Museum and the New York Public Library.

The shop carries cut flowers, seasonal branches, unusual vases, plants, candles and handmade soaps, alongside an incense she made with Blackbird and a chocolate she made with Farm Candy, one sweet with lavender and rose, one savoury with herb mélange and smoked sea salt.

Book a workshop if you want more than a bouquet. Porcaro runs them in the shop, in small groups, and you leave with something you made.

flowergirlnyc.com/workshops-and-walks

Eunji Lee named the place after the French word for museum and her own surname, which tells you most of what you need to know.

Downstairs is a café. Upstairs is more like a gallery, old Korean beams overhead, mother-of-pearl in the walls.

She trained in Rouen and Paris, spent four years at Le Meurice, then ran the pastry kitchen at Jungsik. In June she was named the best pastry chef in North America.

Went last week and had the corn brioche. Soft, buttery, sweeter than it looks.

Go on a weekend if you can. That's the only time they make it.

The only museum in the country given over to drawing, and it's free.

On the walls now you can find works on paper by Pope.L, who spent years crawling the length of Manhattan on his hands and knees before he died in 2023. Same restless energy, smaller scale.

A student show and the Black Art Library take the other floors, so you get three for one visit.

My suggestion, go on a weekday afternoon. Quiet rooms, high ceilings, nobody hurrying you along.

Oroboro has kept the same corner of Mott Street since 2011, which counts for a lot in Nolita.

Ichi Antiquités, Black Crane, Cordera, Lauren Manoogian on the rails. Natural fibres, easy shapes, nothing shouting.

The shelves are where it gets good. Shino Takeda and Claire Resnick make the ceramics, and Resnick coils and pinches hers instead of throwing them, so no two sit the same way in your hand.

Pick one up even if the clothes aren't for you.

Manuela sits on the corner of Wooster and Prince, a few doors from Hauser & Wirth. Manuela and Iwan Wirth named it after her, so the address is no accident.

The art is built into the room. Mika Rottenberg made the bar out of recycled plastic and invasive vines pulled from forests upstate. Mary Heilmann set the ceramic tabletops. Rashid Johnson made the long table in the private room, which seats twenty-four.

The menu is partly vegetarian, cooked over a wood-fired grill or in the charcoal oven, and most of the produce comes from Union Square Greenmarket.

Sit at the bar if there are two of you. You eat under the Rottenberg and get the best view of the room.

Reserve on Resy

Ogden Codman built the place as a house, the Huntingtons lived in it, and the National Academy of Design held it from 1940 until 2019, when Rafael Viñoly reworked the whole thing for Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.

It has been closed all summer and opens again this morning with Anthea Hamilton's Comfort Zones, while Salon 94 Design fills the same building with A chair is a nest, is a foot, is a… on the same day.

Right now you can see two shows in a space where you won't find a white cube anywhere.

Go this week if you can, before the fall crowds find their way up to Carnegie Hill.

Makié Yahagi opened this shop in 1999 and it is still tiny, which is half the pleasure of it.

Her mother was a seamstress in Sapporo, and she started out sewing for her two sons before turning it into a shop, working in cotton, linen and wool in charcoal, mocha, indigo and the palest pink, cut and sewn in New York from cloth she brings in from Italy and Japan.

The children's clothes came first and the women's followed, but look past the rails for the housewares, the Japanese ceramics and the odd vintage piece.

This is the special place to buy for a baby you know. Any item here will become a keepsake.

Elbow Bread occupies the crook where Ludlow bends into Canal, a narrow corner spot holding a counter and not much else.

Zoë Kanan opened it in late 2024 with the Court Street Grocers team, after she ran pastry at Sadelle's for years and spent the pandemic selling doughnuts threaded onto sticks.

The highlight here are the bialys. She hydrates the dough with barley tea, works from a mix of sourdough and yeast, then fills the well with caramelized onion. Then she adds the caraway rye palmier, which manages sweet and sharp in the same bite.

Try to get there before ten, when the pretzels come out with little thumbprints pressed into them.

Jan and Marica Vilcek left Czechoslovakia in 1964, built a life in New York, and started a foundation in 2000 to back immigrants working in the arts and sciences. Marica died in March, and the foundation turns twenty-five this year.

Now on view is the work of Danh Võ, who was born in Vietnam, left by boat as a child and grew up in Denmark. He takes the Statue of Liberty and the American flag apart, reassembles the pieces, and leaves you working out what went missing. That takes on a special meaning in a townhouse that one family's emigration paid for.

The gallery keeps only a few rooms and opens by appointment, so book before you go. That is the reason it stays quiet enough to sit with the work instead of filing past it.

Sarah Zames and Colin Stief run the design studio General Assembly, and in 2021 they opened a shop on Atlantic Avenue to sell some of their favorite pieces.

The place feels like an apartment rather than a showroom, with a living room, a dining area, a bedroom, and a materials library at the back stacked with limewash paint, wallpaper and tile. Some of the brands they carry: Another Country, In Common With, Fort Standard, Atelier de Troupe, Quiet Town, rugs from Tantuvi and Armadillo.

They are showing Amica right now, a new lighting collection from Christopher Merchant with Aaron and Irisa Chan-Kawabi, hand-built ceramic bases carrying shades of Japanese kozo paper.

Go to see the Amica pieces lit. Paper does something to light that no photograph of it catches.

The Auer family has baked in Graz for three generations, and their first shop outside Austria sells one thing.

A 1.5 kilo loaf of 100% rye sourdough, four ingredients, fermented for a day, built on a starter that has been going for 57 years. The rye flour is milled in Austria and shipped over. Sixty dollars, whole, half or quarter, plus tartines if you want it sliced and dressed.

The price caused a small uproar when it opened, and the queue formed anyway.

The room takes as much care as the bread, which is the part people miss when they argue about the number. The building held David Bowie's apartment once.

Isabella Hutchinson started at Sotheby's in the Latin American department in 1986 and opened her own gallery in 2020 with a clear brief: art of the Americas, with Latin American, Latinx and Caribbean artists at the centre, and their diasporas alongside them.

It occupies a townhouse on East 64th Street across four rooms rather than a warehouse, which makes a visit intimate and special.

The new show is Alejandro Corujeira, La sonora luz de lo invisible, or Sounding Light of the Unseen. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1961, spent his student years travelling to remote villages in the Andean northwest, and moved to Madrid in 1991, where he still works. He thins slow-drying acrylic and lays it down in successive layers until the colour turns weightless, then draws lines that wander across it and erases and redraws until the painting settles. Between layers he leaves the work alone for a while and fills the gap with music, poetry and meditation.

Jamie Creel and Christopher Gow filled the former stables of a Grosvenor Atterbury townhouse with the things they found while travelling, and have been at it since 2012.

Call it a cabinet of curiosities and you are halfway there. Rare minerals, taxidermy, coral, shells dipped in silver, lapis boxes, Suzani textiles, a blue lobster shell in a vitrine. Gow came from Sotheby's too, which shows in how the objects sit together rather than compete.

The prices run from serious to twenty dollars for a pewter wishbone in a little box, so go in even if you are only looking.

It sits six blocks from the gallery, which makes the two one afternoon.

The world's first nut butter coffee bar started in Brussels in 2020, opened in Paris, and landed at 340 Bowery in December, on the stretch where NoHo starts turning into the East Village.

Everything begins with the butters, made by hand in small batches in their Brussels atelier, organic, no additives, and the beans are roasted in house. Order Le Buddy, peanut butter with oat milk, espresso and raw cacao, or the almond butter chai if you want the nuts without the coffee.

The room splits in two, the front for talking and the back for laptops with a ninety-minute limit, which is a kinder way of handling it than most.

Go before half nine. The queue builds on weekends and the room is calmest early.

Tania Franco Klein was born in Mexico in 1990 and studied architecture in Mexico City before she turned to photography, which shows in how she builds a picture.

RAGE™ takes rage as the emotion of the moment and treats it as two things at once, something people feel and something produced for them. The images borrow the language of advertising, news and cinema, then hold an emotion that stays real even while quoting. Some of the work deals with what AI does to a photograph's claim on truth, and some with subtitles, and how a line of text under a picture can change what the picture appears to say.

Read the captions. She is using them as material rather than labels.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo hangs in the gallery at the same time, which makes this two Mexican photographers in one visit, eighty years apart.

Lizzie Fortunato started on a sofa in a Lower East Side walk-up in 2008, funded by a ten thousand dollar bonus cheque her twin sister Kathryn handed over with a note that said follow your dreams.

Kathryn joined two years later, and the two of them now run a studio of fourteen in SoHo, working with metalsmiths, embroiderers, enamellers and stone setters across the city, and with a group of women who assemble pieces from home around their children.

The showroom sits six floors up on Centre Street, and it holds more than the jewellery. Look for Fortune Finds, the furniture and objects they bring back from travelling, which tell you as much about the sisters as the earrings do.

Walk in if you are passing, or book a stylist and they will have things pulled and waiting.

The entrance is a door on 56th Street with nothing on it. You give your name, take a lift down, and the city disappears.

The room sits under the Crown Building, low and dark and done properly, and there is a band every night. Later the DJ takes over and the whole thing turns into a dressed-up nightclub, so decide which half of the evening you came for.

Email ahead, since they only take reservations by mail and open the book thirty days out. Bar seats are first come, which means arriving early gets you closer to the stage than a table would.

Officina means workshop, and Rita Sodi and Jody Williams named their shop on Grove Street accordingly.

The two of them are behind Via Carota, I Sodi, Buvette, Bar Pisellino and Commerce Inn, which is most of what makes the West Village worth walking around. This is where the things they cook with are sold: Italian pantry provisions, seasonal produce, and the tools, the wooden spoons and the knives and the pots that last.

Buy the thing you would never buy yourself. A good olive oil or a single beautiful spoon changes how the cooking feels more than another gadget will.

Meadow Lane opened on Greenwich Street last November and the internet lost its mind, first over the queue around the block and then over the price of the olive oil.

Sammy Nussdorf built the audience on TikTok before he built the shop, and what he built is mostly prepared food, cooked in house, sold to people stocking a fridge for three days rather than shopping for ingredients. The room is the other half of it, designed by Sarah Carpenter with a sculptural light from Apparatus overhead, and it reads more like a small gallery than a grocer.

Go for the prepared counter rather than the pantry. That is where the cooking is, and it is where the queue makes sense.

Penny sits directly above Claud on East 10th Street, which means Chase Sinzer and Joshua Pinsky run two restaurants in one building and you can eat at both in a night if you want to.

It is all counter. No tables, no dining room, most seats held for walk-ins, so the room works best for two people who arrive early and settle in.

Order the Ice Box, which arrives on pebble ice with oysters, clams, mussels and scallop crudo laid out together, and ask for the sesame brioche while you wait. The wine list runs deep into Burgundy and Champagne, which is not what you expect from a raw bar.

Esteban Vicente was born in Turégano, near Segovia, in 1903, and died in Bridgehampton in 2001, a few days short of ninety-eight. In between he became the only Spaniard in the first generation of the New York School, alongside de Kooning and Kline, and the city has mostly forgotten that.

The Painter of Reality gathers eighteen works made between 1940 and 1996, lent by the foundation he and his wife Harriet set up here, and chosen by Ana Doldán, who runs the museum named for him in Segovia. The show has already been to Rome, Warsaw and Paris. This is the only American stop.

He called himself a painter of reality while painting abstraction, which sounds like a contradiction until you stand in front of the collages and see that the colour is doing the describing.

This is one of the best discoveries of the year. A true gem, with a life worth reading about on its own, and a painter overlooked in both Spain and the United States. Go before the winter crowds find it.

Lenny Golay and Ray Sherman bought a brownstone at 93rd and Madison in 1976, found a 1920s pharmacy interior buried under layers of paint and grime, and spent two years uncovering the terrazzo floor, the tin ceiling and the wood cabinetry before opening a bookshop in it in 1978.

The pharmacy cabinets are still the checkout. So is a cash register over a century old. Orders go on cards in a filing drawer rather than into a computer, which sounds like a gimmick until you watch how fast they find anything.

They stock what they believe in rather than everything, so ask what they are reading. That is the whole point of a shop this size.

Macrobiotic cooking asks a lot of you. Soak this, cut that, balance the plate. I loved it in my twenties while I lived in Ireland and to this day I remember the main principles when choosing a meal.

Camille Becerra has come back around to the same ideas, and the Care Box is her version of the macrobiotic plate, sent out one drop at a time from her own kitchen. Brown rice and sorghum with mushrooms, greens, a sea vegetable salad, something fermented, cornbread with a carrot and ginger spread, and a kanten to finish. Vegetables from the Union Square market. Organic, vegan, no wheat, no sugar, nothing processed. She calls it a quiet offering for those in need of nourishment, which is exactly what it is.

$125 covers two meals and the delivery. Order one for the week you have no time to cook, then eat it slowly over two days, the way it was meant to work.

Franklin Place is an alley three doors long, so it is easy to miss one of my favorite galleries in the city.

Nicelle Beauchene sits at the end of it, and the walls right now hold William Schaeuble’s first solo show in this space. He is still in his twenties, he lives and paints in Iowa, and he borrows the form of the old miracle picture, the kind a family hangs in thanks for something that went right, then hands it his own life to carry. A man with his tomato plants. A nap during an ascension. His sweetheart with an ice cream, titled Miracle of a Good Day. Funny and tender in the same breath, and bigger in the room than the titles let on.

My suggestion: take the large canvases first, then go back to the small panels. That is where he is funniest.

Broadway above Broome is not where anyone would think of as a quiet spot.

Walk into Buck Mason, past the shirts, and the coffee bar sits at one end of the floor behind a plaster counter with a window onto the traffic. Downstairs holds a library of more than a thousand vintage art and design books, there to browse or to buy. Upstairs works like a lounge, records and leather chairs and low light, and nobody hurries you out of it.

Order the espresso tonic, take a book upstairs and relax away from the buzz of the city.

Nobody books a restaurant for 9 am in the morning but this one is worth the effort.

One Sunday a month Odo clears the gallery space beside the restaurant, lays goza mats on the floor and opens at nine. Rev. Dr. Masaki Matsubara, an eighteenth-generation Rinzai priest who took his doctorate at Cornell, leads two sittings, talks for a while and takes questions. Then the kitchen brings out breakfast. Mazegohan, a soup, vegetable dishes, all vegan, on an Echizen lacquer tray with the five bowls a Zen meal uses. Hiroki Odo designed the menu. At the end Matsubara whisks matcha in front of you and sends it out with a sweet.

Twenty-two seats, around $130, and you are out by a quarter to twelve with your Sunday still ahead of you.

Curator Olivia Shao went through more than a thousand works on paper and came back with fifty.

The Burger Collection in Hong Kong has been buying drawings for decades and showing them rarely. This takes the whole of the Drawing Center, and the list reads like a party you would want to be at. Meret Oppenheim, Anne Truitt, Blinky Palermo, Robert Gober, Jack Whitten, Franz West, Vivian Suter, Zarina, Tadanori Yokoo. Hong Kong and New York as the two poles, Eastern thought and Western philosophy as the frame, which sounds heavy until you walk in and find it quiet and light.

This exhibition deserves time and sometimes a second lap to really appreciate all the detail. The show travels to Asia Society in Hong Kong next year, so this is the only chance to see it here.

Atlantic Avenue is where I go when I want something nobody else will have.

Alice Russotti and Francesca del Balzo grew up together, one went into art and the other into fashion, and they opened Porta on the antiques stretch of Atlantic in 2022. They travel to find the makers and design pieces with them. Hand-painted plates that tell the story of the Palio in Siena, tablecloths embroidered in northern Portugal, glass and ceramics out of small workshops in Italy, Spain and France. Giancarlo Valle built the room around a dining table, so you pick things up and handle them the way you would at home.

My suggestion: mark it as a great place to buy a nice present, but also treat yourself to a gorgeous plate.

Three years ago, on a visit to Tokyo, Kinto came as a special discovery. A Japanese lifestyle brand founded in Hikone fifty years ago, they make the kind of objects that are hard to leave behind. Insulated bottles, coffeeware, teaware, ceramic bowls and cups, all designed with the particular restraint that Japan does better than anywhere else.

The New York store opened on Elizabeth Street in Nolita in 2024, inside a Roman and Williams building, designed by Studio MAI with rough-sawn cedar fixtures, shelving that doubles as a gazebo-like structure, and enough potted plants to make you forget you're in Manhattan. The full range is here, including the TERRA ceramic collection and the Slow Coffee Style line that is worth the trip on its own.

This is the kind of shop that makes you want to rethink everything on your kitchen shelf.

kinto-usa.com

Lilia Carrillo is not a name most New York audiences know yet. That is exactly the point of this show.

The Americas Society, a cultural institution on Park Avenue dedicated to the art and ideas of Latin America, is presenting the first major New York exhibition of her work. Carrillo (1930–1974) was the most prominent female figure of Mexico's postwar Generación de la Ruptura, a group of painters who turned their backs on muralism and looked instead toward abstraction, entering into dialogue with what was happening in New York and Paris at the time.

The 24 paintings here span 1961 to 1974, the year before her death at 44. She built up thick surfaces and then carved or scratched into them, pressed fabric and paper fragments into the canvas, smudged and dispersed pigment with brushes of different sizes and other tools. The result is work that feels physical and mysterious at the same time.

The Americas Society has been showing underrecognized Latin American artists for fifty years. This is one of their best.

as-coa.org

There are udon restaurants in New York and then there is Raku.

Chef Norihiro Ishizuka has sixty years of culinary experience and a single focus: udon done right. The noodles are handmade, silky and chewy, with tapered ends that signal real craft. The broth is clean and deeply flavored.

The SoHo location on Macdougal Street is the one to go to. The room is small, warm, and minimal in the way that Japanese interiors do minimalism, not cold, not stark, just very much itself. Order the gyunan udon with wagyu beef, or the zaru udon cold on a bamboo tray with dipping sauce, the best remedy for the summer heat.

rakunyc.com