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Breakfast: Daily Provisions
An offshoot of the rebooted Union Square Cafe around the corner, Daily Provisions is the coffee bar or lunch counter you would expect of restaurateur Danny Meyer: intimate, crowded, welcoming, polished. The morning menu is an ode to New York street food, a refined take on the junky stuff found at coffee carts. Order the egg sandwich, a perfect softscramble on a light-as-air bun with cheese and bacon or sausage, and a maple-glazed cruller, a crisp spiral of a doughnut that dissolves in your mouth. Go early. The doughnuts often sell out by 10am.
103 East 19th St, New York
Red shrimp, sea urchin, caviar and oysters at Flora.
Power lunch: Flora Bar
The Metropolitan Museum of Art took over the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, renamed it the Met Breuer (after its architect Marcel Breuer), and brought in chef Ignacio Mattos to turn the restaurant into what is essentially a dressed-up outpost of Estela on the Upper East Side. The combination is electric: the food is odd and delicious (what you’d expect of the creatively counterintuitive chef), the setting a spectacularly stark intersection of concrete, stone and metal – Brutalism at its finest. Gorgeous food, exquisite cocktails and obscure natural wines in an architectural masterpiece: it all comes together at Flora Bar.
945 Madison Ave, New York
Inside Atla
Dinner: Atla
Modern Mexican is now a bona fide gastronomic category, but you don’t need to know that to recognise the genius of Enrique Olvera, the chef behind Pujol in Mexico City and Cosme in New York. Atla is his newest project, and his most casual, but the food meets his exacting standards. Think delicate chilli relleno stuffed with steak tartare, ayocote-bean “hummus” served with a blue corn chip that looks like a sheet of tissue paper floating in the air, and raw arctic char on a fresh tostada. Sophisticated and flavourful, the cooking will blow your mente. Open for breakfast and lunch, the high-ceilinged room takes on a buzzy energy at dinner.
372 Lafayette St, New York
Drinks: Diamond Reef
Time to leave behind the sombre bars of the past era and go out drinking in places that are as loud and as fun as this non-speakeasy. Beached on a desolate stretch of Atlantic Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood, Diamond Reef is boisterous, with wood panelling, comfy stools and a tipsy scrum of cool kids priced out of Williamsburg. It was opened by the team behind Attaboy, and the folk servicing the bar make drinks like mixologists, but act like bartenders.
1057 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn
Flora Bar
Sleep: The Whitby
This is a hotel for grown-ups who like to eat and drink in the livelier parts of the city but prefer to sleep it off in a hotel with thick walls and high-thread-count sheets. Close to Central Park and the glossiest stretch of Fifth Avenue – a certain developer-turned-president has a pad at the end of the block – The Whitby couldn’t be more centrally located. The light-filled rooms are lavishly decorated, and the bar is an exuberant collage of colours and finishes.
18 West 56th St, New York
Coming soon: Big Apple bites
Not yet here but much anticipated is the first New York project from the team behind Gjusta and Gjelina in Venice Beach, California, at 45 Bond Street in NoHo. They redefined the LA restaurant scene, but can they do it again in a less forgiving city?
Another is the resurfacing of Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr, the New York chefs who turned Balthazar into the most influential brasserie in the world and Minetta Tavern into the best steakhouse in town. Their new restaurant will be French, bien sûr, and located at 241 West Broadway in TriBeCa.
