This week: the restaurant that earned its reservation the moment it opened, a Japanese tea house in Flatiron that slows the city down, and a spa in SoHo that disappears you the moment the elevator opens.
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.
On the Resy Hit List and one of the harder reservations to get right now. Worth planning ahead.
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.
Tea ceremony from $60. Walk-in daily. Mon–Fri 8am to 7pm, Sat–Sun 9am to 7pm.
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.
Summer calls for a proper reset. Membership from $179 a month for one treatment. Daily 10am to 9pm.
This week: afternoon tea at the newly renovated Frick, a brand-new wing at the NY Historical Society that most people don't know about yet, and a cookbook bookstore on 13th Street that is a little gem in the East Village.
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.
The afternoon tea still feels like a little secret. The garden is at its best right now, and the room looks directly onto it.
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.
The wing opened recently and most people haven't been yet. It also marks the 250th anniversary of American democracy, and the current exhibition is built around exactly that.
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.
Wild Sorrel only opened in April. A new cookbook bookstore is a rare thing in New York, and this one sits in one of the city's best neighbourhoods for an afternoon out.
How this started.
For as long as I can remember, friends have been asking me the same questions. Where should we go for dinner this weekend? Is that exhibition worth seeing before it closes? There's a new shop on Crosby — have you been? I always had an answer, because finding these things is something I do anyway, quietly and constantly, out of genuine love for this city.
At some point it seemed worth writing it down. Not as a guide — there are plenty of those — but as a letter. Three things, each week, that I would tell a close friend over a coffee if they asked me what was worth their weekend. Honest, specific, always timely.
That is all this is. I hope it is useful.
Elena Matsuura, Seen & Savored
Free, always.
This week: a Japanese shop in Nolita that makes you want to rethink everything on your kitchen shelf, a Mexican painter New York is only now discovering, and the best cold udon in the city on a summer afternoon.
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.
Summer is the right moment to replace the plastic water bottle that has been sitting in your bag since January. Kinto’s insulated bottles are the answer.
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.
The exhibition runs through August 1. Curated by Tobias Ostrander of Tate Modern, it arrives alongside the first monograph ever published on Carrillo. 680 Park Avenue, free admission.
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.
Summer is exactly when cold udon comes into its own. 48 Macdougal Street, no reservations.
This week: the East Village bakery worth celebrating a birthday over, a hidden loft in Tribeca where everything is for sale, and an Asian stationery shop in Greenpoint that rewards the trip to Brooklyn.
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.
Summer is when the floral cakes are at their most striking. Open daily 10am to 7pm, 263 East 10th Street.
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.
The bar is now open to the public. Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm, 383 Broadway, second floor.
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.
Yoseka hosts a Stationery Festival this August. Worth going before the crowds find it. Wednesday through Sunday, 63 West Street, Greenpoint.
This week: a nine-course counter restaurant hidden at the back of a Greenpoint building, a furniture store in SoHo with a café worth the detour, and an East Village shop full of things made to last.
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.
An intimate omakase that beautifully blends Japanese technique and French flavors. Wednesday through Saturday from 6pm. Book ahead. 50 Norman Avenue, Greenpoint. 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.
A rare opportunity to enjoy a good cup of coffee while browsing gorgeous modern furniture in a beautiful and serene space. Monday to Saturday 11am to 7pm, Sunday 12 to 6pm. 99 Wooster Street, SoHo. 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.
Sister shop to Picture Room next door. Open daily, 34 East 2nd Street, East Village. salter.house
This week: a Southern French corner restaurant in the West Village that makes you forget where you are, a London coffee brand that finally arrived in Midtown, and a NoHo boutique worth finding before everyone else does.
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.
Southern French cooking done with precision and without pretension, on one of the best corners in the West Village. Book on Resy. Daily 5 to 11pm. 72 Bedford Street. 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.
A second location opens soon at 405 Lexington in Midtown East. The Fifth Avenue original is the one to try first. Mon to Fri 6:30am to 6:30pm, Sat to Sun 8am to 6:30pm. 660 Fifth Avenue. 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.
The summer collection is in store now. Tue to Fri 12 to 6pm, other times by appointment. 33 Great Jones Street, NoHo. maisonmayle.com
This week: an Italian bistrot inside a bookshop on Carmine Street, a seafood restaurant hidden inside an art campus in East Williamsburg, and a curated grocery on Canal Street worth the detour.
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.
Summer is when this kind of place earns its keep. Brunch on weekends, dinner from 4pm Monday through Wednesday, noon from Thursday. 41 Carmine Street. 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.
The rooftop terrace is open for summer. Thursday through Sunday from 5pm. 312 Maujer Street, East Williamsburg. 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.
Exclusively stocks a new tomato sauce made with Oishii’s Rubi tomatoes, built on a 120-year-old Monte’s recipe. 365 Canal Street, SoHo. happiergrocery.com
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