The Kinora Guide to New York

The Ludlow

180 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side

Sean MacPherson has built maybe a dozen hotels in New York, and the Ludlow is the one you go to when you want to feel like you’re in on something. Velvet, iron, lamplight, a lobby bar that fills up around 10pm and doesn’t clear out until it’s technically morning. Ask for a room facing the fire escapes. The neighborhood shows up in the window. There’s a chance you’ll never leave the block.

The Bowery Hotel

335 Bowery, East Village

The one that made downtown feel like a private club again, twenty years ago, and somehow still does. Persian rugs, an old Steinway in the lobby that nobody asks you not to play, waiters who remember your drink after one visit. Gemma is downstairs if you don’t feel like going out. And you won’t feel like going out. That’s the trick of the place. It gives you every reason to stay in.

Hotel Chelsea

222 West 23rd Street, Chelsea

They spent about a decade renovating it, and everyone has an opinion about whether it’s still the Chelsea. What’s not up for debate is the building. You can feel the ghosts in the hallways. Dylan wrote here. Warhol filmed here. Patti Smith paid for her room with a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph. That’s the tax you pay for staying somewhere that mattered. It matters back.

The Standard, East Village

25 Cooper Square, East Village

The younger, cooler cousin to the High Line Standard. Smaller rooms, better neighborhood. Two blocks from the Public Theater on one side, three blocks from Veselka on the other. You could stay a week and not run out of things to walk to. The rooftop is a well-kept secret, mostly by the guests who don’t want you knowing about it.

The Moore

300 West 22nd Street, Chelsea

The kind of hotel you find and immediately want to keep to yourself. Vanessa Guilford did the interiors, and she did them beautifully, but the real move at The Moore is the rooftop wine bar most guests don’t know about until they check in. Cafe Moore downstairs handles your morning. Between the two, you might not need the city until dinner.

Wildair

142 Orchard Street, Lower East Side

Small, loud, and honest about being both. The natural wine list gets talked about more than it deserves — the food is why you’re really there. Get the beef tartare. Get whatever the pastry chef is doing that week and don’t ask what it is. The reservations are the hard part. Set an alarm. It’s worth it.

Frenchette

241 West Broadway, Tribeca

Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson used to run the kitchen at Balthazar, and Frenchette is what happens when the two of them do their own thing. A brasserie the way brasseries are supposed to be. Come early, sit at the bar, order the escargot and a glass of something red. Somewhere between the second course and the third, you’ll realize you’ve been quietly having one of the best nights of the year.

Estela

47 East Houston Street, Nolita

Ignacio Mattos opened this room a decade ago and changed how downtown thought about food. The endive with anchovy and walnut oil is still there. It should be on a plaque. You go up a small staircase into a narrow room that feels like a wine bar in Barcelona, and you leave three hours later trying to explain to someone what you just ate.

Le Dive

189 East Broadway, Lower East Side

A French wine bar on East Broadway with a short menu and a list that goes on for pages. You show up thinking you’ll have one glass. You never have one glass. The bread service is worth the walk. The room is worth the walk. Everything about Le Dive is worth the walk.

Corner Bar

60 Canal Street, Two Bridges

Ignacio Mattos again, this time in the old Jarmulowsky Bank at Nine Orchard. The dining room used to house a bank vault, which is the kind of detail that would feel gimmicky anywhere else and feels perfect here. It’s a neighborhood restaurant that isn’t really in a neighborhood — Two Bridges is still figuring out what it wants to be — but you go anyway, because the food is that good. Ask about the burger. They pretend they don’t have one. They do.

Kiki’s

130 Division Street, Lower East Side

Greek. Cash only. No reservations. You wait outside sometimes for over an hour, and you’ll do it more than once. The lamb is the reason. The lemon potatoes are the reason. The whole thing is the reason. You bring people who don’t know Kiki’s yet just to watch them figure it out.

Attaboy

134 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side

No menu, no sign, unmarked door on Eldridge. You tell the bartender what you like, and they make you something you didn’t know you wanted. It’s the kind of place that a lot of bars have tried to copy and none of them quite get. The trick is that the bartenders here actually listen.

Please Don’t Tell

113 St. Marks Place, East Village

Enter through the phone booth in Crif Dogs. Yes, still. The joke is nearly twenty years old at this point and it still works, because the drinks are still that good. It’s the kind of bar you take out-of-town friends to when you want to briefly show off that you live here.

Bemelmans Bar

35 East 76th Street, Upper East Side

Uptown, and worth breaking every rule of a downtown guide to send you there anyway. Ludwig Bemelmans painted the murals in exchange for a year and a half of room and board at the Carlyle. Order a martini. Listen to whoever’s playing piano. For about forty-five minutes, you’ll feel like you’re in a better movie than the one you’re actually in. Nothing else in New York does that quite the same way.

Death & Co

433 East 6th Street, East Village

The room that trained half the bartenders in New York, and possibly a quarter of the ones in the rest of the country. Still worth going. The move is to skip the menu and ask the bartender what they’ve been playing with. They’ll tell you.

Ray’s

177 Chrystie Street, Lower East Side

A dive bar in the affectionate sense. Cheap beer, a jukebox that someone loves, hot dogs for two dollars. You go before Wildair. You go after Attaboy. You go on a Tuesday for no reason. It’s the neighborhood bar every neighborhood needs, and Chrystie Street somehow ended up with it.

Abraço

81 East 7th Street, East Village

There’s no seating. That’s part of the deal. You order an espresso and an olive oil cake at the counter, you stand at the little window shelf, and you watch East 7th Street wake up. They’ve been doing it exactly like this since 2007 and there’s no reason to change it.

Devoción

25 East 20th Street, Flatiron

Colombian coffee, roasted in Brooklyn, served in the most photographed café in Manhattan. The Flatiron location is smaller and easier to slip into while wandering. Grab a spot by the plants, order a cortado, watch a photographer at the next table trying not to look like a photographer.

Ludlow Coffee Supply

176 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side

If the Ludlow Hotel opened a coffee shop, this is roughly what they’d open. Corner windows, quiet mornings, pastries that don’t try too hard. The kind of place where you tell yourself you’ll only stop in for ten minutes and end up staying an hour with a book you didn’t know you needed.

Walk the Elevated Acre

55 Water Street, Financial District

One acre of park, sixty feet above street level, tucked between two office towers on Water Street. Almost nobody knows it’s there. Take the escalator up, find a bench facing the harbor, and sit for a while. New York’s best free view is a public secret.

The Morgan Library

225 Madison Avenue, Murray Hill

J.P. Morgan’s personal library, still arranged more or less the way he left it. Three floors of illuminated manuscripts, a Gutenberg Bible, and one of the most beautiful reading rooms in America. The rotating exhibits are always worth timing a visit around. Go on a rainy afternoon. That’s when it does its best work.

The Whitney Museum

99 Gansevoort Street, Meatpacking District

Renzo Piano built it, and even if you’re not much for art, the building alone is a reason to go. The permanent collection is deep, but the real move is the outdoor terraces. Late afternoon, low sun, Hudson River. You could go once a month and it would still surprise you.

Katz’s Delicatessen

205 East Houston Street, Lower East Side

Yes, it’s touristy. Go anyway. A pastrami on rye at Katz’s is not really a meal, it’s a piece of New York with a pickle on the side. Go late at night, when the tourists are gone and it’s just people who came here on purpose. Bring cash. Tip the counterman.

The Public Theater

425 Lafayette Street, East Village

Joe Papp built the Public in the ‘60s and it’s still doing exactly what it was built to do. The theater itself is beautiful, the programming is genuinely good, and if you can catch a Shakespeare in the Park transfer, do. Even the lobby feels like an event.

A Walk Down Elizabeth Street

Elizabeth Street between Houston and Prince, Nolita

Not a destination. A walk. Five blocks of the Nolita that still exists between the newer boutiques. Start with a coffee at Sant Ambroeus. End with a book at McNally Jackson. The rest of the walk is the point. Do it in the fall if you can.

McNally Jackson

52 Prince Street, Nolita

The best-organized independent bookstore in New York, and probably the friendliest. They organize by country of origin, which sounds like a gimmick until you find yourself pulling a Japanese novel off the shelf next to a French thriller. The café inside is a real reading spot, not a photo op. You’ll leave with more books than you came in for. Every time.

Dashwood Books

33 Bond Street, NoHo

A basement photography bookstore on Bond Street, hidden well enough that you have to know it’s there. David Strettell has been curating rare and limited-edition photography books since 2005. The kind of place that feels like a museum you can shop in. Even if you don’t collect photography, you’ll want to after.

The Six Bells

211 Elizabeth Street, Nolita

A British countryside design shop in the middle of downtown Manhattan. Ceramics, textiles, cookware, gardening tools. It’s the closest you can get to a five-minute weekend in the English countryside without leaving the island. You go in for candles and leave with a set of enamel plates.

John Derian

6 East 2nd Street, East Village

Découpage plates, French antiques, oddities. The most beautiful shop in the East Village and arguably in all of Manhattan. Even if you don’t buy anything — and you probably will — the browse is the whole point. Give yourself an hour. Come without a plan.

Fort Standard

Available at March, 30 East 20th Street, Flatiron

The Brooklyn-based furniture and homewares studio whose pieces have quietly ended up in a lot of the boutique hotels you already love. You may have seen their brass hardware on a door somewhere and wondered who made it. Now you know. Their pieces are stocked at March in the Flatiron if you want to see them in person.