Passes the Test

Everyone who's really into one sport isn't particularly impressed with Paragon Sporting Goods on Broadway. I've heard complaints from runners, hikers, tennis players, golfers, etc. But it's the standard by which ALL OTHER places are compared; so when someone tells you, "oh, this tennis store is better than Paragon," what they're really saying is: "Paragon is by far the best general sporting goods store in NYC." If you're an absolute tennis nut, you'll like this other place better, but if not, then Paragon is where you should go." And, as it's one of the few places that sells the hard-to-obtain NYC tennis pass, it gets even more of my dollars each year. Paragon: the gold standard in sporting goods.

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Shopping , Bike Shops • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Party in a Pan

The Spanish know how to eat. Nibble on some tapas, sip some fantastic wine, and gorge on some homemade paella. It's hard to do this in New York, because the Spanish places are usually too old-school or too hip and popular. But Socarrat Paella Bar falls somewhere in the middle. Unlike the 1 Euro glasses of wine and 2 Euro tapas plates in Spain, Socarrat charges real NYC money. But that's fine. It may be a little high on an NFT budget, but it's still cheaper than a plane ticket to Madrid. Order some special tapas like Pimiento de Padron and whole grilled sardines. You can't really go wrong with any of the paella, but try the Arroz Negro since it's unlike anything else you'll find in the city. Near the end, they'll start scraping the "socarrat" from the bottom of your pan onto to your plate. This must be the sound of heaven.

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Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

1-800-ARISTON

Want to give flowers to someone you actually give a shit about? Ariston is the answer. Yes, of course you'll use 1-800-FLOWERS for all your knee-jerk flower-sending--Aunt Mable in Buttfuck, TX died? Call 1-800-FLOWERS. Someone's grandmother at the cubicle next to yours died? Call 1-800-FLOWERS. For everything else--i.e. giving flowers to someone whose relationship to yourself you actually value--get off your ass and go up to Ariston. Great staff, conveniently located in Flatiron/Chelsea, they've got flowers and orchids, and they know what they're doing. They're probably more expensive than 1-800-FLOWERS, but remember--you actually VALUE this person, right? So I say: it's about time you showed it!

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Shopping • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Poke, Shove, Repeat

Take a very nice thin baguette. Shove it on a pointed steel rod that sticks up from your commercial-grade grill (enter David Cronenberg) to warm it up. Pour some liquified truffle gruyere cheese in the hole the steel rod has made in the bagette (after it's warmed up), then shove in a beef, chicken, turkey, pork or (duh) lamb sausage. Wrap in aluminum foil. Serve to hungry Union Square daytime workers. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

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Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Mandoos and Don'ts

Mandoo are Korean dumplings. These mouthful-sized morsels are much like ravioli on the outside, and burst with Korean goodness on the inside. If you look in the window of Mandoo Bar on 32nd Street in K-Town, you can see the best mandoo in the city being made right before your eyes. Mandoo Bar’s combo platter ($12 for 12 pieces) will allow you to sample mandoo in three flavors: seafood, mixed vegetable, and pork. Dip your dumpling in soy sauce, and prepare to crave more mandoo during the week immediately following your first bite. The seating area of Mandoo Bar is clean and contemporary, but low on ambiance, and the dumplings are sometimes so fresh in-house that they arrive at the table a little too hot and watery. There are two excellent fixes for these probs: 1) take your mandoo across the street to the low-key La Quinta Hotel rooftop bar, and enjoy your food al fresco with a beer, or 2) have your mandoo delivered. The extra minutes allow your dumplings to cool slightly and congeal perfectly, and mandoo actually taste best when eaten in comfy clothes, in a dimly-lit apartment, directly before a Netflix.

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Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Land of Magic Pillows

Embroidery, chinoiserie, bluebirds and bell jars, well-tended gardens and well-traveled suitcases. This is the symbology of Anthropologie, masterful marketer of girlish dreams. Prices are moderate at this chain, whose best NYC location is in Union Square. Still, in lean times, it's hard to justify spending $30 on goose-shaped measuring cups, however adorable. That's where the SALE comes in. There's always a sale at Anthropologie. While the clothing tends to look washed-out and cheap by the time it hits the sale racks, home decor merchandise loses none of its charms when tossed willy-nilly into piles and bins on the store's lower level. Perhaps that's because most of it’s meant to look as if it were found at a rummage sale anyways. You'll find deep discounts on anything more than a month or so old ($15 for the geese!), but no item is more shockingly and reliably discounted than the "magic pillow." That's my name for the one pillow that can almost always be found here for $19.99, marked down from $80-$200. In a year, I have bought nine magic pillows, the most recent marked down from $148. I'll sleep well tonight on my bargain piece of never-never land.

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Shopping • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

It's Greek to Me

Having spent 4+ years as a resident of Astoria, I never go very long without eating Greek food. The Greeks do a fabulous job of grilling fish, for instance. They generally know how to cook lamb, which is one of God's Great Meat Gifts. They have a fried cheese dish called Saganaki that blows the mozzarella stick out of the water. They compete quite well with the Turks for the best taramosalata (caviar spread). The Greek Salad is almost always a safe bet. They overcook vegetables, but of course, so does every culture west of the Ural Mountains. All this as intro to Kellari's Parea (literal translation: Cellar's Gathering of Friends; don't ask), an excellent example of Greek cuisine in the Flatiron District. Recommended: the octopus (always a great way to tell if a Greek place knows their stuff), the grilled pompano (a fabulous fish from Florida), and, for the more adventuresome, "Yesterday's Lamb," a big mess of baby lamb that's been cooked in garlic overnight. Yum.

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Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Map Party: Saturday March 7, 4-6 pm

Attention lovers of cartography and map nerds everywhere. Not For Tourists is proud of the beautiful wall maps that they've sold on their website for years, and now we're happy to announce that Idlewild Books will be selling these works of art at their gorgeous shop on 19th Street. In celebration of this new partnership, Idlewild is hosting a fabulous party from 4-6 pm on Saturday March 7th. Come on down to one of the coolest bookstores in the city to see the NFT Wall Maps up close and personal. The first twenty people to buy an NFT Guidebook will get a Free Manhattan or Brooklyn Wall Map! All NFT Wall Maps will be 25% off and we'll be handing out lots of other free NFT swag. Plus, thanks to Bazaar de la Paz we'll be serving up organic, fair trade wine from the fine folks at Etica. Their motto: Drink like you give a damn!

RSVP to: events@idlewildbooks.com

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Bookstores , Shopping • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Eat, Pray, Love, Wallow

A very tasty, 24-hour smorgasbord of Korean thingamabobs (exotic!). I recommend the Gobdol Bibimbob but I MORESO recommend the GoongJoongDdukBoki. You decide. The accompanying banchan is served banchan-style: in multiples, containing kimchi and having the quality of tastiness. I'm not so into spiciness but I am an exception. Nonetheless, those requisite complimentary side dishes are way enticing in the taste bud department and when they beckon, I cannot refuse. What else? I'm not so into K-Town, but I like Kunjip a whole lot. Always busy, always (maniacally) efficient, always Korean. Kunjip: Reach for the stars, land on the fish cakes (the only place I want to land besides my bed... and my grave).

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Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Thrice the Agony

Not to be confused with the one in W-Burg, The Triple Crown is a dull, expensive West Side, sporty, crispy calamari, TV-watching wasteland masquerading as a bar. But The Triple Crown has its high points. For example, it effectively caters to expansive groups. And its employees are immaculately neat and disciplined. On the other hand, it gives you nothing for free. It does not, as far as I can see, offer any 2-for-1 drink specials though well-dressed, drunken middle-aged men in three-piece suits on boiling hot days have been known to buy rounds of drinks for gaggles of unsuspecting innocents. I do not heartily enjoy this place, nor do I find it worthwhile enough to hate. I get the nauseous feeling a lot of ho-hum Midtown/"Fashion District" businesspeople find a bland place like this comforting. The Triple Crown is situated on a block of 7th Avenue close to 12 million other vaguely Irish sporty he-man bars like Mustang Harry's and Bikini Bar that all blend together and do nothing interesting.

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Nightlife , Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

(Leg)Room With A View

Wall Street is crashing, the ice caps are melting, oil prices are on the rise again, and mayoral term limits are optional. Time to get out of New York for the weekend. So pack your crap and get to Penn Station! Nearly a half-century after the original structure was demolished, the claustrophobic corridors thick with the scent of Auntie Ann's continue to disappoint millions of passengers each year. The Amtrak-owned station services the Northeast Corridor and beyond, and there's no more picturesque time of year to experience life beyond Metropolis. Despite an economic/ecologic-inspired increase in passenger traffic, fares are still relatively cheap and rarely sell out. Less cramped than the bus, guilt-invoking than a rental car, or aggravating than flying, Amtrak has plenty of reason for resurgence. The train warms the hearts of the eco-conscious and the false-nostalgic alike. Too bad after your weekend away you end up back in Penn Station.

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Landmarks • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Mediocre Faded Brunch Spot #509

Unless you show up at The Coffee Shop at 12:30 on a Saturday afternoon, your experience has the potential of being pleasant. Otherwise, early-afternoon-on-the-weekend patrons should brace themselves. Brunch is a force of biblical proportions more intense than a plague of locusts—two million hung-over hipsters and villagers demanding ham and eggs—get ready for a side of self-flagellation along with your pancakes. The food is good once you get at it, though the efficiency of this process is contingent on your ability to get in with the hostess. If you're on her bad side, you'd be smart to order a bloody and a side of bacon while you watch every party that arrived after yours be seated first. And to answer the question you'll passive-aggressively ask yourself and your friends a thousand times before asking the hostess: that empty table for six in the corner is being held for the owner, who will never actually sit there in the three hours you spend in purgatory. Otherwise, the servers are solidly OK and the food is fine, though nothing to write home about. Come back later in the evening (or hell, why wait?) and grab a gin and tonic. They're heavy on the gin and help take the edge off a hellish brunch experience.

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Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Famoso Pizza

First opened nearly two decades ago, Family Famiglia packages itself firmly within the mythology of the American Dream. Four brothers come to the US; they grow up in New York; they find success in opening a pizzeria that they eventually successfully franchise. Of course, this isn't the only (or even original) FF location by a long-shot, but it’s my favorite. While there, spend some time looking at all of the grease-film-coated, framed pictures of celebrities they have on their walls and grab an amazing slice (or three) of pizza. During any sort of food-oriented hour, namely lunch or dinner, expect to fight a crowd for your slice. The lines, which move forward surprisingly quickly, amass so easily as every slice available here is excellent. The garlic knots, however, are a whole different story. Eat one of these atomized, garlic-infused dough-balls and you'll be sucking on packs of Trident in hopes of neutralizing your off-putting exhalations for months.

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Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Hot Dawgs

Do you know that line about truth being stranger than fiction? And have you seen Best in Show? I ask only because the 132nd Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show arrived in NYC this week. Which is a good thing: America’s second oldest sporting event (after the Kentucky Derby) is also one of its most entertaining. There's nothing finer than to revel in the silly delights of watching 20+ Old English Sheepdogs waggle about Madison Square Garden as their handlers–at least two per pup–follow nervously with combs, sprays, and all toys squeaky. Another lasting memory? The frisky young Basset Hound–long, large and in charge--who extended amorous post-show "greetings" to three separate women in the space of five minutes. Dogs will be dogs!

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Landmarks • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Abracadabra Superstore

Guarding Abracadabra’s threshold is a pile of eviscerated corpses, gargoyles, and the occasional iron maiden. All are made of old latex or plastic and look pretty well-loved, though they’re used primarily for display. They also serve as pretty good indicators of what you’ll find in the store: latex masks, battle axes, props, squibs, and whatever you’ll need to assemble a costume for Halloween, or any occasion, though the emphasis is squarely on the macabre. Rentable costumes for adults are downstairs, and the stairwell is usually lined with latex heads in various states of mutilation. There’s also a dummy vomiting into a bucket. Abracadabra supplies props and costumes for Saturday Night Live, Conan, Letterman—I overheard a manager discussing NBC’s account. For the layman, however, the store can be a bit difficult to navigate. I’ve only seen it tidy once: the managers took down some of the gorier artifacts right before Halloween, in anticipation for the soccer moms and their brood, who will inevitably spend the weeks leading up to the holiday torching the place. When the store is relatively organized, you begin to realize how much the disorder works in its favor.

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Shopping • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Jazz Record Center

While I’m not particularly knowledgeable about the jazz scene in New York—or anywhere else for that matter—I have acquaintances that are. During my indentured servitude, they sent me to the Jazz Record Center to pick up albums difficult to find at a chain retail outlet. The hard part was locating the store; the Jazz Record Center is situated in a large office building, surrounded by law firms and tech centers and directly across from Chelsea Television Studios. Note how Martha Stewart marked her territory across the southern wall. The Jazz Record Center, however, is completely inconspicuous. Take the elevator to the eighth floor, hook a right, and you’ll find a closed metal door, easily mistaken for a freight elevator or a broom closet. Inside is a small, three-room jazz center with a single employee listening to NPR. The staff doesn’t offer any assistance as their customers already know what they’re looking for. They have an eclectic and rather disorganized selection of LPs and CDs and a wide range of boxed sets, discographies, and biographies. Additionally, free copies of Jazz Improv NY and All About Jazz are available to keep interested parties abreast of live shows that week.

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Shopping • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

The Honey Crisp Apple

The countdown is on. We figure we’ve got about another eight weeks before we’ll have to say goodbye to the Honey Crisp apple, possibly the best thing ever grown on a tree. We've heard conflicting reports about its origins—mostly we hear it's a cross between a Macoun and a Honeygold, but I've also heard that it descends from the Pink Lady. (If you dear reader have any info about the mysterious Honey Crisp, feel free to send us an email.) Frankly, we don't really care where it comes from. We just care about getting our hands and teeth on as many of them as I can while their season lasts. It would be one thing if the Honey Crisp were just amazingly crunchy. Or if it were just enticingly sweet and slightly tart. Or if it were only delightfully juicy. But it's all of the above, and every fall we succumb to their deliciousness and, regardless of their price, eat them by the bagful. But why are we telling you this? We should be trying to keep them all to ourselves!

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Farmers Markets • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Craft

My first dinner at Craft was easily one of my most memorable meals, because it was the first time a dish had actually made me cry. Everything at dinner had been great: beet salad, quail, sweetbreads, potato gratin, Brussels sprouts with bacon. But then it was time for dessert, and when I saw there were doughnuts on the menu, I just knew that was the route I had to go. Upon my first bite tears instantaneously sprang to my eyes; it wasn’t just that the doughnut was deliciously hot and yeasty and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, but that perfect little doughnut was the culmination of a meal that started off great and got progressively better at every turn. It was also one of my first three-star dining experiences, and I was taken by the unstuffy homeyness of the space with its vast cherry wood tables and comforting lighting. I still love going back to Craft, especially with a group so we can order and share more dishes from the à la carte menu. But once in a while I’ll sneak in alone so I can have a whole order of doughnuts to myself.

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Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

Eleven Madison Park

On your way into Eleven Madison Park you might be tempted to make a detour across the street to the Shake Shack where you could buy twenty meals for what you might pay for one dinner at the Shack’s bigger, classier sister. But then you’d miss out on the warm, enthusiastic hospitality and the chance to dine sitting in black leather chairs on sleek marble floors under an impossibly high ceiling. And you wouldn’t be able to choose from the three prix fixe menus that hold the promise of course after course of beautifully executed dishes like suckling pig confit and the slightly overkill (but delicious nonetheless) foie gras terrine accompanied by foie gras crème brûlée . You’d also miss out on the expert service and the occasional edible surprise (like the pretty loaf of brioche we got as a take-home treat). And you wouldn’t have the opportunity to stop yourself from eating too much of the freshly baked olive bread with sweet, creamy butter. But if you find yourself still longing when dinner’s over—which is kind of hard to imagine—you can always swing by the Shack for a frozen custard when you leave.

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Restaurants • Flatiron / Lower Midtown

LES Ecology Center Composting Drop-Off Site

You’re going to the Union Square Greenmarket, but not just to pick up biodynamic yogurt from Hawthorne Farms or a sunflower millet loaf from Our Daily Bread; today you’re bringing a sack of peach pits, onion skins, and egg shells that you’ve been saving in your refrigerator all week. You’re closing the circle, dropping off compostable scraps to the Lower East Side Ecology Center’s stand at the market so they can be made into nitrogen-rich fertilizer and maybe someday contribute to the growing of more wholesome, organic eats. You’re treading a bit more lightly upon the earth. You are generating good karma. You are breathing deep, abdominal breaths. Say, do they sell granola at the Greenmarket, too?

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Farmers Markets • Flatiron / Lower Midtown