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Sunday Jazz Brunch
Join us for a groovy Sunday Jazz Brunch where smooth jazz with Boncellia Lewis, delectable food, and good vibes collide for a great timeAbout this EventSunday Jazz BrunchGet ready for an unforgettable Sunday Jazz
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DESI COMEDY NIGHT- ONE NIGHT STAND UP @230 FIFTH ROOFTOP BAR (NYC)
An evening filled with laughter, joy, fun with USA’s top desi comedians, VISHNU VAKA, RAJ BELANI & amp; SHIVANI DAVE @230 fifth rooftop barAbout this Event https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events10/banners/f96af2d
Towner Galaher Organ Trio
A fun night of jazz featuring Sedurah Avecmoi for Woman’s History MonthAbout this EventSeydurah makes you feel the blues deep down and raises you up. Join Patrick’s Place for the Seydura
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Entrepreneurs & Small Business Owners Networking @ The Sentry
If you are an entrepreneur, small business owner or business professional, this event is the perfect opportunity to get away from your desk.About this EventNetworking for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, and Start Ups
Jamaican Jazzmatazz with Derrick Barnett
Get ready to groove to rhythms of Jamaican Jazzmatazz with the incredible Derrick Barnett, its going to be an electrifying in-person eventAbout this EventJamaican Jazzmatazz with Derrick Barnett
https://allevents.in/new%20york/jamaican-jazzmatazz-with-derrick-barnett/10000800425011757
Cloud 9 Sensual Bachata Social
February 24. Saturday. 9pm-2amSophisticated and stylish Bachatwins are taking over CLOUD 9 !!Bachata SENSUAL music ALL night by DJ R Open level class by Dani 9-10pmA chance to win 2 Pas
https://allevents.in/new%20york/cloud-9-sensual-bachata-social/80007598026468
Laura Kim Is Running on Sugar and Jamón
As the creative director at both Oscar de la Renta and Monse (where she is also a co-founder), Laura Kim has a lot on her mind. But lately, her thoughts have been occupied by aliens: “They’re a big theme for our fall collection,” she says. “Are they here? Are they not here? It’s something that spooks me a lot.” One thing she was thinking about a little less than usual during the frenzy of Fashion Week was trying to keep a healthy diet: “You got me on the right week,” she says. “Sometimes I’m like, Oh, I’m going to be vegan, but nope — not during Fashion Week.”
Saturday, February 10
Today my brand, Monse, has our Fashion Week show. My mom always comes and stays with me for NYFW, which is the best. She makes me a beet juice with grapefruit and ginger.
Usually, I have a very healthful diet filled with vegetables. But I also really have a sweet tooth and love pastries. I run to Lodi to get coffee, orange juice, and their giant bombolone. Feels like I’m in Italy for a second.
I head upstairs to get as much work done as I can before the show. I’m sick, and I’m upset about it because I’m never sick. I think I overdid it, to be honest. I worked too much and sometimes you don’t calculate the mental stress into how much you do, and I don’t really feel the stress because I think my brain blocks it — so it hits you and you’re not expecting it. I’m doing DayQuil and water backstage. I also have two coffees from Café Grumpy. I’m grumpy at work, so everyone’s like, that’s funny.
Around 4:30, I run back down to Lodi to do the seating for dinner. I wasn’t going to have a drink, but I see the people next to me having a martini and it comes on such a pretty plate. I’m like, I want what they’re having. And I have some buckwheat carrot cake with it. I’m literally only consuming sugar.
It’s showtime! We paired a theme of aliens with inspiration from old tapestries from the 1700s. From far away, many of the pieces look like a classic tapestry fabric, but if you look closely, there’s a little alien UFO landing. This is the first show that I personally raised money for, so I am feeling very accomplished and proud. I walk the runway with my business partner Fernando and do a few press interviews, and then go to meet friends at Naro. I’m still feeling a little sick, but I am running on adrenaline and happy to celebrate the collection.
Next, we’re hosting a party for the collection at the Bazaar at the Ritz-Carlton in Nomad. I love the Spanish ham — the leg — they have on display. The guy carving it is really handsome. I take a few bites, but I don’t get to eat too much because I don’t want to take off my mask and reveal my germs.
Everyone knows I’m sick, and Daisy, who works at the Ritz, is constantly delivering me tea and hot toddies through the night. It’s so nice.
Sunday, February 11
I sleep pretty late and go to breakfast with my boyfriend at La Mercerie because we live nearby and we go there almost every weekend. I just want to live there. They also allow dogs, so we take our dog, King. They may not know my name here, but they know King. We always order the same thing, so we don’t even look at the menu: crêpe complète, which is a buckwheat crêpe with a sunny side-up egg, ham, and cheese, and a green salad.
From there, I head to the Oscar de la Renta offices to finish the collection. We order Le Botaniste takeout at the office. I have chili that tastes like meat but is completely vegan. I also have a mushroom coffee and a turmeric-onion pickle. I eat the whole bowl of that, and it probably doesn’t smell great, but oh well.
For dinner, I go back to Naro with my business partner Fernando. It’s run by my favorite restaurateurs in the world. Another restaurant of theirs, Atomix, is my favorite restaurant in the world. I just can’t find anything else that i like better. Naro is such a cute restaurant, they have amazing food, and they’re one subway stop from the Oscar office.
We have tangpyeong-chae (mung-bean jelly salad), gamtae roll (my favorite seaweed made into a roll), king salmon bibimbap with uni, and a Korean pear dessert.
Monday, February 12
I’m still feeling super sick, so I stay home. I never take a day off, but I’m dying sick, so I stay home on the couch. I get takeout pastries, which I never do. I also order a tabbouleh grain bowl with smoked salmon that I’ll have for lunch and a mushroom toast. I won’t eat all of it; I am definitely ordering for three people.
I’m not very good at sitting and watching TV, so I just work on my phone all day. It was so nice not to leave the apartment all day, so I think that cures me a little bit.
I’m too tired to cook, so I take my boyfriend out for dinner at Ma.Dé. We order lobster dumplings, which come with caviar on top, and a yuzu martini, which comes with caviar on the side. I always sit in the window seat here, which I love even in the winter.
Before bed, I have Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, my favorite, and watch about 15 minutes of a Korean drama. I try to do that so I don’t dream about work. I’d rather dream about someone falling in love than have fashion nightmares about chasing my samples.
Tuesday, February 13
When it’s not Fashion Week, I make sure we eat lots of color. My mom always says that you have to eat the rainbow to get all your different vitamins. So I usually pick a color every day of the week. This week I only did it once: I make a green crêpe by blending spinach with flour, egg, and water. I put egg and avocado and different kinds of greens in it, and we drink green juice. I head to work for a little bit to keep finalizing the collection.
I have dinner with Ezra, my best friend, and my business partner Fernando, at Le Rock. It’s early, so we don’t do a main course. We have a seafood platter, caviar dip, and their amazing baguettes. One of my favorite things at French restaurants is the radishes with salt and butter. I don’t know what it is about it — I just love it so much. The person who introduced me to it was super French. She was like, Oh, in France we don’t need fries because this is what we eat. She was making fun of me because I eat so many French fries. We had some Champagne, too — it really feels like Paris there.
After that, we get on the subway to go to a Vogue party at Temple Bar. I’m a subway girl — there’s no way I’m taking a cab at six o’clock.
The party is super fun. Fashion Week is like riding a fashion bus every day — you see same people and go to the same parties. I love seeing what people are wearing because people are dressing extra, so it’s very inspiring.
I leave the Vogue party early and have a pretty chill evening. Everyone else goes to another dinner, and I come home and play with King and eat a bunch of Pocky. I love synthetic strawberry flavor — there’s a smell to it, and it’s almost bad how much I like that.
Wednesday, February 14
It’s Valentine’s Day. My boyfriend and I love making quiche at home. I bought a heart-shaped mold for Valentine’s last year, but I still have it. I make him a heart-shaped quiche and put chopped tomato on top to make it red.
Paris Hilton did this Walmart collab, which is apparently doing so well. It’s a whole kitchen set, all pink. She sent everything to me, so I made a pineapple Bundt cake in the pink mold. That’s just for me.
My boyfriend hates going out to dinner on Valentine’s Day because it’s all couples holding hands. He just refuses to go out, but we don’t want to cook either, so I pick up a plate of jamón at Despaña for us. It’s so expensive! I was expecting it to be around $30, and they’re like, Oh, it’s $100. It really made me appreciate the Ritz dinner where they were carving it all night. I get that with some cheese and baguette for our ham dinner.
I have some of my pink pineapple Bundt cake for dessert, along with some Ladurée cake that my boyfriend gives me for Valentine’s Day. Then we play ball with King before bed because he’s a little sports boy.
Small Business / Entrepreneurs / Start Ups Networking Mixer: NYC Networking
Mix and mingle with entrepreneurs, small business owners, executives, professionals, freelancers and everyone in between.About this EventNetworking for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, and Start Up
Alma Negra Is a Perfect Neighborhood Restaurant
In the frenzy of ongoing openings, between the highly publicized new chapters from name-brand megachefs and whispered, word-of-mouth semi-private debuts stoking curiosity (hello, Frog Club!), there is a gap a mile wide. A hardworking restaurant critic can go out every night, discreetly belch his way through the newest and the loudest hotspots, maintain ready answers to friends and strangers’ interrogations of “Where should we eat now?,” and still overlook some of the neighborhood steadies whose Resy pages are not a source of constant frustration, who open quietly and serve excellent food night after night after night.
I am guilty. I am here to make amends. I have been to Jean-Georges’s new Park Avenue dining room, and I have occupied one of April Bloomfield’s 20 seats at Sailor. Having recommended both, let me now recommend an uninspiring stretch of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, hard by the tire shop and a nondescript liquor store. In an area I called Park Slope, until a Park Sloper of my acquaintance protested that the Gowanus dividing line is right down the middle of the avenue and we were west of it, stands Alma Negra, which opened in May 2002, during the long tail of the streetery era.
Inside, half of Alma Negra’s dining room is taken up by a long, wood-topped bar, around which orbit a bank of tables and a greenhouse’s worth of plant life. I never visited Alma Negra with more than a few hours’ notice, and I never encountered a problem or an attitude. Most important: I never had anything less than a very good meal.
Alma Negra is the third restaurant from Fermín Teco, who arrived in New York from Puebla, Mexico, in 2000 — the city has seen such a Poblano influx in the last few decades that it’s now called, in some corners, Puebla York — and began cooking at the kind of restaurants that teach a cook to be a chef, if not always a particularly novel or creative one. (He worked at Carmine’s, the Manhattan red-sauce tourist trap.) From there, he worked for Máximo Tejada at Rayuela and, in 2015, opened Amaranto in Bushwick. There, as at Alma Negra, he began cooking Mexican food that’s far older than what’s served at most of New York’s factory-line burritories—it’s Mayan as much as Mexican.
There’s no margarita on the colorful and extensive cocktail menu, and there doesn’t need to be. They’ll make you one if you want it, just like your local Irish pub will. There is guacamole listed among the entradas — a Mexican restaurateur probably can’t get away without it if they want to make payroll — and it’s fine, served with homemade fried tortillas. But why fill up when you could have a cool, spicy bowl of aguachile de tuna, a spoonable, cevicheish salad of nearly raw loin in an herby green broth with thin coins of jicama? Or one of Teco’s tamales, magically both dense and light in its ruddy bath of sikil pak, a smoky Mayan pumpkin-seed sauce? Unlike many traditional tamales, made with lard, Teco’s is vegan, which must be the secret to its soft touch. (It is also, like every dish save dessert, gluten free.)
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
Teco doesn’t skip steps. Down in the basement, he nixtamalizes his own corn — imported from Mexico — and presses his own tortillas, not in batches but to order. They’re not actually listed on the menu, but you should order them anyway. They arrive swaddled in a napkin-lined basket, blue as a bruise and earthy as anything. They’re perfect for wrapping up short ribs, braised for five hours in huaxmole, a tart, funky sauce made from guaje, sometimes called river tamarind. There is very little on the menu that I wouldn’t stick in one, authentic or not, like the pile of shrimp and squid atop vivid arroz verde, or the excellent octopus, a giant biceps whose bulk belies its tenderness, served in a peanut mole with an unexpectedly perfect complement of cauliflower.
Mexican food is never in short supply in this city, but at the moment, intriguing spots are coming fast and furious. I’m eager to try the newly opened Corima, from Fidel Caballero, in Chinatown, and Soledad, from Julian Medina, on the Upper East Side. Soon, I’m sure, I will, and the buzz and the rush of the latest will take hold again. But until then, I’m glad to have Alma Negra in my back pocket. On the nights I went — random weeknights — it filled up to a comfortable but not squashed fullness. I watched couples sipping mezcal and groups of three and four ordering dinner unhurriedly. I asked a Park Slope–dwelling colleague if he’d been, and he looked as though my asking left him confused. “Yeah, it’s good,” he said, furrowing his brow a little, and then, “Very good, actually.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Ignacio Mattos Is Leaving Corner Bar and Swan Room
When it opened during the summer of 2022, Ignacio Mattos’s Corner Bar marked the beginning of post-pandemic dining in Manhattan. The chef — at that point best known for his grilled foie gras and mushroom-topped ricotta dumplings at Estela, or the Roquefort burger at Altro Paradiso — took a hard swerve into room-service food, putting his spin on hotel staples like Niçoise salad, shrimp cocktail and steak au poivre. In the Times, critic Pete Wells wrote that it was “nobody’s idea of a cutting-edge restaurant.” It was good, and popular, though — plus the move was fitting, since the restaurant anchors the Nine Orchard hotel. But now, word arrives that Mattos is out, a rumor that’s been confirmed by the chef’s reps.
The hotel has been controversial since it opened — accused of amplifying gentrification in Chinatown, as well as killing the vibes at Clandestino — but Mattos’s attachment brought a great deal of buzz, regardless. Along with Corner Bar, he opened Swan Room, a cocktail bar which occupies a gilded room that looks like it could be used for an Age of Innocence shoot. Other plans didn’t fully materialize, though, namely the promised fine dining restaurant, Amado Grill. In April 2023, Eater NY reported that Mattos had killed the plan to focus on Corner Bar. But in December, he reportedly had a change of heart, and announced he would open it this year. Guess not!
No word from Nine Orchard, yet, on future plans.
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