(Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev for Grub Street)
On Saturday, the weather took a brief and unexpected turn into iced coffee territory and I found myself craving the city’s most delicious and instantly effective caffeinated beverage: the coffee seltzer at Northern Spy Food Co. But as fate would have it, the seven-year-old brunch standby had closed just days earlier. Somehow I had missed the heads up, a couple of weeks prior, from owners Christophe Hille and Chris Ronis.
(Photo: Courtesy of Yasmina Guerda)
Bar Omar, a new addition to Williamsburg’s bubbling culinary landscape, is a French-Algerian restaurant that forgoes the stereotypical Moroccan-style lamps and ornamental plates in favor of what co-owner Yasmina Guerda says is a “Brooklyn aesthetic”: natural wood paneling, a well-stocked, speakeasy-type bar, and a window-paneled front looking out onto Grand Street.
(Photos: Daniel Maurer)
The long vacant retail spaces at 51 Astor got a CVS back in December, and now the futuristic office building that’s home to Jeff Koons’s balloon rabbit is getting its latest tenant. Chopt, the self-described “creative salad company” with over a dozen locations around the city, opens Monday with a freebie giveaway. Now the busy bees working upstairs at IBM Watson won’t even have to cross the street and stoop to the salad bar at Ray’s Pizza Bagel Cafe in order to sling croutons down their gullet.
(Photo: Courtesy of VERBureau)
Who knew ice cream could be so socially charged? In an exhibit entitled “Who Owns the Cone?”, UK-based curatorial collective VERBureau is determined to dig past the frozen treat’s creamy vanilla exterior to reveal the socio-political history of ice cream and its preferred serving location of choice, the ice cream parlor. Starting this evening at 6pm, VERBureau is setting up at a project space in East Williamsburg. Installations by three artists, one from Brooklyn and the others from Glasgow, Scotland, will explore the social ramifications surrounding everyone’s favorite sugary concoction.
(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
Last night a man soliciting donations slashed a waiter in the face at Silver Spurs in Greenwich Village after he was kicked out of the restaurant. [NY Daily News]
Pet NV, a Bushwick pet shop previously slapped with cockfighting and animal cruelty charges, was subject of an ASPCA search warrant yesterday. [Bushwick Daily]
Former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who will be sentenced on federal corruption charges on April 13, was photographed purchasing Raisin Bran at the LES Rite Aid yesterday afternoon. [Bowery Boogie]
Wiliamsburg Common apartment (Photo by Sophie Wilkinson)
During a recent trip backpacking through Thailand, Kamilah Gray was taken with the experience of meeting new friends at hostels. So, once the 25-year-old got back in New York she Googled “adult dorm” on a whim and found Common.
It’s not exactly a dorm, she says, but it’s definitely a change in lifestyle. Three weeks ago, she moved into one of the start-up’s Crown Heights locations, where she pays $1,540 a month for a small bedroom that comes with a host of perks: a mattress, linens, free laundry and housekeeping, and, above all, a sense of belonging with her 18 new housemates– something that had been hard to achieve during her three years as a New Yorker.
10 Montieth rendering via ODA New York
Hot on the heels of the new “Bushwick-inspired” hotel, a quiet corner of the neighborhood is about to get a futuristic makeover. Just take a look at the ODA New York-designed building coming to 10 Montieth, part of the old Rheingold Brewery property. When it opens, residents will be able to skate right across the street to their jobs at a slick new office building coming to the area, 95 Evergreen.
(Courtesy of The Hollows)
We’ve got plenty of ideas for Valentine’s weekend, but none of them are quite as romantic as an escape to the Catskills. If this were Don Draper’s day, you could drive a couple of hours up to Liberty, New York, where Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel once stood. But since this is the year 2016 and the hotel is rotting away, you should do the next best thing by heading to “The Resort,” a show at The Hollows that will bring a taste of those Borscht Belt glory days to Bushwick.
(Photo: Nicole Disser)
If things had gone as planned, the St. Mark’s Bookshop would’ve been closed for good by now. But the store has received a stay of execution and is still holding out, selling off its books at half-price while hoping for a miracle– or at least more investors to join the two who have already stepped up. Still, with new information surfacing about the plan for a St. Mark’s redux, it’s not looking good. Asked how long he thought the store had, owner Bob Contant guessed, “We might be here until the end of the month.”
