manhattan food recs

  
1. Cienfuegos, East Village: amazing dark & stormy cocktails with homemade ginger beer; crispy avocado with guava habañero; excellent atmosphere. Yes, the cocktails are expensive. Yes, they are worth every penny. Excuse the blurry picture of the crispy avocado. I would have taken another shot, but we were too busy devouring them.

2. Peels, Bowery: everything about the decor (bright natural light! pale wood!) appealed to me immensely. The food was not as amazing as I would have hoped, but it's a fantastic place to go hang out and linger over breakfast on a weekday. Weekend brunch is apparently crazy, so take advantage of being on vacation and go during the week.

3. Shake Shack, Madison Square Park: exactly what I had been craving for days. I got the bacon cheeseburger because, you know, sometimes you just need these things, but actually even for non-vegetarians I'd highly, highly recommend the portobello burger. That thing is a work of wonder stuffed with cheese. The cheese fries and the milkshakes are excellent as always, and the people watching/photobombing can be counted on to be excellent.

facades of manhattan

  
When you visit Manhattan, don't forget to look up. The facades in SoHo are particularly excellent.

brooklyn

Stephen and I spent parts of five days in NYC in early June. Here are a few shots from the wonderful Saturday we spent in Brooklyn, land of Smorgasburg and microbatch, locally sourced cat food. Bless hipsterland.

surrey

We rented a surrey bike with my grandmothers and biked around Stone Harbor for an hour in June. It was awesome.

eirlys

When I was home in June, my parents got a new dog! Her name is Eirlys, and she's a Welsh terrier. She was about nine weeks old in these pictures and pretty much looked like a ridiculous little bitey mop of fluff. She's starting to look more like a real dog now, but is no less bitey.

midd grad

My brother Conor's graduation from Middlebury College, with my parents, both surviving grandparents, and all of the kids plus significant others. We were quite the crowd rolling into small town Vermont restaurants. Particularly recommended, the Starry Night Café about half an hour north of Middlebury, where the food was excellent and watching Gran try Stephen's "Dark & Starry" cocktail, a dark & stormy knockoff so similar to paint thinner that we all passed it around the table ("This is awful, you need to try it!"), was one of the best things I saw all trip ("Woohoohoo! That is strong!").

boston, briefly

     
On the way to my brother Conor's college graduation, Stephen and I spent a couple of nights at Megan's house in Somerville. She kindly showed us around Boston (I loved Beacon Hill -- that ivy! those houses!), fed us ridiculousness from Union Square Donuts and the greatest egg/avocado breakfast sandwich I've had in a while from Bloc 11 Cafe and cannolis, and accompanied us to what was possibly the most miserable baseball game I have ever been to, weather-wise (and that is saying a lot, given there I went to that Phillies game in 2010 where it was too hot to drink beer). And then on top of all that she drove us to Vermont! Pretty excellent stuff.

berlin II: nhow berlin

Some shots from Friday and Sunday hanging out outside our hotel in Berlin. Our room looked like someone let their 7-year-old Barbie-obsessed daughter make all the design choices, but the bar sure did make some excellent cocktails. Pictured above: one of two Sunday afternoon Mai Tais before getting on a train back to FFM.

berlin I: the xx night and day

     
In the middle of May (so oh, you know, two full months ago?!), Tatjana, Joachim, Stephen, and I went to the xx's night + day festival . It was cold and rainy (though the days before and after were beautiful, of course!) but the location at Berliner Spreepark, which we nicknamed DDR Disney, was something else.