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The first time I interviewed David Korins for Time Out, in 2005, he was a rising Off Broadway talent on the verge of his very first Broadway show. In the years since then, he has emerged as perhaps the preeminent theatrical set designer of his generation: He’s the man behind the scenes of Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Beetlejuice and the current revival of The Who’s Tommy, to name just a few of his two dozen Broadway credits. But none of his past projects have been quite as spectacular as what he created last summer for Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s musical portrait of the morally compromised Filipina First Lady Imelda Marcos. Working with director Alex Timbers, Korins shaped the production in multiple incarnations over the course of more than a decade before arriving at the massive Broadway Theatre, which Here Lies Love transformed completely from a traditional proscenium space into an immersive nightclub experience. This was set design on an unprecedented scale: groundbreaking, radical and thrilling. Korins has somehow never won a Tony Award for his work, but now he has been nominated again. Here Lies Love closed in November, but if Tony voters have any sense, this should be his year. 

For all his success, Korins seems to have remained fundamentally the same as he was 20 years ago: candid, articulate, friendly and passionate about his creative endeavors. In this interview at his apartment, we talked about his astounding work on Here Lies Love as well as his career, his design philosophy and his feelings about the Tony race. As a bonus, he took me on a tour through the process behind some of his past projects. 

I hate the April crush on Broadway, but I do feel like Here Lies Love would’ve had a better shot of getting Tony nominations, for whatever that’s worth, had it opened later in the year.
Me too. Here Lies Love has sort of dropped out of the consciousness a little, but it is one of the shows—and I’ve worked on a couple, Passing Strange being one of them—where people find me and tell me how important it was for them. People passionately remember all the different iterations, because we worked on this show for over a decade, and we had five pre-Broadway experiences: a workshop at Mass MoCA [the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art], two runs at the Public, a show in London and one in Seattle, each time getting better and better. I actually think that getting four nominations, given that it closed a year ago, is a testament to how deeply it penetrated the community, or the Zeitgeist. It’s an awards-y kind of show, but we opened in the summer. We fought and we jumped up and down about it, and we tried not to have that be the case. But, you know, we also took 12 and a half years to find a theater. We did a site exploration of almost every Broadway theater, and Alex Timbers and I went and pitched theater owners before we found the producers. We were trying to find a home for it. But when we did, we really didn’t have much of a choice about the summer. And it was also, I think, the longest load-in of any show in the history of Broadway. It’s unbelievably ambitious, that design. 

The logistics alone must have been very daunting. 
The effort of Here Lies Love was so deceptively complicated. Just the engineering of it. When you build a structure that 250 people sit on, and 315 people are inside the structure, and another 500 are behind the structure, and another 38 are underneath it—every single floor plan that we made had to be individually permitted with the city of New York, because every time it moved, the fire egress moved. How people could get in and out, life safety, ADA regulations, all those things—just the conversations with the architects alone was years before we even talked about design, materials, lighting, any of that stuff. Even just the removal of the front-of-house balcony rail, which we made into a catwalk; we had to make that be a weight-bearing catwalk for actors to be in and amongst the audience. I remember Alex and I were standing there looking down thinking, “I can’t believe the Shuberts gave us the keys to do this.” Like, we used to do this stuff downtown—figuring out these macro moves—but I couldn’t believe we were doing this in a Broadway theater. It was just insane. 

There are other shows with immersive elements on Broadway, but this was on a totally different level.
I think those are environmental, and ours was immersive. There’s a big difference between what happened at Here Lies Love and some other things that present as environmental. This was written into the DNA of the show. David Byrne saw Grace Jones pop up at Studio 54 on a platform amidst a crowd, and was like, “Huh! What a dynamic, interesting way to stage a performance,” and filed that away in his mental Rolodex. Then he saw a photo of Imelda and an arms dealer under a disco ball, and thought, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” And he went and did the research and wrote the show. So when the Public and Alex were gonna do the show, it was like: How can we literally cast the audience as a group at a wedding, at a funeral, at a protest, a riot, an election, whatever it was—and at a nightclub? How can we move seamlessly in and out of that? Will that even work? And for that not to be about a room that’s branded as a different experience or something, but to really be what the show is. The superstructure of the show was built around how we could make the people the pivot. I don’t think there’s ever been a show where people actually moved around like that on Broadway.

It’s hard to even imagine the show in a traditional proscenium staging, without that immersive element. 
And that’s the challenge. It’d be interesting to see what happens if David ever tried to produce the show again—if he would lose that. But when the producers signed on, they were audacious enough to honor the original idea of this thing, and not to try to make it more feasible for Broadway. 

Incorporating the audience is so central to the way the show works and what it is saying. 
It’s a really important show, I think, because it’s about the fragility of democracy and how close we come. What is brilliant about the writing is that it’s a complicated thing: You fall in love with the rags-to-riches story of this poor person who rises to extraordinary prominence and power but who then goes from being the protagonist to being the antagonist and ultimately the villain. It dupes the audience in an interesting way.

Here Lies Love is very Evita-ish, obviously, but in that way it reminded me a lot of what Alex did in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson—the way it builds the central character up in a fun way, and then takes a hard turn.
And it also hits differently to root for a dictator in 2024. We worked really hard to calibrate that. People were into it and having a really good time and then realized, “Wait a minute, I’m supposed to be against this person. I’m kind of complicit in this.”

Which is a complicated reaction. And that poses a bit of a marketing problem, I imagine. Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 ran into this trouble, too, because it was sold as a big party when it was mainly an ambitious adaptation of War and Peace. People got confused. And with Here Lies Love, a lot of the sales pitch was understandably like, “Come have a wild time in a big disco”—which is part of the show, but then it gets serious and people go, “Wait, what is this?” 
A hundred percent. You nailed it. It was hard even explaining to people the different ways in which they could possibly buy a ticket. I made all these renderings to kind of explain what a view might look like from the front mezzanine looking down into the box, or from a side looking down, or from the ground looking up. 

It didn’t run long, but I think of Here Lies Love as a great artistic success. 
Me, too. And, you know, what makes a show successful? With Here Lies Love, I would imagine they lost all their money, but artistically it was such a huge success, on every level. It redefined so many different things. It was so extraordinary to actualize the show at that level, especially since we started at Mass MoCA, pushing platforms around. So in that way it was such a beautiful experience. We maintained everyone, like the whole creative team plus all of our associates. It took so long. We all got so old! But everyone stayed. And everyone’s institutional knowledge was the only thing that allowed us to move to the next step. If we had to start over with any single discipline—like even where the quick-change booths are, or how the performers got in and around the space—we would’ve been in trouble. So we got really lucky in that way. And it was a home-run, extraordinary artistic success. But so much of Broadway is about commercial success and so much of what people think is successful is because of box-office numbers. 

One of the show’s four Tony nominations was for your design, which must feel good.
Honestly, my relationship to Tony nominations is very complicated. I’m just gonna say: I have been down this road before in such varied offerings, and I never really understand how you can quantify and assess one person’s contribution to a project. It’s the icky part of the business, because on the one hand it’s a beautiful, incredible honoring of an effort of work, but also you’re subjectively comparing artistic offerings.

And because of the nature of the beast, great work in shows that have closed or that were not otherwise well-received often end up being overlooked.
Yeah. I remember I was sitting there at the Tonys one year, and they called a name, and [another nominee] leaned in behind me and said, “They vote for most set design, not best set design.” But then again, I’ve also been there with the most set design! [Laughs.] So maybe it’s something else. I don’t know how it goes down, but it really does make me uncomfortable thinking about it. 

When you got nominated for the first time, for Hamilton, you’d already designed many shows on Broadway—but smaller shows, which are not what tend to get nominations.
Except for Chinglish. Actually, Chinglish is a really good example—Chinglish should have been nominated, you know? People said to me, “Oh my God, you’re gonna get nominated. You’re gonna win.” But at that moment in my life, I was blissfully ignorant of what all that was. I wish I could remain that way, to be honest. Now, I wake up and I watch the nominations because, you know, whether Tommy got a Best Musical Revival nomination or not was a really important thing for the business of the show. As an artist, I kind of hate that it’s important—but it is. 

I was just looking back at the first interview we did together back in 2005. We were talking about the seemingly simple swaths of black fabric that formed the background design for Thom Pain (based on nothing). You said: “Every single fold and dip in those panels was designed and sewn in. We hung up the fabric, we made it crooked—we made it look like it was sort of thrown together by the house staff very quickly. People walked in and said, ‘Oh my God, there are no production values.’ But that’s design! Nothing in this world is undesigned.”
That is the challenge of what we do. There are no economies of scale. I mean, okay, in this instance here, Here Lies Love actually was a harder design than Thom Pain. [Laughs.] But I do think that our job continues until the last second. There’s wet paint on every single first preview. Set designers at their best are co-conceivers of a space of how you’re gonna tell the story: interior designers, engineers, architects. There’s never a shortage in the level of detail. Whether it’s realistic or abstract, the way in which they get rendered on stage is unbelievably specific and detailed. I was doing a talk with a group just the other day, and of course they were talking about Beetlejuice and Hamilton. But I was saying that the greatest compliment I’ve ever received is from an actor saying, “When I step on stage and I look at this desk or I look at my prop, I know exactly who I am.” Because those are things that the audience never sees. They inform the performances and, through that, the way in which we attach to the show. 

Even in the case of those two shows, though, the design in Beetlejuice is a lot showier than it is in Hamilton. 
But Hamilton was no different. The thing that we didn’t know about Hamilton was whether people would be able to follow it at the tempo that Lin wrote. We had to find a way to focus their eyes—so you know who’s talking, so you can understand it. Even the shade of the bricks we used was important. The conversation with [costume designer] Paul Tazewell and [lighting designer] Howell Binkley about that specifically—the color tone of that. We were thinking about skin tone and lighting and costuming, and calibrating all of it. That wasn’t one hour-long meeting; that was weeks and weeks and weeks of conversation. We went through over 30 variations of the color of brick. And then it all kind of gets dismissed as, like, “Oh, yeah, cool bricks!” [Laughs.]

As though it were in a bare theater! Right. The shows on your Broadway résumé range from some of the most spectacular designs of the 21st century—like Here Lies Love and Pee-wee and Misery—to some, like Just for Us, that are about as minimal as can be imagined. So your approach does seem very show-specific.
You know, a long time ago—and maybe this is because I used to produce shows—I made a decision not to impose my design opinion upon what the show should be. I spent a lot of time producing shows with living playwrights. And I always felt the responsibility of sitting down with a playwright and saying, like, “Tell me about this stage direction. What is specifically going on in the room?” I remember David Henry Hwang said to me, “I have to be honest, I feel a little uncomfortable. No designer has ever asked me these questions. They just sort of…design.” But it’s all a collaboration: You’re building these worlds, you’re midwifing these things into existence. My goal was to not have someone walk in and say, “Oh, it’s a David Korins set.” Hamilton should look very different from Here Lies Love and Beetlejuice and Dear Evan Hansen and Pee-wee Herman, or it’s a problem. 

When you mention working with living playwrights, it strikes me that nearly all of your Broadway shows have been new works. Annie and Godspell and Tommy were revivals but even there, most of the authors were alive at the time. 
I don’t know any other way but to ask the playwrights. Because I’ve discovered that they might be writing about a parlor, but what they’re actually talking about is their specific childhood home. Or it’s set inside such-and-such a school, but actually it’s their own high school. So the best parts of mining the territory come through conversation and collaboration. I know that sounds kind of corny, but once you get people opening up to that experience, they realize, “Oh, I didn’t know it, but I was writing about my grandmother’s house.” I’ve experienced that often in the last 25 years. Go to the source. 

I want to talk a little bit about your work this year on Tommy, too, because I think that production was underrepresented in the nominations. That’s partly because of overcrowding, but I also suspect that the fact that it was directed by Des McAnuff, who also directed it 30 years ago, gave people the incorrect impression that it was a retread of the original production. 
Getting the phone call to work on Tommy was a bit of an out-of-body experience. I didn’t see the original, but you can’t work in technical theater without knowing that it looms extraordinarily high in the pantheon of great, needle-moving shows. So when Des called me, I felt like I had an insider secret: Oh my God, you’re doing a revival of Tommy? This is so exciting! That was about five and a half years ago. And Des said, “I know what works in the show, and I know what doesn’t work. But I’m also completely open to wiping the slate clean.” That’s a pretty big deal. Can you imagine Tommy Kail reconceiving Hamilton or Alex Timbers reconceiving Moulin Rouge? I was like, Really? You want to just start over? And he did! And I felt honored that he would ask me, because it’s such a seminal show. We immediately talked about [projections designer] Peter Nigrini, and we immediately talked about Howell [Binkley] lighting it—at the time Howell was alive, but it became clear that he wasn’t gonna be healthy enough to do the show, but Amanda [Zieve] was his acolyte. In a way it was a blessing that the pandemic happened because we got to sit at that dining room table and storyboard the show piece by bloody piece. Des had the rigor to show up at every meeting and throw out what he did originally. That show has a lot of visual firepower—and, I’m told, very differently than the original.   

The tech of it alone seems incredibly complex.
It’s interesting, because Tommy sort of takes place in the future at times, and this design was not possible even six months ago. Those light bars are things that I’ve dreamt up and contemplated for years—and now, due to technical advancements, we can actually put them into the show. And it’s the same thing with those flying panels, those Muxwave panel—it’s basically a piece of glass with LED nodes inside of it, so it’s completely see-through, or it can have content all over it. It’s kind of like the world’s most advanced version of a scrim, where you could front-project it and have an image or then it could be see-through. I think it’s how advertisements will happen in the future. There’ll be windows, and then on the windows you’ll see video content. It’s the first time it’s ever been used on Broadway. It wasn’t even available when we were doing the show at the Goodman. That’s how new it is. It’s never happened before. So it’s kind of like the design is living in the future. And nothing moves faster than light and video, right? The whole thing is kind of a magical, three-dimensional, dynamic, glowing Mondrian thing. And I actually think the show is more powerful now than probably it was in 1993, because we’ve all just suffered and still suffer from this incredible trauma—this trauma about isolation. And so the most powerful moment in the show I think is the one where there’s no scenery: when the actors break the fourth wall and just stand there and sing “Listening to You.” It’s this human-connection moment. The hairs on my arms are standing up just as I tell you about it! The humanity of that wall of people and that sound smash through the isolation. And in the audience, people stand up and they stay up for the rest of the show. Consistently. And I feel like it’s a really good example of a completely cohesive collaboration. Direction, choreography, lighting, video, sound and scenery: You don’t know where one of them starts or leaves off for most of the show. 

I found it disappointing that Lorin Latarro wasn’t nominated for her choreography in this show.
I think it’s her best work! But who knows. As I said to Lorin and other people on the day of the nominations: We have no idea. It could have been that Tommy was one vote away from having 13 nominations. We really have no idea really how that goes. And frankly, I think if you get caught up in that—having been a person who’s been caught up in that…you just can’t. 

I feel like there’s sometimes a weird dynamic where the most obvious candidate doesn’t get nominated because everyone on the committee thinks they’re gonna be nominated by someone else. It’s a complicated thing.
And I think people think I have 10 Tony Awards! [Laughs.] Every single person that congratulated me—almost to a person—was like, “Congratulations, but you already have so many, right?” And then you have this sad moment where you have to tell them—where you have to spend the next six weeks telling people how you actually don’t have Tony Awards.

The Who’s Tommy is playing at the Nederlander Theatre. You can buy tickets here. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

BONUS: A PEEK AT DAVID KORINS’S PROCESS

Hamilton:
“This is kind of a microcosm of how a show is put together. This is the original script when it was called Hamilton Mixtape. And these were things that I wrote down in my interview with Tommy Kail. Bad idea, bad idea—but there’s the Winter’s Ball, and there’s the double turntable.”

“Another bunch of bad ideas: a dirt floor, a big piece of parchment with a crow’s nest, a huge column monument that was going to be part of an ending to the show that we didn’t go with. But there’s “Helpless”/”Satisfied,” there are the candle wagons—that’s kind of ultimately what it becomes.”

“We actually built a six-foot-diameter reflecting pool, but only 600 people in the world ever saw it. Eliza crossed a bridge over the water to be rejoined with Alexander and they stood there in this beautiful glowing light. We had it in three previews and then Tommy cut it, because the question people were asking at the end of the show was not ‘Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story’—it was, ‘Is that real water? Was that there the whole time? Like in the turntable?’ So we drained it and we let it sit there for the rest of the Public run. [Otherwise] it’s the same set [as Broadway]. It’s a little taller and wider, but the scaffolding at the bottom is literally from the Public. I etched my daughter’s initials into the set, and they’re still there!”

Dear Evan Hansen: 
“On Dear Evan Hansen, I took a piece of paper and I folded it up into sixteenths. While I saw Ben [Platt] do the original reading of the show, I did 16 little tiny sketches—all of these. And then in my first meeting with Michael Greif, I opened it up and said, ‘Here are 16 things I drew.’ And he went, ‘Hmm, what’s that one?’ I mean, look at that: a little disc with a little windchime of stuff. And that’s what became the set.” 

Beetlejuice:
“Here’s the Beetlejuice process. It’s the same thing: It starts with the research, then a really bad first version, then the sketches get refined.”

The 94th Academy Awards: 
“The slap happened and I get a phone call the next morning, not from one person but from 38 journalists saying, ‘Do you think that your immersive design…’—because we took out all the seats—’Do you think that your design contributed to the ease with which Will Smith was able to get to the stage and hit Chris Rock?’ And I was like, This is…a no comment moment. Can you imagine? I was like, Am I going to be pinned for this? I’m sure Will Smith would’ve been on an aisle anyway.” [He laughs.]

* This article was originally published here

Chef Annisha Garcia—who TV cooking competition fans will remember as a two-time Chopped champion—is bringing the burrito stylings of Northern Mexico to downtown Manhattan with Son Del North, a new fast-casual concept debuting on the Lower East Side on Thursday, June 13.  

RECOMMENDED: The best Mexican restaurants in NYC for guacamole, house-made tortillas and margaritas

At 177 Orchard Street, the Tijuana native pays homage to the culinary traditions of the country’s northern region via burritos that have no rice, just beans and high-quality proteins, all wrapped in a large Sonoran flour tortilla. Among your choice of fillings are a classic Carne Asada (grilled steak with salsa roja and grilled onions, for $15)—inspired by Sonora’s famously meaty burro percherón—as well as a Camaron Ranchero (shrimp with pico de gallo and salsa roja, for $16) and a vegan option made with cauliflower “chorizo,” potatoes and salsa verde ($13). 

Along with a handful of burrito options, the quick-service restaurant also doles out traditional sides and toppings like heirloom totopos, escabeche, house-made refried beans, guacamole and salsas, and “SDN Dipping Sauce” (a creamy roasted green chili blend), as well as drinks like aguas frescas and Mexican sodas.

To celebrate the restaurant’s grand opening on June 13, Son Del North will offer half-price burritos this Thursday from 3pm to 6pm, with a limit of one per customer.

And the team is seemingly already planning for more locations of the burrito concept: per a Culinary Agents listing, Garcia and Co. are looking to open a second location this fall in the West Village. (“We thrive on good burritos and great hospitality,” they promise.)   

Check out some of those good-looking burritos for yourself below before the grand opening of Son Del North on Thursday. 

* This article was originally published here

Whether you prefer it shaken or stirred, you can’t deny the classic elegance of a martini. So this June we’ve got our eye on one specific date: Wednesday, June 19th. Why, you may ask? Because it’s National Martini Day, of course!

But if you ask us a National Martini Day celebration deserves way more than gin, vermouth, and a lemon peel. That’s why we’re going beyond the classic recipe with dirty martini dip, tiny ‘tinis, and even caprese salad…in martini form. If you’d like to join us, check out our favorite classic martinis and martini-centric creations you can find around NYC:

Best Spots in NYC for a Classic Martini

For when there’s no time for frills–you want a martini and you want it now.

Gage & Tollner

Gage & Tollner opened in 1879 in downtown Brooklyn–arguably the borough’s oldest restaurant and bar–and considering they’ve been operating for nearly 150 years you know know they’ve gotten the classic martini down to perfection. Visitors can choose between vodka or gin.

372 Fulton St.

Le Crocodile

This French brasserie is one of NYC’s most beautiful restaurants, and beyond their mouthwatering French fare they’re also pouring an absolutely delicious classic martini made with Amalfi Coast Gin, Cucumber Botanical Vodka, dry vermouth, and lemon oil.

80 Wythe Ave.

The Long Island Bar

The exterior of The Long Island Bar may look like a neighborhood dive, but the bar has been open for decades and is a must-visit if you’re looking for a classic martini. Bartender Phil Ward, whose been here for nearly a decade, and is obsessed with martinis and martini derivatives so you just know it’ll be a good one!

110 Atlantic Ave.

Best Spots in NYC for a Dirty Martini

For when you’re looking to *add a bit of spice* and zhuzh up the classic martini.

Chez Zou

Located three floors above its sister restaurant Zou Zou’s, Chez Zou’s signature dirty martini, the Dirty Zou, combines Olive Oil Vodka and Grape Leaf/Dill Brine in a mouthwatering proportion, and serves it with Shankleesh Olives.

385 9th Ave.

Dante

Dante makes their dirty martini with Reyka Vodka, Cinzano 1757 dry, olive oil, and olive bitters, and they also add St. Germain, a French liqueur made with fresh elderflowers that adds such an interesting touch.

551 Hudson St.

Martini Pepperoncini – Bad Roman

Okay okay, so it’s not the dirty martini we’re all familiar with but it still deserves a spot on this list–Bad Roman’s Martini Pepperoncini. It may sound a bit weird to some but take it from us: don’t knock it til you try it because it’s pretty damn delicious. This iteration pairs Grey Goose, pepperoncini brine, and lemon zest into a perfectly balanced martini.

3rd floor, 10 Columbus Cir

Dirty Pickle Martini – The Bonnie

Aaaand since we included a pepperoncini martini we have to include this dirty martini iteration as well: the Dirty Pickle Martini at Astoria’s The Bonnie. This martini combines Breckenridge vodka with McClure’s pickles into what is a pickle lover’s dream cocktail.

29-12 23rd Ave.

Best Spots in NYC for an Espresso Martini

For when you’d like to sip on a martini but also have a long night of dancing under glittering disco balls ahead of you.

Kuroba Espresso Martini – Crave Sushi Bar

Not your average espresso martini, the Kuroba Espresso Martini at Crave Sushi Bar highlights unique Japanese ingredients. The martini features a black sesame syrup made in-house and black walnut bitters, which adds a rustic warmth to each sip.

947 Second Ave.

EO Espresso Martini – Employees Only

Landing the #15 spot on North America’s 50 Best Bars list, Employees Only has been called the “New Yorkiest” cocktail bar in the city, so they’re not only a must-visit in general, but they’re also a must-visit for their espresso martini which combines Grey Goose Vodka shaken with fresh espresso and a hint of cinnamon.

510 Hudson St.

FREEHOLD

Considering FREEHOLD is an award-winning coffee shop by day, we’re not surprised that their espresso martini is out of this world. It’s made with Tito’s vodka and FREEHOLD’s famous house recipe (Counter Culture cold brew concentrate and Caffè Borghetti coffee liqueur) and topped with dark chocolate shavings. They also offer $2 oysters and $10 martinis every Wednesday!

45 S 3rd St., Brooklyn

American Bar

American Bar’s espresso martini is made with Grey Goose, espresso, and Caffe Lolita, a Mexican coffee liqueur which has hints of chocolate and seamlessly blends with the espresso flavor. It’s served extra cold, shaken or stirred. And once you’ve finished it you can also order a classic martini, pornstar martini, or lychee martini.

33 Greenwich Ave.

Best Spots in NYC for Unique Martini Creations

For when all the classic martini recipes we’ve come to know and love just aren’t doing it for you.

Dirty Martini Dip – Chelsea Living Room

Chelsea Living Room recently debuted in the heart of Chelsea serving as a supper club and lounge where they’re offering live music and a pianist, classic cocktails, and our favorite: Dirty Martini Dip. The dip is a lighthearted wink to the classic cocktail and is topped with sliced olives and served with an assortment of crackers. It’s super rich (in the best way possible), 1,000% worth ordering, and absolutely drool-worthy.

243 W 14th St.

Caprese Martini – Jac’s on Bond

Why just eat your caprese when you can drink it too?! This quintessential Italian antipasto, which combines fresh mozz, tomatoes, and sweet basil, is being served cocktail style over at Jac’s on Bond. The Caprese Martini combines olive oil, tomato, and basil-infused Grey Goose vodka with Lustau blanco, and balsamic vinegar–and what’s created is the most innovative cocktail we’ve seen in a while.

26 Bond St.

Cold A$$ Martini, Really Wet Martini, & more – Bar Bonobo

This sexy new cocktail bar that recently opened in Chelsea not only serves ’70’s Italian disco meets New York City, but they also serve several different riffs on the classic martini. There’s the Cold A$$ Martini made with Malfy Gin or Verita Vodka and Cinzano 1757 Dry Vermouth, the Really Wet Martini made with Malfy Gin, Cinzano 1757 Dry Vermouth, and charred scallions, and the CornStar Martini made with Verita Vodka, Chinola, and vanilla which comes with mouthwatering truffle popcorn, just to name a few!

184 8th Ave.

Vegemite Martinis – Ra-Ra Rhino

Ra-Ra Rhino is not only serving up funky and tropical vibes, but they’re also taking you down under with their totally unique Vegemite Martini, or aptly named the Vegemitini. The martini combines Vegemite-infused gin martini paired with Haku Vodka, Noilly Prat extra dry vermouth, and sherry. And they now offer a mini version of it during their happy hour along with their Ultimate Dirty Martini and Dill Martini!

1329 Willoughby Ave.

Compost Feta Brine Martini – Mr. Melo

Mr. Melo, a vibey, analog dance bar, opened its doors in Williamsburg this past December, but what really hooked us was their “compost cocktails.” No, they don’t have compost in them, rather they repurpose the byproducts from their kitchen into imaginative libations, such as their Feta Brine Martini which seamlessly combines Greek feta, olives, white vermouth, and Misguided vodka into the most delicious sip.

61 Withers St.

Tiny ‘Tinis – Tao Uptown

As part of Tao Uptown’s new happy hour available Monday through Friday from 5 pm to 7 pm, they’re pouring their already popular Tiny ‘Tini Flights for just $15. The flight includes a choice of three miniature martinis from their expansive list. Think: espresso, dirty, apple, and even lychee! Even more, the happy hour also includes dumplings for just $1!

42 E 58th St.

Best Spots in NYC for Happy Hour Martini Deals

For when you’re looking to sip on a martini–and maybe pair it with a bite to eat–without breaking the bank.

$9 Happy Hour Martinis – Emmett’s on Grove

Martinis are good, but martinis for $9 during happy hour are even better, and thankfully Emmett’s on Grove offers just that every Tuesday through Friday from 5 pm to 6:30 pm. They offer the martini two ways during happy hour–with Tito’s or Letherbee gin–and we must say they pair perfectly with their olives and chicken parm sliders!

39 Grove St.

Burger + Gin Martini Happy Hour Combo – Ray’s Bar

The only thing better than a classic gin martini is one that comes with a burger–and Ray’s Bar serves just that! Monday through Friday from 5 pm to 7 pm, Ray’s Bar curates the ultimate happy hour combo with a burger by Michelin-starred Chefs and a crisp gin martini.

LES – 177 Chrystie St.

Greenpoint – 905 Lorimer St.

A Martini & Caviar Cornet Happy Hour Pairing – Caviar Russe

Monday through Friday from 4:30 pm to 7 pm Caviar Russe hosts a Martini Happy Hour where you can get a martini (or two…or ten) with a complimentary caviar cornet!

538 Madison Ave.

$9 ‘Tini Tuesdays – Castell Rooftop Lounge

Midtown rooftop hidden gem Castell has just launched ‘Tini Tuesdays, during which their most popular martinis–classic, dirty, and espresso–as well as Cosmopolitans and Manhattans are just $9 all night long! And if you’re looking to splurge they also just introduced a $40 Dirty Caviar martini which comes with blue cheese stuffed olives topped with caviar.

AC Hotel – 260 W 40th St.

The post Dirty Martini Dip, Caprese Martinis, & More Creations To Dig Into On National Martini Day appeared first on Secret NYC.

* This article was originally published here

“Let Me Tell You” is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They publish each Tuesday so you’re hearing from us each week. Last month, Senior News Editor Anna Rahmanan sang the praises of sitting at the bar at restaurants. 

It was inevitable: New York eateries have been turning to gimmicky offerings for years now (Have you seen “The Chobster” yet?) while local hotel chains have been focusing on oddly themed experiences, so it was just a matter of time until creativity (AKA weirdness) would also creep into our wellness spaces.

As a health freak and a devotee of, well, feeling well, I decided it was time for me to try some of the city’s most odd-sounding wellness treatments on my own skin, literally.

I kicked things off at Remedy Place in the Flatiron. Aptly described by Inc. as the love child of Soho House and Equinox, the destination markets itself as a social wellness club that focuses on human interactions as much as actual treatments. I didn’t, however, interact much with others during the rainy afternoon I spent at the peaceful space. That’s probably because I quite literally could not catch my breath after a few seconds spent inside the ice bath meant to help with my circulation and pain relief.

The experience kicked off with 11 minutes of guided breathwork laying next to the 39 degree tub that I was to submerge in right after for six minutes.

Not usually a fan of the sort of medication practices that a lot of New Yorkers swear by (I find movement more soothing than dealing with my own thoughts), I promised I’d give it a shot. There must be a reason why everyone swears by the practice, after all. I’m happy to report that I did feel an overall sense of calm, albeit tinted by pangs of anxiety at the thought of all the time I was wasting away from my desk, while “meditating.” 

It was, however, a short lived joy: as soon as my buttocks touched the freezing water, I went numb. I wanted to scream “get me out of here” but all I could muster was an “oh ah oh ah” while shivering and trying not to fall into the bath. 

The session was meant to be a group experience and I was joined by what I am still convinced was a robot in human form who was able to plunge directly into the water and chit chat about his upcoming weekend plans and potential summer vacations with the instructor without flinching or complaining about the coldness of the bath. 

I felt like I was being punched in the gut and couldn’t even fathom living through a minute of the plunge, let alone six of them. I lasted a total of 33 seconds (that’s what the instructor said, although I am sure he felt bad for me and added 20 seconds to my actual time). 

Word to the wise: cold plunges aren’t just cold, they’re ice-like, a step beyond freezing—and, apparently, all the rave: plenty of wellness centers in New York now offer the chance to bathe in freezing water, including the well-known AIRE Ancient Baths in Tribeca. 

Arguably one of the most recognized names in the local spa world, AIRE opened back in 2012 and seems to now be trying to diversify its roster of offerings. A modern take on the ancient bathhouses popular across the Roman and Ottoman empires, the destination is really a collection of pools of different temperatures (cold plunge included) meant to soothe your skin and spirit in different ways. 

Perhaps as a way to once again stand out in the now-crowded wellness space, AIRE has debuted a strange-sounding signature wine experience that allows patrons to enjoy a private red wine soak featuring red grapes from the Ribera del Duero region in Spain. 

First things first: stripped of its alcohol content, the wine that you soak in, which comes out of a giant faucet straight into a bath made of stone, does not stain and cannot get you drunk. 

What may alter your consciousness, though, is the bottle of red that is served to you as part of the experience. Three types of cheeses and grapes accompany the drink.

The experience, which costs $650 per person, lasts a total of 180 minutes and includes a cranial massage, a tour of the thermal baths and a 50-minute full body massage in addition to the wine soak, which apparently helps you feel clean and exfoliated given the wine’s antioxidant properties. 

Did I feel relaxed post wine bath? Sure. Was it worth the price tag? Probably not, but who am I to judge where New Yorkers  spend their extra cash? AIRE was pretty busy for a random weekday morning, supporting my thesis that New Yorkers are all in when it comes to wellness these days.

Following my memorable wine soak, I made my way to the relatively new Virgin Hotel in midtown Manhattan, also home to Exhale Spa which, out of all the venues I visited, mostly resembled the sorts of traditional spas that have been defining the industry for decades now. It is at Exhale that I found myself in perhaps the weirdest state of being–one that I can’t wait to enter again. 

I signed up for the salt lounge journey and was led to a peaceful, relatively small room filled with zero-gravity chairs, each one equipped with sound and vibrational therapy. 

Focusing on the “healing properties of salt,” the experience lasted about 30 minutes and included the use of giant compression boots that reached way above my thigh. I was then asked to put on an LED face mask and just sit there. 

Once again alone with my thoughts, I was sure that anxiety was about to creep over me… until I woke up from a deep slumber that caught me completely by surprise and was made that much sweetener by the compression boots I had on.

The “shoes” would squeeze my always-achy legs and then let go. It was basically a boot-delivered massage that could have lasted hours. A similar experience was provided to my head: the goggles vibrated and almost massaged my temples throughout the half hour that I spent in the salt room. My first thought upon waking: where can I buy these boots and glasses and can I wear them while sitting at my desk all day? Alas, despite the presence of countless other “unusual” wellness treatments around NYC—including nap pods! Face gyms! Head spas! Crystal bed therapy sessions!—my adventures came to a close.

Did I feel lighter? More relaxed? Cleaner? Well-er? Sure, sort of. 

When come to think of it, though, a single aspect of all treatments resonated with me most: all of them were performed without invasive technology around. That is to say: I was away from my phone and laptop and people screaming in my ears throughout each session, allowing me to take in whatever was happening while in a, yes, calmer headspace. 

Was it the wine soak and the alien-like boots that contributed to my overall wellbeing or the absence of distractions while partaking in the treatments? Probably, the latter—which is just as well as the former. 

* This article was originally published here

If you ask us, New York has the best restaurants in the world full stop, but that diehard conviction wasn’t exactly reflected in the James Beard Foundation’s 2024 Restaurant and Chef Awards winners. Alas, despite the likes of numerous local finalists including Fariyal Abdullahi of Hav & Mar, Nasim Alikhani of Sofreh and Atsushi Kono from Kono, NYC was sadly shut out of most of the big awards of the night, including Best New Restaurant and Outsanding Chef. But it wasn’t a total upset: one Brooklyn-based chef proved to be a winner at this year’s ceremony, and what a winner he is. 

RECOMMENDED: Iconic NYC restaurant Sylvia’s wins the James Beard Foundation’s America’s Classics Award

Executive chef Charlie Mitchell of Clover Hill, a New American stunner in Brooklyn Heights that we gave a raving five-star review, rightfully took home the James Beard award for Best Chef: New York State, beating out fellow nominees such as Jeremy Salamon from Agi’s Counter (Crown Heights) and Chris Mauricio from Harana Market (Accord, New York).

At the 20-seat, reservations-required tasting room at 20 Columbia Place, Mitchell turns out dynamic, seasonally driven plates that, along with that big Beard win, also scored the chef a coveted Michelin star, making him the first Black chef in New York City to earn the distinction. On the current spring menu at Clover Hill, which is set at $305 per person, you can enjoy carefully composed dishes like Hokkaido scallops, nori tartlets, a dry-aged Rohan Duck and a strawberry cheesecake.  

As for the other winners of this year’s James Beards, midsize cities continued their dominance in the major Restaurant and Chef categories: the Outstanding Chef honor went to Michael Rafidi of Albi in Washington, D.C.; the Outstanding Restaurant award went to Langbaan in Portland, Oregon; and the Best New Restaurant sparkler was awarded to Dakar NOLA from New Orleans, Louisiana. 

* This article was originally published here

Though summer doesn’t officially kick off until the solstice (June 20th), we think it’s safe to say NYC is already in full summer mode! And Mother Nature seems to agree by giving us temperatures nearing the 90s this weekend.

Friday’s high of 89°F will have a real feel of 95°F and a UV Index of 10 according to AccuWeather, so be sure to bring out the sunblock even though rain might be in the forecast.

As for the rest of the weekend, New Yorkers can expect temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s with an even greater UV Index of 11!

Not sure how to stay cool in the heat? Lucky for us New York City beaches have already opened. Plus, you can even explore Manhattan’s very own first public beach that debuted last year.

This weekend will set the tone for what’s expected to be one of the hottest summers of our lifetime. Beyond record temperatures expected throughout the next few months, NYC is also on track to experience plenty of heavy rain.

Find out how to best prepare for this summer’s weather conditions here.

The post Friday’s Scorching Temperatures Will Feel Close To 100°F appeared first on Secret NYC.

* This article was originally published here