Ever dreamed of visiting Thailand? Well now you can—in Williamsburg! And no, we’re not just talking about an exceptionally good Thai restaurant that will transport your tastebuds; we’re talking about an entire bus tour through the streets and canals of Bangkok while you’re served dishes native to the country.
You’d nearly miss BangBang Bangkok on Grand Street, if not for the tiny neon sign confirming you’re at the right place. Upon entering, you’ll be greeted at the door and offered a seat to grab a drink before the tasting menu begins. BangBang Bangkok presents the first Thai tasting menu in all of NYC.
Secret NYC / Justine Golata
Once the time of your reservation has struck, you’ll be guided along their narrow bar to a back room that’s anything but a room. In fact, what you’ll be entering into is actually a bus, or a simulation of one. With colorful gingham seats, enormous windshield wipers and your very own tour guide, BangBang Bangkok takes you on an in-depth tour of Thailand through Bangkok’s streets, bridges and canals.
Tour guide and manager of BangBang Bangkok, Art, effectively takes you around his home city in an effort to encourage all of his customers to visit his beautiful country. The evening kicks off its 10-course menu with the Welcome Amuse (a French dessert twist combined with Massaman curry in a chicken-mouse filled Choux au Craquelin) while driving through Bangkok’s vibrant streets.
As you move on to the following course like Bangkok (lime tart, coconut, cashew nut, topped with coconut foam; steam pork dumpling, soy vinagrette gel shallot tuile; cold lobster clear soup, lime foam) and The Influence (tomato sorbet, green papaya salad aspic, lime gel, cashew nut & parmesan crumble) the bus will actually transform into a boat, sailing you through Bangkok’s floating markets.
Secret NYC / Justine Golata
We understand a common hesitancy towards viral-style restaurants going above and beyond in their visual presentation and individuality in relation to their quality of food. Let me say it here that we’d still recommend this tasting menu if we were crammed in a dark corner staring at a blank wall.
The food had taken us by surprise with its rich flavors, thought out ingredients and innovative plating. It was as if each bite was more delicious than the next. However, we could have had endless portions of the White River (poached lobster in a coconut soup, mushroom galangal compote with dried chili tuile and coriander oil), our favorite dish of the night.
Secret NYC / Justine Golata
From there, you’re back on wheels as you cross the oldest bridge in Bangkok and carry on to the booming streets of Chinatown. As you move through the city and dine on each course, Art shares bits and pieces of cultural and historical information on the beautiful sites being projected. The menu ends on a bright note or Bang Bang as they call it, with mango sorbet and sticky rice sponge.
Overall, this will go down as one of our favorite finds of the year. Whether you have people in town visiting or you’re planning a date night, we can’t recommend this unique experience enough.
Mark your calendars–NYC’s first-ever halal festival is heading to Queens this October, and it’s the perfect excuse to spend a day outdoors enjoying the crisp, fall weather!
The event is being held by North America’s premier halal Insta-based food blog, MuslimFoodies. The blog was founded in NYC by Jiniya Azad, Sameen Choudhry, and Tahirah Baksh, and is dedicated to discovering and reviewing halal dining options for a growing community seeking quality halal eats.
An estimated 5,000 attendees will take to the festival, which will feature an extensive selection of dishes from various culinary and cultural traditions, all adhering to halal standards. The inaugural event will feature 25 amazing food vendors, including:
Hungry guests will be able to eat their way through all the best halal eats on Saturday, October 5th, from 12 pm to 8 pm in the parking lot of Long Island City’s nonprofit art gallery, performing arts venue, event space, and community center Culture Lab. A seating area will be provided at the festival, but since it’s being held only a few steps from Gantry Plaza State Park you can also enjoy your food on the waterfront with breathtaking views of Manhattan.
NYC Halal Fest will celebrate the rich diversity of halal food available in NYC, offering attendees the opportunity to sample unique dishes that are often hard to find. The event aims to address the increasing demand for halal dining options and highlight the importance of accessibility to halal meat within the broader culinary and dining world. Beyond the food, prayer space accommodation will be provided inside the building until 5 pm.
“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 are published every week.
This past Sunday, I went to the Broadway Flea Market, as I do every year, in search of casts recordings on CD to add to my already disquietingly large collection. (Yes, on CD. I know. I have a problem.) The ebullient actor Todd Buonopane, who was hosting a charity auction, spied me in the crowd and invited me to join him on the small stage that had been set up in Shubert Alley. Noting my bag of CDs—I know!—he observed that I was a Broadway fan as well as a Broadway critic. And then he asked what seemed like a simple question: What shows was I most looking forward to this fall?
It’s a question I get pretty often around this time of year, and I should have had an answer at the ready. But I realized, in that moment, that I did not. The best I could do was summon the names of the first three shows that came to my head. (It was an odd assortment; people looked puzzled.) I had spent most of the previous two weeks putting together fall previews: a complete guide to the shows coming to Broadway this fall, and a second assemblage of 30 promising shows in the Off Broadway world. But I’d been so busy getting the information in our system that I hadn’t stopped to process my expectations.
As a critic, expectations aren’t great. They can get in the way of your judgment; you want to evaluate every show on its own terms, not in comparison to what you imagined it would be. But as a fan, expectations are to some degree unavoidable. There are 17 new productions opening on Broadway this fall—a big step up from last year, when there were just 10—and I hope all of them are good; I go into every production hoping for the best. But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a few that I was particularly eager to see.
So let me put it all on the table. These are the six Broadway shows (three new works and three revivals) that I am most excited to check out this fall—as a fan, if not necessarily as a critic.
Jez Butterworth’s last two Broadway plays, Jerusalem andThe Ferryman, were pretty terrific: ambitious dramas that were not afraid to go big. So I am very curious to taste what he’s been cooking up for the past seven years. And The Hills of California reunites him with two keys The Ferryman‘s success: director Sam Mendes, most recently represented on Broadway by The LehmanTrilogy; and Butterworth’s wife, actor Laura Donnelly, who inspires him to write beautiful roles for her. The play was well received in in London earlier this year, and the main female performers from that production are all making the leap across the Pond.
Photo: Courtesy Mark Douet | The Hills of California
Another British import! I saw the lavish original Broadway production of this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical toward the end of its run, with Elaine Paige as the secluded and deluded former film star Norma Desmond, and reviewed the concert-ish revival a few years back with original star Glenn Close. The musical itself is not my favorite Lloyd Webber effort, though the parts with Norma are undeniably compelling. But I am intrigued by the casting of Pussycat Dolls frontwoman Nicole Scherzinger in this revival—she got fabulous reviews in London production, but English taste in musicals doesn’t always always align with mine—and I loved the minimalist approach that director Jamie Lloyd brought toA Doll’s Houselast year; my hope is that his version of Sunset strips away some of the flab, as John Doyle’s 2016 revival of The Color Purple did with that show.
A third London transfer on this list? Oh, dear. That doesn’t look very good, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think English theater is better than ours overall; it’s just that the English productions that come to Broadway, having already proven themselves in the West End, tend to be better than average. Anyhow, this biomusical comes with a good pop pedigree—the songs are by Elton John and Jake Shears (of Scissor Sisters)—and an inherently interesting subject: PTL Club televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who went down in a blaze of scandal in the 1980s. I’m both old enough to remember the Bakker story as news (did I mention I collect CDs?) and gay enough to have seen Bernadette Peters play Tammy Faye, opposite Kevin Spacey as Jim, in the 1990 TV movie Fall from Grace. I may be the target audience for this.
The two main attractions of this musical dark comedy, adapted from the fondly remembered 1992 film, are obvious. Assuming the dueling-diva roles originated by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn are two of the funniest women in musical theater today: Anyone who saw the omnitalented Megan Hilty in 2016’s Noises Off can testify to her prodigious comic abilities, and Jennifer Simard’s genius has been on evidence in many scene-stealing roles in musicals, most recently Once Upon a One More Time. And here’s something else: I haven’t heard the original score by newcomers Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, but I did see them years ago (when they were mere striplings, I tell you!) in a cabaret show at 54 Below; she was playing a washed-up showbiz barely-survivor and he was accompanying her as—incongruously and hilariously—Randy Newman. They were very funny then, so I have reason to hope they’ll be funny now.
Let’s face it: They had me at Audra. Gypsy is perhaps the best Broadway musical of all time, and its central character, Mama Rose, is certainly the best musical-theater role for a woman. So it was only a matter of time until Audra McDonald, the leading leading lady of her generation, took a crack at it. But this production also surrounds her with a dream team: George C. Wolfe as director, and Danny Burstein and Joy Woods is the major supporting roles. I thought Patti LuPone was definitive in the last Broadway revival, but it’s not a contest; I love that so many different stars have made the part their own, and McDonald has certainly earned her turn. (Calling the character Mama Rose, by the way—instead of Madam Rose, or worse yet Madame Rose—is a hill I will die on if it comes to that, which in my circles it someday might.)
There’s been a minor trend on Broadway lately toward shows that ran Off Broadway several years earlier. Last season gave us a completely new production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2013 play Appropriate, and now Manhattan Theatre club is mounting a reimagined take on Jonathan Spector’s 2019 dark comedy about a mumps outbreak at an ultraliberal elementary school. I really enjoyed the Off Broadway production, and am curious how the play’s prescient topicality—including deeply felt disagreements about vaccination—will land in a post-Covid landscape. I’m also excited to see what the stacked new cast—Bill Irwin, Jessica Hecht, Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray and Zoë Chao—will bring to the playroom table.
Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy | Death Becomes Her
While all of New York City is worthwhile in our eyes, there’s one that stands out among the rest right now.
Last year, we named Fort Greene as the coolest neighborhood in NYC for its family-friendly atmosphere, slew of mom-and-pop shops and cultural hot spots. This year, we’re choosing Flatbush (dubbed Little Caribbean) for its many cultural shops, fantastic restaurants and bars and the community vibes its residents and business owners uphold and celebrate.
To come up with the final ranking, our global network of local editors narrowed down the selections by considering community and social ventures, access to open and green space, and thriving street life. Flatbush landed the top spot as the coolest neighborhood in NYC and the 17th coolest in the world (out of 38).
“Yes, you’ll find some of those international hallmarks of ‘cool’. But in every neighborhood on this list there’s something you won’t find anywhere else,” Time Out’s Travel Editor Grace Beard says. “When communities fiercely support and rally around their local businesses, even the most eccentric ideas can become a reality. And that, in our eyes, is what makes a neighborhood truly cool.”
So, why did we choose Flatbush?
South and east of Brooklyn’s leafy Prospect Park, Flatbush has its own gravitational pull. The neighborhood’s bevy of Black-owned businesses—from popular watering holes to restaurants that slap—its perfect proximity to arguably the city’s best park and its rich cultural landscape all play into why it’s the coolest neighborhood.
Rooted along Flatbush, Nostrand, Church and Utica Avenues, Flatbush is home to the largest and most diverse Caribbean-American-Latinx community outside of the West Indies, according to Caribbeing, a cultural organization celebrates and supports this Little Caribbean and its artists, business owners, creators and residents. You see this community thriving in spots like Peppa’s Jerk Chicken, Lips Cafe and Bodega Lounge and, most overtly, at the annual West Indian Day Parade that dances up Eastern Parkway every Labor Day weekend. Its tree-lined streets were once home to icons like Joey Bada$$, Busta Rhymes and Barbra Streisand and still pull big names, especially to its historic Kings Theatre.
Photograph: Shaye Weaver for Time Out New York
Here’s how to have the perfect day in the neighborhood
Wake up in your beautiful VRBO in the neighborhood’s enclave Prospect Lefferts Gardens and make a beeline to Allan’s Bakery to beat the crowd waiting for its flaky currant rolls. Get your coffee a few blocks down at Ciao Bella before a walk in the park, which hosts a Greenmarket on Saturday mornings and the home of the Lefferts Historic House.
Photograph: courtesy Little Caribbean Duty Free in Flatbush
Do lunch or dinner at Aunts et Uncles and Peppa’s, because it’d be a missed opportunity not to, then drinks at Bodega Lounge, which regularly hosts events from wine tastings to mixers, or Miss Barbs, which does coffee and wine.
Photograph: Shaye Weaver for Time Out New York | Flatbush’s Aunts et Uncles Wildflower Salad
Make sure to visit for Labor Day weekend, when the whole community is out to celebrate the West Indian Day Parade—a joyful gathering of thousands of residents who dance and showcase their incredible regalia down Eastern Parkway.
Photograph: By Steve Sanchez / Courtesy of Shutterstock
See the full list of Time Out’s Coolest Neighborhoods in the world, along with details from Time Out’s local experts on why they have made the grade at timeout.com/coolestneighbourhoods.
The massive redevelopment of the old Domino Sugar Refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront is progressing with the debut of Domino Square, a new one-acre park designed for public programming.
Photograph: Courtesy of Two Trees Management
The egg-shaped plaza in the middle of the space will be used as an ice skating rink (the first-ever in the area) in the winter starting this November.
In the warmer months, the section of the park will be turned into a stage of sorts. Theater-like seat options frame the area, overlooking the Manhattan skyline and the East River, effectively turning the destination into one of the most beautiful open-concept theaters in the city.
Photograph: Courtesy of Two Trees Management
Not many details have yet been released regarding the types of events that will be hosted on site, but officials have mentioned salsa nights and farmers’ markets to start with, plus movie screenings and more.
Another exciting prospect: the retail spaces that will frame the street edges of the park and create entry points into the space. The structures will house food vendors and other retail concepts.
Rendering: Courtesy of Two Trees Management
Domino Square is the penultimate portion of the redevelopment effort, one that follows the debut of an incredible indoor vertical farm boasting over 15 different 30-foot-tall trees weighing 10,000 pounds each.
Officials are still working on the construction of a new residential building on Kent Avenue, the very last part of the project.
Rendering: Courtesy of Two Trees Management
“Domino Square will enhance everyone’s life in south Williamsburg,” said Jed Walentas, the principal at Two Trees, the company behind the redevelopment, in an official statement about the development. “We are really proud of what we have built and excited to see its potential as it evolves.”
131 Grand St
Saturday, October 5th, 2024
12 pm – 8 pm
Priority tickets (12 pm – 2 pm) – $8 / General Admission (after 2 pm) – free with RSVP
