Warm winter holiday vibes all year long, especially during the holidays. A hint of the old NYC where one could be a functioning alcoholic by day and artist by night. Proper characters here, the lore is deep.

Dia:Beacon is a short train ride from the city in a former Nabisco box printing factory. This art foundation has 240,000 square feet of art from the 1960s to the present. Dia features the work of Sol LeWitt, Imi Knoebel, Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, and many others. I love going during the summer to enjoy the gardens surronding the building.

Cute and eclectic, The HiHi Room serves a variety of comfort foods with vegetarian options in a chill atmosphere on a bustling street in Brooklyn. 

This is my go-to spot in my neighborhood. The food is fantastic. They have an ever changing selection of beers and the staff is friendly, attentive and down to earth. Love this place.

I'm a huge Japanophile: if there's one other place I'd like to live, it's Tokyo. I must have been there seven or eight times, most recently just after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Anyway, EN is a gem on Hudson Street, serving real Japanese cuisine. It turns out that EN is a chain in Japan; there are a lot of branches making lovely bosky food in cosy neighbourhood locations. But their New York incarnation is grand in scale and ambition, with solid, warm interiors (not unlike if the Whitney were a Japanese restaurant, oddly) - a remarkable hybrid of this city, and the other one that I'd love to live in.