Lunch there before a visit at the MET with a walk in Central Park

Grand Central is big and beautiful and it also periodically hosts free cultural events - poets at typewriters custom-composing poems on demand - or Alvin Ailey dancers performing in Artist, Nick Cave's horse suits!

The Family Store is the best Mediterranean food you can get in New York City. That is all.

Rudy's Pastry Shop is a little place my boyfriend and I like to go to on Sunday mornings. The place is super small and cozy and full of all the sweetest treats you can find. They have such a large selection of pastries and the coffee is just as delicious. The location is cute as well and a nice place to stroll afterward. There is a cute record store right around the corner.

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.