Consistently superb wlbrg staple. Good for coffee, lunch and lavish dinners.

I love that there's a museum dedicated to American art, founded at a time when American artists were underappreciated. The exhibitions are curated with a broad but discerning eye, and the architecture is spectacular. In my experience it's typically much quieter than the obvious choices like the Met and the MoMA - although both are remarkable, there's something I love about the scale and style of the Whitney.

In 1963, the Italian-born sculptor Costantino Nivola filled a playground that covers an entire city block with avant-garde abstractions. In the middle of an Upper Manhattan housing project, there are cuboid cutouts sculpted in cement, a fountain made with two diamond-shaped boulders, concrete play horses, and a sand-casted relief carved high into a wall. In the northeast corner, a matriarchal figure known as “The Nanny” rises from the ground. The artist’s sculptures were built in an era when urban development incorporated art in its effort to uplift communities and express democratic ideals. “A work designed for a public space is less a work of art than a civic act,” Nivola once said. “It concerns the ways in which we live together, and in which we influence each other.”

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!

Paris in Brooklyn, etc. I have to try hard not to say 'Garçon.' But either way, 'monsieur' would be more appropriate; proper French waitstaff, proper French food.