Neighbourhood bar

Is the place that all the hipsters are eating at recently. Its speciality is noodles and it has a baroque, video game, retro, decor inside, complete with pac man neons and cheesy strip lights and mirrors. Think 1984 strip bar meets bourgeois chinese take out spot.

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.”

Apart from Dia Beacon, in Beacon (upstate New York about an hour away from Grand Central Station) and also the Judd Foundation in Soho, this institution is absolutely one of my favourite places to visit and it is located in Long Island City, Queens. It showcases sculpture in the broadest sense and has an incredible building that used to be a workshop that refurbished and fixed subway cars. It has been running since 1928 and when you visit you will definitely see why that is.

Best restaurant in the world.