ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

If the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple gets too much, try a spot of island hopping around its shoreline, like saxophone, it’s plonked off the main bulk of the Bronx, roughly an hour and a half from mid-town Manhattan (take the 6 train to the lovely sounding Pelham Bay Park, then catch the bx29 bus).

“You going for lobster?” asks our hotel manager Robert, the only New Yorker who doesn’t raise an eyebrow and ask, tone incredulous, “Are you sure you don’t mean Manhattan Island?” when I tell him we’re heading to the fishing spot. “I’d bunk off work and come with you – it’s my favourite.”

Standing on the main drag, it’s possible to glimpse the island’s edges peeling away into grey-green water on either side, and you can meander from one end to the other – even dawdling jealously outside its clapboard houses with their wraparound porches in creamy crayon hues – in under 20 minutes.

We decide that’s just about enough exercise to warrant crumbly, herb-stuffed crab cakes and butter-drowned scampi tails in an oxtail leather booth at the City Island Lobster House, at the northern pinnacle of the island.

A crew of retirees sit nearby, hunched over fire engine red lobster shells, chortling through what sounds like their weekly lunch. Billowing napkins are tucked under wrinkled chins and snippets of their conversation – difficult children, a bank robbery – carry across the room. It’s all very Sopranos.

On the wall, there’s an ode to Ernest Hemingway, but when asked if the writer really ate here, our waiter just grins wryly over his coffee pot and says cryptically, “Maybe he did.” There’s a quiet, ineffable charm about the place, and it’s not just the elderly, lobster-scoffing gangsters.

Back in town, we easily lose an hour in 239 Play, an independent