Lower East Side rising
Quirky corner of Manhattan offers more reasons to linger
The Lower East Side, to paraphrase the old cliché, was a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to stay there.
Sure, you came down to touch base with New York’s roots at the Tenement Museum. Maybe you stopped into Katz’s (scene of “I’ll have what she’s having”) for a pastrami sandwich and an egg cream. But then you hightailed it back to your uptown hotel — or, if you were a bit more edgy, over to SoHo. Because unless it was a weekend and you were a 20-something looking to get as drunk as possible, there was no reason to linger on the Lower East Side.
Until now, possibly. The Lower East Side has sprouted a slew of new hotels — both posh and hipsterish — as well as a whole crop of fabulous restaurants you’d be more than happy to eat in sober. Even the bars have gone upscale. Add to the mix the always innovative New Museum and the newly relocated International Center for Photography catercorner from it on Bowery.
Is it enough? Is there enough justification to hang below Houston and east of Bowery — even if it’s Tuesday and you’re old enough to have seen “When Harry Met Sally” in a movie theater? Is it possible that, suddenly, the neighborhood where Meg Ryan demonstrated faking an orgasm has become an exciting, real destination in itself?
An appealing trait of the Lower East Side is that it’s still a neighborhood. Stop by Orchard early in the day, and you might catch one of the remaining tailors sweeping his steps, morning sun shining on his yarmulke. Walk Canal at dusk, and you’ll be sideswiped by housewives swinging pink plastic shopping bags dripping crab water.
It’s also an old neighborhood, which makes visiting the Lower East Side’s bars and restaurants feel like a form of time travel to some misty Prohibition year. Take Sel Rrose, a glamorously decayed bar/restaurant with distressed concrete walls and gunmetal stools. At Sel Rrose, it’s all about the oysters — which you order yourself on a pad with a small pencil — and the mixology.
Sel Rrose’s white marble bar is jammed with mason jars filled with sage leaves and blackberries, candied ginger and red peppercorns — destined for the fabulously decorative (and potent) cocktails shaken up by its lush-bearded bartenders.
If it’s a more cozy atmosphere you’re after, try Hill & Dale. The name refers to the hill-and-dale process — the term for cutting vertical grooves into a phonograph record or wax cylinder — one of the earliest methods of audio recording. This belowthe-sidewalk bar has a 1920s speakeasy feel to it.
It’s dim and wainscoted, decorated with old gramophones and wax cylinders. Hill & Dale’s signature drink — which is hot pink and served with a flower floating in it — is called the Floozy, and it takes zero imagination to picture a Jazz Age flapper downing it in the brick-walled back room.
If beer is more your thing, your best bet is Top Hops — especially if you care about freshness and you’re kind of a clean freak. At Top Hops, the enormous blackboard behind the bar is chalked with each beer’s name, the brewer, its origin, style, date tapped, alcohol by volume and the date the draft line was cleaned. Kind of makes you never want to drink beer anywhere else. Top Hops also keeps pieces of soft Brooklynmade pretzels on the bar for noshing, which definitely makes me not want to drink beer anywhere else.
The restaurant Louie and Chan, with one foot in Chinatown and one on the Lower East Side, is so straight out of the early 1900s with its thinplanked wood floors, porcelain light fixtures and dark-brown walls, the three young millennial women I once saw texting at the bar looked as if they’d been dropped from another planet, not just another era.
Louie and Chan doesn’t try to do anything inventive with their food. They serve oldschool Italian classics — cacio e pepe, burrata e prosciutto. But they do it so reliably, who needs invention?
If somebody spirited your favorite northern Italian restaurant into a space that could best be described as Haute Tenement, you’d have Bacaro. Their main dining room is in the (slightly musty-smelling) basement, beneath exposed water pipes and a tin ceiling.
But I prefer the smaller upstairs bar, with big windows that in warm weather are opened to the street. Bacaro’s menu includes green-beanand-anchovy salad, pasta in squid ink and the most perfect chicken Milanese outside of Milan. And you have to love a restaurant that gives you your own bottle of olive oil for dipping your bread.
Fried chicken and Champagne are two things I am 100 percent behind — which makes Birds & Bubbles my new favorite restaurant on the Lower East Side. This narrow, slightly subterranean space is a bit like eating in a wine cellar. But who cares when they’re pouring you Champagne (of every price range) and serving you teethcrackingly crisp fried chicken. If you must eat something else, the menu does feature other South- ern favorites, such as tomato pie (highly recommended).
Ivan Ramen is the Lower East Side outpost of the self-described “Jewish kid from Long Island” who went to Tokyo and became a Japanese god of noodles. Though they take the ramen seriously at Ivan Ramen, that’s about all they take seriously — which seems appropriate when you’re slurping your food. The mural of soup slurpers above the counter includes a kid in a Batman mask, a Japanese man in an Indiana Jones hat and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
In NYC, even the ice cream joints get their 15 minutes of fame — and Morgenstern’s deserves at least that much. Last time I visited this brightblue storefront, a photographer was angling his camera over their New God Flow sundae as if it were Gisele Bündchen. I judge an ice cream shop by its vanilla — because you can’t tart up vanilla. Morgenstern’s has six versions. I would vouch for every one.
If you want a sense of Blue- stockings Books, let’s just say it has an uncommon number of volumes by Noam Chomsky. Also, there are three shelves devoted to anarchism. And the fiction section is divided into post-Colonial fiction, feminist fiction and general fiction — with the latter possessing the smallest number of books. It is a terrifically interesting place to hang out.
Edith Machinist is one of the best vintage clothing stores I have ever shopped in. No mildewy smell. Stylish vintage from the 1930s to the 1980s. Dressing rooms big enough to turn around in.
Moo Shoes is out to prove it is possible to be vegan and not look as if you stepped off the Berkeley campus circa 1973. Its animal-friendly collection of bags and shoes for men and women is fashionable enough for even the most stylish leather-lover. And for those who prefer to wear their convictions on their chests, there’s a full array of “It’s Not You, It’s Meat” outerwear.
If you’re Airbnb-ing it on the Lower East Side, you’ll want to visit the Essex Street Market. This indoor mall of ChinoLatino-accented food stalls has been around for decades, but recently, a few gourmet vendors — such as Saxelby Cheesemongers — have joined the ranks. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, stop into Kenny Shopsin’s idiosyncratic diner, located in the market. Shopsin is legendarily cranky, although I’ve never had any trouble from him.
Just behave yourself and don’t be a prima donna. Good advice no matter what neighborhood you’re staying in.