Whenever a holiday rolls around, I reflexively stop by The Peninsula hotel on Fifth Avenue. New York has no shortage of hotels that indulge in full-throttle decorating, but no one does it quite like the Peninsula. Or as often. Read more
Spring and its holidays are about new beginnings, and what’s more renewing than a new hat?
Three fetching Easter bonnets perch on a flower-garnished hat rack atop a table on the mezzanine landing at the Peninsula New York, located (aptly) on Fifth Avenue for all you fans of the Irving Berlin movie and song “Easter Parade.”
They look good enough to wear. But the twist is they’re good enough to eat, created from 25 lbs. of chocolate and 12 lbs. of sugar pastilage by Executive Pastry Chef Deden Putra and his able team. Read more
As we breeze into the holiday home stretch, what better time to blow off an afternoon or evening with a fortifying drink, wintery exercise or seasonal visuals? Here are five hotels to check out even if you’re not checking in. Read more
Once again The Peninsula New York has proved you don’t have to eat pastry to enjoy it.
The showpiece of the hotel’s wildly decorative holiday lobby is a Snowpage family — roly, poly papa, mama and baby — cooked up from 90 pounds of white chocolate along with fondant (five pounds), sugar (three pounds) and a sprinkling of gold dust. Read more
For those who keep track of these things, there are 36 replicas of the Eiffel Tower scattered throughout the world. This summer the number jumps to 37.
Number 37 is spectacular but, alas, temporary, as creations tend to be when they are made from macarons. And unlike Tokyo Tower, the Paris, Texas Eiffel and other towering homages to the 1889 Paris Exposition’s instant icon, the French cookie tower is indoors – in the upper lobby of the Peninsula New York hotel, to be precise. Read more
This is shaking up to be the biggest year in memory for good eggs in New York.
First came the Fabrege Big Egg Hunt, which deposited 250 gigantic eggs decorated by artists, designers and bold-face names around town, including at hotels (it ends April 26). And as we zero in on Easter, hotel pastry chefs are proving, once again, that chocolate is a natural companion to the egg.
I always stop by The Peninsula New York when a holiday nears to see what’s new from executive pastry chef Deden Putra, who never lets a red-letter occasion go by without creating something witty, like life-size lollipop reindeer or a gigantic white chocolate snowman. Read more
I doubt I’m alone in saying I’ve been counting the hours, the minutes, the seconds to the arrival of spring.
By Siberian standards — but New York isn’t Irkutsk. And when you rack up the days that failed to break 30 degrees, couple them with more than 56 inches of snow and throw in a Polar Vortex or two, Winter 2013-14 was brutal.
Even if the snow doesn’t cease on March 20, we’ve crossed the seasonal divide.
To celebrate the official start of spring, I visited several midtown hotels known for their flowers, camera in hand. Looks like yellow is the color of spring this year.
Some of the most fetching hotel decorations in town come with messages that go beyond Happy Holidays and champion a good cause. Here’s a sampling. Read more
He’s a chocolate lover’s dream – a child-size snowman concocted almost entirely from white chocolate (the carrot nose is marzipan). He greets all who enter The Peninsula hotel through early January. Read more
Who knows? But consider the jaw-drop vital statistics of the ultimate Easter egg on view at the Peninsula Hotel: three pastry chefs, 48 hours and 45 pounds of chocolate.
The result stands three feet tall and boasts enough hand-made candy flowers and butterflies to fill a small army of Easter baskets. Read more