I finally got around to seeing the year’s top fashion documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel. In the spirit of her fabled Why Don’t’ You lists that spiced up an earlier iteration of Harper’s Bazaar, I offer Overnight New York’s Why Don’t You: the NYC Hotel holiday version. Here’s what to see and do at New York hotels while the holidays are still humming. Read more
Party in the ballroom.
Bill Cunningham, sporting his signature blue jacket, strode in just ahead of me, a Nikon slung around his neck. Proof positive that there was to be no shortage of social glitter at the launch party for Sirio Maccioni’s new Sirio Ristorante at The Pierre last night. Read more
No surprise Arbitrage was a hit with New York hotel viewers last month. The sleek financial thriller set in Bernie Madoff’s pre-incarceration Manhattan features lavish footage of two New York City hotels, The Pierre and The Plaza and a big kiss to The Sherry-Netherland.
Elsewhere in hotel rooms around the nation and Canada Arbitrage came in fourth (Marvel’s The Avengers is uber-resilient). Here’s the complete list, as always provided by LodgeNet, suppliers of in-room entertainment to 1.6 million hotel rooms in the U.S. and Canada. Read more
School isn’t a word that leaps to mind when we think of The Pierre. But six times a year the drinks team in the hotel’s Two E bar/lounge cooks up a specialty cocktail menu. The night the drinks debut, Two E hosts a free mixology class where patrons can stop by, watch the team led by drinks maestro Sachin Hasan in action, and sample the new cocktails. Forget homework, but you can leave with a recipe or two. Read more
You’re out of luck if you wanted to try the Eggs Benedict at Le Caprice. The Pierre hotel’s gleaming by-the-numbers copy of the popular London brasserie closed earlier this year. (We wonder who got their hands on the gorgeous David Bailey photos of Jean Shrimpton that dressed the walls.) Read more
If you’re on top of drinks trends, you know all about barrel-aged cocktails, mixed drinks like Negronis and Old Fashioneds poured into barrels and left for weeks or months to oxidize and absorb flavor and color from their woody casings, much like whiskey and wine. Read more
The Eleanor Roosevelt.
Ah, Memorial Day Weekend – the ideal time to kick back with a start-of-summer cocktail, something refreshing and light with a touch of sweetness, like a drink made with . . . scotch?
The Two E Bar at The Pierre, a velvety, windowless lair that is one of our favorite midtown hotel bars, cooks up specialty drinks menus eight times a year. Read more
We love it when a New York hotel makes a cameo appearance in a novel we like. So imagine our glee upon opening Rules of Civility, Amor Towles’ exquisitely layered portrait of strivers and high society in late 1930s Manhattan, and following the characters into not one but three hotels, all beauties. Read more
Chocolate cocktails sound pretty good, but as I discovered on a recent visit to the lounge at the Pierre Hotel, they’re oddly polarizing.
While keeping a friend company before she went to a dinner party upstairs, I spotted the bar’s Chocolate Cocktail Festival menu featuring eight drinks (five hot, three chilled) and two lavish desserts, $14 each. Read more
Not long ago Trip Advisor posted its crowd-sourced list of the top hotels in the US. New York City fared badly with not one property in the top 25.
Another day, another survey. AAA has released its 2012 list of Five Diamond hotels and restaurants, and New York City cleaned up with eight hotels and one hotel restaurant landing the coveted diamonds, the goldest star AAA’s professional raters award. Only Las Vegas scored higher in the hotel category, with a nod for ten properties. Read more