Meridian

A private travel office · Amsterdam You were given a word.

New York · In season April to May and September to October

New York City

The city that never sleeps, with enough on offer to keep its visitors from sleeping either. The museums and the art scene are unparalleled, the shopping likewise — New York has whatever is being looked for.

Eat

  1. Gem Flynn McGarry’s tasting menus, shifting with the seasons — Portuguese-leaning seafood, vegetables treated as headliners, in a tastefully appointed room. Lower East Side
  2. The Waverly Inn The Vanity Fair editor’s neighbourhood standby — reliable in the way that matters, with the bar holding the wait. Reservations are not optional. Greenwich Village
  3. Bemelmans Bar The Carlyle’s bar, painted by Ludwig Bemelmans himself — New York in the forties, preserved in murals and low light. Upper East Side
  4. Café Sabarsky An Austrian kaffeehaus authentic enough to relocate the visitor to Vienna — coffee and sachertorte after the galleries upstairs. Upper East Side
  5. Hart’s The kind of room that turns customers into regulars — a short, elegant, ever-changing menu, Mediterranean-leaning, with natural wines and the pork Milanese as the fixed point. Bedford-Stuyvesant
  6. Via Carota The cult classic of the West Village — traditional Italian cooking and apéritifs that reward arriving early. West Village

Stay

  1. The Lowell Hotel On a leafy Upper East Side street — a landmark hotel, posh in the quiet sense, for resting properly in a city that doesn’t. Upper East Side
  2. The Mark Stylish and subtle in the heart of the Upper East Side — breakfast at the Jean-Georges restaurant is the house habit. Upper East Side
  3. Nine Orchard Downtown romance in a former bank — architecture worth the stay alone, the Swan Room for cocktails, and service that stays cool without the white gloves. Lower East Side

Do

  1. Sotheby’s Exceptional art without the museum — the auction house at work, with coffee at the on-site Sant Ambroeus while dealers whisper into their phones. Lenox Hill
  2. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral and the collection inside it — a fixed point of any New York visit. Upper East Side
  3. The Museum of Modern Art The modern collection that has to be seen firsthand — a few hours in the galleries, then lunch at The Modern downstairs. Midtown West
  4. Brooklyn Bridge A mile across the East River on foot — the walk that pays the city’s definitive view of Manhattan. Two Bridges

Shop

  1. Smorgasburg The largest weekly open-air food market in the country — provisions for a picnic on the lawn, chosen the hard way. Williamsburg
  2. McNally Jackson The Prince Street institution — books and magazines selected with unusual care. SoHo

The office can arrange any of this.

You were given a word.