Despite the thin actress’s physique, Sarah Jessica Parker has begun a search for the best pasta in the city.

For ravioli, she has already found the place–Gradisca, in the West Village on 13th street between 6th and 7th. The actress told the New York Times that the eatery’s ravioli “is absolutely gorgeous. It is light as air. I always tell people to go visit Gradisca because I think it’s such a surprise.”

She’s also fond of the restaurant’s pasta carbonara, which she calls “beautiful” with its perfect balance of bacon, cheese, olive oil, salt, and pepper. She is still on the prowl for the perfect carbonara, telling the Times that she has an obsession with it. “Like, I comb the Internet,” she said in an interview. “I call in advance to make sure it’s still on the menu. I ask for double portions.”

Gradisca is a great and underrated place to go for pasta. Opened in 2000, the eatery seeks to provide New Yorkers with “the soul of authentic Italian cooking.” The restaurant has become popular, and residents throughout Manhattan are happy to travel to the west side of the island to encounter the delights on offer.

When you go, you might meet Caterina Schenardi, the 65-year old who makes the pasta fresh every night, just for the diners at Gradisca. You may even hear her speaking in Italian to the restaurant’s owner, Massimo Galeano, who is also Ms. Schenardi’s son.

Her craft is not limited to ravioli; tagliatelle, tortellini, linguine, and a variety of other pastas can be had at the small restaurant.

Beyond Gradisca, The West Village is well known amongst city dwellers for its wide array of gourmet eateries, where the competition to get and keep customers is fierce. As a result, only the best survive, and only the best are available for those who wander the neighborhood.

And while they’re always fixing up other people’s homes; they have also managed to rebuild and redesign their current home in NoHo. The six-story townhouse which was a gun store in its past life was a project that Rob Novogratz probably took extra care and love to design; turning it into an urban oasis for the entire family

Of their new show, Rob and Cortney say “Our new show is more design-centric than the other one. It’s all about how to re-create an environment, and show the viewers how to make it happen in their own space. And to inspire people to take design chances! Every week, we go into a space and do a makeover quickly, with a limited budget. It was a lot of fun for us, and very challenging to come up with so many fresh ideas under the gun and without a lot of money. But we always say that style and good taste is not about cash!”

And one thing that’s obvious from the get-go is that the Novogratzes are not afraid of color. They use it to brighten up spaces and liven up a drab, cold home to make it instantly more inviting. Perhaps the beginner won’t be able to execute every design, but they definitely show some fun and easy design ideas that can be implemented to any space.

When you decide that you’ve found an area of Manhattan that you want to live in; then it’s time for you to give us a call! The Novogratzes can give you design help and we’ll find you the right place!  Dial 877-852-6636 to speak with a representative today!

Everyone hits up places like Pinkberry and Red Mango for frozen yogurt rather than plain boring ice-cream, but artisans around the City are making it hip again to be into the dessert we grew up loving.

Melt Bakery was developed by experienced pastry chef Julian Plyter and Kareem Hamady. They married old-fashioned cookies with specialty flavors that are updated and changed regularly. The duo got their start at the Hester Street Fair and continue to sell their sandwiches at stores, and fairs throughout the City. And if you’re enjoying your Lower East Side condo too much to go out; they will deliver to you with a minimum order of a dozen sandwiches from a select menu!

But they’re not the only ones in town offering to deliver you ice-cream to your door! MilkMaid uses local ingredients to create two flavors each month. For a membership fee, they hand deliver the goods right to your door!

In the West Village, Victory Garden is the brainchild of Sophia Brittan who wanted to offer something different to NYC residents who were into the frozen yogurt scene. That’s when she introduced her goat’s milk soft serve ice-cream, featuring interesting flavors like Turkish Delight (Damascene Rose & Mastic with Pistachio).  The healthy alternative is not only good for you, but delicious too! And for those that have issues with lactose intolerance, goat’s milk is a great way to get your ice-cream fix without getting sick!

Amorino sets out to give a taste of authentic Italian ice-cream or gelato. The ingredients are the best quality and there are no artificial flavors. And with locations throughout Europe; we’re lucky to have one close by! With flavors like Caramel Salted with Butter and Bourbon Vanilla, who wouldn’t want to give them a try?

If you’re really into health and have a restrictive vegan or raw food lifestyle or you just want to eat better; there’s even something for you! The Raw IceCream Company is a “ice-cream” made of natural, 100% raw fruits and nuts to create their products.  Not only are the ingredients all natural and good for you, but the packaging is also made with renewable materials. The fantastic “ice-cream” will still keep you cool and is available in stores throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.

This summer, while you’re on the hunt for a sweet way to stay cool, why not give us a call to find you a place to call home? We want to get you as close as we can to your favorite ice-cream place. Call 877-852-6636 to speak with a representative today!

Brunch

If you live in New York, you more than likely love to find a great brunch place on the weekend, especially in the summer when you can sit outside with a good meal and good friends! With literally hundreds of restaurants to choose from it’s difficult to find a place that you enjoy. Like other New Yorkers, I like to take a couple of hours to enjoy brunch and have found some personal favorites that I found myself frequenting time and time again.

The first is 7A Cafe in the East Village which is open 24 hours a day offering comfort food at any time. The brunch is casual and has delicious options like Salmon Eggs Benedict, Smoked Mozzarella Frittata, and Brioche French Toast. All paired with coffee, tea and options of a Bloody Mary, Screwdriver, Mimosa, or Bellini. There’s a reason the wait time is long and every weekend there are diners both in the restaurant and eating their brunch al fresco.

If you find yourself hungry for brunch on the Upper West Side, my pick is Good Enough to Eat which gives classic breakfast options like omelettes, pancakes, and waffles. Personally, I go for the Strawberry Almond Waffles which just melt in your mouth. The food is fresh, delicious, and the service is great! Be forewarned, you will more than likely see a line as you walk up, but the food is definitely worth the wait!

Elephant & Castle

My most recent brunch discovery is Elephant & Castle in the West Village. I can’t believe that I have missed this place so often when I’ve been in this area. This thirty-five year old restaurant’s dishes have been copied and served by other restaurants like it; forcing them adopt the motto “Copied by many, excelled by none”. The namesake of this restaurant has a long history based in England, but the food is unique to New York. The brunch menu has “favorites” such as Eggs Benedict on Potato Pancakes, Old Fashioned Porridge Brule and Yukon Brunch with Country Eggs, Spinach Puree, Hash Browns and Grilled Tomatoes. Nothing beats the warm drinks such as Spanish Latte or Hot Chocolate which are served in a bowl; not a cup!

Pates et Traditions

When I find myself in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I’m always on the hunt for a unique experience in the young, artsy neighborhood. That’s why I was elated to find a little restaurant called Pates et Traditions that serves French classics and brunch favorites. As soon as you walk in, you feel as if you’ve been transported to the South of France, into some seaside retreat (sans the sea). The waiters (and just about everyone) greet you with a “Bonjour” and all speak French, but are more than happy to revert to English (French accent intact) as you order from their delicious menu. Croque Madame and Croque Monsiuer are offered, but if you really want, they will happily serve you a crepe instead of what’s on the brunch menu.

Wherever you’re having brunch, don’t worry about finding a place to live! Should you find a neighborhood that really catches your fancy, a representative is but a phone call away at 877-852-6636 to help you find the condo of your dreams!

West on the Left | East on the Right

For years on Manhattan, the West and East split ways and tried very hard to ignore each other. Nowadays, a friendly rivalry between the East Village and the West Village has been fueled by comparing the amenities available in both neighborhoods. The latest competition was sparked by the return of 75 1/2 Bedford Street to the market. This four story townhouse is on the market for $4.3 million, even if it is a mere 9 and a half feet wide. The house is so narrow that it has long been known as “the skinniest house in NYC”.

Not to be outdone, the East Village has its own contender: 39 St. Mark’s Place in the heart of the trendy bar and club-filled street. This building measures a mere 8 and a half feet–a full twelve inches thinner than the West Village digs. So, does this mean Greenwich Village needs to give up the crown?

Not quite yet. After an extensive write-up, the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation explains why the West Village still gets to keep the crown, although the East Village house is narrower. 39 St. Mark’s Place was built in the 1860s along with the adjacent townhouse at 41 St. Mark’s Place. In the early twentieth century, the owner of 39 St. Mark’s decided that he wanted a much larger building, so he built an extension, that made the building a full 28 1/2 feet wide. Since the facade of the extension is so different from the rest of 39 St. Mark’s, it looks like a separate building when it is in fact part of the same address. For this reason, 75 1/2 Bedford gets to keep its crown.

Narrow townhouses are part of the charm of Manhattan, and they are a hot commodity. We have dozens of townhouses listed for sale, many of them dating from the nineteenth century and featuring original features! Why not take a look for one that matches your lifestyle on our website, or ask one of our agents at 1-877-852-6636 to find one for you?

Every so often, we receive breaking news of a so-called “new New York City neighborhood.” In recent decades, we’ve been asked to add TriBeCa (the “triangle below Canal Street”), NoHo (“north of Houston Street,” modeled on the forty-year-old designation of SoHo, “south of Houston Street”), and even DUMBO (“down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass,” believe it or not) to our local lexicons. Even more recently, there have been attempts to brand NoLita (“north of Little Italy”), CanDo (“Canal Street downtown”), and BoHo (“Bowery south of Houston Street,” whose nickname at least has an appropriate double-meaning, as in bohemian).

These designations underline the fact that in New York, the neighborhood – as opposed to the city, county, or borough – is the relevant local unit. Unless he or she is out of town (or speaking to out-of-towners), you rarely hear a New Yorker say “I live in Manhattan.” Rather: “I live in Chelsea” or “I live in Harlem.” Some of these neighborhood identifications arise organically, assigned to areas of the city by people who live there; others are the calculations of marketers and developers looking to imbue a neighborhood with unearned cachet. Regardless, these designations often prove fleeting, and any survey of the city’s history is also a survey of neighborhoods and names which have come and gone with the passage of time.

The phrase new neighborhood is generally a misnomer, actually describing a neighborhood which has been there all along, but now has a new name. Usually, neighborhoods don’t simply appear, but they have been known to disappear. San Juan Hill was once the name of a thriving working class neighborhood on Manhattan’s west side; it was obliterated in the 1960s to make way for Lincoln Center. (It lives on in art as the setting for West Side Story.) Little Syria was once a similarly authentic Middle Eastern neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, but in the same era, it was demolished to clear space for the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Some of Little Syria’s population relocated to the southern portion of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, just as the German residents of what was once Little Germany (now the East Village) moved uptown (to what is now Yorkville) following the havoc wreaked upon their families by the General Slocum steamboat disaster in 1904. In the Civil War era, before the development of Harlem, the city’s preeminent African-American neighborhood was a section of Greenwich Village known as Little Africa.  A cool site to see NYC Neighborhood Reviews.

Along with these defunct ethnic enclaves, there have been business districts which lost their names when they lost their businesses. Park Row, east of City Hall, was called Newspaper Row when the city’s press was based there, in the nineteenth century; the future World Trade Center site was known as Radio Row before its cluster of electronics stores was decimated to make way for the towers.

Sometimes, old neighborhood names have been abandoned in an effort to dispel an area’s unsavory reputation. The Five Points (now the cusp of Chinatown and the municipal district) was such a notorious slum in the nineteenth century that its name was forsaken when it was rehabilitated. On the west side of midtown, the Tenderloin was similarly known for crime and corruption, but renaming it Hell’s Kitchen hardly seems like an act of euphemism. Still, this neighborhood’s residents persist in using that richly evocative expression, rather than the area’s colorless official name, Clinton.

As long as New York City exists – which, judging by the daily news, should be for at least another few weeks – it will be cleverly divided into distinctive neighborhoods, and these neighborhoods will be given names, reflective of their character, residents, purpose, or location. These can be expected to come and go, as they always have. In the early 1990s, the New York Times held a contest to rename the southern portion of the extreme West Village. The winning entry, WestHo, never caught on. One wonders if more lasting success would have been granted to one of the runners-up: AssHo.

It was another snow day here in New York City, and I don’t know if you noticed but the day was a perfect for heading to New York public parks for some fun in the snow. Minus the transit troubles, the city was beautiful. Just check out my friend Gillian’s view outside her balcony on East 89th Street, a tree line shot right to Central Park:

If you are a new comer to New York, or you are planning to buy a new condo in the area, here are some tips for adjusting to the harsh New York winters.

1) Make sure you have serious snow boots that can take the deep slush puddles on every corner as the snow slowly melts. Great snow boots are key to wintering in New York.

2) Make sure you have the proper socks, jacket, hats and gloves because you are going to need it. You never know when a the subway is cancelled or the buses get cancelled and you need to do a little more walking.

3) If you have a car, I would suggest parking it in a garage for the winter. Digging your car out in New York can be impossible. Just check out my friend Marley’s car in Chelsea:

It took my friend several hours get this car out.

4) Watch out for falling trees, icicles and the over abundance of salt eating away at your shoes. Check out what happened on my co-worker Anna’s block, a tree could not handle the weight:

I feel like I see way to many people out there that are unprepared. If you are new to town or planning on moving to New York in the future, you will look like a natural with my tips.

If you need help in your process of buying your piece of New York, contact one of our agents. We can help you save money that you can use to buy your stylish winter gear.

Central Park, December, 2010. (Photo: Noah Diamond)

Given the wintry mixes with which our city has been battered in recent weeks, it seems a good time to discuss heat, both literal and figurative.

First: Is there any area of New York that is not at least occasionally referred to as one of “New York’s hottest neighborhoods?” Google that phrase, and among copious results you’ll be told that the city’s hottest include Alphabet City, Astoria, Allerton, Arden Heights, and Annadale — and that’s just the As. Some neighborhoods, like Greenwich Village, Soho, and Tribeca, have been referred to as “one of the city’s hottest neighborhoods” for so long that they beg questions about the nature of hotness itself. Can the Village really be hot if it’s been hot since the nineteenth century? The Village was hot for a hundred years before this particular meaning of the word hot even existed. But it seems to me that when someone says, “Oh, Battery Park City is truly one of New York’s hottest neighborhoods,” their implication is that it has attained this status recently. Hot, in all its sexy, slangy glory, connotes newness, urgency, up-and-coming.

Therefore, we might immeasurably improve the level of public discourse in this town by developing a new term, to apply to neighborhoods which have been hot for longer than a decade. First a place is hot, and then after ten years, if it’s still hot, it graduates to — torrid? Sweltering? Radioactive? Suggestions are welcome in the comments section.

But that’s just figurative heat, and figurative heat, poetic though it may be, does little to improve a frigid day in January. And my inquiry into hot neighborhoods has me thinking: What is New York City’s hottest neighborhood, in the literal sense? Whether seeking heat in the winter or cool in the summer, it would be useful to know if, say, Turtle Bay is a few degrees hotter or colder than Murray Hill.

There’s been surprisingly little scientific inquiry into this question, though last summer one atmospheric physicist at Columbia University discovered that the warmest and coolest neighborhoods in the five boroughs are, inexplicably, right next to each other: East Flatbush (cool) and Bensonhurst (hot), can be separated by as many as five degrees Fahrenheit.

In Manhattan, the greatest contributing factors to heat are crowds, exhaust, skyscrapers, asphalt, and reflective surfaces. All of this points to the Financial District, but no — because Lower Manhattan is so narrow, and the water is so close, the Wall Street area is generally slightly cooler than, say, the office districts on the east side of midtown. Conversely, the western extremes of Hell’s Kitchen are close to the river and should be relatively cool — but the abundance of automotive and industrial facilities seems to negate the effect of being on the waterfront.

We could nominally point to Times Square as a safe bet. It has everything going for it, thermally speaking — crowds, traffic, skyscrapers, and more electrical wattage than any other part of town. But then again, it has less traffic now, since Broadway has become a pedestrian promenade. And Times Square is open, due to the diagonal of Broadway; it ought to be fairly breezy compared with the heat-retaining cast iron buildings of Soho or the cramped, winding side streets of Chinatown.

You know what? Never mind. I have to cool down.

According to Curbed NY the Superior Ink, a condo building that I have blogged about in the past, has recently sold it’s penthouse for a total of $31.5 million. That’s a lot of money, but hey if you have it, spend it.

The new proud owner is Mark Shuttleworth, a British and South African entrepreneur that is famous for paying $20 million to be sent up to space. He is the world’s second space tourist (An interesting thing to be know for). He apparently already owns a building in the unit and must really love the building if he is buying the penthouse as well. Streeteasy shows the penthouse in contract with an original asking price is $33.5 million.  It is a full 6,321 square feet of space and is unfinished so that the owner can personalize the condo to their own preference. I love this idea. What do you think? How would you personalize this expensive square footage?

If you are interested in buying a condo in the Superior Ink building overlooking the amazing Hudson River, check out CondoDomain.

A $40,000 home smack in the middle of the one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City? Well let’s not get to excited because it is just a temporary model home available for tours. The Wall Street Journal reports on this new modern wave of affordable modular homes. They are made for you to place these sleek blocks onto a purchased piece of land. A modern design trailer if you will.

MEKA Luxury Modular Homes is the creator of this amazing piece of design. These blocks are essentially shipping containers and were created by the entrepreneur Michael de Jong. An interesting fact is that the homes are built in China and then shipped to their new owners. Mr. Jong has only sold about ten units and is looking to establish himself with sales to New Yorkers. Will they bite? I will say he has me intrigued.

If you are interested in a buying a home, why not start with a condo. Check out Condodomain.