Cyber burger
Una Pizza Napoletana, Foxface Natural, Hamburger America, Brooklyn brownstones, truffle dinners, Little Cranberry Island, MORE
REAL ESTATE • Brownstone Report
Deals of the century
The turn of the century — the 20th century, that is — was a fruitful time for brownstone builders in Park Slope. That’s when many of the neighborhood’s signature townhouses, which often top the sales charts for Brooklyn real estate when they trade, date from. Nearly 125 years later, asking prices for townhouses range from $2.5M for the two-family townhouse at 649 Degraw St. to the grand 18 Prospect Park West, asking $13.995M.
In between, three deals that recently went to contract give a sense of the state of play in the market.
→ 416 7th St. (Park Slope) • 4BR/2.5BA, 2224 SF • Three-story townhouse built 1899 with backyard • Monthly taxes: $535 • Listed: 6/20/23 for $3.38M, in contract: 10/9/23 • Closing ask: $3.6M • Listing broker: Delroy Bodley, NY Living Solutions.
→ 359 Bergen St. (Park Slope, above) • 7BR/3.5BA, 3108 SF • Two-family home built 1910 with upstairs triplex and backyard, plus garden-level rental apartment • Monthly taxes: $930 • Listed: 5/18/23 for $5.95M, in contract: 11/20/23 • Closing ask: $5.5M • Listing broker: Dawn Silverstein, Corcoran.
→ 131 Lincoln Place (Park Slope) • 5BR/3BA • Four-story townhouse built 1901 with back garden • Monthly taxes: $932 • Listed: 10/18/23, in contract 11/6/23 • Closing ask: $6M • Listing broker: Jessica Buchman, Corcoran.
NYC REAL ESTATE LINKS: 2024 NYC housing market predictions: asking prices coming down? • Buyers remorse at The Plaza is real • New renderings for The Keller at 150 Barrow St. • Hamptons brokers split over sky-high asking prices.
CULTURE & LEISURE • Friday Routine
A pizza guy on the trail of the Tour de France
ANTHONY MANGIERI, founder/CEO, Genio Della Pizza, and chef/owner, Una Pizza Napoletana
Neighborhood you live in: East Village
It’s Friday afternoon, how are you rolling into the weekend?
Friday afternoon I’m most likely making sorbetto and our Almond Cremolata ice cream at Una, after I finish making dough for dinner service. I usually wake up early, go cycling around Central Park, then head into Una by 9am to start the dough. I’ve basically had a similar routine for almost 30 years, though nowadays I also have virtual meetings for Genio Della Pizza while making dough and prepping.
Where are you dining this weekend?
On my Una workdays, I usually Citi Bike home for lunch, or, if it's a Saturday, I can steal a slice of cake or a mortadella sandwich from our pop-up caffè while I prep for dinner service. But, on Sundays, I like to get out for a meal. Probably my favorite spot on a Sunday morning is abcV. I really love the ingredient/market-driven menu, and the pancakes are delicious. If I’m heading out for dinner, there are a bunch of spots I like, or that I’ve been waiting to hit: Rezdôra, Jupiter, and Crown Shy to name a few. I’ve also been wanting to dine at Le Bernardin.
How about a little leisure or culture?
For the most part my culture/relax time is relegated to Sundays. My daughter and I both play instruments, so if we have free time in between my work schedule, that’s a great way to have a little mental break. We also love doing art, so we’ll sit around the dining room table and watercolor paint or draw and talk.
Any weekend getaways?
On Sundays we love to head down to Monmouth County in NJ, and go mountain biking or hiking, then hang out at the beach. (In the summer, we’ll go for a dip, but the rest of the year we sit on some folding chairs listening to the ocean and breathing in the sea air.) There’s also a juice spot we love in Long Branch called The Herd Juicery. Then we usually have Mexican for dinner in New Jersey, or we’ll head back up to the city and cook a nice dinner at home before starting the workweek. In the city, I recommend The Well. It’s an escape from the daily grind, and you can never have too many massages.
What was your last great vacation?
My last great vacation was in the French and Swiss Alps this past summer. We stayed in some incredible spots — our favorite was Hotel des Horlogers in Switzerland. We brought our road bikes and did a ton of cycling, including some of the climbs from the Tour de France. Super amazing, beautiful hikes, and quite a few massages/spa sessions. I’m also really fortunate to visit Italy multiple times a year because Genio Della Pizza is produced there, and I’m there at the factory for every production run. Whenever I'm in Italy and near Bologna, I make several stops (a day) to Galliera 49 for gelato and granita.
GETAWAYS • Maine Report
Acadian glory
Islesford Dock Restaurant & Gallery is accessible only by boat, unless you happen to live on Maine’s Little Cranberry Island, which only a couple hundred people do. This past August, we shared the 20-minute ride from Northeast Harbor (via Cadillac water taxi) with one of those residents, Elaine, who had missed an earlier ferry and needed a lift home.
She returned the favor when we docked by taking us on a quick tour of the island on her golf cart, parked just up the road. The kids hung off the back as she pointed out her friends’ houses, mostly modest affairs with windows pointing towards the sea.
Back at the restaurant with some time to spare before our reservation, we sipped drinks on the dock, our elbows on the wooden rail pointed west toward the mountains of Acadia. Multi-generational parties came and went — regulars, mostly. Eventually, the sky and harbor blended into a color we’d never seen before, and the Mainers and interlopers all took turns trading phones and posing.
When the show ended, we sat inside at a table beside one of the walls of windows framing the bright dining room. There’s a sturdy bar in the center, wood beams and white clapboard walls throughout. Art lines the passageway to the gallery in the back, where local works are for sale.
What’s the Maine slogan — the way life should be?
The menu is a mix of Downeast vacation comfort and farm-to-table ambition (there’s a greenhouse behind the restaurant and a fisherman’s co-op next door). A season later, the particulars of the dishes have mostly faded into the glow of that sunset and the buzz of the room. But the food just needed to be hot to clinch the meal of the summer, and it was much more than that. The desserts, particularly, are still rendering in color: five spoons at once in a chocolate trifle and a too-hot-to-touch berry crumble.
On its website, the restaurant warns that it’s not responsible for your ride home or finding lodging in the event you’re stranded. Honestly, it would’ve been fine. Elaine told us to stop by; she was carrying a bag of groceries from the mainland. The sun would be up in nine hours. –Josh Albertson
→ Islesford Dock Restaurant & Gallery (Little Cranberry Island) • 1 Main St., Islesford, ME • Open mid-June through late-September.
GETAWAYS LINKS: Relocated Rowdy Hall opens in Amagansett • First design images of Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival building in Garrison • The Standard preparing to unveil new The StandardX hotel concept • Esquire’s best new restaurants 2023 • Last chance to buy an Epic Pass for this ski season is Dec. 3. • Connecticut is trending.
RESTAURANTS • First Word
Smash hit
The Skinny: Hamburger America, George Motz’s new burger joint just a few doors up from Roscioli in northwest Soho, is as much museum as it is restaurant.
The Vibe: The interior is painstakingly sculpted to call back to the sunny optimism of the American postwar burger stand: a sweeping formica counter, bright chrome and yellow accents with dark wood paneling. Naturally the place to be is at the counter, especially if Motz, one of America’s foremost burger historians and champions, is manning the griddle, grinning sideburn to sideburn.
The Food: The menu is a stripped-down affair: just two burgers and five sandwiches — PB&J, grilled cheese, hot ham, egg and chicken salad. Also, fries, pie, cookies, a selection of flavored milks, and Miller High Life. The style is smash, balls of beef tossed on the griddle, pressed down into pucks and shrouded with layers of onions. Motz tends to them with a knowing certainty, prodding and shifting the simmering patties until they’ve attained the right level of wilt and char, before flipping them, topping them with cheese and, finally, depositing them into a buttered bun to be wrapped in paper and served on a ceramic dish.
The Verdict: Framers, each and every one. –Nick Solares
→ Hamburger America (Soho), 51 MacDougal St. • No reservations.
RESTAURANTS • The Nines
Ticketed truffles
Al Coro (Chelsea), 12/1, six courses plus wine, $800/$1500 per, Reserve
Alice (Greenwich Village), 12/3 and other dates, Village Italian, $120 per, Reserve
63 Clinton (Lower East Side), 12/5, six-course tasting from chef Sam Clonts, $250 per, Reserve
Lucciola (Upper West Side), 12/6, seven-course tasting with Barolo wines, $1049 per, Reserve
Le Pavilion (Midtown East, above), 12/9, six-course annual black and white truffle dinner, $495 per/$695 with wine pairing, Reserve
Ai Fiori (Midtown South), 12/12, Barolo and truffle wine dinner, $1100 per, Reserve
Lincoln Ristorante (Lincoln Center), 12/12, five-course tasting, $550 per, Reserve
Babbo (Greenwich Village), 12/14, six-course tasting with wine pairings, $1000 per, Reserve
Eleven Madison Park (Flatiron), 12/15, white truffle and wine dinner, $950 per, Reserve
Additions or subtractions? Hit reply or found@foundny.com.
CULTURE & LEISURE • Cheer
New York City Ballet: The Nutcracker, David Koch Theater (Lincoln Center), Sat @ 2p, orchestra, $320 per
Rockettes Christmas Spectacular, Radio City Music Hall (Midtown West), Sat @ 4p, orchestra, $475 per
KISS: End of the Road (last show), Madison Square Garden (Midtown South), Sat @ 730p, section 107, $746 per
CULTURE LINKS: USTA weighs more ‘bunker suites’ at the U.S. Open • Ukranian art gallery/weed shop Mriya opens in Tribeca • The digital innovators reshaping the art world • 46 forecasts for the cultural trends of 2024.
LOST & FOUND • Behind the Paywall
Dispatches from the frontline, from FOUND subscribers for FOUND subscribers: