Pre-July 4th gala America special
Kin Gin, Ear Inn, Kabin, Gabriel Kreuther, Yakitori Kono, Governors Island, Mallorca, Crow’s Massage, business travel, Lucky Selectism, sunglasses, MORE
RESTAURANTS • First Word
Kith and kin with gin
Three springs after Rivington Street’s post-pandemic rebirth as a maze of outdoor dining set-ups populated mostly by twenty-somethings let loose, it’s now less frenetic, more suited to a leisurely meal or drink. The sidewalk between Essex and Ludlow is mostly navigable, for example. And there, about midblock, is the newly opened Kin Gin. It’s an easy, uncrowded place to duck into for cocktails and a few snacks (or maybe dinner), inoculated against accidental crowds by its positioning inside the Hotel on Rivington.
The inside is glossier than your average izakaya. The bar up front seats about 10, while the large dining room in the back is lined with white bouclé chairs and plush pink banquettes, all surprisingly bright under an expanse of skylights that let the sun creep through well into date-night hours. The drink list opens with a geographically themed gin and tonic section, each selection served in a big goblet with convincingly relevant garnishes ($19 per). Increasingly elaborate cocktails follow. Spirits (including a wide selection of whiskeys), sake, wine, and beer are also on offer.
Kin Gin’s raw bar items are its best. The tuna tartare is a colorful palate of bluefin, quail egg, finely chopped shiso, takuan, and avocado, to mix and fold into nori sheets. The ocean umami ($32) is even more vibrant, with scallop sashimi, gleaming ikura, and just enough uni. Small plates include a chicken kara-age and a few fried items, including sho’s kakiage, its root vegetables light and crisp. The goma-ae ($16) with endive, fennel, and radicchio also makes for a pleasant little salad, and a dry-aged whole mackerel ($48) and Australian Wagyu strip (MP) number among the large plates. –Amber Sutherland-Namako
→ Kin Gin (Lower East Side) • 107 Rivington St • Tues & Wed 5p-10p, Thurs-Sat 5p-11p • Reserve • Photo: Noah Fecks.
RESTAURANTS • Fine Dining Report
Our fine dining correspondent Lee Pitofsky dines at Per Se as often as most civilians order delivery. Here, now, his New York City report for FOUND:
→ KABIN FEVER: First-time bar owner Alex Tangen is looking to make a splash this summer on Spring Street, blending her British and Norwegian heritage at her new cocktail bar, Kabin (Hudson Square). It opened to the public last week. She got some help on the drinks list from cocktail consultant Pam Wiznitzer and Dante’s head bartender Eloy Pacheco. Snø, inspired by the “soft white snow that covers the Nordic landscape,” features gin, bitter bianco, dry vermouth, blanc vermouth, mango and bitters. Elsewhere, expect plenty of Aquavit. The (also Scandinavian-inspired) food menu comes from D.C. chef Johnny Spero (Reverie and Bar Spero) and includes dressed oysters, pickled fin fish, Swedish meatballs, and caviar service with Norwegian waffles. Reserve.
→ HIGH CALIBER: Midtown’s Gabriel Kreuther is currently featuring some of the best compositions I’ve had there in recent memory. On a recent visit: Montauk royal red shrimp crudo lies under a tuile made from cayenne, with jalapeño coulis and grated macadamia nuts. The sweetness of the raw shrimp with gentle spice and the nuttiness of the macadamia is a perfect match. White asparagus from Holland is cooked in a pastry crust and presented tableside with spring onion, white vermouth, and a farm egg mousseline with a dollop of imperial kaluga caviar. The chef’s tasting menu, at $265 per, remains one of the better deals in the city for cuisine of this caliber. Reserve.
→ GO KONO: Tucked away in an alleyway in Bowery, Yakitori Kono (Chinatown) continues to put out some of the best Yakitori I’ve had outside of Japan. The consistency in char is second to none, and you don’t have to go hoping you’re in chef Atsushi Kono’s section, because the whole restaurant is his section. Make sure you ask for the chochin, as it’s the only place you’ll find this delicacy (a skewer of unfertilized egg yolk, ovary, and liver, above) outside of Tokyo. Kono’s beverage program and impeccable level of service only add to its appeal. Prices have remained steady at $175 per guest. Reserve. –Lee Pitofsky
BARS & RESTAURANTS • Intel
→ EAR YE: Celebrate the 4th with a night out at the iconic Ear Inn (Hudson Square) on Spring St. The spirited Papas Dream Shadow Orchestra plays from 11p on July 3 to 2a on July 4. Eating, drinking and music is the scene. Menu favorites remain the chicken pot pie, the cowboy chili, and the burger (also iconic). Martin Sheridan and Richard "Rip" Hayman gave the bar its name when they took over in the late 1970s. They cleverly altered the existing neon "BAR" sign to read "EAR," avoiding a lengthy review process by the Landmark Commission for new signage. A legend was born. –Brad Inman
NYC RESTAURANT LINKS: Chef Daniel Humm signs lease for new restaurant at 435 Hudson St in West Village • Flynn McGarry’s Gem Wines popping up on Spring Place rooftop in Tribeca all summer • Australian cafe Ruby’s coming to Williamsburg • Cocktail trend watch: just mashing them all together.
WORK • Tuesday Routine
Two-man shop
NOAH DAVIS • co-founder • Three Point Four Media
Neighborhood you work in: Carroll Gardens
It’s Tuesday morning. What’s the scene at your workplace?
I’ve always been a work-from-home person. I make some coffee and head to the office (the half of the living room table that’s closer to the window). My Three Point Four Media business partner and I have a standing morning Zoom meeting, so I spend from about 7:30 a.m. until our chat catching up on emails that came in overnight, prepping for the day, and reading a variety of newsletters (Stratechery, Puck, One Thing, After School, Cultivated, and FOUND, of course) and the news.
What’s on the agenda for today?
Bill and I are both former freelance journalists who launched Three Point Four Media in 2017 as a way to use the skills we developed to help companies and organizations tell their stories. We’re the only two full-time employees, leading every project and pulling in freelancers on a project basis. We work on a range of stuff.
Today, I’m coordinating timing for an interview I’ll be doing later in the week with a U.K.-based actor, building out and organizing the content plan for a company called 11VEN, finalizing part of a naming project for a well-known outdoor recreation company’s upcoming line, talking to a tourism client about a potential project, keeping tabs on a website we helped launch recently, and writing our twice-a-month company newsletter.
While I mostly work from home, I’ll occasionally spend a couple hours at Principles in Gowanus. Or walk to Dae (best cappuccino around) or Nili (best blueberry muffins; my snack of choice tends towards kindergartener-with-disposable-income tastes) for a break. Today, I went to Laurel because I had been wanting to go and I was writing a newsletter about making myself look cooler than I am. The pain Suisse was exceptional.
Any restaurant plans today, tonight, this weekend?
Popina in the Columbia Waterfront District has my favorite backyard within walking distance, and I haven’t had a disappointing dish since they opened. Bonus points for The Hop Shop next door, good for a pre-dinner drink. I’m also a fan of Popina spinoff Gus’s, now with pasta, in addition to burgers and steaks and chophouse fare. I have a soft spot for the good people at Aromi since stumbling in during a driving rainstorm last year. They made space for me at the bar on a totally slammed night and poured an exceptional Negroni. My Lower Manhattan go-to is Epistrophy in Nolita — a simple, solid, affordable place that hasn’t changed since I first moved to the city.
How about a little leisure or culture this week?
Summer is Governors Island weather. If the mood strikes, I like running a race with NYC Runs — the most approachable and fun 5k and 10ks in the city — then, staying on the island for the day. Or skipping the run thing, going to Governors for the afternoon, ferrying back to Red Hook, getting pizza outdoors at Hoek, and watching the sun set at Louis Valentino, Jr. Park, or having a drink at Seaborne if we can figure out when it’s open. (Sporadic hours make a bar feel homey.) I go to a fair amount of movies: Cobble Hill Cinema or Nitehawk Prospect Park for less spectacular features; Regal Essex for anything with explosions.
What’s a recent big-ticket purchase you love?
On the recommendation of a friend, we went to this wild restaurant in the middle of Mallorca, the type of place where each (excellent) dish features multiple ingredients that have been fermenting in pine straw for 24 months. Just outside the bathroom was an enormous and amazing photograph of Buttermilk Channel and the Red Hook terminal shot from a pier in lower Manhattan. I asked the chef, Edu Martínez, about it, telling him that it more or less showed where we live. He said he took it on a trip in 2001. When we got back home, I emailed Martínez and asked if we could buy a print. Despite being a chef and not (yet) a professional photographer, he was willing. Now, after spending far too much on a frame in Brooklyn, we have a little bit of the nearby waterfront via Mallorca on the wall in the living room.
What NYC store or service do you love to recommend?
Crow’s Massage. As someone who works out a bit too much and warms up/stretches far too little, an occasional massage from Michael Croes goes a long way toward working out the accumulated knots and tightness. You’ll walk out feeling looser and lighter, and Croes will even suggest some quick and easy things to do at home to prevent whatever issue he worked out from returning. The man is a genius, and a nice dude, too.
WORK • Travel
Business class
I’m on a long plane ride back from a family trip. As remote work spaces go, it’s cramped and the air quality isn't ideal, but it’s mostly quiet and dark in a focusing sort of way.
I used to travel for work about once a quarter, sometimes more, usually to put on events and make sales calls. Some of the trips were even productive! More often, they were a source for corporate humor, like the time we flew to Chicago to throw a meet-and-greet cocktail party at an ad agency and no one showed.
Like everyone, the trips stopped with the pandemic. I picked back up in late 2021 and early 2022, but since we started FOUND last year, we haven’t really made work travel part of the regular business cadence.
Mostly, it’s because during this building phase, it’s more efficient and cost-effective for us not to spend days on planes and in hotel rooms when a Zoom call will do. And we have families.
But the routine-breaking of this family trip is a reminder of how travel can introduce new angles on old habits and processes. (Maybe one refresh a day is enough on the subscription charts.) Of course, I’ll probably return to most of them when I sit down at my desk tomorrow, but hopefully with a slightly sharpened perspective.
So, a resolution for Q3 (a top 3 quarter!): Find a good reason to get on a plane for work again. Experience the business from outside the house, broaden horizons, clear some space in my head. Or maybe we’ll just start looking for an office. –Josh Albertson
WORK LINKS: Private equity lawyers are getting paid • Junior bankers are working 100 hours a week again • Consulting firm Kearney takes two highest office floors at resurgent Empire State Bldg • Teen-ternity leave and other solutions for working while raising teenagers • Cringe alert: writing team-building songs in Nashville on the company retreat.
GOODS & SERVICES • FOUND Shop
Lucky vintage
A new pair of sunglasses is never the wrong idea, but especially not in early July. For a unique look, go vintage, preferably at least a few decades old. They crafted glasses with higher quality plastics back then, so the frames are often in perfect shape despite their age, and the lenses are more easily swapped out.
In the Meatpacking District, I love the choices at Lucky Selectism. The shop also sells gorgeous garments, jewelry, hats, and other accessories, but the real stars are the sunglasses, with a small collection of vintage, plus new, handmade limited editions of no more than 100, designed by the owner, Heewon Kim.
“I’m focused on glasses for fashion, not optical,” he explains, “and I’m very picky about the shapes — they’re based on feelings, not commerciality. I take inspiration from vintage for modern frames.” What’s old is new again. –Karen Moline
→ Shop: Lucky Selectism (Meatpacking District) • 346 W 14th St. • Mon-Fri 12-8p, Sat 11a-8p, Sun 11a-7p.
GOODS & SERVICES LINKS: Scandinavian textile company Nordic Knots opens NYC flagship on Canal St. • Souped up Land Rover Defenders are the ultimate status symbol • Balenciega’s bags, including rereleased Le City, are driving a comeback • Summer camps are banning skin-care and beauty products.
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GOODS & SERVICES • The Nines
Sunglasses
Lucky Selectism (Meatpacking District), vintage and new, small batch collections