Twinkling lights and terrific eats make for big-city holiday magic.
Have you heard the one about the four Arizonans who wander into Rockefeller Center plaza during the holidays and, well, can’t move a muscle because they’re cheek by jowl with people just like them from all 50 states, Puerto Rico, each of the six retail continents and probably even a few countries we’re technically at war with?
The punchline is… well, my family is the punchline, sadly, doing that most touristy of things in this most touristy of towns. You can’t fault us for wanting to visit New York City during the Christmas season – it’s one of our civilization’s great cultural marriages. Miracle on 34th Street. The Rockettes at Radio City. The Donald cameo in Home Alone 2. And further, you can’t blame us for wanting to lay eyes on Rockefeller Center and the 100-foot Norwegian spruce that towers over its famous ice-skating rink every winter.
But presuming we could just walk up and freely ogle the tree and ice skaters at 8 p.m.? Very naïve. It’s hard enough for the four of us simply to stay together as we’re pulled into counter-rotating orbits of humanity on 42nd Street, all fighting to get a glimpse. To get closer. We feel like pilgrims in Medina.
Thankfully, there are gentler, more generously spaced pleasures in the Big Apple during the holidays – particularly for folk from Phoenix, where the only visual difference between July and December is the ambient temperature reading on your dash. NYC, on the other hand, slips fully into Yuletide character every Christmas. And we love it.
Midtown Christmas Magic
Roughly defined as the waist-like portion of Manhattan that stretches from the bottom of Central Park at 59th Street about 2 miles south to 34th Street, Midtown serves as the city’s primary Christmas-energy reactor pile, to my outsider’s eye.
It’s where you find The Rink at Rockefeller Center (600 Fifth Ave., 212-771-7200, rockefellercenter.com) and the world’s most famous Macy’s department store – now known as Macy’s Herald Square (151 W. 34th St., macys.com) – which continues its long tradition of elaborate holiday window displays remembered by admirers of Miracle on 34th Street. It also features a few holiday baubles that didn’t make the Miracle final edit, like the free-to-enter Santaland attraction, a decoration shop on the ninth floor, and the Macy’s Holiday Market (November 1-January 4), featuring jewelry, handmade stationery and assorted trinkets.
Since most of New York’s holiday magic resides in Midtown, shouldn’t you reside there, too? This part of town is lousy with hotels – high-end ones, mid-tier ones, probably a few fleabags – so take your pick. You probably won’t do much better than the Andaz 5th Avenue (485 Fifth Ave., 212-601-1234, hyatt.com/andaz/nycam-andaz-5th-avenue). Part of the same Hyatt luxury imprint that runs the Andaz Scottsdale Resort & Bungalows and its singular restaurant, Weft & Warp, the Manhattan property operates from the same playbook – aggressively engaging local artists and creators, tapping regional culinary talent, splicing those all-important strands of idiosyncrasy and panache into the high-end hotel genome.
Overlooking the New York Public Library (476 Fifth Ave., nypl.org) – my younger son instantly recognizes the iconic Corinthian columns and flanking marble lions from Ghostbusters and emits a gasp of delight – the Andaz boasts one of the most disarming views I’ve ever seen from a New York hotel, with rooms to match. Designed by Brooklyn interior master Tony Chi, who famously spearheaded the three-year Carlyle hotel transformation, the rooms radiate with spare sophistication. The stunner of the bunch: a corner space called the Wellness Suite ($1,200/night), with 10-foot bathroom door panels that resolve into an oversize soaking tub overlooking Fifth Avenue, perfect to thaw your extremities after a day in the cold.
True to its name, the suite even includes a high-tech “studio mirror” from lululemon for solo yoga and calisthenics sessions – if the excellent gym downstairs is too bustle-y for you.
Also downstairs: The Bar Downstairs & Kitchen (bardownstairs.com), a prosaically named gastropub serving New American fare and craft cocktails that are anything but prosaic. Jerk-spice-grilled octopus with Holland eggplant purée turns out to be one of the culinary highlights of the trip, and the skirt steak with chimichurri rumbles with beefy, dry-aged flavor.
The Bar Downstairs also has a terrific breakfast menu headlined by house-cured gravlax and challah French toast. Even if you’re not hunkering down at the Andaz, you’d do well to dine there – a hidden gem on one of the city’s classiest, most walkable streets.
Feasting in Chelsea
I could talk to you now about the Radio City Christmas Spectacular or Saks Fifth Avenue light show or one of the other mass-appeal Christmastime traditions in New York, but cards on the table: I really just want to walk around, look at lights and eat some kick-ass food.
For the urbane holiday brunch of your dreams, book a table at The Garden at the Four Seasons Hotel New York (57 E. 57th St., 844-760-6347, fourseasons.com) in Midtown. A travertine- and marble-paneled extension of the lobby, the restaurant is animated by natural light and an impressive stand of 20-foot African acacia trees. It’s a ridiculously serene refuge with a menu featuring ethereal, tart-sweet lemon ricotta pancakes, a next-level Cobb consecrated with a perfectly poached lobster tail, chicken and waffles, and other late-morning delights. It sets just the right tone for our afternoon, as we stroll up to Central Park (centralparknyc.org) and contemplate a visit to the nearby American Museum of Natural History (200 Central Park W., 212-769-5100, amnh.org).
After the high-toned culinary pampering at the Four Seasons, you might be in the mood for something scrappier, less Occidental. And you’ll find a mother lode of it in the Chelsea neighborhood, Manhattan’s beloved West Side arts district, about a half-hour walk south of Midtown. Home to some 200 art galleries, Chelsea is so packed with restaurants that you could seemingly roll out of bed and stumble into a mind-blowing meal you won’t forget. We spend a couple nights in Chelsea, and it happens to us twice: first at Sappe (240 W. 14th St., 212-466-6361, sappenyc.com), a funky Thai restaurant packed with Gen Z hipsters that was sort of like Glai Baan on Red Bull, with a seemingly endless selection of unusual and delightful dishes from the country’s Isan region, including yum pu dong, a scrumptiously briny salad of blue crab tossed in a pungent plara-garlic-chili dressing with lime, tomatoes and cilantro. The cocktails are next-level, too – many mixed with nuoc mam and other unexpected savory mixers.
We also love Hao Chinese Cuisine (343 W. 14th St., 646-882-0059, haonoodle.com), a more upscale, relaxed restaurant down the street, set in a street-level solarium. Shanghai-style cooking and hand-made dim sum rule the day here, including eye-rolling dan dan noodles, tossed in a spicy mala sauce with nutty, savory tones. One hates to fall prey to “vacation inflation,” where you over-praise everything because, well, it’s new – but I can objectively say we’ve got nothing quite like these two restaurants back home. And we picked them at random.
That’s how absurdly blessed the food culture is in New York City.
That Most Strollable Time of the Year
After one of our Chelsea meals, we roll ourselves over to the High Line (thehighline.org), one of modern Manhattan’s most ingenious and singular creations – essentially a sinuous, 15-block linear park, built on an old rail line.
Connecting Chelsea with Midtown to the north and the West Village to the south, the High Line treats its guests to eye-pleasing views of the city at every length and makes for a perfect Christmas season stroll. Nothing like the mayhem at Rockefeller.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a fan of mayhem in agreeable portions, and we actually do return to the Rockefeller Center to try out the new Top of the Rock Skylift (rockefellercenter.com), a pneumatic viewing platform built into the skyscraper’s observation deck that suspends you 700 feet above the ground and gives you vertiginous, unimpeded, 360-degree views of the city – at least in theory. It was densely foggy in the city when we did it, so it was much like looking into an enormous bowl of soup. But still pretty darn cool.
If seeing primo Christmas displays is on your agenda for a December visit to New York City, hop on the A train to Brooklyn, where residents of the Dyker Heights neighborhood (dykerheightschristmaslights.com) have crafted a well-deserved international reputation for decorating their turn-of-the-century Tudor mansions in impressive Yuletide light shows.
Not that you need to leave Manhattan to enjoy that sort of thing. Taking leave of the Rockefeller Center, we head south on Fifth Avenue to indulge in that other great seasonal Manhattan pastime: walking around with no particular place to go, catching eyefuls of iconic manmade wonders at seemingly every block: the Empire State Building, the wedgelike Flatiron.
Night falls, and the city’s mythical, nocturnal other self comes to life. At Madison Square Park (1 Madison Ave., madisonsquarepark.org) on the outskirts of Lower Manhattan we find exactly the thing we want – a lit-up Christmas tree, set amid park benches and walking paths, splendid and luminous in the inky night. Not as big as the Rockefeller tree, maybe not a Norwegian spruce. But exactly what
we want.
We take a seat in the silent park and soak in the show.
Best of NYC Checklist
Even in December, a NYC vacation should include those essential iconoclastic experiences for which the city is justifiably famous. Our picks.
Kitschy Theme Bar
The Trailer Park Lounge
New Yorkers will turn anything into a bar: beauty salons, mortuaries, you name it. See: in Chelsea, a tacky-fun homage to Southwest Americana that serves hands down the most potent margaritas in the city.
271 W. 23rd St. | 917-261-2777 | trailerparklounge.com
Mood-Altering Pastries
Heritage Grand Bakery
No, it won’t cure your undiagnosed ADHD or repair your relationships, but the flaky, almond-cream-filled croissants at this Midtown institution will definitely fuel a productive walking tour of the city.
8 W. 40th St. | 212-419-9163 | heritagegrandbakery.com
Late-Night Eats
Anytime Kitchen NYC
Eating anything you want at 2 a.m. is municipal liberty in NYC. Koreatown near Times Square has countless options, including this tucked-away gastro-speakeasy, where nocturnal creatures stuff themselves on off-the-wall tteokbokki, gochujang-spiced noodles and street snacks.
23 W. 32nd St. | 646-669-7733 | anytimenyc.com
One-of-a-Kind Museum
Tenement Museum
Any topic is fair game for history-lusting New Yorkers, including the plight of indigent immigrants, illustrated brilliantly and organically in this well-preserved Lower East Side tenement that housed successive generations of German, Irish and Jewish families.
103 Orchard St. | 877-975-3786 | tenement.org
Skeevy Dance Club
Two Doors Down
Was this where Patrick Bateman cut a rug in American Psycho? Hmm, maybe. Smack-dab-middle in the East Village, the basement-level dance floor promises lots of young New York professionals engaged in sweaty, semi-rhythmic stress-relief.
159 E. Houston S. | twodoorsdown.nyc
