Categories: Travel

Berry Bros. & Rudd

Berry Bros. & Rudd
Established in 1698
3 St. James's Street sw1
020 7396 9600; www.bbr.com

The most gracious shopping experience in London without doubt is a visit to Berry Bros. & Rudd, wine and spirit merchants to the Queen and the Prince of Wales, who have carried on business at their sublime lopsided premises since the seventeenth century. There is no finer place to buy a bottle of claret than in this unchanging shop, with its creaking uncovered floorboards, collection of ancient bottles, large set of beam scales, and the courteous service of yesteryear.

Peter Horrocks

Peter Horrocks, a barrister, is a freeman of the City of London. He is a former Chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, runs the Covent Garden Minuet Company, an 18th century dance group, is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.

 

Famed for selling and sourcing the best wines, particularly claret, Berry Brothers gives equal attention to a highly rare case of Château Latour as it does to a single bottle of their famed Cutty Sark whisky. Behind the green-shuttered façade, the Victorian clerks' desks stand on the ancient undulating floor whilst on the scattered Georgian chairs clients quietly discuss their next purchase with the highly knowledgeable staff.

A huge old coffee scale on which most of fashionable London has been weighed since the eighteenth century still hangs in the shop, beside framed telegrams that include one gravely reporting the loss of a consignment of wine aboard the Titanic. Once their clients may have included Napoleon, countless European monarchs, and famous figures, but now they could equally include pop stars and shrewd dot-com millionaires.

Below the shop lie the cavernous cellars, rumoured to link with St. James's Palace by a lost tunnel, which now also play host to dinners and tastings for both private and corporate clients.

Jeremy Garfield-Davies

Jeremy Garfield-Davies is an architectural and art historian. A former director of Mallett in London and New York, he advises privately on the research, restoration, and acquisition of works of art for some of the most important private and public collections worldwide. 

Poet Mark Strand recommends The Russian Samovar

The Russian Samovar 
256 West 52nd Street between Broadway & Eighth Avenue
212 757-0168
www.russiansamovar.com

When Joseph Brodsky was alive, he and I would often go to the Russian Samovar to drink and talk about poetry. It was always vodka-many flavors of it. Joseph would usually have cilantro. I would have cranberry. We talked and talked, stopping now and then to take large bites of smoked salmon, smoked sturgeon, pickled herring, usually with black bread. And the caviar we consumed! The food, like the vodka, was excellent. But what made the Russian Samovar special was its owner, Roman Kaplan, who knew Joseph before he came to this country. He is one of the warmest and most generous men that I have ever known. Whenever I go to New York, I go to the Russian Samovar, sit down, have some vodka, and talk with Roman. A gifted pianist plays sad Russian songs. Almost everyone in the restaurant is speaking Russian. Mikhail Baryshnikov, who is a part owner, is a frequent patron. Joseph hovers nearby.

Mark Strand

Mark Strand is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Man and Camel (2006); The Continuous Life (1990); and Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize. His many honors include the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Frank Stella recommends Sebastiano del Piombo's Flagellation of Christ

Sebastiano's Rome

Flagellation of Christ
c. 1521, Sebastiano del Piombo
Church of San Pietro in Montorio

In a letter attempting to explain his difficulties with a commissioned altarpiece, Rubens complained of a "perversi lumi." Bad light pervades the churches of Rome, yet sometimes it can be more of a blessing than a curse. Discovering a great painting all by oneself is a thrill that is hard to come by nowadays. Usually, the great paintings are thrown at us, overpresented and overlit, but a few are still somewhat hidden in their original settings, awaiting discovery. What light there is in these Roman churches has been mismanaged over the centuries, diminished by careless renovations. Not surprisingly, the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, just such a dark case, made for a perfect discovery. Pushing my son's stroller over a worn stone floor, I looked up into a reveal to catch a poorly defined aura, the afterglow of what had to be a special painting.

A late-winter afternoon in Rome is not the best time to stalk sixteenth-century church painting. It's very hard to find your prey. But that afternoon I did flush a great painting out of the Janiculum's shadow. I had no idea of its source. It looked like a Renaissance painting, but it easily could have been a copy, like the compositionally striking Caravaggio I had seen a few days before at the Palazzo Corsini, a fantastic Narcissus, easily the highlight of the collection. I had been very disappointed when my wife read the label of the Narcissus to me--a "copy after Caravaggio." I went into a deep sulk, wondering why I couldn't tell an original from a copy and why this copy was so good, because even confronted by its lack of authenticity, I still wanted it. To me it was a hot painting from the moment I saw it, maybe the hottest cool painting I had ever seen.

The painting in San Pietro in Montorio didn't have the boxy modernism of the Narcissus, but it did have a special kind of in-your-face classicism. It was an over-the-altar painting with mural power, one with "a tiger in its tank." My first guess was a conservative one, maybe after Giulio Romano; my second guess was, "I just don't know." I was surprised by the attribution to Sebastiano del Piombo, but not by the title, The Flagellation; the darkness was not so great that I couldn't make out the action.

Three months later I was there, again late in the afternoon, when the painting was perfectly lit, the seasonal angle of the sun being now in my favor. Sebastiano's painting was beautiful, inventive, and expansive. The beauty was all Sebastiano's, brought out by his Venetian gift for full-scale color, intensely articulated and swirling across the canvas from side to side and from top to bottom. Beauty brought out also by his paint-handling and form-building skills, so evident that Michelangelo, in Sidney Freedberg's words, had no reservations about selecting Sebastiano as his deputy in what amounted to a Medici-driven painting contest with Raphael.

The inventiveness in the painting owes something to Michelangelo's design, which allowed Sebastiano to run wild with a full-blown painterly classicism tinged opportunely with an innate piety. Painterly, pietistic classicism may sound strange, perhaps even at odds with itself, but it is a quality that really counted for a lot in the following hundred years of painting.

Finally, The Flagellation has a convincing expansiveness, an ability to make narrative action and gesture fill the pictorial boundaries to the point that they seem to swell and and bow out the framing edges. In a similar way, Sebastiano's work pushes painting itself beyond the confines of the sixteenth century into the seventeenth century. It is clear, too, that it was Sebastiano's brand of Roman painterly classicism that helped make the expansion so fluid and so far-reaching. He easily caught the attention of Caravaggio and Rubens, as we can see by their magnificent versions of the Flagellation. Certainly, this power-enhanced sixteenth-century Roman art had no trouble beaming itself out all over Italy and across Europe, led, for example, by Sebastiano's Flagellation to Naples and Antwerp. And it's equally certain that any painter, having seen the Roman light, perversi lumi as it could often be, was bound to follow its path all over Italy, and all across Europe, as the history of Western painting so clearly attests.

Frank Stella
Artist

Dany Levy recommends Doughnut Plant

Doughnut Plant

379 Grand Street between Essex & Norfolk Streets

212 505-3700; www.doughnutplant.com

Closed Mondays.

Sandwiched between a thrift shop and a row of brick apartments, Doughnut Plant's storefront is easy to miss. But what lies within puts the franchise doughnut stores to shame.

One day, while sifting through boxes, Mark Isreal happened on some of his grandfather's recipes, so he whipped up a batch of doughnuts and tried selling them to his local coffee shop. The orders poured in literally overnight, and today Mark's doughnuts grace the counters at, among others, Dean & Deluca, Zabar's, and Balducci's. But for the real experience, head down to Grand Street and meet the man behind the doughnut.

This is not your average cop food. Flavors range from classic vanilla bean to ginger, lime, pistachio, and rose water, all hand-cut, hand-rolled, and fried in canola oil.

Best of all, each doughnut measures roughly the size of a human head. In the words of The New York Times' Florence Fabricant, "a plusher chocolate doughnut than his Valrhona would be hard to find."

Dany Levy
Founder of Daily Candy

Michael Miscione, Manhattan Borough Historian, recommends the Panorama of the City of New York

 

New York City Building in Flushing Meadows-Park
718 592-9700, www.queensmuseum.org

I am the proud landlord of a redbrick apartment building. It's three inches tall and sits on my mantelpiece.

My little piece of Gotham real estate was once part of the Panorama of the City of New York, a scale model of the five boroughs that's one of the few holdovers from the 1964 World's Fair. As a jaded native I'm not easily impressed by New York attractions, but the Panorama leaves me speechless every time I see it. Containing some 835,000 teensy-weensy buildings, it fills a floor space the size of two N.B.A. basketball courts. Every dwelling and large structure in the city is represented. The Statue of Liberty could fit in a coffee mug. The deck of the Brooklyn Bridge looks like a yardstick. Every few minutes the room dims to mimic nightfall and the tiny windows glow just like the real thing.

For years the Panorama was allowed to get dusty and out-of-date, but in the mid-1990's it underwent a sort of urban renewal. The whole thing was given a thorough vacuuming. Then, long-gone structures were unceremoniously plucked out with pliers and newly built ones were glued in their place. During a visit to the makeover site I was given permission to keep a few of the little buildings

I found in a bucket filled with the castoffs from the miniature metropolis. Alas, like so many New York historic preservation efforts, I was only able to rescue a tiny percentage of the many structures that ultimately wound up in a trash heap.

Michael Miscione
Manhattan Borough Historian

Robert Kahn recommends Norman Foster's Sackler Gallery

Sir Nicholas Hytner recommends The Cabinet War Room

Sir Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of London's Royal National Theatre, wrote a poignant piece about the Cabinet War Rooms for City Secrets London.

Cabinet War Rooms

In a corner of Horse Guards Parade, opposite St. James's Park, you can walk through a small door surrounded by sandbags into the underground warren of rooms from which the British Government ran the war when Hitler was dropping bombs on London.

Nowhere is more evocative of the old world where the fortunes of war were tracked by coloured pins on faded maps. They're still there, the pins, stuck forever onto what was left of Europe when the lights were turned out on them for the last time, and the door was locked, three months after VE Day.

Thirty-five years later it was reopened to the public. Years that had seen the liquidation of the British Empire had left magically unscathed the rooms from which Churchill had fought to preserve it. The typing pool, the dormitories, the cabinet room, Churchill's own bedroom--everything breathes the tobacco--stained, down-at-heel heroism of our finest hour.

Sir Nicholas Robert Hytner is an English film and theatre producer and director. He has been the artistic director of London's Royal National Theatre since 2003.

I. Miller Building

How many times have you walked by this without looking up?

I. Miller Building
Louis H. Friedland

As you stroll down Broadway after your matinee, stop and glance at the inscription on the facade of 167 West 46th Street (close to the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 46th Street), the site of the I. Miller shoe shop that served New Yorkers from 1929 into the 1970's. The words "The Show Folks Shoe Shop Dedicated to Beauty in Footwear" describe I. Miller's two passions--shoes and stars. As an added attraction, four statues by Alexander Stirling Calder (father of Alexander Calder of mobile fame) appear in niches below the inscription. Miller invited the public to vote for their favorite actresses asmodels. The winners were Ethel Barrymore as Ophelia, Mary Pickford as LittleLord Fauntleroy, Marilyn Miller as Sunny, and Rosa Ponselle as Norma.

Theresa Craig

Theresa Craig is the author of Edith Wharton: A Full House of Rooms--Architecture, Interiorsand Gardens. She teaches literature at the City University of New York.

Kate Spade & Sarah Stonich recommend Bemelmans Bar

Okay it’s 2010, but still Bemelmans Bar breathes Old New York.

Bemelmans Bar
1947, murals by Ludwig Bemelmans

Legend has it Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle hotel was one of the late Jackie O's favorite haunts, and that her protests, along with cries from others, helped save this landmark from being remodeled into just another Madison Avenue piano lounge ordinaire. Classy, but not fussy, Bemelmans is so elegantly dim that the most shimmering celebrity can be rendered inconspicuous in the shadows of the deep leather booths. Fine, since sighting the rich and famous isn't the appeal here--people come to see the walls. Four walls of murals, once vibrant and now perfectly subdued by half a century of nicotine fumes, teem with characters you will immediately recognize unless you spent your childhood in a culvert. Ludwig Bemelmans, author, artist, and restaurateur, was best remembered as the creator of the Madeline books. In 1947 Bemelmans brought his characters in out of the rain and painted them to life among seasonal views of Central Park. Ever since, twelve little girls in two straight lines, and tweed-clad, shotgun-packing rabbits welcome regulars famous and not.

For a half-century a self-portrait of Bemelmans near the bar has overseen the preparation of countless thousands of perfect martinis by the white-tuxed, black-tied bartenders. The bartenders are no-nonsense veterans,and while only a few could possibly remember Bemelmans himself, they speak of him as if this good friend has just stepped from the room.

I try to visit whenever I'm in New York. One afternoon when I was either dressed well enough or the lights were low enough that I might be mistaken for an Upper Eastsider, the barman headed to my booth with a phone in his hand, just like the movies, bowing from the waist--I swear he clicked his heels--and offered me the receiver, inquiring, "Miss Colgate?"

I was tempted by the mischievous Madeline perched just over my shoulder: Take the call, take the call!

"Miss Colgate?"

But gumption failed and I could only reply, "I wish." The barkeep and I had a good laugh, and a few moments later I was delivered a potent something on the house, which is exactly the type of hospitality Bemelmans himself was loved for.

Sarah Stonich
Author

For me, an evening at Bemelmans Bar has always been both fanciful and familiar. When I was a young editor just getting started in New York, a visit to Bemelmans meant slowly savored martinis and a meal of homemade chips, rosemary marinated olives, and divine mixed nuts. I would float through the front door, past the tastefully dressed giraffe with the yellow handbag that graces the wall near the entry, and casually settle in for a cocktail and conversation. Tommy, the friendly Irishman who has been tending the bar for more than forty years, made me feel right at home. I would slip into a tufted leather banquette and slip back in time. By the end of the evening, I felt as though I had stepped out of a Noël Coward play. Today, the experience of turning back the elegant clock at Bemelmans is every bit as transporting. The refined service and urbane pianist, along with the warm glow of the room and Ludwig Bemelmans' amazing wall murals, have endured and I expect always will.

Kate Spade
Fashion Designer

In search of the perfect martini—found in London, of course.

Author Leslie Downer recommends the best martini in the world.

 

 

 

 

Duke's Hotel

35 St. James's Place sw1

The bar in Duke's Hotel, St. James's, is small, cosy and serves the best martinis in the world. Gilberto, the flamboyant Italian barman, will provide articles from the world's press (New York Times, etc.) to testify to this. Then he brings out a bottle of rare vodka, available nowhere else in Britain and covered with frost, straight from the freezer, plus a glass each, similarly frosted. He pours in a generous measure of vodka and tops it with a swirl of vermouth and a splash of lemon, declaring "James Bond was wrong; martinis should not be shaken and should not be stirred". The resulting concoction is rich, creamy, silky smooth and ambrosial. I have enjoyed the best martinis in New York with a Japanese friend who was writing a book on the subject (of martini). All were pedestrian compared to this. Gilberto is now the star of her book.

Lesley Downer

Author