Spendthrift Shoestring

New York: Cafe Select

Twice now in the past week I've had dinner at Café Select, the newish Swiss bistro in Soho. It's a great little place. I've enjoyed spätzli, veal sausages, braised cabbage, incredible pork belly, and a good cauliflower and apple salad. Everything has been hearty and satisfying, and I've already placed the restaurant on my local restaurant short list. The menu is mostly Swiss German, with a few notable Ticinese exceptions. Bargain hunters, note that you can get in and out at dinner for just about $30 (drink, appetizer, and main). Breakfast and lunch can be had for much less.

As delightful as the grub is, it's not the entire story. Café Select looks and feels like a little flash of Swiss cool. The hip posters and savvy playlist do battle with the austere restroom and retro unisex bathroom door plates. This juxtaposition works really well. Switzerland today is interesting for its aesthetic conjoining of the frumpy and the chic, and the restaurant's interior honors both impulses.

The restaurant also sells a range of Swiss mass-produced items, mostly off the menu: chocolates, condiments, and Swiss sodas like Rivella. The net effect of the interior design and the micro-shop is downright ambassadorial. It's a small and enticing window into Swiss commercial culture. Café Select succeeds along three meaningful axes—those of menu, concept, and execution.

New York: Autumn in Sakura Park

I've lived nearby for five years, but it's only recently that I've come to appreciate Sakura Park, a small park that appears to float above Claremont Avenue and 122nd Street and sits across the street from Grant's Tomb in Morningside Heights. The fall foliage has been particularly splendid in Sakura Park this week.

Sakura Park, yesterday.

New York: Kasadela's Sublime Sashimi

Last night Matt and I went out with Amy and Jinsu for a fantastic meal at Kasadela, a Lower East Side Japanese sake restaurant with a menu of tapas-like small dishes.

Everything was very good, though the highlight of the meal was the extraordinary mackerel sashimi daily special ($14). It was easily the freshest sashimi I've had in recent memory.

My New York readers might want to stop by tonight to see if it's still on the menu.

Yes, it was that good.

Weekend Travel Stories: Massive Cruise Ships, Slovenia, Local Destinations

In the Globe and Mail on Saturday, Wallace Immen reports on the supersizing of cruise ships. He profiles the Carnival Splendor ship, which sleeps 3,600 and serves a whopping 60,480 slices of bacon in an average week. (That's 16.8 strips of bacon per person per week at full capacity. Everybody loves bacon, but that's a lot of bacon, right?)

The Splendor's capacity, it appears, is nothing compared to that of Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas ship, set to launch in 2009, which will be able to carry 6,400 passengers at a time. Having never taken a cruise—something that I should do at least once if I want to be able to credibly claim this profession of mine—the thought of being adrift with 6,399 other passengers strikes me as simultaneously overwhelming and somewhat exotic. More seriously, given the fact that cruising is vastly worse for the environment than flying, one does wonder how great a development these massive cruise ships are.

Jan Morris writes in the weekend FT an enthusiastic, impressionistic blur of a Slovenia feature. Since Slovenia checks so many of the obvious European travel boxes—Adriatic beach towns, stunning Alpine scenery, a hip and happening capital—I find it very odd that features like this are not more commonplace. Slovenia is also delightfully affordable, with the exception of the overpriced Ljubljana hotel market. A Slovenia farmstay brochure last summer included information on farms with nightly rates as low as €10 per person per night. (I wish I could link, but I'm away from home and don't have access to my paper files right now.)

Looking through the travel sections of a number of U.S. newspapers this weekend, the most notable shared feature is an embrace of local destinations and short trips. Clearly, this turn is meant to address the ongoing interest people have in traveling and exploring despite tough economic times. The New York Times' New York City special is one example. Another is the Buffalo News' "One-Tank Trip," which yesterday gave Hamilton, Ontario the day trip treatment courtesy of Dorothy Delmonte. The "One-Tank Trip" feature isn't new for the Buffalo News, but it's especially valuable for this particular moment.

The Air You Breathe Is Not Your Own

That was my favorite of the many turns of phrase used by a passenger-preacher on the B train this afternoon, delivered in a calm, lilting Caribbean accent. It was one of those moments that reminded me in a very self-conscious way that I live in New York City. This happens, I thought to myself, in New York City, and—what do you know?—I live in New York City.

More specifically, I live in Uptown Manhattan, about 50 blocks from the soon-to-be-running second Shake Shack at 77th and Columbus. The current Shake Shack is over 100 blocks from my apartment. Do the math. I'll be too busy eating shackburgers and drinking salted caramel milkshakes for arithmetic.

Nylon Thoughts: NYC's Rain; London's Cultures

Burgertastrophe! Today's rain has forced a change in dinner plans. Because it's no fun to eat your burger in the rain, Shake Shack is off the table.

Among this past weekend's reading materials, Bob Sherwood's article in the Financial Times on the London mayoral election stood out. It looks at how "London's racial diversity and its attendant tensions" may drive voting patterns on Thursday. Were I closer to the flame—in a few weeks, happily, I will be—I'd be able to submit the article to a finer analysis. As a shameless lover of truly cosmopolitan cities, however, I can say that London's diversity is pretty thrilling to me, and is more or less what's driving my excitement to be spending a few months there. A fascinating note in Sherwood's article: of the possibly 400,000 Poles in London, 65,000 were registered to vote locally by February. How will they vote? Apparently, nobody really knows.