April 28, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Adam Gopnik’s “In the Neighborhood,” a delightful postscript to his wonderful “Fresh Paint,” in last week’s New Yorker. It’s a guide on where to eat near the Frick. Here’s a taste:

Begin a blessed Saturday morning at the newly expanded Frick Collection. Be sure to stop at James McNeill Whistler’s “Arrangement in Black and Gold.” Then, though Madison Avenue—heavily weighted down by flagship stores, making a touch monotone the once beautiful flow of galleries, boutiques, and coffee shops—is not all it was, it can still be a pleasure to stroll, staring down the enticing side streets that point toward Central Park. Where to stop for breakfast? There is the last remaining Three Guys coffee shop, right up Madison at Seventy-fifth. All the breakfast dishes are available there, along with the great and vanishing run of sandwiches—B.L.T., tuna on rye—that marked New York cuisine for so long. E.A.T., the outpost of the Eli Zabar empire—which really is an empire, with a single emperor—is farther up, at Eighty-first Street, for unimprovable lox and soft scrambled eggs. And, for coffee after the meal, walk in the opposite direction to Via Quadronno, right off East Seventy-third, which makes one of the best cappuccinos in the city.

I enjoyed this brief piece immensely. I hope Gopnik writes more of them.