On an afternoon this spring, Rony Elka Vardi and Leigh Batnick Plessner stood outside the Bedford Avenue storefront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that for years was a location of their jewelry boutique, Catbird. The cramped space, now a cafe serving coffee and Argentine pastries, has little more than 200 square feet. “It’s even tiny for a…
Prison limits self-expression. Inmates are usually forced to identify as a number and, for the most part, can only wear a standard-issue uniform. After living that way for decades, how do you rekindle a sense of personal style? Six exonerees involved with the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions using scientific methods like…
Mera Caulfield was watching television a couple of months ago when the screen suddenly erupted with characters doing their best evil laughs. Ms. Caulfield turned to her two roommates, Alixandra Matos and Megan Mandrachio. “I was like, ‘That’s literally us,’ ” Ms. Caulfield said. Their apartment in Queens was soon filled with a cacophony of…
The most talked-about dish at ILIS, the cavernous Brooklyn restaurant opened by the Danish-born chef Mads Refslund in October, has to be the clam flask. This is a drinking vessel made by opening a surf clam, removing the clam, resealing the halves of the shell and shearing off a bit of the top lip to…
Next month, Nick Ozemba and Felicia Hung, the co-founders of the Brooklyn-based design studio In Common With, plan to open Quarters, a shop housed in a 19th-century TriBeCa loft. The 8,000-square-foot space is laid out like a well-appointed home: Guests enter through the library and can wander the great room, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, bar…
Sometimes I receive emails from readers saying that I recommend too many Brooklyn restaurants. Though I disagree, I will admit: That’s where I’ve lived since arriving in New York City, so I think it’s a very special place. When I moved here in 2012, Brooklyn was in the midst of a restaurant renaissance driven by…
For over 20 years, Melissa Goldstein worked as a magazine photo editor. While researching imagery, she developed a fascination with Scandinavian ceramics, 17th-century botanical illustrations and Japanese woodblock prints dating back to the 1500s. It wasn’t until she moved to Brooklyn and began rehabilitating the overgrown garden behind her brownstone that she began combining her…
In early February Arturo Payamps, the general manager of a City Fresh Market grocery store in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, received a message on WhatsApp from a friend. It included a link to a TikTok video showing the outside of the store with a sign for Erewhon, the trendy organic grocer in Los Angeles,…
The Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival in Miami just wrapped up this year’s run. Next stop: the New York edition, scheduled for Oct. 17 through 20, but with a big difference. It’s moving its largest events to Brooklyn, to the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park. A 450,000-foot sprawl will contain the…
Emily Zaboski sometimes struggles to describe her living situation to people she meets. “Everybody we know is like, ‘Wait, so you just — you have two apartments?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, no, but kind of,’” she said. Ms. Zaboski technically has just one apartment. She and her roommate Jinn Liu moved into a three-bedroomapartment in…
