The Wire
Rooms
Every room, by desk and neighborhood. Every name opens the map.
Altamarea's Asian dining room under MoMA: all blades and glass and one very good bar.
The Crown Building's basement jazz room: dark, small, and priced like an heirloom.
Crystal chandeliers, a red-glass bar, and the most expensive quiet in Midtown.
Upstairs at the Fasano: live bossa and jazz two nights a week, strictly for two.
Cigar smoke, leather and a fireplace: the last Midtown club that isn't selling anything else.
Columbus Circle, fifth floor, big band and park windows.
Gilt, mirrors and a piano: the Villard Mansion doing exactly what it was built for.
Mutton chops and fifty thousand clay pipes above your head.
Old-world Paris built into a Midtown side street: piano until midnight, DJ after.
Four decades of seafood and still the cleanest dining room in Midtown.
The W Times Square lobby bar, relit and renamed, still the easiest drink in the theater district.
Thirty-fifth floor of the Mandarin, facing the park, with the calmest bartenders in the city.
A steakhouse for people who treat the room as a negotiation.
A Greek fish market with a marble room attached, and the best lunch deal in Midtown.
Fifty years of hand-pulled noodles and an equal amount of hand-pulled attitude.
A listening bar under the street: vinyl, low light, and a room that asks you to be quiet.
The Waldorf's restored promenade, back at a scale that makes one drink feel like an event.
Midcentury power dining, cart service, an absurd wine list.
Empire State straight on, cocktails better than they need to be.
The revolving bar over Times Square: the only room in the city that turns for you.
Tokyo discipline in a Midtown office tower: the robata counter is where the evening actually happens, the dining room is where the deals do, and both are full by six.
