Cocktail trends come and cocktail trends go, and sometimes they even come back again before you even know they went. According to today’s Times, rum is on the up and up, meanwhile, it seems like just yesterday that tiki bar Waikiki Wally’s opened, then closed, in the East Village.

But you really don’t realize how ridiculous [...]

Alexander Wang’s influence notwithstanding, I am mystified by the sweatpants trend. Perhaps because I was born in the pre-Lycra, pre-wicking-material era, I associate baggy gray sweatpants with the general humiliation of high school gym class. Imagine running down the main street in town in the most unflattering clothes imaginable. It’s great that athletic clothes are [...]

What do you think of the Olsens’ mouse and rabbit ear get up for the Tokyo Opening Ceremony party? As mentioned, I haaaated the Louis Vuitton bunny ears on Madonna at the Costume Institute Ball. They even look dumb in the styled ads. With Madonna, as soon as she arrived on the arm of Jesus [...]

What’s surprising about Bruni’s hilarious article today on the psychology of diners, What They Brought to the Table, isn’t that his guests didn’t behave as scripted in restaurants, it’s that they would ever agree to the bargain at all. You couldn’t pay most people to only eat a quarter of what’s on their plate, then [...]

Here it is. Coffee. A seemingly innocuous substance, yet Stumptown, a fair trade coffee brand based in Portland, Oregon, caused a fervor – and a backlash – as soon as it landed in New York this summer, the likes of which we haven’t seen since mid-90s Starbucks encroachment. A NY Press article questioning the boho [...]

Eater has just released photos of the new Daniel Boulud restaurant DBGB Kitchen & Bar, to open on the Bowery in two weeks time. Apparently the place is “meant to evoke the restaurant supply stores that are fast going extinct on the Bowery,” but it looks like an army barracks. Even after construction is finished, [...]

Have you seen the ads for Domino’s “Bread Bowl Pasta”? It’s a big, healthy serving of chicken alfredo, Italian sausage marinara, or three-cheese mac-n-cheese in a bread bowl. Because why have just pasta or bread when you could have twice the carbs in one dish? And there’s nothing like a big chunk of yeasty bread [...]

I would say that fashion is like high school, but that wouldn’t be fair: actually, it’s more like junior high. The amount of sniping that went on before this year’s Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Ball – first with the bashing of Vogue and Anna Wintour’s involvement in the ball by author Michael Gross in the [...]

In a shocking discovery, the Times revealed today that no one is dining at an Applebee’s in Manhattan: in fact, the restaurant is full of empty tables. The exact reason is unclear, but it may be because there are so many other similarly mediocre restaurants in the Times Square area offering up stiff competition, including [...]

Let’s see, what happened this week? The Dow lost about 1,500 points, The New York Sun and Cosmo Girl both folded, Iceland teetered on the verge of bankruptcy . . . and Neiman Marcus launched its Christmas Book catalog!

Now if you know Neiman Marcus’ annual holiday catalog, you know this is the first place to [...]