The Bowery House: part museum, part hotel

by McLean Robbins on


It’s half hotel and half museum. The Bowery House at 220 Bowery is one of New York City’s oldest names. Purchased in 1927 as a manufacturing building, the hotel served as a temporary lodging for soldiers returning home from World War II in the 1940s under the name The Prince Hotel. The rooms or “cabins” became so popular that many soldiers never left and lived in the building all the way through the 1990s.

Today, the property has been re-launched as The Bowery House, a trendy hotel meets museum meets hostel that effortlessly blends historic charm with luxe modern amenities.

Owners Alessandro Zampedri (an Italian race car driver) and Sanford Kunkel (a former real estate broker) re-imagined the property as a new destination for cost-conscious visitors, attempting to preserve much of the property’s original spirit with upgraded amenities like 300 thread count sheets, Ralph Lauren towels, high-end custom mattresses, and more. Items such as dog-tag key chains and specialty posters in each room, pay tribute both the soldiers who once lived there as well as various periods in Bowery history, such as Skid Row and the Bowery Boys street gang. All of the artwork, lighting and furniture are manufactured by independent artists.
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Adding to the property’s museum-like charm, the varied room options highlight the building’s origin and its neighborhood’s culture. Like the actual quarters of the WWII soldiers, majority of the cabins, which start at $59 per night, have just enough room for a bed and essential belongings. They are available in single, twin- and full-sizes. Bunks range from the Museum Bunk which provides direct views of the New Museum (which is located across the street), to the Peppers Bunk, named after one of the most colorful longtime residents of 220 Bowery – Charlie Peppers.

The Bowery House’s original, communal bathrooms have been updated with items like Carrera marble sinks, heated floors and bath products from the its local Prince Street neighbor, Red Flower. Other amenities include a landscaped roof garden, a private living room, The Bowery Bodega where guest can get snacks, toiletries and drinks, Dutch-inspired Bowery Lane Bicycles which are available for daily rentals, etc.

While we’re not sure that staying in a teeny tiny room fits our idea of a “fun” hotel stay, the price is certainly right for cost-conscious travelers who don’t want to utilize a traditional and dubiously-clean hostel.

The best “offline” budget hotels in Paris

by Gadling Staff on

Hunting down a cheap and central hotel in Paris can be a daunting challenge. It’s not hard to find one and two-star hotels for under €75 (about $105) per night, but they’re often less-than-inspiring places and frequently located in rather grim neighborhoods.

Fortunately, there are dozens of hotels in Paris’ prime neighborhoods that offer rooms at budget rates. However, they can be tricky to find online, as many of them don’t work with reservation agencies. This means that you’ll never see them on websites like Hotels.com, Expedia or Kayak.

Most of these hotels want to keep it this way. They’d rather handle their own reservations. After all, the booking agencies usually charge hefty commissions, which drive up room rates for everyone.

For smaller hotels with a faithful clientele, they frequently fill up on their own. They don’t need to pay for the service.

Reserving a room at one of these “offline” hotels requires a little more legwork for travelers. You’ll have to check their website (if they have one), email them (if they have email), or call them (they’ll have a telephone).

EuroCheapo put together a guide of cheap hotels in Paris, and here are five of their favorite one-star sleeps, none of which will ever show up on a booking website:

Hotel Tiquetonne
Double: €60

Located on a boutique-lined street a couple blocks north of Les Halles, the Hotel Tiquetonne seems plucked from a ’60s-era French musical. From the sassy receptionist to the cotton candy color schemes, the hotel sings a chipper tune. Built in the 1920s, the Tiquetonne is massive and creaky, with a wooden banister winding up to 45 rooms with private baths (single rooms share showers). Rooms do not have a TV, but they are equipped with Wi-Fi.

The Tiquetonne is popular-so you should reserve well in advance, by telephone only. The staff speaks limited English, so practice up, s’il vous plait.

(6 rue Tiquetonne; phone: +33 (0)1 42 36 94 58; no website / no email)

Hotel Henry IV
Double €60 – €83

Located on the Place Dauphine near the tip of the Ile de la Cite, the Hotel Henri IV is a royally central Cheapo, and once served as the king’s printing office. The 15 rooms and bathrooms have been significantly spruced up since Eurocheapo first reviewed the hotel in 2001, although despite the 2009 renovation they still offer just the basics: bed, chair, desk and big old windows (some of which look out to the Place Dauphine).

We found the hotel completely charming, although those looking for modern comforts should look elsewhere (no a/c, TV, elevator). Also, while the hotel’s location is a quick walk to the Louvre, Notre Dame and Latin Quarter, the Place Dauphine could seem too quiet for some at night. Breakfast included.

(25, place Dauphine; phone: +33 (0)1 43 54 44 53; website: http://www.henri4hotel.fr; Reservations only taken by telephone.)

Hotel Rivoli
Double €47 – €60

The Hotel Rivoli is a no-frills option for those who want a cheap sleep in the Marais but can’t deal with a youth hostel. Located across the street from Paris’ Hotel de Ville, the Rivoli offers 20 plain (if scruffy) rooms, all of which look out to the busy rue de Rivoli.

The bathroom situation is all over the place: Some rooms share toilets and/or showers, while others have private facilities. We’d recommend asking for a room on the fifth or sixth floor, which should be quieter and have better views. And hey, you can work off those croissants while trekking up the stairs (no elevator).

The Rivoli has neither a website nor email and only takes reservations by phone. If searching around online for the hotel, note that there are other “Rivoli” hotels. Be sure you’ve got the right hotel.

(44 Rue de Rivoli and 2 Rue des Mauvais Garcons; Phone: +33(0)1 42 72 08 41; no website / no email)

Delhy’s Hotel
Double €61 – €91

Offering 21 rooms one block west of the Place Saint Michel, the Delhy’s Hotel is a cheap Latin Quarter pick. The building, with its charming stone walls, wooden beams and lack of elevator, dates back to the 16th century. Rooms have cheery bright colors, satellite TV and telephone. All are equipped with a sink and share toilets, although some are equipped with private showers.

Breakfast is included in the room rate and Wi-Fi is available for free in the reception area. Reserve by email.

(22 Rue de l’Hirondelle; phone: +33 (0)1 43 26 58 25; website: http://www.delhyshotel.com/ email: delhys@wanadoo.fr)

Hotel Eldorado (above)
Double €58 – €85

The fun and funky Hotel Eldorado offers 33 rooms with shabby-chic style near Montmartre. The Eldorado’s bright blue and flower-filled exterior is storybook Montmartre, but things get more bohemian inside. Room décor is eclectic, mixing flea-market finds with antiques and original paintings. While the rooms are perfectly clean, they’re not for the persnickety. (It’s obvious that they haven’t been renovated in ages.)

The Eldorado is quite pleased to keep things quiet: None of the rooms are equipped with a TV or telephone, although free Wi-Fi is offered throughout. Most rooms are equipped with a private bath, although a few super cheap singles share baths.

(18 Rue des Dames; Phone: +33 (0)1 45 22 35 21; website: http://www.eldoradohotel.fr email: eldoradohotel@wanadoo.fr)

More budget hotels in Paris

To read more about these hotels and see other recommended budget hotels in Paris, check out the guides at EuroCheapo.

Fall festivals: five delicious ways to celebrate

by Laurel Miller on

There’s something really depressing about seeing the last of the tomatoes, corn, and stonefruit at the farmers market, the withering vines in my neighbor’s gardens. But fall is also an exciting time for produce geeks, what with all the peppers and squash, pomegranates and persimmons.

If you love yourself some good food and drink, here are five reasons to welcome fall. No matter where you live in the North America, at least one of these is guaranteed to be coming soon to a town near you.

1. Hit a harvest festival
From the hokey (corn mazes, hay rides) to the downright debaucherous (late-night live music and beer gardens, camping in orchards), harvest festivals are a blast, no matter what your age. A great harvest festival will include delicious food; local craft beer, cider, or wine; farm tours and seminars; a children’s area and special activities; live music, and, if you’re lucky, a beautiful, bucolic setting in which to experience it all. Some festivals run the span of a weekend, providing an opportunity to take in more of the educational offerings.

Below are some of my favorite festivals, all of which have an educational component to them. Should you find yourself in Northern California in early October, it’s worth a detour to attend the famous Hoes Down Harvest Festival (Oct.1-2) at Full Belly Farm in the Capay Valley, near Davis. It’s one hell of a party (there’s also a top-notch children’s activity area, so little people will have fun, too); definitely plan on camping in the orchard and bring your swim suit; the farm is located beside Cache Creek.

Other great celebrations of fall: Vashon Harvest Farm Tour (Sept. 25), Vashon Island, WA; CUESA Harvest Festival (Oct. 22), Ferry Building Farmers Market, San Francisco, CA; Annual Harvest Festival, Sustainable Settings (mid-Sept.; date varies, but mark your calendars for next year!) Carbondale, CO.

September 22nd, from 7:30-9pm, the 16th Annual Harvest in the Square is being held in Union Square; online tickets are still available until tomorrow at noon for what is one of New York’s premier food and wine events. Some general admission tickets will be available at the event for a higher price.

[Photo credit: Flickr user zakVTA]2. Check out Crush
In North America, the wine grape harvest is held in September or October, depending upon weather patterns. In Napa Valley, “Crush” has just started, and with it, fall colors on the vines; barrel tastings; special winery tours, wine-and-cheese pairings, and up-close-and-personal views of the Crush itself. Even if you’re not an oenophile, it’s by far the most beautiful time to visit Napa and it’s neighboring wine region, Sonoma Country. For Napa wineries and event listings, click here. For California’s Central Coast wine region events, click here.

Check out wine harvest events in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Washington state’s Yakima and Walla Walla regions, and British Columbia’s Fraser and Okanogan Valleys (go to Wines of the Northwest for events calendar on all of the aforementioned); for New York’s Finger Lakes, Hudson Valley, and other regions go to Uncork New York!

3. Go apple picking
With apple-growing regions scattered all over North America–from Virginia and Pennsylvania to New York, Washington state, British Columbia, and California–there’s no shortage of opportunities to attend festivals or U-picks. This traditional fall pastime is a fun activity for kids and supports the local economy and foodshed. Put up apple butter, -sauce, or freeze a pie for Thanksgiving, but be sure to save enough for winter (all apples and pears are placed in cold storage once the growing season ends, so the fruit you buy later in the season won’t be freshly picked). Store in a cool, dry, dark place. P.S. Don’t forget to buy some cider doughnuts if they’re available.

Please note that due to unusual weather patterns (aka “global warming”) this past year, the harvest is delayed in many parts of the country, including Washington. Check with local farms before heading out.

4. Visit a cidery
If you prefer your apples fermented, there are some excellent craft cideries throughout North America. The tradition of craft cider distilling hails from Western Europe, but domestically, the hot spots are the Pacific Northwest (including British Columbia), parts of the Midwest, and the Northeast.

5. Feast at a farm dinner
For food lovers, few things beat dining outdoors in an orchard or pasture, surrounded by the people and ingredients that made your meal possible. Farm dinners are a growing national trend; they may be hosted independently by the farm (Washington’s Dog Mountain Farm, Colorado’s Zephyros Farm, and California’s Harley Farms Goat Dairy are my picks) or hosted by companies like Portland, Oregon’s Plate & Pitchfork and Boulder’s Meadow Lark Farm Dinners. Many farm dinners are fundraisers to help protect local agricultural easements or wetlands, but your participation also supports the farm and local foodshed.

Farm dinners are also held at wineries, distilleries, craft breweries, mariculture farms, and creameries; a tour should be included. The best part, however, is when the guests include everyone from the local cheesemaker, rancher, fisherman, or winemaker, to the potter who made the plates. It’s both humbling and gratifying to meet the people who work so hard to ensure local communities have a safe, sustainable food supply.

[Photo credits: grapes, Flickr user minnucci]

Nida: Lithuania’s cutest holiday town

by Alex Robertson Textor on

The end of summer is usually more bitter than sweet, and this is nowhere more the case than in a beach town emptying itself out for the season. In Nida, the last stop on the line along the Lithuanian coast before the Russian border, bitter and sweet were clashing like enemies in early September. The summer visitors were thinning out. The campsite south of town was almost empty. Some guesthouses had unoccupied rooms. And, most tragic of all, the outstanding In Vino, Nida’s summer outpost of a much-loved Vilnius restaurant, was in its final weekend of seasonal operation.

Nida is the cutest village on the Curonian Spit. I don’t know this for a fact, but I did ride a bus down the entirety of the Lithuanian side of the spit and I did spy each of the other main villages. If a quick drive-by can be counted on, then Nida is certainly the most beautiful of these towns. Nida has been a tourism draw since the middle of the nineteenth century. It knows that it’s cute and doesn’t need bright lights or obvious attractions to lure guests to its pristine streets. As if the sea, the sand dunes, and the pines weren’t enough, Nida’s houses even follow a distinctive stylistic pattern: a dark red paint job with white and blue window and roof trim (see below).

The Curonian Spit is a 60-mile stretch of land, bisected by the Lithuania-Russia border. Very thin at between a quarter-mile and two-and-a-half miles wide, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Blanketed with sand dunes and pine forests, the Curonian Spit is a beautiful, windswept place that deserves its reputation as one of the Baltic Sea’s most captivating corners.

The Baltic is not the Mediterranean, no matter how assiduously the chefs at In Vino seduce their patrons with ‘nduja and other delicious things from southern Europe. In other words, the Baltic’s water is invigoratingly cold. When you emerge from a dip in the Baltic during the summer, you feel less like you’ve come to the surface of a swimming pool and more as if you’re undergoing a homeopathic spa treatment for arthritis. Your body tingles and attempts to adjust to the shock of the water’s temperature. Nida’s beaches are undeniably lovely, with long wide stretches of pale, almost silver sand. They are separated from the Spit’s main highway by thick pine forests.

What is there to do in Nida, really? There’s the beach, the cute village itself, the Thomas Mann House (Mr. Mann liked it here enough to have a house built; this house is open June through mid-September), the sand dunes, and the border with Kaliningrad, that odd exclave of Russia bordered by Lithuania and Poland. Many visitors rent bicycles, though some of the best excursions, across sand, cannot be done on wheels.

Lots of holiday spots feel anonymous. If people return year in and year out to such places, surely it’s out of habit or collapsed imagination. Nida doesn’t feel anonymous. It feels like a perennial summer destination. With just a handful of recognizable activities, it’s a place that can bask in its physical beauty and simply wait for visitors to return every summer.

Nida’s quite affordable, too, with a visitor base that draws strongly from the domestic market. Several small guesthouses offer en-suite double rooms for around €45 per night. Few restaurant meals will exceed €20. There is also a very well-stocked Maxima supermarket in town for visitors who prefer to self-cater.

Five classic Chilean foods

by Laurel Miller on

Chilean food doesn’t have the glamour and romance of the cuisine of its neighbor, Argentina, nor the complexity and exotic Japanese influences bestowed upon the contemporary dishes of its other neighbor, Peru. I just returned from my second visit to Chile, where in between consuming epic quantities of manjar (dulce de leche) and pisco sours, I found more substantial food to love.

Chilean food is of humble origins; a combination of indigenous influence, simple technique, and hearty, regional ingredients designed to sustain and nourish the body despite limited means and harsh climate. Today, Santiago is a glossy, metropolitan capital of seven million, and there’s no shortage of high-end dining with regard to various cuisines. But travel beyond the city limits, and you’ll see tweaks on Chilean specialties depending upon what part of the country you’re visiting.

Northern Chile is largely high-altitude desert, while Central and Southern Chile have more of a focus on seafood. The following is a very simplified list, but they’re five of the most classic dishes to be found throughout the country.Try them for a taste of Chilean culture and history.

1. Empanadas
Not to be confused with the Argentinean variety, which are essentially a culture within a culture, the Chilean empanada is usually baked, larger and flatter in composition (either crescents or rectangular in shape), and less varied in variety. But what’s not to love about a tender, flaky pocket of dough stuffed with seasoned ground beef, hardboiled egg, and olive; roasted vegetables, or melted, stringy cheese? Not much. Find them at panaderias, shops, markets, or restaurants offering “comida typica.”

2. Curanto
This is a specialty of the lovely island and archipelago of Chiloe in Chilean Patagonia’s Lake District. Curanto is a shellfish, potato flatbread, and meat bake believed to have been inspired by Polynesian luau via Easter Island (Rapa Nui). It’s traditionally cooked in a pit that is covered with seaweed or the leaves of nalca, an indigenous plant related to rhubarb. The potato flatbreads, milcao, and chapalele (the latter flavored with pork cracklings), are delicious street foods in their own right that can be found in coastal towns throughout this region. A curanto is a must-see if you’re visiting Chiloe.3. Pastel de choclo
Sort of an indigenous shepherd’s pie, this comforting dish is composed of ground corn (choclo) mixed with hard-boiled egg, olive, and usually ground beef and/or chicken. It’s baked and served in an earthenware bowl called a paila, and it makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

4. Caldillo de Congrio
Okay, I confess that I have a particular dislike for the congrio, or conger eel, which is an obsession in Chile. It’s not that it’s bad; I just don’t care for most fish as a rule (for the record, it’s fairly mild, white, firm, and rather dry and flaky). But I would be remiss to not include it, because it’s such a classic. Whether fried or served in a caldillo, or brothy soup seasoned with cilantro, carrots, potato, and fish stock, it’s hearty, rustic, and very representative of Chile’s culture of subsistence and commercial fishermen.

5. Chupe
This is a somewhat generic term for a creamy seafood stew enriched with milk or cream. Depending upon where you are (or what country you’re in, because it’s also found in Peru and Bolivia), chupe might contain shrimp (thus, it would be called chupe de camarones), fish, chicken, beef, or lamb. It also contains vegetables, potatoes or yuca, and tomato, but the magic is in the addition of merquen, an indigenous (via the Mapuche people) spice mixture made with smoked, powdered cacho de cabra chili. The end result is fragrant, complex, and delicious.

[Photo credits: Laurel Miller]