My Urban Sherpa

Pure Food and Wine? Purely Delightful

In the increasingly hopping area around Union Square is Pure Food and Wine, a restaurant with bar and spacious courtyard patio that offers a lovely evening, and an excellent start on the next day. The menu offers raw food, that is: nothing is cooked beyond 118 degrees to preserve the enzymes in the ingredients. What’s raw is organic and seasonal fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Aside from being vegetarian and vegan, raw foods also omits wheat, dairy, soy, and refined sugars.

You may not recognize any of the entrees on the menu, nor the tastes on your plate, but you will enjoy the meal, the setting, the organic wines, and a particularly energetic tomorrow.

54 Irving Place
212.477.1010

purefoodandwine@gmail.com

For more restaurant recommendations, where you’ll eat as well as the food is good for you (and the planet!) visit MyUrbanSherpa.net – and MyUrbanSherpa.mobi.

Foreign Language Guide to New York

Are you looking for an Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, or Vietnamese guide to New York City?

Thanks to Google’s fantastic translation site – we’ve got two for you.

MyUrbanSherpa.net offers an excellent guide—in any language—to New York City for use on your home computer or laptop, and MyUrbanSherpa.mobi offers the best of New York for use on handheld devices. Come see.

Columbus Circle goes MAD

The “new” Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) opened at 2 Columbus Circle this week-end with free admission. With more than double the exhibition space of its previous location, MAD will house—among other things—a permanent collection, three artist-in-residence studios, a 155-seat auditorium, and a ninth floor restaurant with sweeping views of Central Park.

A clever and fun something to do on a rainy day.

Celtic Fest – A fiddling fiesta

Only 85 miles from New York City, Celtic Fest in Bethlehem, PA opens Friday, September 26 and runs through Sunday the 28th. For those with a love of fiddling, Irish step dancing, hurling, bagpipes, and beer – this festival can’t be beat.

Assembling musicians from throughout America, England, Scotland, and Ireland who play in overlapping schedules – in four tents, for the three days – the festival is a fiddling extravaganza. Visitors can roam freely from tent to tent, at no cost (except for what you spend on beer and chips).

Click here to see a complete list of Celtic Classic Performers.

graffiti is art

5 Pointz is a free public outdoor art exhibit that spans a full city block in Long Island City, Queens. It’s a commercial factory building almost entirely covered by Aerosol Art…more commonly known as graffiti.

Please Note: Anyone caught on the roofs unauthorized will be arrested.

National Punctuation Day is today. Hurray!

You may be wondering: How should one celebrate National Punctuation Day? You can start with a visit to the National Punctuation Day (NPD) website (yes, there is such a thing). NPD offers the following suggestions:

• Sleep late.
• Take a long shower or bath.
• Go out for coffee and a bagel (or two).
• Read a newspaper and circle all of the punctuation errors you find (or think you find but aren’t sure) with a red pen.
• Take a leisurely stroll, paying close attention to store signs with incorrectly punctuated words.
• Stop in those stores to correct the owners.
• If the owners are not there, leave notes.
• Visit a bookstore and purchase a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.
• Look up all the words you circled.
• Congratulate yourself on becoming a better written communicator.
• Go home.
• Sit down.
• Write an error-free letter to a friend.
• Take a nap. It has been a long day.

May we suggest dusting off your copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss and enjoying this wonderful book? The greatest delight of the day will be sharing the delightful collaboration of Ms. Truss and Bonnie Timmons, who created a magical edition of Eats, Shoots and Leaves for children. The illustration above brings to life the importance of commas: which are as important with numbers as with words.

Please welcome MyUrbanSherpa.mobi

My Urban Sherpa, an insider’s guide to the best of New York City, today unveils our new mobi site: http://www.myurbansherpa.mobi.

The mobi site streamlines a list of recommended restaurants, bars, athletic facilities, shops, and travelers’ needs for handheld devices. This time-efficient resource of reliable insider recommendations features continually updated listings for current museum exhibitions as well as theater, dance, and performance schedules.

Following the mantra “Eat, exercise, explore – enjoy New York like a New Yorker,” the site offers commentary and contact information for well-known destinations and neighborhood gems worthy of a detour.

Search by category: City, Cuisine, Self, Society, Sports, Travel, or through the search box. Categories are arranged by neighborhood. Each listing offers the street address, phone number, web link, map, and occasionally, a logo or photo. Listings are updated daily to ensure accuracy.

MyUrbanSherpa.mobi offers SMS so you can forward listings to your friends from your phone or computer. And My Urban Sherpa is free to the user – which we hope includes you.

We hope you will use and enjoy myurbansherpa.mobi

Cheers,

Alison Curry
Publisher & C.E.O.
My Urban Sherpa
alison@myurbansherpa.net

Library Lions

September usually offers the perfect New York City walking weather. So if you’re anyway near Grand Central Station or Times Square, why not stroll over and say hello to Patience and Fortitude?

The front steps of the New York Public Library—dedicated on May 23, 1911—are home to the Big Apple’s most famous lions.

The NYPL explains: “Their nicknames have changed over the decades. First they were called Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after The New York Public Library founders John Jacob Astor and James Lenox. Later, they were known as Lady Astor and Lord Lenox (even though they are both male lions). During the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named them Patience and Fortitude, for the qualities he felt New Yorkers would need to survive the economic depression. These names have stood the test of time: Patience still guards the south side of the Library’s steps and Fortitude sits unwaveringly to the north.”

A fond farewell to Yankee Stadium

We’ve talked about Yankee Stadium before but now—since the Bronx Bombers are going to miss the playoffs for the first time since 1993—it’s officially crunch time. Sunday, September 21 will mark the final game ever played at the House That Ruth Built.

See it live on ESPN, starting at 8:00pm EST.

Laurent de Brunhoff & Babar at The Morgan

Laurent de Brunhoff, author and illustrator of the ongoing adventures of Babar will be at the Morgan Library & Museum today, Saturday, September 20 at 1:00.

The first exhibition of original drawings of the Babar Collection opened at the Morgan yesterday. Viewers are treated to the studies and original watercolors of Jean de Brunhoff’s introduction of Babar, a story created by his wife Cecile who told her sons Laurent and Mathieu of a young elephant and his adventures. The boys were enamored with the tale and encouraged their father, an artist, to create a children’s book around the character. What resulted was Histoire de Babar.

Jean de Brunhoff continued to write six additional adventures of Babar before passing away at the age of thirty-seven from spinal tuberculosis. At the time, Jean’s son Laurent was twelve. Nine years after his father’s death, at the age of twenty-one, and a period of studying art with his father’s teacher at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Montparnasse, Jean de Brunhoff continued the adventures of Babar, with Babar et ce coquin d’Arthur, published in 1964.

Laurent de Brunhoff continues to write today. With his wife as a collaborator for Babar’s adventures, Laurent de Brunhoff has penned thirty-seven additional adventures of Babar and his family. These include Babar’s Yoga, Babar’s Museum of Art, and Babar’s USA, published August 2008.

What you will find at this exhibition is work equally magical to this story. Jean de Brunhoff’s drawings and watercolors of Babar are lovely, and the story is poignant and timely. This work is paired with Laurent de Brunhoff’s drawings and watercolors for his first Babar adventure, Babar et ce coquin d’Arthur.

The Morgan is located at 225 Madison Avenue, between 36th and 37th Streets. The exhibition runs through January 4, 2009.