Like other rewards programs, Blackbird collects basic personal data — name, ZIP code and birth date — as well as the details of each check: what you ordered, special requests, food allergies and the like. “Independent restaurants don’t have the tools to make use of that raw data,” Mr. Leventhal said. “There’s a difference between…
Three days after Sarah Burton showed her final Alexander McQueen collection at Paris Fashion Week, the brand’s parent company named Seán McGirr, an Irish designer, as her successor. “Alexander McQueen is a house we are passionate about, and we are confident that Seán McGirr will be able to pursue its journey with a new creative…
I’m as confused as a goat on AstroTurf, and I hope you can help me: My wife and I are retired. We got married a year ago. About two years before that, when we started to get serious about each other, I invited her to move into my home. (I own it, and there’s no…
Khalid Abdulqaadir’s life was full of secrets. He started keeping them when he was a teenager, after his father was accused of an unimaginable crime. He didn’t want to explain his family history every time he started a new relationship. So his secrets followed him, even as he got married. Many years later, Khalid was…
It wasn’t until I called Brendan Canning, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, that I found someone willing to speculate how an allergy in the esophagus might lead to the terrifying sensation of drowning. Canning, a self-described “science nerd,” is not a physician but a researcher who focuses on allergies and airways. He explained…
The linen closet did not hold nearly enough sheets to blunt the vengeance of a late-May freeze that turned umbrella-like Astilboides leaves into alien life-forms. There was nothing in any cupboard — or in the barn or the toolbox beneath the pantry sink — to convince the rains to come more gently, please, not several…
You know that feeling of riding a bike as a kid — the freedom to go (almost) anywhere, to explore, to ride with friends? Gravel biking is like that. With a penchant for riding on dirt or gravel roads and paths and piecing together out-of-the-way routes, gravel bikers — as opposed to mountain bikers, who…
At Chanel, meanwhile, Virginie Viard was riffing on the Villa de Noailles, the 1920s artistic salon in the South of France and the creative milieu Coco shared, with bouclés and seaside stripes, long-line bathing suits and flirty cover-ups, logos and flowers and pearls galore. The problem is, for every great piece — a pleated black…
On Monday night, at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, adults in tieless suits and flowing dresses populated the Youth Wing, sitting near stacks of children’s books, some on children’s chairs, with drinks in hand for the library’s 24th annual gala. The benefit, which raised $1.5 million, honored Jay-Z and his mother, Gloria…
Atmosphere The white tablecloths and leather-bound wine lists communicate seriousness, not formality. Servers are welcoming, helpful and quietly efficient at turning tables. Noise Level There’s music, but it’s so soft you probably won’t hear it. The room is only as loud as the conversations around you. Recommended Dishes Artichoke salad; bresaola with smoked stracciatella; antipasto…