By my count, I checked into no less than 25 hotels this year (and one to go!); probably a personal record. There was a touch of mania to my travels in 2025 and, frankly, I’m ready to slow it down in the New Year. A big project for The Telegraph had me in South Florida more frequently than usual. I traveled to Europe twice—once for a Grecian sailing voyage, once to Spain on an art quest. Oh, and I visited Aspen for the first time—probably my favorite trip of the year—where I realized I love skiing after all (but only in Aspen! … or the Alps!). Plus, my goings-on in NYC.
As it turns out, 2025 was packed with some pretty fabulous things. Here are a few highlights.
Hotels
Hotel of the Year
Equinox Hotel New York
My favorite hotel of the year was close to home. I loved the Equinox Hotel New York in Hudson Yards for a true resort oasis in the crush of Manhattan. From the rooftop pool to the spa, gym and hotel rooms, it’s pure luxury.
Honorable Mentions: OKU Kos on Greece’s Dodecanese archipelago. Because I like hotels with ‘palace’ in the name: The Palace in Madrid (where the last scenes of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises are set) and Electra Palace in Athens (especially for its rooftop restaurant’s transcendental views of the Acropolis).
Best New Miami Hotel
The Shelborne by Proper
The first of South Beach’s Art Deco grand dames to reemerge after redevelopment (Delano, The Raleigh, Shore Club, etc await), The Shelborne by Proper (at top) does so with gusto. Stylish and chic with excellent hospitality and food and beverage—it’s everything these classic symbols of South Beach decadence should be.
Best Palm Beach Hotel
Palm House
I spent more time in Palm Beach than usual this year, to the point that I sometimes say obnoxious things, like: I think I’m more Palm Beach than Miami now. Palm House opened in late 2024 as the island’s first new hotel in nearly 20 years. Pretty in pink with luxurious rooms, gracious hospitality and an excellent Japanese restaurant, I especially enjoyed my afternoons flirting with an older gentleman (in true Palm Beach fashion) poolside during my stay.
South Florida Hotel Honorable Mentions
The Boca Raton because it’s fun to pretend you’re a Rich Boca Mom at this all-encompassing Mediterranean Revival resort that’s basically an opulent city-within-a-city; plus, its new Beach Club hotel is especially nice. The Colony Hotel for Lilly Pulitzer acid trip, pink palace kitsch in Palm Beach w new guard ownership. Mayfair House Hotel & Gardenbecause its contemporary glow-up is worthy of this historic Coconut Grove architectural marvel. St. Regis Bal Harbourfor its ginormous oceanfront balconies. Key West Historic Inns, a collection of five b&b-style inns across Old Town for feeling like a local during your stay; Ridley House is my favorite.
Spas
Spa of the Year
The Spa by Equinox Hotels, New York
The Spa by Equinox Hotels takes top spa honor for its impressive treatment menu and luxurious, marble-laden locker rooms with sauna. I enjoyed an incredible customized Biologique Recherche facial with a lymphatic drainage massage, Oxylight LED microcurrent and a collagen mask. The relaxation lounge with private window nooks perched high above the Hudson River makes the whole experience feel like a true escape.
Honorable Mentions: Sage + Sound in NYC for its chic UES location and sublime Face + Body Lymphatic Ritual, which includes a buccal massage, hot oil scalp treatment and infrared sauna from which you emerge feeling reborn and freshly swaddled. Plus, adjacent cafe Isle of Us (Hoteligence’s 2024 Top Fast-Casual Salad Restaurant), provides a 360 spa day experience. Al Hammam Traditional Baths in Athens and the spa at OKU Kos for the Odysseus-inspired olive oil baths of my dreams. Sisley Paris Spa, Palm Beach for million dollar facials. The Spa at The Ritz-Carlton, Mexico City for a New Year’s Day ritual swimming in the heated indoor pool 38 stories above Polanco with my best friends.
Restaurants
Restaurant of the Year
Element 47 at The Little Nell, Aspen
Because never have I ever been to a restaurant where the waiter told me the wagyu is so beautifully marbled and especially tender because the cows lived happy lives, getting massages and listening to Christmas music performed by a live string quartet, before being slaughtered—and you can tell! Element 47’s wagyu was easily the most sublime cut of meat I’ve ever chewed on. Beyond that, it was one of those pitch perfect dining experiences, an exquisite multi-course affair with elegant cocktails and exceptional wine pairings executed flawlessly. I was worked into such a froth by meal’s end (they have a dessert called snow!) that I gave the waiter my number.
Honorable Mentions: Mina in Bilbao for a sublime modern Basque tasting menu with exquisite wine pairings from regional small purveyors. Coque in Madrid, my first two Michelin star dining experience; it was wild! (Shout out to @thankyoumiami for the reco & quoting me half the price of what the meal actually cost!)
Favorite Miami Restaurant
Ariete
Because what chef Michael Beltran is doing with Cuban heritage cuisine prepared with French technique is the most original thing going—a wholly sophisticated, delicious, playful dining experience in Coconut Grove.
Honorable Mention: Mother Wolf
Favorite Palm Beach Restaurant
The Dining Room at Palm House
Palm House also secured top Palm Beach restaurant honors for The Dining Room. Citing Nobu as inspiration, it’s an entirely decadent experience with a parade of small plates at high prices, inlcuding the toro tartare with caviar, lobster and Japanese wagyu taquitos, black cod butter lettuce etc. etc.
Honorable Mention: Renato’s for classic coocoo Palm Beach vibes and because the spaghettini fra diavolo with lobster was one of the most satisfying bowls of pasta of the year.
New York
Restaurant of the Year
Café Carmellini
My favorite meal of the year came from Andrew Carmellini’s eponymous fine dining café at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Perhaps it’s because my company was a lifelong friend visiting from out of town or perhaps it’s because the food was exceptional: oysters à la pomme, a beet and caviar tart with crème fraiche, duck-duck-duck tortellini, spring pea caramelle, halibut au Riesling and the cutest little apple-Cognac soufflé.
Honorable Mention: Sailor
Best New Restaurant
Kabawa
No restaurant rocked my world quite like Kabawa. A Momofuku joint, chef Paul Carmichael’s tasting menu, a fine dining ode to Caribbean cuisine, is pure delight. It’s also a rare New York City restaurant that makes you feel like a regular the moment you first walk through the door. And so I’ve been back several times.
Honorable Mention: Smithereens, my favorite solo dining outing came at the chef’s counter of this funky E. Village New England-inspired seafood joint by Momofuku alums. I’m still dreaming of the steam-poached halibut and eggplant dish and all the delicious wine.
Best New Restaurant, Pre-/Post-Broadway
The View
A Danny Meyer revamp of the rotating restaurant crowning the 48th floor of the Marriott Marquis in the heart of the theater district. Who wouldn’t want to take a spin around Manhattan before catching a show?
Favorite Italian
Ci Siamo
Chef Hillary Sterling’s Ci Siamo is probably the restaurant I return to most frequently. To the point that I’ve refined the perfect order for two: the gnocco fritto with goat gouda, mortadella, a half order of the insalata verde and one pasta, say, the rigatoni alla gricia, but I almost always can’t resist ordering a second one, even if it’s way too much food. The Italian sugar donut bombolonis with chocolate amaro dipping sauce are addictively delicious and worth making room for. Then there’s the sophisticated cocktails, wine and digestifs. I prefer simply rolling up to the convivial bar where the gracious barmen take good care of you. And so does Bobby Cannavale.
Honorable Mention: Locanda Verde
Favorite Steak
Pastis
I am not a steakhouse aficionado, but in my experience, even the finest get it wrong at a surprisingly high rate. That’s one of the reasons why Pastis’s filet mignon au poivre with frites is my go-to—consistently delicious, prepared with a satisfying char and tender, flavorful meat, slathered in the naughtiest au poivre with a cone of perfectly crispy frites. Simply add martini and/or Champagne.
Favorite Sushi
Rosella
This funky American sushi den in the E. Village is an utter delight. With an ethos of sustainability, much of the fish is sourced locally and seasonally in addition to fish flown in from Japan. Opt for the chef’s custom omakase for a parade of creative dishes, paired with smart and sweet hospitality, fun vibes and good music. And it’s a solid value.
Honorable Mention: Teruko at Hotel Chelsea
Favorite Tacos
Birria Landia
Nightlife
Best New Bar
Bar Kabawa
The only thing I might love more than Kabawa is Bar Kabawa. For its life-changing daiquiris made with freshly shaved ice, channeling Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, potent ‘ti punch and all manner of rum delights. It’s especially a treat when chef Paul is behind the bar preparing fancy Jamaica patties by hand, himself.
Honorable Mention: Bar at Fasano; I met Candace Bushnell at the opening party!
Favorite Nightclub
The Mulberry
Look, shortly before my birthday, I announced my semi-retirement from nightlife, so take this with a grain of salt. But The Mulberry in Nolita is fun, nice vibes, friendly door, cool DJs.
Honorable Mention: Aman—who knew it had a nightclub? It’s a hoot.
Favorite Cocktail Bar
Experimental Cocktail Club
I love this little subterranean Parisian cocktail den in Flatiron for its creative, unapologetically French take on mixology (i.e., a little sweet, a little complicated) by Nico de Soto. Take the tarte tatin, made with Calvados, Oloroso sherry, caramel, brown butter and “rectified” apple juice—like, what? The French love cocktails made with apple juice… and Calvados! And I am here for it.
Honorable Mention: Employees Only; still fun, still a line!
Favorite Post-Broadway Nightcap
Upstairs at Sardi’s
Because where else will you bump into an actor in the play you just saw engaged in an earnest conversation about his performance over martinis with friends?
Favorite Restaurant Bar
Santi
Because I prefer the gilded, high-ceilinged bar to a table upstairs at chef Michael White’s midtown power pasta palace.
UWS
This operation is HQed on the Upper West Side, so we’re always scouting out the best of the neighborhood.
Best New Restaurant
Florentin
A welcome addition, Florentin dishes up Israeli Mediterranean and French bistro fare in a cozy setting with a touch of Brooklyn cool.
Best Diner
Old John’s
Favorite Lincoln Center Restaurant
Rampoldi
Over-the-top glamour meets an eclectic UWS/pre-opera crowd at this Lincoln Center restaurant by way of Monaco. I love that you’re presented with a lavish bread basket, including butter, a house-labeled bottle of olive oil and a little dish of Castelvetrano olives, whether you’re dining solo at the bar or in a private dining room with a big group. Service is astute and the elegant French/Mediterranean food is excellent.
Honorable Mention: Cafe Fiorello, El Fish, PJ Clarke’s.
Favorite UES Restaurant
Because I like to consider the Upper East Side an extension of my neighborhood.
Island
Still, to select Island as my favorite UES restaurant is completely unhinged. And I don’t care. The food and wine at this Carnegie Hill staple is mid at best, but I love it for its clubhouse vibes—the hostess is always welcoming you back—like a cafeteria for the neighborhood’s blue bloods. I like that it’s called Island and the vaguely nautical decor. It’s a delicious place to be a fly on the wall.
Honorable Mentions: Harry Cipriani, Sfoglia, Amarena, Hoexter’s, Cafe Commerce, Patisserie Vanessa, Via Quadrano.
A Salute to Tried & True Go-Tos
These NYC spots topped our list last year, lured us back this year and kept us happy: Commerce Inn, Essential by Christophe, Grand Banks, Hi Life, Hotel Chelsea, Joe Allen, La Compagnie Flatiron, La Esquina, Mace, Orwasher’s, Red Hook Lobster Pound at Rockaway Beach, QC Spa.
Books
Best New Fiction
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
Because Gary is one of the few contemporary authors whose new books I will read and author talks I will attend without fail—and this is his best since Super Sad.
Favorite Fiction Read
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
Just when I thought I had wrung all the pleasure there was to be had out of Hemingway, I picked up In Our Time, his first book of short stories published in 1925, a year before his debut novel The Sun Also Rises. While I had read some of these stories before, I had never experienced them together in this collection. They are compressed diamonds, each distilling the beauty and romance and inevitable heartbreak and tragedy of being alive. Every story delivers a sucker punch of a last line as only Hemingway can. Reading them made me feel like I finally understood what a short story is supposed to be.
Honorable Mentions: The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson because I could relate. The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf; I’ll never look at certain UWS characters the same.
Favorite Nonfiction Read
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Favorite Fiction in Translation
On the Calculation of Volume II by Solvej Balle
No book in recent memory has captured my imagination quite like Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. A seven-part series, translated from Danish, these slim volumes follow Tara Selter, a woman stuck in a time loop, experiencing the same day, November 18, over and over and over again.
The first volume covers Tara’s first year as she tries to figure out the rules of her new reality, eventually hiding in the spare room of her farmhouse in a French village because it’s too annoying to try to explain her circumstances anew to her husband every single day.
For a while, I was a little frustrated, thinking there were more interesting ways she could spend her time. (My cheeky One Sentence Review: It doesn’t really go anywhere.) But I was also hooked. In the second book, she sets herself free, traveling through Europe in search of the four seasons to fill her year of perpetual November 18s. She travels north for the feeling of winter and to the beaches of Spain to mimic summer.
I’m partly drawn to the world Balle has created because I think it’s similar to what it feels like to be a solo traveler or simply a single woman in the world. Slipping around in utter anonymity, interacting with strangers with little consequence; it can be a delicious existence. Sure, her situation is dystopian, it can be lonely, but it’s also thrilling.
Reading Calculation sends me down a series of thought experiments, wishing I was stuck in a time loop. Then thinking, how is the monotony of modern life really all that different from being stuck in a time loop? And then, how can I live my life as if I were stuck in a time loop? I would be bolder, live more recklessly. And what’s stopping me from living that way now?
There’s a touch of immortality to Tara Selter, like Circe banished to her magical island. (It’s not totally clear yet whether Tara is aging as she’s been stuck in the same day for over two years.) Circe, witchy goddess, has everything she needs on her island with the wave of her hand, her lovers, Hermes, Odysseus, come and go mostly at her will. Tara’s bank account replenishes every day, she could go home and visit her husband or take a lover—so far she’s done neither. And Balle, herself, lives something of a semi-reclusive dream life on a remote Danish island in the Baltic Sea, refusing to travel by car or plane. To me, it all sounds wonderful, even as both heroines are desperate to escape their circumstances.
At the end of the second book, Tara is on her way to meet a man who may also be stuck in her time loop and hints that there may be others. The third book was just released in English, fittingly, on November 18. (I was surprised to learn in a T Magazine profile that the septology is still a work in progress and Balle had only just finished the fifth installment).
I’m determined to see Tara’s journey to the end, although I didn’t really want her to find a companion in the time loop. There goes her anonymity! What if he’s annoying… or a menace?
Actually, I can’t wait to find out.
Favorite NYC Indie Bookstore
McNally Jackson
Any location, plus their Goods For The Study stationery shops.
Best NYC Magazine Shop
Casa Magazines
Theater & Performing Arts
Best Broadway Musical
Gypsy
Because Audra brought down the house.
Best New Broadway Play
John Proctor is the Villain
A feminist reappraisal of The Crucible via high school girls in rural Georgia? Yes, ma’am.
Best Broadway Play Revival
Waiting For Godot
Bill and Ted take Beckett—most excellent (through Jan. 4)!
Best Off-Broadway Play
A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM
A riveting, muscular, minimalist production of Tennessee Williams’s classic play by London’s Almeida Theatre, thanks in large part to the jittery Everywoman portrayal of Blanche duBois by actress Patsy Ferran. Paul Mescal as Stanley didn’t hurt either.
Honorable Mentions: Wild Duck and Ghosts—I don’t want my Ibsen streak to ever end! Kowalski, a funny and enlightening new play imagining the meeting of Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando before the playwright cast the heartthrob in his star-making role; it sent this TW freak’s heart aflutter.
Best Off-Broadway Musical
Threepenny Opera at BAM
A visiting production by Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. My little drama major’s soul sang—in German!
Best Opera
Rigoletto at Odeon Herodes Atticus, Athens
To witness Verdi’s Rigoletto performed by the Greek National Opera inside a 1st century CE Roman amphitheater on a slope of the Acropolis, where theater was born, during the Athens Epidaurus Festival this summer was the most epic theatrical experience of my life.
Best Literary Happening
Mrs. Dalloway Marathon Reading at 92NY
A cast of literary lights participated in a marathon all day reading of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel, which takes place over the span of a day, on the 100th anniversary of its publication. It proved a totally immersive experience. I couldn’t help but feel like Clarissa Dalloway, window shopping along Madison Avenue during my break, before hurrying back to the Y just in time for her party.
Best Comedy Show
Tom Green at Belly Up, Aspen
Catching this show with my brother and sister who I grew up watching Tom Green with on MTV was one of the most hysterical nights of comedy of my life. He lives on a farm in Canada now and riffed for 2+ hours in an act that’s like Andy Kaufman meets Arlo Guthrie. And we met him afterwards!
Visual Arts
International
Modern Art Museum of the Year
Guggenheim Bilbao
Went for the Helen Frankenthaler exhibit. But RIP Frank Gehry.
Classical Art Museum of the Year
Prado, Madrid
For the Goyas and the Zurbaráns and ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights.’
History Museum of the Year
The Acropolis Museum, Athens
Because I loved reveling in the history of a temple built for the all powerful Athena. She protected Athens from giants, centaurs, gorgon medusas and Poseidon. Basically, Odysseus would still be lost at sea without her.
New York
Best Museum Show
Amy Sherald’s ‘American Sublime’ at The Whitney
Because it was so sublime.
Best Gallery Show
Picasso’s ‘Tête-à-tête’ at Gagosian
Rarely before seen works spanning his entire career, organized thematically, and curated in collaboration with his daughter Paloma.
Honorable Mentions: Cy Twombly at Gagosian
Best Museum Revival
The Frick
Because it’s fun to swan through a Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue with a world class Renaissance art collection.
Best Visiting Art Show
‘Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy’ at The Shed
An art amusement park from Hamburg, Germany lost to storage crates since 1987, Luna Luna unearthed whimsical carnival rides designed by street art stars of that era, including a Keith Haring merry-go-round, Basquiat Ferris wheel, Dalí geodesic dome and Kenny Scharf swing ride.
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