The Best Date Night Restaurants in NYC
With Valentine’s Day mere weeks away, I’ve been getting a lot of requests for date night spots in NYC. Which begs the question: what’s in a date night?
Last night I was wandering the East Village with my friend Belle Bakst and we found ourselves talking about Valentine’s Day plans. She and her husband are over-the-top, all things red and pink, cheese and wine and duck a l’orange kind of people on Valentine’s Day. She waxed poetic about stepping outside and feeling “love in the air” on February 14.
I get that. I honestly love a giant heart-shaped box of chocolate and two dozen long-stemmed red roses and candlelight. If you’re this kind of romantic and you’re trying to eat out on Valentine’s Day, you could go to Libertine or The Four Horsemen or Koloman. For something a little more low-key and pasta-leaning, you could hit Bar Mario in Red Hook and have cute, intimate, and reasonably priced meal.
But in general, my opinion is this: going out on Valentine’s Day sucks. People who work in restaurant kitchens are probably not excited to prepare whatever gooey, over the top chocolate dessert is on their one night only prix-fixe menu. Getting a reservation somewhere “cool” will be even more annoying than it already is. And perhaps worst of all, you’re going to be surrounded by a lot of people who are going through the motions of a performative romantic night out because they feel like it’s what they should be doing.
If my husband and I are going out on Valentine’s Day, we have a few hard and fast rules for picking a restaurant. They are:
It must be a place that does not require reservations. Ideally, they shouldn’t even take them.
It must not be loud.
We must be able to show up in whatever we wore earlier that day.
Dinner should ideally cost $100 or less—significantly less.
By choosing a date night spot based on this rubric, we ensure that our date is primarily about spending time with each other. It also usually leads to much better food than at some alleged hot spot where we’d spend $200+ only to leave hungry and at least vaguely annoyed.
With that said, here are some of our favorite date spots in NYC:
Where I ate in last week’s video:
Snack on this:
Nothing hurts quite like chapped lips during citrus season, so I wrote a lil guide to my favorite lip balms over at BA.
I finally started using the new entertainment feature on my Peloton, and my current favorite show to bike a moderate hill to is Fionna & Cake. I’m a pretty big Adventure Time fan, but I admit I was skeptical about this spinoff. It took me a long time to come around to even wanting to watch it. But it’s actually great and weird and complex and nuanced, just like the best parts of the original show (and Distant Lands, which I think is actually the best Adventure Time content currently available for consumption). I kind of love that it requires you to go deep on lore to fully enjoy it.
Speaking of fandom, I just finished reading Alice Osman’s 2017 YA book, Radio Silence. Specifically, I read the first half on the plane to Orlando, and the second half on the plane home. It’s real and raw and captures all the *big feelings* of being a teenager while also telling a really compelling platonic love story. As an avid reader (and writer) of YA romantasy, it was incredibly refreshing to read something that felt more grounded. When I was a teenager, I craved books like this, and I hope we see more of them on shelves.
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