The sun is back and sanity has been restored! How was your weekend? Here are some of the things I’ve enjoyed in and around New York this week:

1 :: My first visit to a beach this year (well, if you forget a quick visit to one while in Florida in January). It was a happy accidental discovery when Ryan and I drove out to Long Island last weekend and visited Sandy Point. Sitting on a huge rock and soaking up the sun felt like such a luxury.

2 :: A new coffee shop called City of Saints and woah, it is so pretty and so good. I know I go on about new coffee spots all the time, but I feel like I’m surrounded by great coffee shops in this city. You’re never more than six feet from a rat, but you’re definitely no further than that from good coffee either. It’s not just the coffee itself that makes for a good coffee shop, it’s also the customer experience. If the ordering process is slow and customers have to wait in queues for ages, this could put people off frequenting a certain shop. POS systems (like this – https://revelsystems.com/pos-systems/coffee-shop-pos/) could help to turn this around to keep throughput moving smoothly while handling a range of order complexities with ease. It’s certainly a technology worth researching for all the other coffee shops out there.

3 :: That goes for pizza, too. On Friday, I had a New York first — a restaurant where nothing on the menu was vegetarian. The dishes at Kao Soy had looked veggie-friendly when I checked out the menu online but the waiter (thankfully) told me that everything actually contained fish, relegating me to munching on a meatless part of an appetizer as I watched everyone around me eat dinner. Thankfully in New York, you can always trust that there is a great slice of pizza somewhere on the block so Mark’s Pizza came to the rescue. Just what I needed – and probably better than fancy Thai food anyway, right?

4 :: Spying surprisingly regal buildings when I remember to look up as I hurry to the subway. This one was when I was on my way to the 23rd Street stop on Sixth Ave.

5 :: Beautiful plates at County Restaurant, which has been my go-to spot for fancy dinners near Union Square ever since my friend Meghan introduced me a year or so ago. The wait-staff are really great and they start the meal by giving you a pile of free jalapeño fritters, and that’s all the convincing any of us need, really.

6 :: This amazing street art by Esteban del Valle in Red Hook. Sorry about the rubbish quality photo, but let me assure you, this was incredible.

7 :: And around the corner was Sunny’s – a famed Red Hook bar. I hadn’t been back since I helped gut it in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (in the first ever week of this blog! It was so long ago that I was still spelling it ‘neighbourhood’) and it was amazing to see it transformed. It’s an incredible spot – a friendly bar with a great backyard space and brilliant music. Such a treat.

Here’s hoping I get outside a bit more this week! Have a good one, everyone!