Best 5 Bars in 2006

5. The Paris/P.J. Carney
Paris Tavern and P.J. Carney have to share this place because they play such similar roles in our lives. The Paris is our base in the downtown Financial District, P.J. Carney serves the same purpose in Midtown. Both are essentially Irish pubs, but not typical ones. And both we have been frequenting for a very long time. The Paris since end of 2001 and P.J. Carney even longer, since our 1998 honeymoon.
The Paris and P.J. Carney serve decent pub fare, although they are not dining destinations. And both have a huge beer selection, including our favorites Sierra Nevada and Brooklyn Lager.
The Paris
P.J Carney: 906 7th Ave (@ 57th St) - 212-664-0056

4. Lolita
We always come back and after a break for a couple of month last year, where we were drawn into Vasmay Lounge, Lolita again has its fixed place in our bar rotation. Lolita has been our favorite for so long and it's so much laden with stories that it will be hard for any other place ever to catch up.
Lolita is an unpretentious neighborhood bar that is just pleasant to hang out in, especially during happy hour, before the large crowds hit. We had our share of fantastic evenings there, when we met people with whom we chatted the night away. Lolita doesn't serve food which naturally limits the time you can spend there before dinner, but they welcome you to order from a delivery service.
Lolita: 266 Broome St (@ Allen St) - 212-966-7223

3. Bar On A
We like bars where we feel like friends rather than guests of the house. Bar On A carries a record: it took only a couple of minutes until we felt like at home, thanks to Yvette, the charming and beautiful bartender with an excellent taste for music. That's enough to pull us in many Tuesdays or Fridays.
Besides Yvette, Bar On A is an interesting place: they serve bar food, a rarity in New York. Also there's a small stage for live concerts and the weird, snake inspired interior. Certainly a place to hang out far too long.
Bar On A

2. Lotus Lounge
Lotus Lounge is best in the afternoon or early evening. You will find most patrons illuminated by laptop screens, most of them adorned with the white apple. And most of them doing exactly what Apple commercial would like to suggest us: blogging, working on the website, video editing or uploading songs to the MySpace site.
So much creativity is contagious and so we always have good discussions and ideas at Lotus. Of course a unusual and excellent beer selection helps as well as the fact that there is only a single, small TV screen that rarely shows sports but rather quirky movies or Spanish game shows.
Lotus Lounge: 35 Clinton Street (@ Stanton St) - 212- 253-1144

1. Magician
The Magician kind of sneaked up there to the number one spot. It's our favorite place for Mondays and sometimes Wednesdays and usually we seek only one or two relief beers after a hard working day. But in a way the Magician is always comforting and relaxing, albeit rarely exciting. But, again, this is not what we're looking for in there. It's rather a chat with bartender and manager Kelly or with one of the other regulars, a nice Brooklyn Lager or IPA and then heading home with the feeling that we're not alone in the big city.
Magician: 118 Rivington St - 212-673-7881

The Paris Bar & Restaurant

The Paris has its share from the Downtown Manhattan history. Mobsters used to meet there and Buffalo Bill frequented it. Located in the middle of the former fish market the environment is still industrial, with the F.D.R. drive overpass and the old market halls. A couple of month ago you could add some considerable stench as well. But the neighborhood is changing rapidly and The Paris will soon be surrounded by many hip places.
But it will be difficult to top the atmosphere at this Irish pub. The staff of bartenders hasn't really changed since we started to go there after we won a gift certificate at the South Street Seaport Holiday party in 2001 and guests most definitively appreciate this. They have an incredible selection of tap beers and decent food. An host of TVs and screens show live casts of any thinkable sporting event and while we're not into sports watching we've been enjoying to see World Cup soccer or Olympic figure skating being presented in a bar.
All in all The Paris is the best bar you can find downtown and it's certainly worth to walk the extra block in order to evade the chain restaurants of Pier 17 (although the McMenamin's on the 3rd floor has the same owners).
The Paris - http://www.theparistavern.com - 119 South St. (near Pier 17) - (212) 240 - 9797

Bondi Road: Surfing At The Lower East Side

We've always been convinced that New York is only an unfriendly city, if you compare it to the outworldish friendliness in other regions of the country. But taken for itself, New York very well is a place where you can meet people and make friends, especially after you pass the threshold of a bar. But last Thursday even we were surprised, when we visited Bondi Road, the Australian joint that opened a block away from us a couple of month ago.
The two bartenders, both from Australia, were fiercely determined to demonstrate the greatness of their country and its people to us. We had to try Oyster Shooters, a shot with a fresh oyster and some booze in it, that supposedly is used by surfers to battle hang overs. And yes, if your stomach can keep it, it probably would drive a hangover away. We got a lesson in Australian geography with the help of a napkin and we tried South Australian beer ("nobody drinks Foster's in Australia"). We learned that each state has its beer, not very impressive, though, given the fact that in Germany each little village used to have its own brewery (before everything was bought up by multinational brewing corporations).
Food is ordered by ticking off dishes on a simple menu. There are four fish varieties, a bunch of sides and some meat and sandwiches as well. For the beach bar atmosphere of the place (there are surf videos looping on two big screens and picture wall papers from some Australian beach town) we would have expected the food delivered on paper dishes, but it came on stylish, rectangular china. The portions were not big, but the quality was high. The lamb chops were probably the best I've ever eaten and the fish was fresh and tasty.
The only downside are the barstools that don't leave a place to put your feet, which causes a constant discomfort. But anyway, we're happy to have found a new neighborhood joint with excellent food and a good atmosphere.
153 Rivington St., @Suffolk St., phone: 212-253-5311

Bar On A

After our favorite bartenders left Vasmay Lounge, we were searching for a new place to spend too much time and money pretty much for the better part of 2006. We loved Angel at Niagara, but she disappeared without a trace (at least from our angle of view).
The search could be over. While we were looking for a place to spend Happy Hour before Elke's birthday dinner, we stumbled over this place on Avenue A that is officially called "Bar On A", but abbreviated BOA, which inspired a snake theme of the interior. (The name, BTW, hides the place in the Internet - you can't find it in Google.)
BOA remarkably serves food, which is a rarity in NYC bars. So far we didn't try it (the times when we went there, we were on our way to a more or less fancy dinner), but it's a fair selection of bar food at very reasonable prices.
The best in BOA, however, is Yvette (pictured in her Halloween kimono) and her excellent music selection. Her playlist looks like one of the tapes I mixed back in the eighties. Not the cheesy American stuff, but the good music. Now, Yvette probably hasn't lived yet when those songs were recorded, but still - we love her music taste.
We will have to go there a couple of times more, but this could be our favorite hang out for the next months. More on this on NYDiscovery.info.
Bar on A, somewhere on Avenue A and around E 10th St (I couldn't Google the place)

Google Maps Mobile

Our time is not short on technological innovation, but from time to time something just leaves me awestruck. In this case I'm talking about Google Maps Mobile, which gives you the full functionality of Google Maps on a cell phone. You can search for a location and it would give you a high quality map. Then you can tell it to give you directions to any other locations, for example, what's the fastest way from New York to Los Angeles (it's 2,787 miles). Sure, it's not a GPS, so you have to tell it where you are to get the next instruction.
Now one could say that portable GPS devices are around for quite some time, but the nice thing with Google Maps Mobile is, that it literally comes out of thin air. You don't need any special hardware, just a cellphone (and you want to have an unlimited data plan). Imagine being lost in a big city: in that very moment you could download Google Maps Mobile, search for your current location and find the way to your destination. And from this moment on, you'll never be lost again, wherever you are (provided you have Internet connection and Google Maps covers the area).
You even have the satellite view, so you can view your current location from space (of course it's not a live picture) - a couple of years ago this would have been material for a James Bond movie.

The Way To Go for Office

Yesterday Google released a new version of its spreadsheet and word processing application and again everybody is talking about how Google could force Microsoft Office into submission. One can imagine that the guys in Redmond will count features and start laughing if the score comes out at something like 53,738 to 56 or so in favor of MS Office. No, Google won't defeat Microsoft just now, but they're opening up some interesting perspectives.
First of all, as everybody knows, most users only use very few features of MS Office. Recently a co-worker, who works with Excel every day, asked me, how to add values in a spreadsheet. Well, such formulas are why spreadsheets were originally invented, but most people are using them as table-oriented word processors or simple databases. In many of those cases Excel is cumbersome to use, but people got used to it
Second, the idea of having a spreadsheet and word processor working in a browser is compelling. Talk about the "thin client" is as old as the web and so far nobody really has realized it, but the Google applications (and similar approaches by other companies) show an elegant way, how it could be done. Imaging, when you buy a new PC: instead of installing applications and copying your data, you just open the browser and you're already there.
Third, if you want to publish a document in the web, it's easy because they are already in the web. We certainly will take advantage of that feature for NYDiscovery.

Redefining NYDiscovery

Our website NYDiscovery is now more than 5 years old. It's a fun project, mostly to show some pictures and share some of our experiences in New York City. We're doing this mainly for our friends and family, but apparently there are people out there, who are enjoying what we're putting on the site and we totally appreciate that.
Over time the technology (and the language) of the site changed. We started by building each and every page manually with an HTML editor (HTMLKit) and then uploaded the files by FTP. Then blogging became more generally more popular and we turned NYDiscovery into a blog site by using the excellent open source systems Nucleus CMS and Gallery.
Since this time the web evolved (some call it Web 2.0) and it's time for NYDiscovery to adapt. Why running our own software on our own webspace, if there are so many excellent sites out there, many of them free. For blogging we can use Fotolog and Blogger. For uploading gigs of pictures there's Flickr. The glue between all this is RSS, which allows to syndicate all of our content on our own homepage (we use SimplePie for that). That way we're not just doing our own stuff in our little corner of the Internet, but we're integrated into various communities.
We hope that our visitors continue to enjoy clicking around on our site, even if they are more an more directed to other websites. After all this is what surfing the web originally meant.