Walk past the Anthony Gianzero salon in Chelsea, with its glass doors flung open, lush plantings, and people sipping wine on outside benches, and you might mistake it for a hip bar.

Westville pastry chef Ivy Tack bakes the kind of pies you see in old movies and cartoons, the ones that are always placed near an open window to cool, whereupon their wafting aromas prove irresistible to sneak thieves, hoboes, and Jethro Bodine types.

“I haven’t had good sea urchin in ages,” you think. “And I’m really, really in the mood for good sea urchin.” Any kind of sea urchin will do—fried, flambéed, you don’t care.

When you get a typical salon blowout, a stylist tugs your tresses into submission for nearly an hour, and they usually go limp and frizzy by the next day. Then there’s Simon Sabag.

When we fantasize about life in a mile-long, pure-white loft, the walls are dotted with splashy vintage posters. We cultivate this fantasy at Chelsea’s Gail Chisholm Gallery, recently relocated to a sunny new loft.

Sometimes, flower arrangements arrive so stiff and contrived and packed so tightly into a tinny throwaway vase that it's easy to forget that they are (a) alive and (b) natural. Not so at Polux Fleuriste.

An avid shopper for silky underthings, Lauren Blankenship was tired of itty-bitty boutiques that had panties crammed into drawers, inexperienced staff, and closetlike dressing rooms. So she and her husband, Allen, opened Bodyhints.

If ever a doughy denizen of New York’s slice-joint scene needed an image consultant, it would be the calzone, a.k.a. pizza’s overweight, underachieving kid brother. Enter Mario Batali.

In a city of a billion choices, how do you decide where to eat, where to shop, where to get your Limoges tureen repaired? Our annual guide to the best of everything is the best place to start.

On a typical Sunday at Footlight Records, you’ll see hipsters snatching up Italian lounge CDs, hip-hop artists trolling for new beats among the vinyl movie soundtracks, seniors browsing through the Broadway cast recordings, a Liza impersonator scoring Cabaret on DVD.