Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Simon Starling: At Twilight

    Simon Starling: At Twilight

    SIMON STARLING: AT TWILIGHT documents a revival, by Starling, a visual artist, and the theater maker Graham Eatough, of W.B. Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well, the 1916 Irish folk play that drew on Noh drama to break with Naturalism and realist art in general. Ultimate reality was, to a Symbolist like Yeats, immaterial but accessible…

  • Bohemian

    Bohemian

    Secret restaurants are a thing. You hear about them in Europe, in Buenos Aires, in New York. Some are pop ups, some are tucked away in dark alleys or at the back of other establishments. It is the aesthetic of the speakeasy, the private club, the clandestine party, the convocation of spies and secret agents.…

  • Cata

    Cata

    “Cata” means “tasting” or “bit or sample” in Spanish, and so the experience of the so-named Iberian bar and restaurant on the Bowery is best understood less as tapas bar and more as do-it-yourself tasting menu. The tapas are for the most part traditional, with very few modernist touches, simply prepared, the flavors rich and…

  • The Brandy Library

    The Brandy Library

    I am sure that on this New Year’s Eve there will be a sedate and dignified celebration at the Brandy Library, to which I was privileged to pay my first visit on Friday evening. There is a kind of hush in the air at the place, as if one were reading Plutarch rather than nosing…

  • The Spanish G and T

    The Spanish G and T

    The tradition in saunas is to be beaten with a pine branch, and so I sought solace in the swelter that was Manhattan on Saturday in the great juniper based cocktail that is a gin and tonic. For that I went straight to Boqueria at its Flatirons location, from which I had received a promotional…

  • Pisco Portón

    Pisco Portón

    That, in the photo, is pisco in a specially designed pisco glass and how you sniff the pisco in advance of swushing it about in your mouth to adjudge its subtleties. It was a very informative talk that Pisco Portón founder Johnny Schuler gave on Saturday at Tutuma Social Club‘s Happy Hour, an event lubricated…

  • William Barnacle Tavern

    William Barnacle Tavern

    You are looking at absinthe just louched at the William Barnacle Tavern in the East Village, an eccentric establishment if ever there was one, owned and run by a descendant of Restoration playwright Thomas Otway and attached to Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place. The place was a Prohibition era speakeasy that was actually wired…

  • Amor y Amargo

    Amor y Amargo

    Amor y Amargo popped up a few months ago, just steps from Tompkins Square Park, to become one of the more interesting little bars in New York, specializing in homemade vermouth on tap, bitters and other herbal liqueurs, and a few Spanish tapas. I tried the vermouth (perfect, not too sweet), the francophile flight (it…