CDLP Swim Brief Box Cut

The Stockholm label built its name on treating swimwear like fine tailoring, and the Box Cut is its sleeper—a square-cut that lands somewhere between a brief and a short, cut low and clean in recycled Econyl. It’s the rare suit that flatters the confident swimmer without tipping into Speedo territory, and it packs flat enough to forget you brought it.

$120, SHOP NOW

Orlebar Brown x Automobili Lamborghini Bulldog

Orlebar Brown’s breakthrough was simple: treat a swim short like a pair of trousers. Two decades later, the formula still works. Lamborghini’s hexagonal graphics give this version some visual speed, but the real selling point remains the side adjusters, which keep everything sitting properly long after most drawstrings have surrendered.

$368, shop now

Brioni Printed Swim Trunks

Most tailoring houses stumble the moment they wander into leisurewear. Brioni doesn’t. The navy-and-white foliage print gives these enough personality to earn a spot in the suitcase, while the whole effect stays unmistakably Roman in its sprezzatura.

$715, SHOP NOW

Sunspel Striped Swim Trunks

While most swim shorts angle to be noticed, these do the opposite. The green-and-white stripe looks lifted from a vintage beach umbrella, and the cotton blend has a softness the technical stuff never manages. For the man whose summer kit already runs to Oxford shirts, espadrilles and a sun-warped paperback, here’s the match.

$175, SHOP NOW

Tom Ford Straight-Leg Mid-Length Dégradé Swim Shorts

No one arrives at an $850 swim short by accident. Tom Ford knows that, which is why these lean fully into the fantasy. The hand-painted gradient washes from cobalt into burgundy, while side buckles keep the waist clean and uninterrupted. Excessive? Certainly. Then again, moderation has never been the house specialty.

$850, SHOP NOW

Gucci GG Poplin Swim Trunks

There are subtler ways to dress for the beach, and Gucci has no use for any of them. The interlocking GG covers nearly every inch of these trunks, turning one of fashion’s most familiar logos into pool attire, although the black-and-grey palette pulls it back from the brink.

$900, SHOP NOW

Hartford Classic Swim Trunks

French brands have a habit of making casual clothes feel as though they’ve already lived a good life. Hartford garment-dyes these trunks, then brushes the fabric until it feels soft enough to suggest years of wear. The result lands somewhere between a swim short and something found in an old photograph of the Riviera.

$205, SHOP NOW

Fedeli Madeira Printed Straight-Leg Swim Shorts

Up close, the print resolves into a tiny diamond lattice of cobalt, brown and white, the kind that passes for solid navy across a terrace and only reveals its intricacy when someone leans in. Fedeli builds these from its Airstop technical cloth, which beads water and dries on the walk back from the sea, and finishes them with a small fish-shaped carabiner at the waist.

$220, SHOP NOW

Charvet x Thorsun Large Paisley Swim Shorts

Paisley is one of those motifs that spends years looking hopelessly dated before suddenly appearing sophisticated again. This returning collab with swimwear brand Thorsun borrows the pattern from Charvet’s tie archives and scales it up dramatically, letting deep reds and violets spread across a dark ground.

Sundek Washed Nylon Taffeta Swim Shorts

Before luxury swimwear became a category, there was Sundek. The California surf brand has been making nylon taffeta trunks since the Eisenhower administration, and this pair feels pleasantly untouched by trend cycles. The garment purposefully welcomes color fading, so it looks lived-in like something pulled from a Ligurian beach attic.

$89, SHOP NOW

Oas Elowen Swim Shorts

Cut from brushed quick-dry shell, this pair is splashed with a surreal garden motif that reads art-school sketchbook. The fit is relaxed and straight, with a comfortable mesh lining and an elastic drawstring waistband that doesn’t dig. A hidden zip pocket keeps your room key or card out of the sand.

$100, shop now

Conrad Athens, The Ilisian

• Vasilissis Sofias Avenue, Athens 115 28, Greece

The 1963 Hilton was the hotel where modern Athens first dressed for the international jet-set, and after a long, dark stretch, it reopened this April as the Conrad, the brand’s Greece debut. Behind the mid-century facade near Lycabettus sit 278 oversized rooms, the largest outdoor pool in central Athens, a rooftop running track and nine places to eat and drink—chief among them Byzantino, a grand Greek-French brasserie from Angelos Lantos, the first chef to earn two Michelin stars in the city.

Ace Hotel & Swim Club Athens

• Artemisiou 1, Glifada 166 75, Greece

Ace’s Greek debut took a 1972 Brutalist block in beachy Glyfada—a short stroll from the Niarchos cultural center—and turned it into the neighborhood’s de facto living room. A stunning four-story Claire Manent mural sets the tone—18 Greek artists worked over the interiors—and the culinary action moves from Sebastian’s Mediterranean bistro by day up to the new fifth-floor Sora, a Pan-Asian rooftop.

Monastik Living in Athens

• Karea 20, Athina 116 36, Greece

Athens has no shortage of boutique hotels, but few feel this private: just 11 suites set into a quiet residential hillside, each one framing the Parthenon from bed. Breakfast turns up in woven baskets, and the rooftop plunge pool doubles as a lookout over the city. It suits travelers who want Athens at arm’s length without giving up the view, which the plunge pool duly clinches.

La Divina

• Adrianou 3,  Athens 105 55, Greece

Lodged in the 1897 neoclassical building that once held the Odeon Athenaeum—the conservatory founded in Maria Callas’ honor—La Divina names its 12 suites after the operas she sang and faces them toward the Acropolis, the Ancient Agora and the National Observatory. It sits on pedestrian Adrianou Street in Thissio, the cobblestoned quarter that traces the western foot of the Acropolis, a two-minute walk from the Monastiraki flea market and 10 from the new Maria Callas Museum. 

Hotel Grande Bretagne

• 1 Vasileos Georgiou A, Syntagma Square Str,  Athens 105 64, Greece

Sited in Syntagma Square since 1874, the Grande Bretagne has put up heads of state, film stars and visiting royalty for 150 years. Across 320 rooms and 58 suites, it remains entirely certain of its own importance. The redrawn GB Roof Garden—reworked by London’s Goddard Littlefair—holds one of the city’s great lunch reservations, the Acropolis laid out behind your table and the changing of the guard performing in the square below.

Perianth

• Limpona 2,  Athens 105 60, Greece

K-Studio’s revival of a 1930s building on Agia Irini Square—one of the liveliest little plazas in the center—made it a 38-room Design Hotels member with genuine character and a refreshingly low-key mood. Downstairs, the 2025 arrival of Anther serves contemporary Greek plates around a photogenic circular terrazzo bar.

Shop Like a Local

Athens has long goaded the well-dressed to think past trend, and the proof now spreads across a handful of neighborhoods. In Plaka, Maria Lemos—founder of London’s cult Mouki Mou—planted an Athens sister in a restored 1970s building in 2023, stocking the likes of Casey Casey, Lemaire and Toogood among makers who reward a slow look; climb to the roof terrace, and the Acropolis stares back. Meanwhile, Hyper Hypo keeps an unshowy concept store and art-book warren of Greek editions, design zines and risograph prints, while Totimo Design shows collectible furniture and lighting from global names beside homegrown talent. Lito Fine Jewelry deals in statement pieces that double as art history shrunk to the wrist.

Dig Through Monastiraki’s Wonders

A pileup of epochs, Monastiraki trades on texture and contradiction. It spills from its namesake square into Byzantine rubble, Ottoman mosques and a flea market that lands somewhere between souk and surrealist stage set—leather sandals, vintage vinyl, museum-grade antiques and counterfeit sneakers jostling in one open-air bazaar. Side streets conceal concept stores and cafes, the gallery Melas Martinos among them, dealing in Greek antiques and folk art. Sunday is the market at full tilt, when the junk dealers spread across Avissinias Square and the haggling turns competitive.

Plyta

• Plateia Plyta, Pangrati, Athens 116 34

Lodged in a high-ceilinged hall on Plateia Plyta with the original mosaic floor left untouched, Plyta—which opened fall 2025—bills itself as kafeneio, refreshment stand and grill at once; the market menu turns over daily, and the plates emerge from the wood fire and embers built for the middle of the table.

Pharaoh

• Solomou 54, Athens 106 82

Pharaoh passes for a wine bar until the open kitchen and charcoal grill give the game away. Chef Manolis Papoutsakis resurrects the rural Greek comfort cooking of his upbringing—meatballs, bitter greens, slow-roasted lamb—then lifts it through obsessive sourcing and a technician’s hand, all of it sized for sharing across a packed little room.

Linou Soumpasis k Sia

• Kalamida 9, Athens 105 54

A modern reconsideration of the taverna, staged in a terrazzo-floored canteen with metal chairs and a lemon tree out back. Greek salad with local brie and lamb tagliata with wild herbs land familiar and subversive at once, and with nearly everything organic, the all-Greek wine list doubles as a crash course in native varietals you’ll struggle to find by the bottle back home.

Soil

• Ferekidou 5, Athens 116 35

This Pangrati powerhouse is where chef Tasos Mantis’ “earthy gastronomy” takes root in a regenerative farm, and nearly every plate carries that dirt-to-table logic. Aspromitiko beans from Limnos surface in X.O. sauce, fig consorts with tarama and celery, and the desserts fold in koji, elderflower and bronze fennel—even the bread turns up plated with gallery polish.

Feyrouz

• Agathonos 1, Athens 105 51

Feyrouz dispatches Syrian-Greek flavor from a blink-and-miss-it storefront near Agia Irini—vegan pies, lentil-stuffed wraps, semolina cakes drenched in orange-blossom syrup, all made fresh and priced with rare mercy. A few doors on, Feyrouz The Levantine Pastry piles on baklava variations and tahini-slicked sweets.

Telion

• Kalogira 1, Athens 113 62

Kypseli is the neighborhood every Athenian will swear is about to break, and Telion is one place that makes the case—a listening bar slotted into a shuttered old pastry shop, the original Telion sign still overhead. Vinyl governs the room and bartender Popi Sevastou governs the drinks, low-lit and exact, among them a Negroni talked into softness with apricot and Pedro Ximénez.

Kennedy Vins Bons Vivants

• Nikiou 9, Athens 105 60

Photographer and tastemaker Chris Kontos decants his globe-trotting eye into Kennedy, a downtown natural-wine bar wired for sound. The labels run idiosyncratic and far-flung—Greece, then well past it—and the turntable does as much to set the mood as the pour.

Line

• Agathodemonos 37, Athens

Line treats waste as a dare. Lodged in a converted gallery in Kato Petralona, it ferments its own non-grape “wines,” beers and sourdough in-house, then routes the leftovers back into the cocktails as vinegars, syrups and clarified fruit waters; the Delusional Margarita pulls reposado through mustard, ketchup, potato water and spice and somehow hits all the right notes. Order it with the house bread and Greek cheese and watch the loop close on your own table.

Wine Is Fine

• Vissis 6, Athens 105 51

Two Frenchmen and a Greek chef opened this corner room in early 2023 with a list that spans nearly 80 natural labels, mostly French and Greek, with side trips through orange and pét-nat and only a handful by the glass. Put yourself in the hands of whoever’s working the bar—you’ll be more than “fine.”

Cantina Social

• Leokoriou 8, Athens 105 54

There’s no sign—you slip down a covered arcade off Leokoriou and surface in a strange, high-walled courtyard that feels clandestine even shoulder to shoulder. By day, it’s a neighborhood café where antique dealers nurse their coffee; after dark, resident and guest DJs work disco, house and techno in the cramped interior den while the overflow drinks cheap at tables scattered across the stones.

Sabah Palermo Baba

The woven outlier of the bunch, and a reminder that you don’t need four figures to buy a shoe with a story. The upper is vegetable-tanned leather, hand-woven by artisans in Almanza, a northern Spanish town that has been making shoes since the early 1700s, then assembled into a backless Baba at Sabah’s El Paso workshop. The open back makes it the pair you shuffle into for a dinner that started on someone’s terrace and went long.

$395, shop now

Puma x Nahmias Speedcat

The Speedcat is the low-profile sneaker of the year, the slim motorsport shape eating the chunky dad shoe’s lunch, and Doni Nahmias’ second Puma collaboration dresses it in lightly distressed premium suede with rope laces over that flat racing sole.

$160, shop now

Hereu Sastre Suede Pull-On Loafer

Barcelona’s Hereu is the name on every stylist’s summer mood board, and the Sastre is its silhouette of the moment, split cleanly between loafer and espadrille.

$500, shop now

Marni Fussbett Sabot

The Fussbett—a postwar German orthopedic footbed reborn in dyed pony hair—is the shoe that turned the men’s mule from a dare into a category. Tyler, the Creator wears them; so does half of the guest list at any Frieze iteration. Lean into the color: yellow, fuchsia, deep green, paired with cropped trousers, so nobody mistakes what the outfit is about.

$950, shop now

Bottega Veneta Haddock Intrecciato Leather Loafer

Intrecciato—Bottega’s hand-woven leather—is the logo that refuses to be one, recognizable only to people who already know. The chunky rubber lug sole drags it into 2026 instead of 1996, grounding the weave so it sits right with tailored trousers or a bare ankle and shorts.

$1,600, shop now

Gucci Horsebit-Embellished Webbing-Trimmed Suede Loafers

The horsebit is the only shoe in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it’s barely moved in seven decades—Coppola wore them directing The Godfather, A$AP Rocky still wears them to Basel. This version’s trick is the collapsible heel: crush it flat, and the loafer becomes a mule.

$1,090, Shop now

Baudoin & Lange Sagan Classic Tassel Loafers

Allan Baudoin began hand-assembling these unlined Belgian-style loafers in London in 2016 and has since gathered a cult following among the men who can discuss welts for an hour. The shoe folds nearly flat and weighs almost nothing, the smartest thing to pack when you don’t yet know how dressed up the trip will get.

$780, shop now

Brunello Cucinelli Woven Suede Penny Loafer

Hand-woven suede basketweave, a penny slot kept where tradition wants it and a soft rubber sole—all of it Solomeo craftsmanship that doubles as Cucinelli’s religion. This is the Aspen-in-July loafer, made for men who summer at altitude with good espresso.

$1,450, shop now

Wales Bonner x Adidas Karintha OG

After five years reworking the Samba, the Japan and the Country into the most coveted sneakers alive, Grace Wales Bonner finally designed something wholly her own. The Karintha—named for the woman in Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel Cane—is a flat, low-profile leather shoe in cream Wonder White with black stripes, a contrast brown T-toe, rope laces and gold-foil branding you have to lean in to catch.

$220, shop now

Estela

• 47 East Houston Street, New York, NY 10012

Ignacio Mattos has held the star and the room for a decade-plus, which in downtown years is a small geological era. The endive salad with walnuts and Ubriaco rosso is the kind of dish you order without consulting the menu. Same for the ricotta dumplings under raw mushroom and the burrata toast that launched a thousand imitations. Late-night at the bar is when the room turns over to industry—the people on the stools beside you are usually working dinner shifts elsewhere.

Rubirosa

• 235 Mulberry Street, New York, NY 10012

The Pappalardos have run this corner since 2009. AJ opened it as a tribute to his father Joe’s Staten Island pizzeria, Joe & Pat’s. After AJ died unexpectedly in 2015, his sister Maria stepped in beside their father and chef Albert Di Meglio, and the place has somehow gotten better—a sentence that should be impossible to write about a room that turns this many tables. Order the Tie-Dye pizza: vodka, marinara and pesto on a thin crust from a 57-year-old family recipe. Then the vodka rigatoni. Then a Negroni and the chocolate budino, in that order, even though no one asked.

Boni & Mott

• 238 Mott Street, New York, NY 10012

Algeria-born Mehdi Mokrani opened this Mediterranean spot with his brother, Foued and cousin, Salim Ben, in 2024. Menu standouts include citrus-glazed lamb chops with amba marinade, half chicken under ras el hanout and mussels with green apple and chorizo, which sounds like a dare and lands like a thesis. The wallpaper, by neighborhood artist Pili Weeber, is a hand-drawn catalog of local landmarks: Katz’s, Elizabeth Street Garden, Thai Diner.

The Mulberry

• 240 Mulberry Street, Lower Level, New York, NY 10012

The basement under Rubirosa, opened in 2023 by Phil Meynell, Leo Jacob and Justin Sievers, has filled the see-and-be-seen vacancy that Pravda left when it shuttered. Come for caviar service, dirty martinis with the brine pulled forward and murals by Emelie Törling. The DJ booth that runs past midnight will keep you there.

Spring Lounge

• 48 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012

Known to its lifers as the Shark Bar—fiberglass sharks bolted to the walls, 1920s growler-shop bones, 12 craft taps. Free hot dogs on Wednesdays at 5 p.m; free bagels on Sunday afternoons. The doors swing at 8 a.m. and don’t shut until 4 a.m. The morning shift feels uniquely New York City: contractors before site, off-shift bartenders before bed, the occasional novelist before deadline.

Onieal’s Grand Street

• 174 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

Chris Onieal opened this 19th-century building as a cocktail bar in 1995. The Tammany Hall-era Prohibition tunnel that once connected the basement to the old Police Headquarters across Centre Street is now the wine cellar—not a metaphor, an actual brick passage with a key. Aiden and Steve’s “Scout Bar” in Sex and the City, for the small percentage of you who needed that note.

Madhappy

• 207 Mulberry Street, New York, NY 10012

The L.A. mental-health-forward label opened its first New York flagship late last year, debuting 1,800 square feet across two floors of blue-dyed concrete and Douglas fir, designed by PlayLab Inc. The ground-floor café, the Pantry, partners with Hotel Drugs for Japanese coffee, Sofreh for Persian baked goods and Tom’s Juice. NYC-exclusive merch leans Yankees, Mets and Lucali—a trifecta that implies a brand strategist who rides the train.

Albanese Meats & Poultry

• 238 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10012

Vincenzo and Mary Albanese opened this butcher shop in 1923. Coppola installed the now-faded red sign as set dressing for The Godfather Part III, and the family kept it, because of course they did. Longtime owner Moe Albanese died in 2020, but his granddaughter, Jennifer Prezioso, runs it solo now, Monday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m. Original 1940s tile floor, original butcher block, original methods. Prezioso got married inside Elizabeth Street Garden in 2024—locals call her the unofficial mayor of the block.

Di Palo’s Fine Foods

• 200 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

The Di Palos have been selling cheese on this corner since 1925, with origins in a 1910 latteria a few doors down. Lou, Marie and Sal Di Palo run the front, while the fifth generation runs the Enoteca next door. Lou flies to Italy multiple times a year to source, and will tell you why the pecorino he just got off a plane is the one you want, in a soliloquy that’s worth the wait, whether you’re buying or not.

Tour the Catacombs at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral

• 263 Mulberry Street, New York, NY 10012

Mangin’s 1815 Gothic Revival cathedral—designed by the same architect who drew City Hall—served as the seat of the Archdiocese of New York until the Fifth Avenue successor opened in 1879. The 1866 fire gutted the interior; the rebuild added the cast-iron columns still in place. Pope Benedict XVI designated it a minor basilica in 2010. The catacombs underneath—35 family crypts and five clerical vaults holding Delmonicos, a Civil War general and the Tammany boss “Honest John” Kelly—opened to public tours run by Tommy’s New York.

Stop by Storefront for Art and Architecture

• 97 Kenmare Street, New York, NY 10012

The 1993 Steven Holl and Vito Acconci pivoting-panel façade is a contemporary architectural landmark in its own right—nearly 100 feet of tapering triangular space whose hinged walls swing open onto Kenmare like a Calder mobile that someone learned to weld. Founded in 1982 by Kyong Park, Storefront has been a launching pad for downtown architectural thinking for over four decades. Pair with a New Museum visit; it’s a five-minute walk and a useful palate cleanser between the two scales of building.

Saint Clement

• 7 Arundel Street, London, WC2R 3DA, United Kingdom

Nick Jones built Soho House into a membership empire across three continents, then handed back the keys in 2022, and the obvious question was what a man like that does for an encore. Saint Clement is the answer. It occupies a hushed stretch of Arundel Street between the Strand and the river, a few doors from his old 180 House flagship and directly above the Corner Shop 180 deli he opened last June. The new venture, Jones & Co., fills it with 90 bedrooms, 15 loft apartments for the longer-stay crowd, a rooftop restaurant and a gym. There is no membership, no application and no one to decide you are not quite right for the room, which, from the man who spent two decades monetizing the velvet rope, is the genuine plot twist.

Henrik’s Hotel

• Studiestræde 57, 1554 Copenhagen, Denmark

In 1969, Aase and Jørgen Henrik Hildebrandt bought a Copenhagen building for a car-rental business and stumbled sideways into hospitality, which is a more charming origin than most hotels can claim. More than 50 years on, the family has named its fourth property after the patriarch, and the sentiment is doing real work. Henrik’s keeps 44 rooms on Studiestræde, a vintage shop-filled street near Tivoli Gardens that once marked the old city gate, and the interiors run tactile and dollhouse-precise, all warm wood and deliberately low light. There is a fireplace in the lobby and two bars, plus the pillow menus and blackout drapes the Hildebrandts have spent decades refining across their Ascot, Wide and Hypernym hotels.

Tierras Villas

• Mononaftis, Agia Pelagia, 715 00 Heraklion, Crete, Greece

Crete spent years as Greece’s reliable second-tier getaway—the island you finally visit once Santorini and Mykonos have worn you out, and the family behind Omicron Hotels has wagered that the reputation is an asset rather than a consolation prize. Tierras Villas, opening this July along the coast at Agia Pelagia near Heraklion, is where that pays off. There are only five villas, each named for one of the five elements and built around it, with the design by Manos Kipritidis holding a hard line: Cretan stone and raw wood, low horizontals that follow the hillside rather than fight it, the Aegean left to do its own work just beyond the terrace.

The Carlton, a Rocco Forte Hotel

• Via Senato, 5, 20121 Milan, Italy

In a fashion district where Giorgio Armani built his own hotel and Bulgari handed the keys to Antonio Citterio, Rocco Forte made the least obvious move on the block: a family operation, a residential design firm, and roughly $65 million spent making you forget you are in a hotel at all. The Carlton reopened last November in a charmless 1963 building that Olga Polizzi gutted without sentiment. “Hand on heart, this time there wasn’t anything I would have kept,” she says of the Baglioni-era bones, all low ceilings and dark, undersized rooms. The 71 keys now reference Gio Ponti and Milanese sobriety, the wall patterns hand-painted by the San Patrignano workshop.

Casa Cedo

• Rua de Cedofeita 389, 4050-178 Porto, Portugal

You enter Casa Cedo through a flower shop, which also functions as reception and sells ceramics, coffee and Byredo fragrances, a sequence of small ambushes that tells you the Irish-Italian owners have thought harder about arrival than most hotels think about anything. Behind it wait just eight rooms in a 19th-century townhouse on the main drag of Cedofeita, Porto’s gallery-and-vintage quarter, with interiors by Lisbon’s Quiet Studios and a garden by Toni Sastre.

Luura Cliff

• Agia Irini (Agia Eirini), 844 00 Paros, Greece

Hotel operator Morgans Originals practically invented the boutique hotel in 1984, so its first Greek venture, choosing Paros over the obvious islands, doubles as a tip on the country’s emerging hot spot. The 39 cliffside suites perch above the bay of Agia Irini on the tamer western coast, many with private pools and uninterrupted sightlines to Antiparos and a sunset Mykonos would charge a cover for. Elastic Architects shaped the whitewashed village forms; Berlin’s cult studio Lambs and Lions did the interiors, and the restaurants arrive with real pedigree in Mimi Kakushi and La Cantine du Faubourg.

Ytri

• Husøy, 8770 Træna, Norway

The Træna archipelago sits 40 miles off the Norwegian mainland, on the Arctic Circle, home to roughly 450 people and a fishing tradition older than the country itself. Ytri, whose name means outermost in Old Norse, opened in April on the island of Husøy with 38 rooms beneath the granite spike of Trænstaven. Architect studio Vardehaugen angled the timber-and-glass building toward the light and the water, and there is a wood-fired sauna and a lounge built specifically for watching the aurora come down. You reach the Relais & Châteaux property by plane and then boat, on the islands’ own schedule, which weeds out anyone whose idea of remote is a resort with a spotty signal.

The Hotels Doing the Most

New York hotels have approached the tournament the way fashion houses approach Cannes, with varying degrees of admiration and awe. The Peninsula New York abandoned both immediately. Its World Cup package includes two suites, five nights, chauffeured transfers, private shopping appointments and in-room viewing setups. The rate for July 14 through 19 is up to $500,000 for two guests, which places it somewhere between oligarch wedding logistics and sovereign-wealth off-site retreat. More egalitarian—ironic for a members’ club—is Soho House Meatpacking, which is hosting opening-week screenings, rotating menus tied to competing nations and a final-weekend takeover centered around a still-unannounced performer. Members can reserve private screening rooms for hosted dinners, where the real tournament economy emerges, away from branded fan zones and activation jargon. At the more survivable end of the market, Moxy’s “Summer of Soccer” package bundles welcome cocktails, daily credits and transportation to matches for travelers who would rather spend money on the city than on imported marble bathrooms.

The Bars That Earn Their Place

Most bars suddenly calling themselves soccer bars this summer are participating in a seasonal identity crisis, but two places genuinely matter. Football Factory at Legends on West 33rd Street remains the city’s foundational institution, a basement-level cathedral to televised football with more than 100 matches shown weekly and upwards of 30 supporters’ clubs cycling through the room. Founder Jack Keane more or less built modern New York soccer culture at Nevada Smith’s before transplanting it here. Smithfield Hall on West 25th Street is the city’s only purpose-built soccer bar, outfitted with 26 indoor screens and another eight across a heated terrace. The place brands itself as “the home of football in New York City,” which would normally sound insufferable if it were not substantially true. Both venues also serve as hubs for the St. George’s Society of New York’s official England and Scotland watch series, a surprisingly civilized arrangement from a charitable organization founded in 1770. Humans will invent centuries-old institutions for almost anything except fixing Penn Station.

The Beer Gardens and Dance Parties

The schedule was practically drawn up for a New York July: kickoffs at 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 p.m. push the whole tournament onto terraces and into gardens. Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden in Astoria, run by the Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society since 1910, remains the category leader and one of the last places in the city where mass sports viewing still feels old-school communal—Czech pilsners in heavy mugs, schnitzels at picnic tables, Croatia supporters growing louder by the half. Over at Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, the Jersey Fan Hub pairs a 60-foot pitch-level screen with a concert series that turns match days into dance parties: DJ Snake and Justice for France-Senegal on June 16, Kygo with Kaleo for Norway-Senegal on June 22. And Governor Hochul’s temporary loosening of State Liquor Authority outdoor-service rules matters more than it sounds—bars can expand into adjacent space for the duration, effectively granting the city permission to behave Mediterranean for six weeks. Overdue, frankly.

The Free Map and the Westchester Loophole

Liberty State Park is off—the Fan Festival there was scrapped in February—but the official footprint is sprawling and, in places, free. The Telemundo Fan Village at Rockefeller Center runs July 6 through 19 as the Manhattan flagship: the ice rink becomes a temporary pitch with large-format screens, the Channel Gardens become a “Champions’ Garden” honoring the eight nations that have ever lifted the trophy, and Top of the Rock has been designated the official NYNJ Viewpoint with priority entry to the Hyundai-presented “Legacies of Champions” exhibition. The Fan Zone Queens at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center runs June 17 through 28, with 10,000 capacity, $10 admission and the best food of any official zone by virtue of geography alone. Brooklyn Bridge Park hosts a fan zone on select dates, with the most photogenic free skyline in the city as a backdrop. And Governor Hochul has booked two free state-run viewings: Stony Brook on June 12 for the U.S. opener, and Kensico Dam Plaza in Westchester for the final itself. The Kensico event is the way to go for any household north of the city that wants the communal version of the day without the drive south or the price of a couch at MetLife.

Guarda Golf Hôtel & Résidences

• Rte des Zirès 14, 3963 Crans-Montana, Switzerland

The Severiano Ballesteros Course sits nearly a mile up in the Valais Alps, and when you mishit a 7-iron at that altitude, the ball keeps going until you stop being embarrassed. Guarda is a two-minute walk from the first tee. The DP World Tour shows up the first week of September for the Omega European Masters, and for a few afternoons, the hotel lobby fills with caddies and Trackmans and someone’s wife holding a glass of Fendant at 11 a.m. The rest of the summer, the mountain belongs to the breed of golfer who believes oxygen is a swing aid. The concierge will get you an 8:12 a.m. tee time if you ask twice.

Verdura Resort, a Rocco Forte Hotel

• SS 115 KM 131, Contrada Verdura, 92019 Sciacca AG, Italy

The six clay courts at Verdura sit in a groove between olive orchards and orange groves, and in May, the whole resort smells like the blossoms have conspired against you. Certified coaches are on staff year-round, which means the 10 a.m. hit isn’t a resort hit—it’s a resort hit run by someone who has drilled French juniors. Padel on two more courts, pickleball on one, and Juventus runs a football academy down the road when the Italian kids are on summer break. Kyle Phillips designed the two 18-hole golf courses running to the Mediterranean. Book the sea-facing suites—designers Paolo Moschino and and Philip Vergeylen redid them this year, and the new upholstery is the correct shade of faded coral.

Sani Resort

• Kassandra, 630 77 Halkidiki, Greece

The Rafa Nadal Tennis Center at Sani is the most serious coaching in the Mediterranean, and the fact that Rafa himself hasn’t been photographed here recently hasn’t slowed the bookings. Coaches rotate in from the Academy in Manacor, which means the 10 a.m. session on a Wednesday in July might be with someone who has spent the winter drilling 14-year-olds destined for the tour. All eight clay courts are French red. The sailing school out of the marina runs RYA-certified catamaran and keelboat instruction, and the Aegean here in August has a steady afternoon breeze. More to love: A protected pine forest cuts a meandering trail through the property, and stand-up paddle yoga happens in the lagoon at 7 a.m. Your Greek athletic moment is here.

Forestis Dolomites

• Palmschoß 22, 39042 Brixen, South Tyrol, Italy

Forestis sits 5,900 feet up the Plose massif, and the chairlift that runs out the front door drops you directly onto miles of hiking trail or, if you’ve brought the right equipment, downhill flow trails that will age you five years in a morning. Herbert is the in-house guide. He does the sunrise hikes, speaks English and German and a dialect neither of your parents would recognize, and has a habit of pointing at a peak across the valley and telling you its name as though you should have known already. Come September for the Bike Festa Südtirol (Sept. 17-20, 2026), the new flagship mountain bike weekend out of Brixen.

Rosewood Castiglion del Bosco

• Località Castiglion del Bosco, 53024 Montalcino SI, Italy

Castiglion del Bosco has one of the best resort cycling programs in Europe. The on-staff guides put you on a carbon-fiber road bike or a gravel setup, read your cadence inside a few kilometers and have you climbing white roads north of Siena by lunch without realizing you signed up for a training ride. The estate is 5,000 acres with a working Brunello winery at its core—actual Brunello, actual vineyards, not just a gesture toward them—and the Tom Weiskopf golf course at the top of the property is the only private club in Italy, which matters more to certain people than it should. L’Eroica runs the first weekend of October out of Gaiole in Chianti, a vintage gran fondo on strade bianche, and the cycling program can build an August around the race, whether you ask it to or not.

Awaroa Lodge

• Awaroa Inlet, Abel Tasman National Park, Tasman 7183, New Zealand

Awaroa is one of the few hotels inside Abel Tasman, which is New Zealand’s smallest national park and one of its most spectacular—a coast of granite headlands, tidal estuaries and beaches the color of bone. The lodge is reachable only by boat, small plane or foot, which is also how the sport program works. Sea kayaking out of the on-property beach runs ability-tiered day trips to Torrent Bay and Bark Bay, and in season, the pods of orcas move through the inlet close enough that the guides have you hold the paddle still. The Abel Tasman Coast Track, 37 miles end to end, passes the front lawn—trail runners time themselves on the Marahau-to-Totaranui leg. Add a fly-fishing partnership on the Motueka River, 45 minutes inland, for brown trout the size of a housecat. 

The Ranch at Rock Creek

• 79 Carriage House Ln, Philipsburg, MT 59858

Rock Creek is a working cattle ranch that happens to put you up in a 29-key collection of cabins, canvas glamping tents and the Granite Lodge. The equestrian program operates across several arenas, with on-staff trainers teaching both Western and English to the same child over the same week, which is a small feat of patience. Cattle drives actually move cattle, and barrel-racing clinics actually clock times. Four miles of Rock Creek run Orvis-endorsed blue-ribbon trout, and the fly guides will tie you something local that works before the hatch figures itself out. Sporting clays, archery, a 19th-century saloon restored for poker nights that go later than they should. Six thousand six hundred acres of Montana, and the only sound after midnight is whatever the coyotes are gossiping about.

Finolhu Baa Atoll

• Kanufushi Island, Baa Atoll, Maldives

For most people, the Maldives is filed under beach vacation, which is a tax bracket away from a sports destination. Finolhu, however, sits in a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve on Baa Atoll, one of the most-watched manta aggregations on earth. From May through November, Hanifaru Bay fills with feeding mantas and the occasional whale shark. The dive center runs daily snorkel drift trips led by marine biologists, and the kitesurfing school has IKO-certified instructors and flat turquoise water that makes learning embarrassingly easy. Private villas sit on stilts over a house reef you can drop into from your deck with a mask, while yoga on an overwater platform at 7 a.m. is the rare cliché that truly does relax you at a cellular level.

Four Seasons Resort Punta Mita

• Bahía de Banderas, Nayarit 63734, Mexico

Pacifico’s alternate 19th is in the Pacific Ocean. No, not overlooking it—in it. Known as the Tail of the Whale, the green is a natural island reachable only by amphibious cart at low tide, and when the tide is wrong, the starters wait because the alternative is flinging golf balls into the sea at a different hole. The Tropicsurf coaches will meet you at El Anclote before breakfast and have you standing on a soft-top by the time the other guests are ordering huevos. Tennis is run out of a 10-court complex with resident pros. Add kayaking, stand-up paddle and whale-watching when in season. The peninsula is 52 private acres, and whatever you want to do, someone on staff knows how to do it better.

Keens Steakhouse

• 72 W 36th St, New York, NY 10018

Four blocks from Madison Square Garden and 141 years into the run, Keens still serves its 26-ounce mutton chop with mint jelly. Roughly 45,000 clay pipes hang above you, a vestige of when patrons, which once included Babe Ruth, J.P. Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt, were permitted to store their fragile clay pipes on-site. The single-malt list stretches north of 300 labels, and the bar Bloody Mary is finished with balsamic, a twist that sounds odd until you’ve had one. Order the chop, the porterhouse for three, the wedge salad and the coffee cantata sundae that wraps up a $400 dinner with the dignity it deserves.

Torrisi

• 275 Mulberry St, New York, NY 10012

The bigger sibling to Carbone, with less circus and more production. The Puck Building gives you 30-foot vaulted ceilings, an art program designed to keep you looking up between courses, and an à la carte menu that wanders happily between chopped liver with Manischewitz and cavatelli with Jamaican beef ragu. Major Food Group knows how to throw a dinner, and this is the room they built for the version with 12 guys and a reason. The spaghetti al pomodoro is doing exactly what it’s meant to and very little else; ask the captain which pasta to push.

Coqodaq

• 12 E 22nd St, New York, NY 10010

Another entry from Simon Kim: Coqodaq, where you wash your hands at the entrance with rotating luxury soaps, sit under gold-arched ceilings styled like a chicken coop reimagined by Gucci, and order from what the restaurant bills as the longest Champagne list in America—roughly 400 labels. The Bucket List menu runs $42 a head and arrives in waves: consommé, banchan, the original fried chicken, a second round glazed in soy garlic or gochujang, cold perilla noodles and frozen yogurt. The $28 caviar nugget exists as a photo op—pretend you’re above it before ordering one anyway.

Six Coasts by Smorgasburg

• Soissons Landing, Governors Island, New York, NY 10004

This Pan-American waterfront restaurant opened May 9 in the 32,000-square-foot space that used to house Island Oyster. Chef Scotley Innis runs a coastal menu pulled from six coastlines across the Americas—Nova Scotia, Baja and Bahia among them—across raw bar, whole grilled fish, ceviche and rice plates, all coming out of a fully electric kitchen. A seven-minute ferry from the Battery Maritime Building drops you at Soissons Landing with unobstructed views of Lower Manhattan and New York Harbor. Built for long Saturday lunches with rosé and zero plans afterward.

Bowery Meat Company

• 9 E 1st St, New York, NY 10003

The room is dark, the lighting flatters everyone, and Josh Capon’s duck lasagna for two arrives in cast iron hot enough to need warning labels—easily feeding four if you order it as a pregame. The Bowery Steak makes the case for staying, the charbroiled oysters land under garlicky breadcrumbs and Romano that sounds wrong on paper and right on the table, and the sides hold up better than the meat at most legacy steakhouses. For six guys in town for a Knicks game, this is the East Village answer to the $200-a-head Midtown chophouse—followed by a nightcap at McSorley’s.

Don Angie

• 103 Greenwich Ave, New York, NY 10014

The pinwheel lasagna for two—stuffed rolls of pasta fanned like a sundial across a cast-iron skillet—is one of the great carbohydrate engineering feats downtown. Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli have been running this 50-seat West Village room since 2017, with sister restaurant San Sabino next door for the spillover (it’s always packed, too). The chrysanthemum salad and gnocchi with pancetta and pomegranate fill out an order that turns four-tops into three-hour dinners. Six guys fit comfortably, 10 probably won’t.

Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi

• 10 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023

Former New York Times food critic Pete Wells’ top-ranked restaurant in New York in both 2023 and 2024, tucked inside David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, where Kwame Onwuachi’s Afro-Caribbean menu plays with a Bronx accent—curried goat patties, jerk lamb ribs in a sweet-spicy glaze, braised oxtail, truffled chopped cheese buns. The music plays loud, the room holds 70 and the energy refuses to settle. Reservations drop 28 days out at noon and the prime windows are gone in under 30 minutes; showing up at 5 p.m. for the walk-in bar list is a real strategy worth knowing.

Peter Luger

• 178 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11211

The 1887 Williamsburg institution accepts cash, debit cards and the Peter Luger card, but no credit cards—period. There’s essentially one order: porterhouse for two, three or four, with the bacon arriving first as its own course (thick-cut, peppery, a single slab per person), followed by creamed spinach, German fried potatoes, the requisite tomato and onion and schlag for dessert. The waiters remain gruff in a way that has become its own form of showpiece, and nothing has changed here in any meaningful way, despite the place losing its Michelin star in 2022.

Crane Club

• 85 10th Ave, New York, NY 10011

This two-story Tao Group production took over Del Posto’s space in West Chelsea, where Michelin-starred Melissa Rodriguez drives a wood-fire program off a 12-foot Mibrasa grill. The dining room is draped in red velvet and gold leaf and the wine list tops 1,000 bottles. Order the 30-day dry-aged bone-in ribeye, the maitake (hen-of-the-woods) mushrooms with cognac and Thai basil, the bone marrow with grilled filone bread and the bread service that comes in an edible bowl. The members-only club downstairs runs most of the same menu, leading to a version of the night nobody wants to reminisce about on Monday.

Taverna Kyclades

• 36-01 Ditmars Blvd, Astoria, NY 11105

The Astoria flagship that takes no online reservations and, frankly, may never need to to fill the convivial dining room. Whole grilled branzino arrives boned tableside and glossed in olive oil and oregano, the grilled octopus and lamb chops anchor the starters, and the Greek salad turns up with feta thick enough to slice with a fork. The line out front on a Saturday at 7 p.m. stacks 40 deep, but the kitchen turns tables fast, so Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. is the play for a group of eight. The bar has expanded since the early BYOB days, leaving a wine list that’s short, Greek and reasonable.

Fraunces Tavern

• 54 Pearl Street, New York, NY 10004

The most consequential drinking room in American history sits on the southern tip of Manhattan—a Georgian brick walk-up that has been serving food and drink since King George II was on the throne. On December 4, 1783, Washington summoned his Continental Army officers, including Henry Knox and Baron von Steuben, to the second-floor Long Room and bid them farewell: “With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you.” The Long Room upstairs is preserved as part of the Sons of the Revolution museum, but the ground floor operates as an independent bar and restaurant with a serious cocktail program and an annual reenactment every December 4. Tavernkeeper Samuel Fraunces—likely Black or mixed-race, called “Black Sam”—went on to become Washington’s presidential steward. Order the punch.

Old ’76 House

• 110 Main Street, Tappan, NY 10983

The Orangetown Resolutions, an early protest document against the Crown, were signed on this site on July 4, 1774—two years before the Declaration. The tavern served as Continental Army headquarters during the Tappan encampment and held Major John André, the British spy caught with Benedict Arnold’s plans to surrender West Point, from September 25 to October 1, 1780. Washington personally denied André’s request to die by firing squad rather than the rope, and he was subsequently hanged on the hill behind the tavern on October 2. An inverted portrait of Benedict Arnold still hangs over the fireplace as a deliberate insult. The menu offers Eggs Benedict Arnold without irony. The dining room ceiling beams are original; the fireplaces are wide enough to walk into. A confession: the prime rib is excellent. A second confession: the historical drama outpaces the cocktail list.

McGillen’s Olde Ale House

• 1310 Drury Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107

Tucked into Drury Street, an alley between 13th and Juniper, McGillin’s opened the year Lincoln was elected. The Irish immigrants who founded it raised 13 children upstairs. Union soldiers reportedly celebrated the surrender at Appomattox here in 1865. The bar survived the 1918 flu, Prohibition (operating as an “ice cream parlor” with a tea room upstairs that was definitely not a speakeasy) and Covid. Every liquor license the bar has held since 1871 is framed on the walls, with one telling gap for the dry years. The original wooden “Bell in Hand” sign hangs above the bar, surrounded by reclaimed signage from defunct Philadelphia institutions—Wanamaker’s, Strawbridge & Clothier, an F.W. Woolworth subway tile—a kind of municipal taxidermy. Order the Yards-brewed McGillin’s 1860 IPA and a roast beef sandwich. The Irish stew won’t disappoint either.

Round Robin Bar

• 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004

Inside the Willard Hotel, a block from the White House, the Round Robin is the bar that runs the country between hearings. Senator Henry Clay introduced the mint julep to Washington at this circular mahogany bar. Lincoln stayed at the Willard for the 10 days before his 1861 inauguration. Julia Ward Howe allegedly wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” upstairs. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Ulysses S. Grant—who reportedly coined “lobbyist” while smoking cigars in the lobby—were regulars. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. finalized the “I Have a Dream” speech in a Willard room hours before delivering it on August 28, 1963. Bartender Jim Hewes has worked the Round Robin for more than 25 years across six administrations and assigns each president a personal drink. In summer, he stirs more than two dozen Maker’s Mark juleps a day.

Dobbin House Tavern

• 89 Steinwehr Avenue, Gettysburg, PA 17325

The oldest building in Gettysburg opened the same year as the Declaration. Reverend Alexander Dobbin built it; his abolitionist son, Matthew, carved a three-foot crawl space between the first and second floors to hide escaped enslaved people moving north on the Underground Railroad. The space is still there, visible from the dining room. The tavern served as a Union and Confederate field hospital after the July 1 to 3, 1863, battle, and Lincoln’s procession to deliver the Gettysburg Address passed in front on November 19, 1863. Seven fireplaces, native stone walls and six themed dining rooms—including one where guests eat in a four-poster bed. The basement Springhouse Tavern is built around three natural springs that still flow under the floor.

Old Talbott Tavern

• 107 West Stephen Foster Avenue, Bardstown, KY 40004

Old Talbott Tavern predates the town it sits in, and calls itself the oldest bourbon bar in the world, which actually understates the case. Daniel Boone gave a deposition here in April 1792. Louis-Philippe of France—the future king, then exiled—arrived October 17, 1797, and a member of his entourage painted murals on the wall (which were badly damaged in a 1998 fire). A young Abraham Lincoln stayed here around age six or seven, in 1812, while his parents fought and lost a land-title lawsuit that drove the family to Indiana. Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Stephen Foster and General George Patton all drank here. Jesse James—a relative of Bardstown’s sheriff—reportedly fired at the painted birds in the Louis-Philippe murals after one too many drinks.

Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge

• 422 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203

The youngest bar on the list is indispensable to the cultural-patriotic frame. Tootsie’s sits one alley behind the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974. Willie Nelson said it best: “It’s 17 steps to Tootsie’s and 34 steps back.” Hattie “Tootsie” Bess kept a cigar box of IOUs for broke songwriters—Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Roger Miller, Patsy Cline, Tom T. Hall and Loretta Lynn all cashed her informal credit. Roger Miller wrote “Dang Me” here. Nelson got his first songwriting gig walking out the back door. The garish purple paint job was an accident—debt-paying contractors used the wrong color, and Tootsie kept it. She was buried in 1978 in an orchid gown, in an orchid casket.

The Palace Restaurant and Saloon

• 120 South Montezuma Street, Prescott, AZ 86303

This is Arizona’s oldest bar and the spiritual heart of Whiskey Row. Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp and Doc Holliday drank here before decamping to Tombstone—Virgil lived in Prescott as town constable. The defining anecdote happened on July 14, 1900: as the Whiskey Row fire raced through downtown, regulars hauled the massive hand-carved Brunswick bar across the street to Courthouse Plaza and kept drinking while the building burned around their old spot. They rebuilt by 1901 around the same bar, which is still in use—24 feet of solid oak with a cherry top and French plate-glass mirrors, originally shipped around Cape Horn from New Jersey to San Francisco and packed in by mule. Theodore Roosevelt visited in 1907 to commission a statue of Rough Rider Bucky O’Neill. Bullet holes are still visible in the pressed-tin ceiling.

Saloon No. 10

• 657 Main Street, Deadwood, SD 57732

Wild Bill Hickok was shot dead by Jack McCall during a poker game on August 2, 1876, holding two pair, aces and eights—the original “Dead Man’s Hand.” That actually happened at Nuttall & Mann’s Saloon, later renamed Saloon No. 10, at 624 Main Street—across the street and down the block from today’s bar, on a site that burned in the 1879 Deadwood fire. The current Saloon No. 10 was conceived as one of America’s first theme bars in 1938 and now holds South Dakota’s largest whiskey selection, sawdust on the floor and a “Wild Bill’s Death Chair” displayed in a velvet-lined illuminated case above the front door, though current owner LuAnn “Louis” LaLonde concedes the chair’s authenticity is doubtful. The murder is reenacted multiple times daily. A competing “Wild Bill Bar” at the actual original 624 site has reclaimed the “Original Location” branding since 2013, which is part of Deadwood’s particular charm.

Congaree National Park

• South Carolina

Don’t be mistaken: South Carolina’s only national park is not a swamp. That word was dropped from the name in 2003, and the locals would like you to know it. Congaree is a floodplain forest, the largest intact stretch of old-growth bottomland hardwood in North America, and it floods about 10 times a year, on schedule. The trees are the draw, with Loblolly pines that push 167 feet and bald cypresses pushing 500 years. The park holds the tallest known specimens of 15 species, more champion-sized trees than anywhere else on the continent. In May, the Photuris frontalis fireflies sync up in tight bursts over Cedar Creek, 70 flashes a minute—a different show from the Smokies’ slower Photinus carolinus, and the park runs a lottery for the eight viewing nights.

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve

• West Virginia

Designated in 2020, New River Gorge remains America’s newest national park, spanning 70,000 acres along the New River in southern West Virginia. The sandstone walls rise 1,000 feet above whitewater-rated Class III to Class V water, and more than 1,500 climbing routes have been bolted across them, drawing climbers from Berlin to Bishop. The 3.2-mile Endless Wall Trail edges the canyon rim through rhododendron and hemlock. Long Point delivers the postcard shot of the New River Gorge Bridge—876 feet up, 1,700 feet across, the longest single-span steel arch in the Western Hemisphere. Bridge Day, the third Saturday in October, is the only day of the year you can legally BASE-jump it.

Yellowstone National Park

• Wyoming, Montana and Idaho

America’s first national park, signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872, still stands a step above the rest. More than 10,000 hydrothermal features hiss and gurgle from Yellowstone’s glacier-sculpted basins—roughly half the world’s total. About 500 geysers are active, more than the rest of the planet combined. Old Faithful goes off every 94 minutes on average; Lone Star, three miles by trail from the Old Faithful complex, performs every three hours for a fraction of the crowd. The 2022 floods are mostly settled, with the permanent rebuild of the North Entrance Road breaking ground this summer with two new bridges and wildlife underpasses.

Acadia National Park

• Maine

The only national park in the Northeast hits different. Granite coastline, spruce forests, the carriage roads John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded between 1913 and 1940—Acadia condenses New England into 47,000 acres on Mount Desert Island. Cadillac Mountain summit road requires a $6 vehicle reservation from May 20 through October 25, 2026; sunrise tickets sell out the moment they release at 10 a.m., 90 days out. Precipice and Beehive trails climb iron-rung ladders up granite faces; Jordan Pond House serves up its famous popovers afterward.

Dry Tortugas National Park

• Florida

Seventy miles west of Key West, past the last channel marker, Fort Jefferson sits on a sand island in 100 square miles of reef-flecked water. The fort was the largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere when construction stopped in 1875; it never housed a battle, just Lincoln conspirator Samuel Mudd. The Yankee Freedom III ferry (2026 fare is $220 per adult, departs Key West at 8 a.m.) is the only authorized passenger boat. Key West Seaplane Adventures runs the 45-minute flyover at $507 half-day, $890 full-day. Snorkel the moat wall, tour the fort, or watch the sooty terns at Bush Key. If you decide to overnight, there are 13 primitive campsites on Garden Key—no restaurants, no fresh water and no excuses for forgetting sunscreen.

Voyageurs National Park

• Minnesota

First things first: Voyageurs is a water park. More than a third of its 218,000 acres is lake—pristine boreal water carved by glaciers along the Canadian border, 655 miles of undeveloped shoreline, 500 islands. Everything moves by boat. Houseboats from Ebel’s, Rainy Lake or Voyagaire run a week; ranger-led pontoon tours into Kettle Falls leave from Rainy Lake Visitor Center starting June 15, 2026. The night sky is the other reason to go: Voyageurs is an International Dark Sky Park, and the Conservancy’s Boreal Stargazing Week in February pairs aurora viewing with cross-country skiing. Kettle Falls Hotel, the only lodging inside the park, is reachable by boat across two international borders.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

• Tennessee

The most-visited national park in America (12.2 million visits in 2024’s blockbuster season) straddles the Tennessee-North Carolina line. Kuwohi—the 6,643-foot peak that was known as Clingmans Dome until the U.S. Board on Geographic Names restored its Cherokee name in September 2024—gives the highest views in the Smokies. Cades Cove’s 11-mile loop closes to motor vehicles every Wednesday from May 6 through September 30, 2026, the morning bike loop a local rite.

Glacier National Park

• Montana

Glacier National Park axed its reservation system completely for 2026—that includes no more vehicle reservations at Going-to-the-Sun Road, North Fork, Many Glacier or Two Medicine. The trade-off: a new three-hour parking limit at Logan Pass starting July 1 and a ticketed-only express shuttle replacing the old, free hop-on system. The Going-to-the-Sun Road, the engineering masterpiece that crosses the Continental Divide at 6,646 feet, opens between mid-June and early July 2026, depending on plowing. Unfortunately, the 26 named glaciers that survive are predicted to be gone by 2100.

Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park

• Hawaii

Kilauea has been erupting in episodes since December 2024. Forty-five episodes through April 2026, lava fountains as high as 1,500 feet from Halemaʻumaʻu, episode 46 forecast for early May. The USGS daily update is the place to check before booking—when the show is on, the after-dark glow from Uēkahuna Overlook (the rebuilt former Jaggar Museum site) is the closest most people will ever come to a planet making itself. Mauna Loa, also in the park, has been suspiciously tame since its 2022 eruption.

Omni Parker House

• 60 School St, Boston, MA 02108

This is the longest continuously operating hotel in America, give or take a 2020 pandemic gap that interrupted a 165-year streak. The building Bostonians know—Desmond and Lord, 14 stories, 1927—sits over the foundation of Harvey Parker’s original 1855 establishment, which is to say that the elevators are modern but the address is older than the Civil War. The Saturday Club—which included Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes, Lowell and Whittier—met upstairs once a month through the 1850s and 1860s. It’s where they conceived The Atlantic Monthly in 1857. Charles Dickens lived in the hotel for five months in 1867 and 1868, and gave the first public reading of A Christmas Carol to the club in the Mirror Room before performing it for paying audiences at Tremont Temple. The real room to ask about, however, is Table 40 in Parker’s Restaurant, where John F. Kennedy proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier in June 1953. It can still be booked, though the staff prefers you don’t make a thing of it.

The Williamsburg Inn

• 136 E Francis St, Williamsburg, VA 23185

John D. Rockefeller Jr. paid for Colonial Williamsburg’s restoration, an undertaking that turns 100 in 2026, and when it came time to build a hotel on the grounds, he gave Perry, Shaw and Hepburn a single instruction: it must not be confused with anything 18th century. That is, regency, not colonial. Rockefeller and his wife, Abby Aldrich, personally selected the furnishings and rejected four architectural plans before approving the design. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip stayed in 1957 and again on the 50th anniversary of that visit in 2007; the royal suite was redecorated in pastel pinks and greens for her arrival. Emperor Hirohito, King Hussein, King Mohammed V, Winston Churchill and successive U.S. presidents have followed. Ronald Reagan chaired the 9th G7 Summit (the only one he ever chaired) from May 28 to 30, 1983. Margaret Thatcher slept at Chiswell-Bucktrout, Pierre Trudeau at Bracken, Helmut Kohl at Moody, Reagan at Providence Hall. The Foundation closed Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area to the public for the first time in its history to host the summit.

The Hermitage Hotel

• 231 6th Ave N, Nashville, TN 37219

The Hermitage is the only surviving Beaux-Arts commercial building in Tennessee. It’s been a National Historic Landmark since Aug. 28, 2020—the centennial of the 19th Amendment’s ratification. Until the summer of 1920, the hotel was the de facto third house of the Tennessee legislature. NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt lived in Suite 309, while anti-suffrage commander Josephine Pearson ran her operation from the eighth floor. Suffragists wore yellow roses, and antis wore red; the antis ran a de facto speakeasy in Room 812, plying wavering legislators with whiskey through Prohibition. On Aug. 18, 1920, with the Tennessee House tied 48 to 48, 24-year-old Rep. Harry T. Burn—wearing a red rose—switched his vote after a letter from his mother urging him to “vote for suffrage.” He subsequently fled the Capitol and ran across the street to the Hermitage to phone Febb Burn to let him know the amendment had passed. A Toby Bishop renovation in 2021 and 2022 added Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Drusie & Darr; the women’s lounge—a maximalist pink homage to the suffragists—is the strongest set piece on the property.

Hotel Monteleone

• 214 Royal St, New Orleans, LA 70130

The Sicilian cobbler Antonio Monteleone bought a 64-room hotel at Royal and Iberville in 1886, and his great-great-grandson, Billy Monteleone Jr., runs the place today—that’s five generations and 140 years in the same family, among the longest unbroken family tenures in American hospitality. Albert Weiblen designed the Beaux-Arts core in 1908; it was designated a Literary Landmark by the Friends of the Library Association in 1999, one of three hotels in the country so recognized. Tennessee Williams set scenes of The Rose Tattoo and Orpheus Descending in the rooms upstairs, and Ernest Hemingway wrote the hotel into “Night Before Battle.” Truman Capote joked on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show that he was born there. Now, for the false narratives: The Faulkner-honeymoon-and-Sound-and-the-Fury claim that the Monteleone has been repeating for half a century is wrong. Faulkner wrote the novel in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1928. He stayed at the hotel on his 1929 honeymoon, when the novel was already at the printer.

Hotel Jerome

• 286 Grand Ave, Mackinac Island, MI 49757

Jerome B. Wheeler was an Aspen silver-and-railroad investor (and co-owner of Macy’s) who opened the four-story brick hotel in November 1889. It was modeled on Claridge’s in London, with electric light and an elevator from day one. During Prohibition, the J-Bar served the “Aspen Crud,” a vanilla milkshake spiked with bourbon, which is still on the menu. Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke leased the hotel for 25 years after WWII and launched the Aspen Idea, the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Music Festival and the Aspen Skiing Company, all from the hotel lobby. The fattest seam, though, is Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 “Freak Power” sheriff campaign, run from a corner table in the J-Bar. Thompson lost to incumbent Carrol Whitmire on Nov. 3 by roughly 500 votes. The journalist’s memorial service was held in the ballroom 35 years later.

Hotel del Coronado

• 1500 Orange Ave, Coronado, CA 92118

The James and Merritt Reid Victorian on the beach is the second-largest wooden structure in America. It’s been a National Historic Landmark since 1977, and more than $550 million was spent over its multiyear Blackstone restoration, which was completed when the historic Victorian guest rooms reopened on March 1, 2025—the final phase of a project that touched every public space on the property. L. Frank Baum stayed regularly from 1904 through at least 1910 and wrote three Oz sequels there; he is credited with designing the Crown Room’s crown chandeliers. The line is “16 presidents”—a dozen overnight stays from Benjamin Harrison through George W. Bush are properly documented; the rest are visits. On Sept. 3, 1970, Nixon held the first state dinner ever conducted outside the White House in the pillar-free Crown Room—160 by 60 feet under a 33-foot Oregon sugar pine ceiling—for Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, with Reagan, LBJ, Sinatra and John Wayne in attendance.

Yale Golf Course

• 200 Conrad Drive, New Haven, CT 06515

One of the most noteworthy courses in 2026 American golf is reachable from Grand Central by 11 a.m. Yale’s 1926 Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor masterpiece, public for a century but gatekept like it wasn’t, closed for a multimillion-dollar Gil Hanse restoration in 2024 and reopened to non-affiliate play this April 28. The work isn’t exactly subtle: USGA-spec greens, the Punch Bowl 3rd reborn, the Biarritz 9th rebuilt to its original dimensions and double fairways restored at the 3rd and 18th, with the par-3 9th now reading like the photographed icon it always wanted to be. Take Metro-North’s New Haven Line to Union Station and a 12-minute Uber. A few caveats: Non-affiliate fees climb to about $350, the course is closed on Mondays, and you’ll need to book through Whoosh 10 days out. Pair with Wooster Street pizza on the way home.

Skyway Golf Course

• 200 Lincoln Park West, Jersey City, NJ 07304

Built on a reclaimed Hudson County landfill in 2015, Skyway is nine holes of fescue-clad links framed against the Manhattan skyline and the Pulaski Skyway, a course you can reach faster than you can reach your dentist in rush hour traffic. Roy Case and Jeff Grossman routed it on heaving, dune-style ground, with peak weekend rates running $50 to $75 and twilight dropping to $30. Take PATH to Journal Square plus a $12 Uber, the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail to West Side Avenue plus a 15-minute walk, or NJ Transit’s #119 from Port Authority.

Mohonk Mountain House

• 1000 Mountain Rest Road, New Paltz, NY 12561

Among the oldest continuously played courses in America, with Albert Smiley’s original 1897 nine and Robert Pryde’s 1911 redesign still defining a par 35 on a 2,707-yard ridge above the Hudson Valley. It has the kind of severe undulations and Scottish-style blind shots—playing into greens you can’t see—that modern courses grade away. Resort guests play free with overnight stays, and the all-inclusive Mountain House itself, a National Historic Landmark Victorian castle on a glacial lake, is the destination as much as the golf is. Day visitors need a $119 Sports Pass or a dining or spa reservation.

Wintonbury Hills

• 206 Terry Plains Road, Bloomfield, CT 06002

Pete Dye and Tim Liddy built this in 2003, the only Pete Dye in Connecticut and, as of 2025, GolfPass’s number one public in the state. Non-resident green fees run about $65 on weekends with cart, roughly a third of what equivalent architecture costs in Westchester, and the routing earns every dollar with a reverse Redan 9th, a signature tree behind the 14th green and the 14-15-16 stretch along Bloomfield Reservoir.

Buck Hill Golf Club

• 357 Golf Drive, Buck Hill Falls, PA 18323

Robert White designed the original nine at Buck Hill Golf Club in 1907, Donald Ross expanded it to 18 around 1922, and Rees Jones completed a centennial restoration in 2022, putting a real Donald Ross in the Poconos at about $60 a round. The catch—and the reason this is a spring story—is that Buck Hill goes members-only Memorial Day through Labor Day, so book before someone you know does. Pair with one of the other Pocono courses on the Robert White triangle—Shawnee, Glen Brook, Skytop—for a weekend itinerary built around a single architect’s hundred-year footprint.

Hominy Hill

• 92 Mercer Road, Colts Neck, NJ 07722

The state of New Jersey’s flagship public county course, with a backstory that public golf doesn’t usually get: Robert Trent Jones Sr. built it as a private course in 1964, and the family eventually donated it to Monmouth County. 7,049 yards, 138 bunkers, host of the 1983 U.S. Amateur Public Links and the 1995 U.S. Women’s, with non-resident weekend play running about $95 to $110 with a $270 Player Pass and residents paying closer to $55. Pair with a Sandy Hook beach afternoon.

Hemlock Falls (South Mountain Reservation, New Jersey)

• Locust Grove Trailhead, Glen Avenue, Millburn, NJ 07041

Take NJ Transit and step off the Morris and Essex at Millburn, and the trailhead is right there—a hundred yards, less than your walk to the platform from a midtown office. The Lenape-Rahway loop runs 5.9 miles and 767 feet up through a forest the Olmsted Brothers laid out—yes, sons of the man who did Central Park—and the carriage roads still hold their original logic a century on. There’s a shorter spur if all you want is the 25-foot waterfall, which earns its keep after a spring rain. Walk back to Millburn when you’re done. Or ride one stop east to Maplewood Village and put yourself at Lorena’s.

Walkway Over the Hudson (Poughkeepsie, New York)

• 87 Haviland Road, Highland, NY 12528 (west landing); 61 Parker Avenue, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 (east landing)

The Hudson Line ends at Poughkeepsie, and 1.28 miles of repurposed 1888 railroad bridge open up 212 feet above the river—call it the laziest legitimate hike on this list, because the bridge does all the climbing for you. It starts with the Roosevelt Ride, a free NPS shuttle that runs from the Poughkeepsie platform to Springwood, Val-Kill and the Vanderbilt Mansion, meeting the 10:35 a.m. train and looping back at five, running seven days a week from May 1. The Hyde Park Trail strings it all together—nine miles of woodland between the FDR estates, doable in a day with shuttle pickups in between. 2026 is Frederic Church’s 200th, so Hudson River School programming is heavy across the valley this season.

Mount Beacon Fire Tower (Beacon, New York)

• 788 Wolcott Avenue, Beacon, NY 12508 (Casino trailhead)

Beacon is 90 minutes north on the Hudson Line, and Main Street walks approximately 1.5 sidewalked, restaurant-lined miles down to the trailhead—latte, lunch, antique literature before the climb. The 200-step staircase follows the bed of the old Mount Beacon Funicular, which was the steepest incline railway in the world when it opened in 1902, and tops out at the restored 1931 fire tower. Manhattan south, Catskills north, on a clear day. Walk back into town for Dia:Beacon, the Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt and Walter De Maria temple inside a former Nabisco box-printing factory. The food is the best argument for hopping a later train back: Lyonshare took Chronogram’s 2025 Readers’ Choice for best new restaurant in the valley, Saint Rita’s Music Room opened last summer at the KuBe Art Center, and Oui Oui Cuisine just moved into a brick-and-mortar this winter.

Hook Mountain and Nyack (Nyack, New York)

• 698 North Broadway, Upper Nyack, NY 10960

The 9-line buses out of Port Authority—that’s the 9T, 9AT and 9W—run roughly hourly to downtown Nyack for $8 to $12; if you’d rather start at the GW Bridge Bus Station, the 9 and 9A both drop at the foot of Broadway too. Walk 1.5 miles north to Nyack Beach State Park and start a 5.9-mile loop over Hook Mountain, the 730-foot diabase prow that anchors the northern Palisades and counts as a federally registered National Natural Landmark. Twelve thousand raptors a year ride the thermals through the summit’s hawk-watch site, and the Knickerbocker Ice Company ruins line the river path back down. The coda is Nyack: the Edward Hopper House Museum, Two Villains Brewing, the Farm at Hotel Nyack and Thai hotspot Bangkok Station, which opened late last year inside a railroad-car-shaped building at 12 Park Street.

Bull Hill (Cold Spring, New York)

• Little Stony Point, Route 9D, Cold Spring, NY 10516

Hudson Line to Cold Spring is the same train Breakneck regulars used to take, and Bull Hill is what New York State Parks and the Fjord Trail are now steering everyone toward in its place. The argument is that it was the better ridge, anyway: more rewarding, no notorious scrambles, same minutes on the train. The full loop runs 5.5 miles and 1,400 feet up to a 1,420-foot summit; a shorter version knocks it down to 3.7. The trailhead is a 20-minute walk north from the platform along Fair Street to Little Stony Point, where a small freshwater beach makes a pre-hike Hudson swim almost mandatory. The Taconic Conservation Corps cut a new Washburn Trail reroute and a viewing platform above the old quarry in 2023, and the Cornish Estate ruins—a 1917 stone manor that burned out in 1958—sit halfway up. Stop at Cold Spring Depot for oysters on the way back.

The Cardinal—New York to Chicago via Charlottesville and the New River Gorge

• Three weekly departures, roughly 28 hours, on the only Amtrak that draws a U-shape across the eastern United States.

Book eastbound from Chicago if you want the New River Gorge in good light—westbound hits it late in the day for half the year. Out of New York’s Penn Station, the Cardinal cuts south to Charlottesville for Monticello and UVA, then burrows into Appalachia on CSX’s old Chesapeake & Ohio mainline. Past White Sulphur Springs (detrain here for the Greenbrier if the schedule cooperates), the train delivers what no other Amtrak offers: a glide beneath the New River Gorge Bridge, a 3,030-foot arch of COR-TEN steel suspended 876 feet above the river. You pass under it, not over it, framed by cliffs. Twenty minutes later, the train stops at Thurmond, a near-ghost town inside America’s newest national park. Coach is fine; the handful of Viewliner roomettes sell out weeks ahead. Bring a book and food for dinner.

 The California Zephyr-Chicago to Emeryville

• Fifty-two hours across seven states, Amtrak’s longest daily train and the strongest case for American West scenery.

Book a westbound roomette on this train and make sure to sit on the left for the Rockies, right for the Sierras. Past Denver, the Zephyr climbs the Front Range, threads 31 bores and enters the Moffat Tunnel—6.2 miles under the Continental Divide at 9,239 feet, the highest point on the entire Amtrak system and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark since 1979. Fifteen minutes of dark, then the Colorado River for 238 canyon-filled miles. Upper Gore Canyon has no road, no trail, no way in except this train or a whitewater raft. Glenwood Canyon delivers 12.5 miles of red rock; time a stopover in Glenwood Springs for the hot springs, a short walk from the depot. The original 1949 Zephyr rolled out with Vista-Dome cars and the tagline “look up, look down, look all around,” which still holds. The Sightseer Lounge is open to all.

The Pennsylvanian—New York to Pittsburgh

• A nine-hour day-train over the route that broke the Alleghenies and turned Pittsburgh from river town into steel capital.

Board at Penn Station before 11 a.m. and you’ll take the Horseshoe Curve in afternoon light. About five miles west of Altoona, the Pennsylvanian rounds it—2,375 feet long, 220 degrees of arc, designed by Pennsylvania Railroad chief engineer John Edgar Thomson and dug mostly by Irish immigrants who arrived with shovels and stayed to build the town. The curve has been a National Historic Landmark since 1966 and an ASCE Historic Civil Engineering Landmark since 2004. Its stakes were sharpened in June 1942, when a U-boat landed eight Abwehr saboteurs on Long Island with the curve and the Altoona shops on their target list. Six were executed. Today the bend carries 50-odd Norfolk Southern freights a day—plus the Pennsylvanian, the only passenger train that still takes the curve, once in each direction at a scheduled 35 mph. Sit on the right side westbound; the view runs out the window for a full minute.

The Crescent—New York to New Orleans

• Thirty hours and 1,377 miles through 12 states plus D.C., from the northeastern megalopolis to the Mississippi Delta.

No other Amtrak route crosses more jurisdictions. The train is the lineal descendant of the 1891 Washington & Southwestern Vestibuled Limited, the first sleeper service to carry dining cars between New York and New Orleans. It glides through Charlottesville, Charlotte, Atlanta and Birmingham, crosses Lake Pontchartrain on the longest railroad bridge in the United States—5.8 miles of trestle over saltwater—and terminates a few blocks from the French Quarter. Book a roomette for the overnight leg; the coach seats are fine south of Atlanta when the scenery earns the window. In July 2024, the Justice Department sued Norfolk Southern for failing to give the Crescent the track priority federal law requires. January 2026 on-time performance hit 84.8 percent, which for Amtrak is a minor miracle. Ride it with a book and no hurry. The dining car still serves flat iron steak.

Paul Mole Barbershop

• 1034A Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10021

Joseph Molé opened a barbershop on Lexington Avenue in 1913 after inheriting his uncle’s establishment around the corner. The address has shifted slightly over the decades, but the three original chairs made the move every time. Adrian Wood, an Englishman, took over in the 1970s and still runs the place alongside Michael Wood. Fathers bring their sons here, and those sons bring theirs. At around $40 a cut, it may be the last appointment on the Upper East Side that hasn’t adjusted for inflation.

Astor Place Hairstylists

• 2 Astor Pl., New York, NY 10003

Walk-in only since 1947, aggressively indifferent to aesthetics and the closest thing New York has to a democratic institution that also gives excellent haircuts. Barber Jose has held his chair for 25-plus years; men cross the Hudson from New Jersey specifically for his hands. The walls are layered in decades of celebrity Polaroids nobody has bothered to curate, and the Saturday crowd—punks, bankers, tourists sharing the same plastic bench—is a beautiful chaos you cannot manufacture.

Martial Vivot Salon Pour Hommes

• 39 W. 54th St., New York, NY 10019 (flagship)
• 639½ Hudson St., New York, NY 10014

Vivot started apprenticing in the south of France at 15, then trained in London, and finally showed up in Manhattan in 1999, attracting clients who need partitioned stations and complimentary bourbon to take the edge off what they’re about to spend. A cut in his chair runs $420, and nobody who’s sat in it has ever called it unreasonable twice. Protégés trained in his image now staff both the Midtown flagship and a West Village location, which means you can get the Vivot school of thought without the Vivot price tag, though plenty of people pay it, anyway.

Fellow Barber

• 5 Horatio St., New York, NY 10014 (West Village flagship)
• 33 Crosby St., New York, NY 10013 (SoHo)
• 101 N. 8th St., Brooklyn, NY 11249 (Williamsburg)
• Additional locations in NoMad and Hudson Yards

Sam Buffa opened this West Village spot in 2006 before the phrase “barbershop renaissance” existed, and the argument can be made that every shop on this list owes him a modest debt. Additional locations in SoHo, Williamsburg, NoMad and Hudson Yards followed—the Williamsburg outpost inherited a former Yeah Yeah Yeahs rehearsal space. Fellow Barber also runs a “Pay What You Can” program for clients in financial need.

12 Pell

• 12C Pell St., New York, NY 10013

When an NBA franchise trusts you with a first-round pick’s hairline, you’ve made the argument. The Knicks featured 12 Pell in their official Rookie’s Guide to New York, the city cheat sheet handed to newly drafted players who need to look camera-ready before their first press conference. A consultation here includes an assessment of hair texture, scalp condition, and bone structure, which takes longer than most shops spend on the entire appointment, and that forensic intake is exactly why people travel boroughs for barber Tim’s chair.

Mildred New York

• 124 Ridge St., New York, NY 10002

Rob McMillen and Eric Holmes left Blind Barber to build the opposite of a speakeasy barbershop—named after both their grandmothers, who happened, with storybook neatness, to both be named Mildred. A collaboration with menswear label 3sixteen sends 10 percent of product sales to the local elementary school PTA, which tells you everything about the clientele and the values.

The Stepping Razor

• 952 Flushing Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11206

Barber Danny has been at this cash-only, appointment-only spot for 13 years—clients have booked flights from other time zones to sit in Niamh’s chair, which is the species of loyalty most businesses never even approach. Cape Verdean-owned since 2010, with mint-green plaster walls, skateboard decks for décor and a resident mutt named Buckley who has never once rushed a client.

Frank’s Chop Shop

• 19 Essex St., New York, NY 10002

Mike Malbon opened this on Essex Street in 2006 and named it after Benjamin Franklin—”a smart modern man of leisure of his time,” as he put it. When the shop first opened, the neighboring brothel assumed it was a surveillance front, and SWAT teams would raid next door while clients sat mid-shave in the four vintage chairs. First-chair barber Brandon “Mr. Bee” Wiseman, a self-taught cutter who learned on mohawks during a punk-skater youth in Boston, has held the same station for over a decade. Adrien Brody, Drake, Anderson Cooper and GZA have all sat in those chairs.

Opening Night of The Metal Children

• Vineyard Theatre, New York, 2010

For the opening of Adam Rapp’s paranoid satire about a young-adult novelist accused of corrupting teenagers, staged at the Vineyard on East 15th Street, Domingo turned up in the kind of downtown theater-guy outfit that has since gone functionally extinct: gingham button-down, black sport coat softened at the shoulder, no tie and no pretending one was missing.

25th Annual Broadway Flea Market

• Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, New York, 2011

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS holds its annual Flea Market every September in Shubert Alley, where casts of every running show set up signing tables and the gig is four hours of autographs under a sun that does not negotiate. Domingo arrived in a mint-green cardigan with gray trim along the V-neckline, layered over a gray tee, dark indigo jeans, gray sneakers and a watch. The whole fit radiates theater-camp counselor on his day off.

Selma New York Premiere

•  Ziegfeld Theatre, New York, 2014

Ava DuVernay’s Selma premiered in New York four days before Christmas. Domingo played Ralph Abernathy and arrived dressed like he had studied the period instead of acted through it. He chose a combination of vintage Valentino and Vivienne Westwood—cream wool overcoat, double-breasted, worn draped over the shoulders above a matching cream waistcoat and a white band-collar shirt. Navy slim trousers, black leather gloves on both hands clasped at the waist, black dress shoes. A beaded necklace—he said they were prayer beads—with a rectangular pendant at the collarbone. The gloves were the most photographed detail of the evening.

Fun Home Broadway Opening Night

• Circle in the Square Theatre, New York, 2015

Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her closeted gay father eventually won five Tonys. For the opening night, Domingo arrived in a two-piece suit in an indigo ground covered in stippled psychedelic swirls of tangerine, red and electric blue, notch lapels, a black shirt open at the throat, blue stud earrings, a beaded bracelet on the right wrist and a watch on the left. A printed suit at a 2015 Broadway opening was not a choice other men his age were making—the ballroom was still running on Hugo Boss charcoal and bow ties that had never been untied.

If Beale Street Could Talk Premiere

• Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto International Film Festival, 2018

In Barry Jenkins’s first film after Moonlight‘s Best Picture win, Domingo played Joseph Rivers. For the premiere, he wore an electric cobalt Haider Ackermann two-piece suit over a matching draped wrap blouse with a loose cowl at the neckline, black leather belt, black Chelsea boots, a dark bag strap cutting diagonally across one shoulder. Tonal dressing at this volume in 2018 was Thom Browne territory, and every inch above the ankle was committed to the same blue.

Euphoria Season 2 Photo Call

• Goya Studios, Los Angeles, 2022

Sam Levinson rolled out Season 2 at Goya Studios in early January and Domingo went full cream for this photo call: patent-finish ecru trench hanging open with the belt dangling loose, white crewneck underneath, cream cropped trousers cuffed at the ankle and cream lace-up boots on chunky soles.

34th Annual GLAAD Media Awards

• New York Hilton Midtown, New York, 2023

Fifteen years as one of the most visible out Black actors on the circuit, and he arrived this night with his award-winning role in “Rustin” already in the can. A black Moschino two-piece with white topstitching tracing every seam and gold cross-stitch X patterns worked into the lapels and cuffs, the whole suit looking like a pattern-maker’s working draft that forgot to be hidden. Black shirt remains open at the chest, complete with a pendant necklace, pointed-toe black boots and a red bracelet on one wrist.

29th Annual Critics Choice Awards

• Barker Hangar, Santa Monica, 2024

A week after the Globes, the Critics Choice Awards staged its carpet inside Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, and the suit Domingo wore sent photographers running back to the benches to file. Here’s what stuck: a Valentino mustard-yellow three-piece over an icy blue shirt and a floor-length gold-sequin coat draped over the shoulders so densely encrusted it shot the hangar lights back into the cameras. Gold metallic Chelsea boots finished the look.

30th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards

• Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, 2024

Domingo’s first ceremony as a lead-actor nominee and he wore Off-White by Ib Kamara, specifically a pale ballet pink suit with a wide black satin collar crossing diagonally across the torso to form an oversized X, sash and sculpture at once. Black suede ankle boots, gold watch, multiple rings, the front of his hair bleached silver-blond. Margot Robbie reportedly cornered him backstage to ask how he kept landing on every best-dressed list.

Vanity Fair Awards Insider Event

• Carlton Cannes, Cannes Film Festival, 2024

The Carlton on the Croisette is the hotel that hosted the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946, and Vanity Fair‘s Awards Insider lunch there in late May ran on the beach sand out back, with the Mediterranean doing the lighting. Domingo wore an Amiri off-white micro-check gingham suit with wide-leg trousers breaking over black leather kitten-heel mules—a shoe decision most men his age will not touch. He wore it to a beach lunch in the French Riviera and made it look like a mandatory part in the dress code.

2025 Met Gala Press Conference

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2025

The morning warm-up is one most co-chairs navigate in a safe black suit so as not to spoil the evening, but Domingo refused. He wore a textured magenta jacquard suit—custom Ozwald Boateng—with single-breasted peak lapels, a white shirt, a dark plum patterned tie, and a black Kangol beret tipped forward on the head. A gold filigree brooch with a green gemstone drop was pinned high on the left lapel, and a red silk pocket square was folded to two points.

AmfAR Gala Venezia

• Arsenale di Venezia, Venice Film Festival, 2025

The amfAR Gala runs inside the Arsenale, the ancient Venetian shipyard compound, every August during the festival. Domingo arrived in Valentino emerald jacquard with a pointed open collar, gold buttons down the front, sash-tied at the waist in matching fabric, a white shirt visible underneath, black trousers, black leather loafers and stacked silver bracelets on one wrist.

Valentino Fireflies Spring/Summer 2026

• Paris Fashion Week, 2025

Alessandro Michele’s “Fireflies” show was the first SS26 collection on the Paris calendar, staged the morning after the BoF gala, and Domingo took the front row for the designer he had been wearing nearly exclusively for the past 18 months. He wore a long double-breasted coat in cream jacquard woven with a chocolate-brown geometric grid, black velvet collar and pocket flaps, over a horizontal-stripe turtleneck in green and tan. The coat is bookish, the stripe borrows a Wes Anderson palette. The combo files him under tweedy dandy rather than volume dandy.

37th Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival Film Awards

• Palm Springs Convention Center, Palm Springs, 2026

The Palm Springs Film Awards in early January is traditionally the first ceremony of the Oscar runway, where favorites collect trophies before the Academy has even sent its ballots, and Domingo opened 2026 in Dolce & Gabbana. He wore a three-piece suit in deep chocolate crushed velvet trimmed with tonal satin piping along every lapel. The desert reference is Johnny Carson 1973, which tracks precisely to the Nat King Cole biopic Unforgettable he was directing that fall.

Vanity Fair Oscar Party

• LACMA David Geffen Galleries, Los Angeles, 2026

Graydon Carter handed the Vanity Fair Oscar party to Mark Guiducci in 2026, and Guiducci moved it out of the Wallis Annenberg and into LACMA’s newly opened David Geffen Galleries. Domingo, on Michael press-tour mode, came in a double-breasted Jacquemus pinstripe in espresso brown threaded with chalk, peak lapels, an oversized crinkled white silk pocket square exploding out of the chest and a Boucheron brooch pinned to the pocket square.

Mandarin Oriental, Costa Navarino, Messinia, Greece

• Navarino Bay, Costa Navarino, 24001 Pylos, Messenia, Greece

In Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus sailed to this coast 3,000 years ago looking for his father and found Greeks sacrificing bulls to Poseidon on the beach. Since then, hospitality has only improved. The Mouratoglou Tennis Center occupies nearly five acres above the Ionian Sea with 12 Grand Slam-standard courts—eight clay, four hard—coached by the system Patrick Mouratoglou developed for Serena Williams, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Coco Gauff, plus three panoramic padel courts on the periphery. The Palace of Nestor, a Mycenaean complex dating to 1300 B.C., sits 25 minutes away by car. Christopher Nolan shot his $250 million Odyssey across this landscape in spring 2025, filming the Cyclops sequences at Nestor’s Cave. Costa Navarino now runs Odyssey trails past the locations for guests who prefer their match play with a side of mythology.

Monte-Carlo Country Club, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France

• 155 Avenue Princesse Grace, 06190 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France

Despite the moniker, the Monte-Carlo Country Club is not technically in Monte Carlo. It sits about 500 feet outside Monaco’s northeastern border in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, a jurisdictional detail that matters to no one standing on its 21 clay courts watching superyachts idle in the harbor below. Nadal won 11 titles here, eight of them consecutive, on terraces cut into the hillside where every changeover comes with an involuntary glance at the Mediterranean. The Letrosne-designed clubhouse opened in 1928, and the dress code has not relaxed since—tennis whites required, clay shoes only.

Gstaad Palace, Gstaad, Switzerland

• Palacestrasse 28, 3780 Gstaad, Switzerland

Four red clay courts sit at about 3,000 feet in the Bernese Oberland, with wildflower meadows stretching to the tree line, snow-streaked peaks stacking up behind them and a turreted hotel overhead that looks like it was illustrated rather than constructed. The scenery alone would justify inclusion, but the reason to actually go is Roy Emerson. The Australian won 12 Grand Slam singles titles and has run his celebrated Tennis Weeks at the Palace since 1973—five hours of on-court coaching a day, groups of three or four, with the man himself still directing play into his 90s.

Necker Island, British Virgin Islands

• Necker Island, British Virgin Islands

Richard Branson’s 74-acre private island has ring-tailed lemurs, giant Aldabra tortoises, a flamingo population and two floodlit courts at beach level where the Caribbean serves as the only fence. The full buyout is about $102,500 per day for up to 48 guests, with a staff of 100 who comfortably outnumber you. The annual Necker Cup pro-am has drawn Andy Roddick and James Blake, and costs $50,000 to enter, though individual rooms open during Celebration Weeks at about $5,150 a night for a more modest commitment. The tortoises predate the sport by several centuries and remain thoroughly unimpressed by everyone’s backhand, which is humbling in a way that money cannot buy, but apparently can rent.

The Breakers, Palm Beach, Florida

• 1 South County Road, Palm Beach, FL 33480

In 2024, The Breakers completed a $12 million renovation anchored by the world’s first hydroponic grass courts—CapillaryFlow turf grown without soil, irrigated from below, saving 85 percent more water than traditional grass and producing a surface that plays like Wimbledon relocated to the subtropics. The full complex spans 104,000 square feet, with 16 courts across four surfaces, two padel courts and an elevated viewing lounge called The Veranda, where watching other people sweat counts as a legitimate leisure activity. Tihany Design built the whole thing in white, dark green and jasmine pergolas that feel like Old Florida, given a very generous budget.

Cheval Blanc Randheli, Noonu Atoll, Maldives

• Noonu Atoll, Maldives

Maakurandhoo, one of five islands in this 46-villa Cheval Blanc property, is used exclusively to house two Grand Slam-standard courts cleared in the interior and a beach you will have to yourself between sets. Jim Courier, the former world No. 1 who won four majors in the early nineties before becoming one of the sport’s best-known broadcasters, designed the coaching methodology while staffing the program with former ATP professionals. The resort counts Roger Federer and his wife Mirka as repeat guests, which, if you know anything about how the most traveled man in tennis chooses where to rest, is the only endorsement the courts need.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Todd Snyder Italian Linen Cupro Floral Tuxedo

Somebody at the summer wedding is going to wear a floral suit—this is as certain as the open bar running out of decent bourbon by 10 p.m. The only variable is whether that person looks like he just headlined a Carnival cruise, or like this: Italian linen-cupro with a tonal pattern you only notice at conversation distance, shawl lapel, double-pleated trousers, double vents.

$1,496, SHOP NOW

Boglioli Double-Breasted Linen, Wool and Mohair Suit

Wearing a green double-breasted blazer to an event like the Kentucky Derby or an art fair requires either impeccable judgment or total delusion, and Boglioli’s K-Jacket has been landing men on the right side of that question since 1987. That’s when the Boglioli brothers debuted garment-dyeing on finished tailored jackets at Pitti Uomo, building the whole unstructured piece first, then dyeing it whole, a technique so technically unhinged that almost nobody else has cracked it at scale. 

Jacket $1,990, Trousers $940, shop now

Brunello Cucinelli Hopsack Deconstructed Cavallo Suit

This Cucinelli suit calls to mind a corner table, canvas espadrilles, linen tee, no socks, the maître d’ using your first name. The hopsack is virgin wool, silk and linen with an irregular shimmer that happens when three fibers compete. Cucinelli’s Solomeo Shoulder creates structure through cutting, not padding, because nobody in Umbria believes your jacket should do what your posture won’t. The leisure-fit pleated trousers are soft through the seat.

Jacket $4,900, Trousers $1,500, shop now

Sunspel Cotton Linen Two-Piece Suit

Sunspel invented the T-shirt in 1860 and put one on Daniel Craig in Casino Royale in 2006, and their approach to suiting carries that same energy: do less, but do it so well that people speculate about your secret to effortlessness. Thanks to the French cotton-linen, it gives you that broken-in hand from the first wear. No adjustment period needed.

$885, Shop Now

Suitsupply Mid Green Milano Suit

Your friend who works in finance and always looks appropriate has been recommending Suitsupply for years. It’s time to listen to him. The linen-wool-mohair blend comes from Vitale Barberis Canonico, a Biella mill that has been weaving since 1663 and runs vertically from its own sheep station in New South Wales to finished cloth. Linen breathes, wool holds a line and the mohair picks up a sheen after sundown. Plus, their 150 stores have in-house tailors who can alter it while you grab a coffee. 

$959, shop now

Kyoto, Japan

• Foreign tourists now outnumber Japanese ones at Kyoto hotels for the first time ever. The city’s response: make luxury stays 10 times more expensive to tax.

Kyoto’s accommodation tax jumped tenfold at the top end on March 1—from about $6 to $62.50 per person per night for rooms above $625, a bracket that covers every marquee ryokan and the Aman. A couple doing a week at that tier now pays roughly $875 in lodging tax before they’ve booked a single temple visit. If you’re staying at a hostel under $37.50 a night, nothing changes. The system is progressive by design: Kyoto wants luxury travelers to fund the infrastructure their presence demands, and it is not being subtle about it.

The context makes the breakdown feel less punitive than it sounds. Foreign tourists outnumbered Japanese ones at Kyoto hotels for the first time in 2024—8.21 million to 8.09 million—and domestic travelers dropped 13.8 percent. They’re day-tripping from Osaka now, treating the old imperial capital like a museum you leave before dinner. If you’re booking a mid-range hotel in the ¥20,000 to ¥50,000 range (around $125 to $312), the new tax adds about $6.25 per night—noticeable but not trip-altering. Revenue from the overhaul is projected at $79 million annually, earmarked for transit capacity, crowd management and cultural preservation. Tokyo still charges about a dollar a night—and Kyoto has decided it can no longer afford to.

Rome, Italy

• The Trevi Fountain now costs $2.30. The city expects $7.5 million a year from it. Early reviews are oddly glowing.

The Trevi Fountain started charging $2.30 on Feb. 2, and the strange thing is that almost everyone prefers it this way. The basin—the sunken area where the coins and the selfies happen—now caps at 400 people at a time, down from a daily crush that routinely hit 70,000. You tap a card or Apple Pay to get in (quite modern for an 18th-century attraction), or book ahead online if you’re the planning type. No timed entry, no rush once you’re inside. Rome residents, kids under six, and licensed guides skip the fee entirely. After 10 p.m., the whole thing opens up for free, which is when the fountain actually looks like it does in the movies.

What this means for you practically: the scrum is nearly gone. The experience of standing in front of Nicola Salvi’s facade with enough room to actually see it is a new experience for this century. Rome expects about $7.5 million a year from the fee, has already extended the ticketing model to five previously free cultural sites and is watching other Italian cities take notes. Tourism Councillor Alessandro Onorato offered the kind of Roman calculus that makes you forgive the confidence: if the Trevi were in New York, he said, it would cost $100. He’s probably not wrong.

Santorini and Mykonos, Greece

• A $23 per-passenger cruise levy. An 8,000-visitor daily cap on Santorini. Greece’s most photographed islands are rewriting the terms, and cruise lines are mostly absorbing the hit.

Greece started charging cruise passengers up to $23 per person to step onto Santorini and Mykonos last July, and the fee carries into 2026 with a tiered structure that scales by season—$23 peak, $13.80 shoulder, $4.60 off-season, with no age exemptions. Every other Greek port charges significantly less. And yet the first partial season pulled in $35.7 million.

Santorini also capped daily cruise arrivals at 8,000, roughly half of what peak days used to look like, when 17,000 passengers would pour off gangways onto an island with 15,500 permanent residents. Port authorities now calculate ship loads at full occupancy rather than 80 percent, so the cap has actual teeth. Cruise lines absorbed the fees rather than rerouting, because nobody cancels a Santorini sunset over $23. Meanwhile, Chania broke its all-time cruise record by 40 percent. The Cyclades are thinning the herd. The rest of Greece is picking up the overflow.

Pompeii, Italy

• A 20,000-visitor daily cap, named tickets and a site director who once suspended admissions entirely when the crowd got too large. Pompeii does not bluff.

Pompeii capped daily visitors at 20,000 in late 2024—15,000 morning slots, 5,000 afternoon—and made every ticket nominative, meaning your name goes on it and your ID gets checked at the gate. Director Gabriel Zuchtriegel wanted scalpers gone, and he got his wish. The site drew over 4 million visitors last year, a 33.6 percent increase, with a single free-entry Sunday in October pulling 36,480 people through ruins that last saw that kind of population density in 79 A.D.

Morning peak-season tickets now sell out weeks in advance. Admission runs about $23 for the main circuit and $29 for the expanded route. Implementation has been imperfect—tour guides report 45-minute sun-baked queues and staff handwriting names on tickets at bottleneck speed. On one Sunday in May, the site hit capacity, and Zuchtriegel shut the doors entirely. A trade union wants the whole system scrapped, but he has not flinched

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

• The first U.K. city to tax tourists. Projected revenue: $66.5 million a year, earmarked for affordable housing and a theater restoration.

Edinburgh becomes the first city in the U.K. to charge tourists for overnight stays on July 24, and the structure is disarmingly simple: 5 percent of your room rate, capped at five nights. At a $266-per-night hotel, that adds about $66.50 to a weeklong stay—less than dinner for two on the Royal Mile, and considerably more useful. Everything from five-star hotels to houseboats is covered. Business travelers pay the same rate as tourists. No exceptions, no drama.

The revenue is where it gets interesting. Edinburgh earmarked $120 million over three years for street cleaning, a city-center policing unit, Leith Theatre’s restoration and 472 affordable homes, three-quarters of which will be social rent. Glasgow follows in January 2027. Aberdeen in April. Wales has yet to confirm its plans for the same year. While the levy is modest enough that most visitors won’t register it on a single receipt, it is however meaningful enough to put roofs over people’s heads.