UWS Weekend: Great Things To Do In (or Near) the Neighborhood

By Tracy Zwick

Let’s Weekend! 

July 12-14, 2024

Jazz: Ethan Iverson Sextet at Smoke Jazz & Supper Club, 2751 Broadway (106th St.); Friday, Saturday and Sunday shows at 7 and 9 p.m.; Tickets $25 to $55 and available online; no ticket required to sit at the bar

Opened in 1999, Smoke is celebrating 25 years of world-class jazz with longtime Smoke favorites as well as some Smoke debuts, like Ethan Iverson, who brings his sextet to the Smoke stage this weekend. In the repertoire are classics by Mal Waldron and Thelonious Monk as well as half-a-dozen Iverson originals. Smoke’s owners, Molly Sparrow Johnson and Paul Stache, have a long history at Smoke. Paul moved to New York City from Berlin in 1992 and spent his first evening in town at Smoke’s predecessor, a dive bar called Augie’s, listening to Arthur Taylor and Cecil Payne. Enchanted, Paul got a job there as a dishwasher and kitchen helper. He never really left. His wife and co-owner, Molly, a former bartender, is the executive chef. She undertook a complete overhaul of the kitchen during the pandemic, and Smoke just reopened its sidewalk cafe last week. The menu is modern American. “We keep it super fresh and seasonal,” Paul explained. Among his personal favorite dishes are the fresh cod over shrimp risotto, and the prime dry-aged steak. One of the best bargains in town may be sitting at Smoke’s bar, which you can walk into without a ticket. Order a drink or a bite and listen to the set. You can’t see the stage from the bar, but you can soak up the ambience, and the jazz. 

Check back this weekend for WSR’s Q&A with Paul Stache. 

Eat:  Hungarian Pastry Shop, 1030 Amsterdam Ave., 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Saturday-Sunday; 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Monday-Friday

If you’ve never been to the UWS’s legendary Hungarian Pastry Shop, correct that gap in your epicurean and cultural education this weekend! It sits opposite the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue near 111th Street and is instantly recognizable by its red-and-white striped awning. Hungarian has been beloved for decades by writers, Columbia students and professors, and local families who come for the Dobos torte (sponge cake layered with chocolate buttercream and topped with caramel), Sacher torte, strudels, and Hamantaschen, along, of course, with the  Hungarian coffee (and espresso and cappuccino). The atmosphere is European coffeehouse meets American beatnik café. You can sit for hours with a book or a conversation partner. Think of all the cookies you can sample in that time! I’ve lived on the UWS for 25 years, so you can imagine my shame when I discovered the Black Forest cookie this week for the first time. How could I have missed it all these years? It’s a chocolate sponge cookie with a dab of cherry jam in the center, all covered in a white candy coating. The rainbow cookies are also excellent, as are the brownie cookies, sandwich cookies, and Florentines. 

Thanks to the 111th Street Block Association’s Open Streets NYC permit, there’s no vehicular traffic on Amsterdam between 110th and 111th Streets on Saturdays and Sundays. Extra tables and chairs are usually set up on the street, where you can sit and enjoy your pastries while looking at the garden and sculptures of St. John the Divine. The block association provides a helpful walking tour of the area on its website. 

Read: “Long Island Compromise” by UWSer Taffy Brodesser-Akner 

Having set her first bestseller, “Fleishman Is in Trouble” on the Upper East Side, Upper West Sider Akner places the farkakte Fletcher family in this Jewish-American epic on Long Island. Could an UWS novel be next? I devoured this page-turner that’s inspired by the true-life,1974 kidnapping of Jack Teich. Teich was a friend of Akner’s father, whom she wrote about in this week’s New York Times Magazine. In addition to a kidnapping, “Compromise” includes a dominatrix with a missing tooth, a Hadassah bowling league, a desperate quest to talk with UWSer Mandy Patinkin, and much more. There’s a review in the Rag, and a longer one here.

Watch: Janet Planet and Last Summer at Film at Lincoln Center; 144 and 165 West 65th Street

I saw and loved Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer” a couple of weeks ago at a screening and discussion with Breillat, the French auteur who’s been making provocative work for nearly fifty years. Be warned: this complicated, riveting drama (in French with English subtitles) involves a lawyer who specializes in cases of sexual consent and parental custody who herself, over the course of the film, engages in a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old stepson. She’s happily married; or is she? Is the May-December relationship purely sexual? The tension surrounding the shifting power dynamics make for a gripping 104 minutes.

I’m looking forward to seeing “Janet Planet,” the debut film by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, also at Lincoln Center. The New York Times called it “a tiny masterpiece — a perfect coming-of-age story for both a misfit tween and her mother.” Maybe I’ll see you there?

Please send your ideas for future WSR Weekend columns to info@westsiderag.com

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