All posts tagged: WELLNESS

What are the Best Vegetarian Restaurants in Manhattan?

Published by Pamela Thomas-Graham

Eatery Row is an occasional series here at Dandelion Chandelier assessing the best restaurants for a romantic night out, an important business lunch, or a luxurious meal with friends. We only recommend establishments that we’ve personally road-tested and enjoyed. We’ll let you know if a hot place actually lives up to the hype, and whether a classic is still maintaining its high standards. Because an essential element of luxury is knowing that you’re in really good hands. Our newly-appointed Food Editor has given us her insider’s view on the best and most popular vegetarian, vegan and vegetable-forward restaurants in Manhattan right now. Here’s her report:

interview with Lauren Lovette about luxury

See Luxury in a new light with: Lauren Lovette

Published by Pamela Thomas-Graham

The Dandelion Chandelier Luminary Café is the place to find a series of personal interviews with fascinating people who are stellar achievers in their chosen field of endeavor. Our Luminaries are sharing their origin stories, life philosophies, secret songs, guilty pleasures and hidden talents. It’s guaranteed to be illuminating.  Lauren Lovette is a Principal Dancer with New York City Ballet (NYCB). Born in Thousand Oaks, California, she began studying ballet at the age of 11. In 2006, after taking courses there for two summers, she enrolled full-time at the School of American Ballet – the official school of the NYCB. She became a member of the NYCB corps de ballet in 2010, was promoted to Soloist in 2013, and became a Principal Dancer in 2015.

The Luxury of an Autumn Vegan Feast at Millennium

Published by Pamela Thomas-Graham

Steak or salad? Or to be more precise, steakhouse or vegetable-forward? Which provides the most luxurious experience? Sure, in the past, steakhouses were the ne plus ultra of fine dining – martinis, jumbo shrimp cocktail, a huge hunk of charred beef, and creamed spinach. That was what you ate if you were in the global power elite, circa 1980. But what about now? With so many vegan, vegetarian and vegetables-first gourmet fine dining establishments having opened up shop in so many of the world’s glittering cities, here at Dandelion Chandelier, we decided to go on a quest to answer this pressing question. Our first field report was from Restaurant Nix in Greenwich Village. It’s the only vegetarian restaurant in the US with a Michelin star, so we thought that would be a good place to start. And it was.

In Luxury Travel, Mystery is the New Transparency

Published by Pamela Thomas-Graham

In recent conversations, a new trend has become clear to us here at Dandelion Chandelier: for luxury travel experiences, word of mouth is the new social media. Analog is the new digital. Silence is the new shouting. How do we know this? Because some of the best luxury properties in the world have exited social media completely. We recently interviewed a devotee of ultra-luxury destination health and wellness retreat Vana in Dehradun, India. It’s a unique and highly exclusive spa for the jet set (frequent guests call themselves “Vanavasis,”) and it’s not well known amongst the hoi polloi. Hearing about its many wonders made us keen to visit: the property’s website is filled with images of a dreamy tropical paradise where serenity might actually be within reach. Eager to share our discovery, we published our post and then set to work on our usual social media promotion for the post. A curious thing happened on the way to social media, though. We went looking for the Instagram handle for the Vana retreat, and we couldn’t …

Is Nix Really the Best Vegetarian Restaurant in New York?

Published by Pamela Thomas-Graham

In the not-so-distant past, “sexy vegetarian” would have been an oxymoron. However, Beyoncé, Brad Pitt, Samuel L. Jackson, Woody Harrelson, Ariana Grande, Liam Hemsworth and Natalie Portman have definitively proven that such creatures exist and freely roam the earth. PETA even names the two “sexiest vegetarians” annually. But a sexy vegetarian restaurant? Extremely hard to find in the precincts of Manhattan until very recently. During the dark days of 2016, an annus horribilis if ever there was one, at least one bright spot appeared on the horizon: restaurant Nix opened on February 29th. Perhaps not since the Garden of Eden has being surrounded by plants been so interesting. The restaurant, located on University Place in the Village, is the brainchild of James Truman and Chef John Fraser. Truman is the urbane and insightful former editor-in-chief of Details magazine and longtime Editorial Director at Condé Nast. After a hiatus in the art world, Truman turned his formidable talents to the restaurant world, first as a culinary consultant to hotelier André Balazs at restaurant Narcissa in the …