A slice of the Big Apple

It's a feeding frenzy in Manhattan. Annabel Rivkin gets stuck in at the Monkey Bar, the John Dory and Sweetiepie...

Bryant Park is best known as the heartland of New York Fashion Week, and the hotel of the same name sits bang on that patch of green. International fashion editors still tend to bunk up there for sheer convenience. The lobby is dark, small and a bit hip. There is always music playing - probably because in this hotel is the hot Cellar Bar which plays host to New York personalities such as Sam Ronson and Marc Jacobs.

My room was huge, bare, light and peaceful, with a big, plain marble bathroom and a terrace. Birdsong trilled from the little machine by the bed that also produced thunder, rainfall, white noise and jungle rustling. Room service was, impressively, from Koi. The New York branch of this muchloved Los Angeles Japanese restaurant is attached to The Bryant Park Hotel, so it was excellent sushi for supper. A taste of things to come.

At the end of April New York suffered a freak heatwave. 'You came at the right time,' everyone chirped as I hauled my sticky self around the sunbleached city. The air-con in New York restaurants makes them downright cold, which is heaven.

Teatime on the first scorching day led me to Sweetiepie, the adorable new Greenwich Village restaurant for the young and the young-at-heart where the menu ranges from Sweetpiglet ice cream sundaes in oldfashioned, oversized glass goblets to scrambled eggs with caviar. But it's the concept and execution of the place that so entice.

The banquettes are rococo pink leather, the chairs are white wrought iron, the ceiling is mirrored and balloons float around dreamily; the bar is laden with crystal ice buckets (complete with tongs) full of pretzels, gobstoppers (maybe they were bubble gum, this being America) and mini Tootsie rolls.

The back room is more masculine, with its trippy mural of storm troopers and motorbikes. Even the loo door has a mini-door inset that commands 'Open me'. Pure joy. And there are great vintage stores flanking the establishment - I bought a cheesecloth, off-the-shoulder hopelessly bucolic number from Zachary Smiles for 50 quid.

The John Dory is the newest venture from Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield (a chef with a River Café, Bibendum provenance) the team behind the much-heralded Spotted Pig. It sits in a hinterland in the Meatpacking District and lies under a huge elevated railway that runs along the West Side of Manhattan and is being transformed into the High Line Park elevated park, or greenway, the most ambitious openspace project since Central Park. High Line Park will be a green promenade extending for about a mile and a half above the streets of Manhattan.

The John Dory is small, dark and brilliant. It is like a Seventies Cornish fish restaurant gone wild. The walls are lined with charts of fish, there are fish mosaics and glass fish, and the place is imbued with the colours of the sea broken only by the open kitchen. This place has its wellies and oilskins on and is ready to head for Atlantis, and the waiters are fish aficionados, too. I love New York waiters. This one gave the impression he'd caught the fish, invented the dish and wanted to join us to experience it. I had ramps (a cross between a spring onion and a leek) on sourdough bread topped with a fried egg, sea bream, and then the increasingly famous John Dory steamed treacle sponge. Ken Friedman is usually around, which is a huge bonus as he is a flirt, a gossip and an expert on the New York restaurant scene.

I bumped into the tall, gentle and clever Jeremy King (he and his partner own The Wolseley and St Alban - they sold The Ivy and Le Caprice to Richard Caring) on the pavement outside Monkey Bar, his new venture in partnership with hotelier Jeff Klein and Vanity Fair editor and Waverley Inn proprietor Graydon Carter, which will ensure a suitably starry show.