Lower East Side Reaching Higher As Destination

The Lower East Side, to paraphrase the old cliche, was a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to stay there. Maybe you stopped into Katz’s (scene of “I’ll have what she’s having”) for a pastrami sandwich and an egg cream. [...] you hightailed it back to your uptown hotel — or if you were a bit more edgy, over to Soho. Because unless it was a weekend and you were a twentysomething looking to get as drunk as possible, there was no reason to linger on the Lower East Side. [...] possibly. The Lower East Side has sprouted a slew of new hotels — both posh and hipster-y — as well as a whole crop of fabulous restaurants you’d be more than happy to eat in sober. Add to the mix the always innovative New Museum and the newly relocated International Center for Photography catercorner from it on Bowery. Is there enough justification to hang below Houston and east of Bowery — even if it’s Tuesday and you’re old enough to have seen “When Harry Met Sally” in a movie theater? Is it possible that suddenly the neighborhood where Meg Ryan demonstrated faking an orgasm has become an exciting, real destination in itself? Stop by Orchard early in the day, and you might catch one of the remaining tailors sweeping his steps, morning sun shining on his yarmulke. Walk Canal at dusk, and you’ll be sideswiped by housewives swinging pink plastic shopping bags dripping crab water. Take Sel Rrose, a glamorously decayed bar/restaurant with distressed concrete walls and gunmetal stools. Sel Rrose’s white marble bar is jammed with mason jars filled with sage leaves and blackberries, candied ginger and red peppercorns — destined for the fabulously decorative (and potent) cocktails shaken up by its lush-bearded bartenders. The name refers to the hill-and-dale process — the term for cutting vertical grooves into a phonograph record or wax cylinder — one of the earliest methods of audio recording. Hill & Dale’s signature drink — which is hot pink and served with a flower floating in it — is called the Floozy, and it takes zero imagination to picture a Jazz Age flapper downing it in the brick-walled back room. At Top Hops, the enormous blackboard behind the bar is chalked with each beer’s name, the brewer, its origin, style, date tapped, alcohol by volume, and the date the draft line was cleaned. Top Hops also keeps pieces of soft Brooklyn-made pretzels on the bar for noshing, which definitely makes me not want to drink beer anywhere else. The restaurant Louie and Chan, with one foot in Chinatown and one on the Lower East Side, is so straight out of the early 1900s with its thin-planked wood floors, porcelain light fixtures, and dark brown walls, the three young Millennial women I once saw texting at the bar looked as if they’d been dropped from another planet, not just another era. If somebody spirited your favorite northern Italian restaurant into a space that could best be described as Haute Tenement, you’d have Bacaro. [...] you have to love a restaurant that gives you your own bottle of olive oil for dipping your bread. Fried chicken and Champagne are two things I am 100 percent behind — which makes Birds and Bubbles my new favorite restaurant on the Lower East Side. [...] who cares when they’re pouring you Champagne (of every price range) and serving you teeth-crackingly crisp fried chicken. Ivan Ramen is the Lower East Side outpost of the self-described “Jewish kid from Long Island” who went to Tokyo and became a Japanese god of noodles. The mural of soup slurpers above the counter includes a kid in a Batman mask, a Japanese man in an Indiana Jones hat and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In NYC, even the ice cream joints get their 15 minutes of fame — and Morgenstern’s deserves at least that much. Last time I visited this bright-blue storefront, a photographer was angling his camera over their New God Flow sundae as if it were Gisele Bündchen. Its animal-friendly collection of bags and shoes for men and women is fashionable enough for even the most stylish leather-lover. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, stop into Kenny Shopsin’s idiosyncratic diner, located in the market.