NY Adventures

It’s a store about life. And death. About 100 million years’ worth.

From floor to ceiling, there’s not a scrap of space that isn’t occupied by embalmed eels coiled in jars, orangutan vertebrae, shark teeth, insects the size of your face, sabretooth tiger claws, dinosaur eggs, skeletons, meteorites and fossils. Oh, and scorpion lollipops. They’re like normal lollipops, only there’s a scorpion inside. Obviously. And yes, they are available in strawberry flavour.

It’s an entomologist’s, palaeontologist’s and anthropologist’s collective wet dream, but don’t let that mind-mangling image put you off. Evolution is rammed full of endless curiosity, and certainly more worthy of your time than another bloody trip to the Apple Store round the corner.

Evolution
120 Spring Street, SoHo
Open 11am to 7pm, seven days a week

Korma in the USA

Foot long hot dogs drowned in mild mustard and ketchup, pretzels and bagels, piled-high pizzas as huge as the moon and unidentifiable meat on a stick.

With New York’s street vendors, takeaways, bars and world class restaurants offering tastes to titillate and tantalise the tongue, one of the less likely questions you’ll ask yourself will be: “Where can I get a good curry?”

It’s an unquellable hunger that little else will satisfy, but fear not. The oldest Indian restaurant in Manhattan is awaiting your custom a few blocks North of Times Square.

The Bombay Masala was, according to the scroll at the ground floor entrance, established “at this site in 1917”, a claim somewhat challenged by the first floor interior. You could be dining in any English curry house, surrounded by the timeless 80’s décor of bejewelled elephants, patterned carpets and a pink colour palette for co-ordinating the walls and linen napkins.

The food rescues the experience. The inexpensive lunchtime menu means you sample the best of the fare, with spicy poppadoms accompanied by onion pickle and a thin and rich mango chutney, mulligatawny soup and a choice of traditionally prepared main dishes and rice.