The James Beard House

Brownstone home of the late James Beard, now housing the cookbook author’s posthumous foundation. Available for the multiple-course "group table" dinners that David Foster Wallace would write about. (Think $250 a head, and errant midlife couples mingling with Sebastian Cabot types.) Interior dotted with Beard leftovers, from shower to bed platform. Upstairs, Francis Baconian portrait of the man himself seems primed to shout "Wrong fork, you wastrel!"