The holiday season means higher-than-usual tourist density in New York City, and naturally, that spike in traffic is due in no small part to your own eager friends and family, who descend on the city for an authentic, fairy-lighted experience of the Big Apple in winter. But after a day at Macy's, an evening at Rockefeller Center, and a dinner somewhere "New York-y," as per their request, where do you, their trusty tour guide by default, take them for a night on the town? Here are a few crowd-pleasers that will still earn you some street cred, whether that crowd involves your boyfriend's distant Uncle Larry, Mom and Dad, long-lost friends who've emerged from the woodwork, hard-to-impress rubberneckers, or your old high school mates. A comprehensive list of the best yuletide boîtes to celebrate the new year - and the best of NYC.

At David Barton Gym annual toy drive: ● MARC JACOBS - "In Paris, there's a small club called Montana, and there's a restaurant called Thiou. Bars I really don't hang out in. Oh, there's this great club that happens once a month in Paris called Club Sandwich. And it's at the Espace Cardin. And everyone gets super dressed-up, so it's really, really fun. I try to go whenever I'm in Paris, if it's going on. And we stay out all night and just dance like crazy. And in New York, my favorite restaurants have always been the same. I love to eat at Pastis. I love the Standard. I love Da Silvano. I eat in the lobby of the Mercer a lot, the hotel. I usually go to Pastis for lunch, and there's a sandwich that was on the menu, but they don't make it anymore, but I always insist that they make it for me. And it's really fattening, so I shouldn't eat it, but it's chicken paillard and gruyere cheese and bacon. And it's so delicious. It's really good. And it's my weakness. It's just like the most perfect sandwich."

Do you remember the first drink you ever ordered? Mine was an Amaretto sour -- not very adventurous, and though I like them to this day, I’ve been fine-tuning my drink list ever since. I’m now partial to sidecars, although more often than not, a bartender turns me down. So I’ll ask for something easier -- a lemon drop, a mojito, or, facing a very limited bar, that girly drink every mixologist knows how to mix: a cosmo. But I’m always embarrassed to utter that word. I am not a cosmo girl. They’ll do in a pinch, but how much lovelier to saunter up to a long bar and order something refined, raising one’s eyebrow and rolling each syllable off the tongue -- Bran-dy Al-ex-an-der, or Sing-a-pore Sling? The elegant romance of these classics is evoked by Assouline’s glossy new picture book, Vintage Cocktail. Gorgeously photographed by Laziz Hamani, the drinks in this coffee-table treasure were mixed at an equally urbane watering hole, Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle Hotel.

Growing up, my friends had very traditional pets: dogs, cats, Tamagotchis. My family, being the eccentrics that they are (re: immigrants) made sure that my brother and I had something a little more fierce to play with. Our pet cougar loved us for ten passionate years before his unfortunate death at the hands of a demented hunter. My mother, saint that she is, told her distraught sons that our dead cougar was going to "cougar heaven," a place where "cougars roamed free and never went hungry." Little did I know she was talking about New York City.

Ivan Kane, the metteur en scène behind Ivan Kane’s Café Wa s French Bistro and Piano Lounge in Hollywood and Ivan Kane’s Forty Deuce Nightclub and Burlesque at Mandalay Bay in Vegas, opens up on his idols, theater requirements, and the death of the velvet rope.

There's only one thing to do in a financial crisis-get shlammered

Glimpse the city as it was before fauxhawks, metrosexuality, and that internets thing.

Graydon Carter -- editor of Vanity Fair and owner/savior/matchbook-maker at the Waverly Inn -- has come to the rescue of yet another beleaguered New York restaurant. Word has leaked that Carter, along with a pair of partners, has purchased the Monkey Bar in the Hotel Elysée.