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Since launching the croissant-donut hybrid known as The Cronut on May 10th, Dominique Ansel has never been the same. Instantly, the famed French pastry chef's namesake bakery in Soho has become the hottest New York venue between the hours of 5:30am and 8am – and it's not even a nightclub. 

It’s a common discussion when chatting over drinks at your local watering hole: “This is fun, but I wish it were somehow a contest, and that I got to pick the winner.” Homebrewklyn: Homebrewer’s Contest & Festival, happening in the heart of Brooklyn this Saturday, June 22, has got you covered.

The specialty at Hill & Dale, new to Allen Street, is a peach and vodka Jell-O shot called the “Dot & Dash.” Our waitress told us it was the house signature, so I suggested we all take one together. She declined, saying she didn’t like the feel of Jell-O in her mouth, and neither do I, so instead of the Jell-O shot, I drank just about everything else, and just about everything else was lovely.

NOW: Magnetic Northside

Brooklyn’s annual explosion of music and film is back, taking over scores of spots across the borough’s north end. You can catch live music at the likes of Cameo, Trophy, and The Gutter. Son Volt is at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, The Gories are at Brooklyn Bowl, and The Jazz Butcher plays Spike Hill. And that’s just Saturday night! The festival continues through Thursday, June 20th, with plenty more chances to soak up the spirit of Brooklyn. Start tonight with the reunion of Black Flag’s 1979 lineup at Warsaw.

Here in New York, we take tacos seriously - especially during summertime. There's something about rolling that soft tortilla up, drizzling lemon over the white shrimp and seared talapia, covering it in guacamole, and dipping it in a fresh coat of rice and beans.  But no - not all tacos are created equal. We live in a world where tacos are sometimes soggy, made with stale tortilla shells, and filled with unidentifiable pieces of meat. This is unacceptable. And thankfully, New York's five best taco places agree. Dig in, compadre.

While food etymologists were losing it last week over the cronut, a subtler move was taking full effect: pickles no longer means pickles, as in pickled cucumbers. Order the house-made pickles at a New York restaurant, and you’ll get ramps (Betony), or cauliflower and okra (Battery Harris), or stringy white mushrooms (Lavender Lake). At the newly opened Preserve24 on East Houston, you’ll get carrots, red onions, ramps, and jalepeños (be careful with those). Cucumbers, meanwhile, have become the red velvet cupcake of the pickle world.

On the south end of Bedford Ave., a line is forming. Every weekday at 3:30pm, crowds are making their quiet shuffle to the Grand St. corner, where they await their aphrodisiac fix at a price that can't be cheaper: $1 oysters from Maison Premiere.

Most of us - upon being proved a laughable plagiarist/journalistic fabricator and fired from our staff writer position at the New Yorker - would go ahead and disappear from public life for maybe more than a year. But disgraced hack Jonah Lehrer has bounced back already, it seems, signing a deal with Simon & Schuster to write a book about—I don’t think I can say this with a straight face— the "power of love.” 

New Zealand and Australia might be considered afterthoughts among New York bars and restaurants, but a new wave of Trans-Tasman spots is primed to change that. Open now are The Musket Room and Hawker Bar (pictured), with the latter spinning off Burke & Wills and the Manhattan Cricket Club later this summer.

Did you grow up with that Sunday family feast? Are you Italian? Did you sit through weekly screaming matches about the significance of ricotta cheese and marble entryways? Starting tonight and every Tuesday at Isola Trattoria in the Mondrian Soho hotel, you'll be able to revisit these magical family moments in their chandelier-filled space with their new "Family Meal:" a weekly table-full of $12 rigatoni bolognese and Margherita, truffle artichoke-topped pizza, $30 carafes of wine from the village of Puglia in Italy, and $15 pitchers of Peroni.