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Tapas are bullshit, and let me tell you why. Because while there's nothing wrong with a variety of different bites served on small plates meant for sharing, the end result, and reason for the rise of tapas in trendy restaurants, is less food for more money. You know you've been to a tapas place when you pick up a slice of pizza on the way home with the three dollars you have left in your pocket. But of course you're a philistine if you question the value of tapas. If you want a full belly on the cheap, Taco Bell is right this way, Bubba. Well, as Eric Felten pointed out in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, tiny cocktails are the new thing, and they're tastier and more sophisticated than the regular bloated varieties, so don't embarrass yourself by complaining that you've blown all your money and you're still sober, okay?

The third date. You've made it. Now it's totally acceptable for you to take your date back to your place and [fill in the blanks]. 

This year the James Beard Foundation debuted the Outstanding Bar Program Award, an honor sponsored by Campari that is given to a bar that “displays and encourages excellence in cocktail, spirit, and/or beer service through a well-presented drink list, knowledgeable staff, and efforts to educate customers about beverages.” The winner of the inaugural award was PDT. We chatted with the humble owner of PDT, Jim Meehan, after he won the prize.

Once upon a time May Day meant walking around the May pole and the hedonistic jumping through fire to celebrate fertility for both the land and people. In the late 1800s it became International Worker’s Day and after the May Day riots in 1894 the day quickly became a time to speak out against government, capitalism, and what have you. This year the month of May kicked off with branches of the Occupy movement storming the streets of Manhattan marching and videotaping police brutality.

Imagine being a huge sports fan, and Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and Wayne Gretzky all walked into a bar together ...

"A Lolllapalooza of Booze"

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.

In partnership with the aspirationally driven folks at HBO's How to Make It in America, we're proud to offer you the chance to achieve a personal gold standard by unlocking the exclusive BlackBook Nightlife badge on Foursquare. Make HTMIIA your Foursquare friend, then check into any 3 of 20 possible New York nightlife or dining destinations (restaurants are the new nightlife, you know), and you'll get the shiny new Foursquare badge pictured here. Soon we may provide an even more material motivation to have fun with this, but for now, download the BlackBook Guide iPhone app and start hitting the hotspots. Complete list of eligible joints after the jump.

If you wanna make an omelet -- or a pisco sour for that matter -- you gotta crack a few eggs. But after what seems like a recent Health Department crackdown, bartenders who prepare drinks with raw egg are on the rocks. The victim of a recent bust, Pegu Club in SoHo, has stopped serving its MarTEAni, a drink featuring egg whites to balance out tannin-infused gin, after a health inspector issued the bar a citation and summons to court for serving the drink without checking to make sure the patron knew he was exposing himself to salmonella. The Health Department would prefer that bars use pasteurized eggs, which have been warmed up to prevent the growth of bacteria, but they leave drinks smelling like a "funky wet diaper," according to Audrey Saunders, who owns Pegu and created the MarTEAni.

Andrew Carmellini, head chef at Tribeca’s Locanda Verde and co-author (with wife Gwen Hyman) of home cooking-savvy cookbook, Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food, has cooked at some of the finest eateries around the world but remains modest about his culinary experiences. In New York, he’s gone from the kitchen of Le Cirque to Café Boulud to A Voce, and rumors of "all you can eat' pasta night" at Locanda have been turning heads recently. We've been told that dinners such as these are not planned to start until January ... we'll see.