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.

It's about time somebody launched a festival dedicated solely to the consumption of booze, with zero pretense of cultural distractions like movies or music. The first-ever Manhattan Cocktail Classic kicks off this weekend, with events like "The Agave Session: The Magical Elixirs of Mexico," and "Cocktail Kingdom Presents: A Practical Guide to Barware from Around the World." Beyond the seminars, which promise to have many tastings, there's a series called "Stories from Behind the Bar" where you can get up close and personal with bartending talent on their home turf.

For those with their heads still stuck in a panini press, this Vietnamese sandwich is the best thing that ever happened to toasted mini baguettes, pork pâté and mayonnaise, pork cold cuts, barbequed pork, pickled carrots and daikon, cucumbers, chiles, and cilantro. Known as the No. 1. Also, bun me. Proving French colonialism wasn’t all bad.

Here at BlackBook, we pay a lot of attention to where cool customers go out -- bars, clubs, restaurants, shops, hotels, you name it. So why not flip the frame and let you see where we go out? Here's a periodically updated, exhaustive list of hotspots currently favored by everyone at BlackBook, from the mighty bosses down to the humble interns, from the charming local lounges around the corner to the jet-setting temples of luxe living.

The Mayahuel boys turn tequila into art