Prospect Park | Frederick Law Olmsted

What about dessert? Is there another neighborhood place you want to take us to? On Ninth Avenue between 40th and 41st, there's a place called the Cupcake Café. It's a little hole-in-the-wall place with incredibly good cupcakes and cakes, and they're beautifully decorated. They're made with butter-cream icing, so they're not too sweet. I guess you have to kind of know about it, because it ­really is a hole in the wall. There's no air ­conditioning. Nothing in there except beautiful cupcakes. Whenever I find myself in that neighborhood, I always think about going there and getting one of those cupcakes.

What are your favorite little pocket neighborhoods? I like the far West Village, where it's still, at least for the moment, pretty quiet. When I was in college, I used to spend a lot of time on the Lower East Side, although I don't anymore. I remember feeling that was an amazing place at that time. Everyone lived in such teeny-tiny apartments, so there was one particular coffee shop called the Pink Pony that everyone used as their living room. Union Square farmers' market is great. It's best on the weekends. It depends on the season, but you can get really great local produce. There's one stand that has delicious grainy bread and granola and things like that. You can get beautiful cheese and farm-raised meat. It's a really good market. Really far west in Chelsea is nice. Central Park really puts all the other parks to shame. I like Prospect Park in Brooklyn too. It's ­really beautiful. The same person, Frederick Law Olmsted, designed both of them.