In This Issue:

• At the Top: Autumn in the City
• The World’s Best: City Tours
• Ins and Outs: Top 5 New Recommendations
• The Urbie Awards: Chicago
• Alan’s View - ASD Picks: 3 Best U.S. Wine Festivals

At the Top: Autumn in the City

Fall is almost here, and just as the school kids have their work cut out for them, we cool kids have our sights set on getting to know our cities better. Whether you’re visiting a city for the first time or exploring new venues in your own back yard, September is the ideal time to beat the crowds and discover the best of what urban culture has to offer.

This month’s Night+Day e-letter takes you for an insider’s tour of the world’s coolest cities, as our writers on the ground name the three Best City Tours. They include a jet ski tour (Miami), a cemetery tour (New Orleans), and an after-dark bike tour (D.C.). You’ll also find out which among the many walking tours—whether food-, history- or architecture-themed—are the ones to put on your itinerary. (They all sound great online, but, as always, our writers separate the fluff from the real deal.)

And our monthly Ins and Outs section highlights the best openings across all of the cities we cover. September is hot for new restaurants, and our featured venues include two Japanese places, a Cuban Fusion restaurant, a Pan-Asian hotspot, and a destination gastropub.

We give out our coveted Urbie award to James Goeke, Chicago events-planner extraordinaire. His work will inspire you to celebrate Fall in high style. Enjoy!

THE WORLD’S BEST City Tours

One of the best ways to see a city is through insider eyes, and the top tour guides know every nook and cranny of their stomping grounds. From jet ski tours of Miami, to cemetery walks through New Orleans, to Los Angeles literary excursions, we’ve compiled here the very Best City Tours in the world’s coolest destinations.

MIAMI • DR. PAUL GEORGE’S TOURS, HISTORYMIAMI’S CITY TOURS

The Draw: Historian Dr. Paul George’s tours are packed with fascinating local lore. Perfect for history, ecohistory, and architecture enthusiasts or for those simply interested in the colorful characters of Miami’s past and present.
The Scene: Tours by foot, bike, coach or boat take place yearlong and include strolls through Little Havana cigar factories, Dominican market places, The Everglades National Park, MiMo, Sunset Park, and even what was once Al Capone’s Miami home. Also offered: eco-coach tours of the Everglades and Redland.
Hot Tip: If you have the opportunity, reserve a spot for the ever-popular “Mystery and Mayhem: Crime Coach Tour,” offered just twice a year.

The Draw: A bar crawl through the French Quarter, chased with a history lesson.
The Scene: Despite what some may claim, the cocktail as we know it today was not invented in New Orleans. Still, the “Original Cocktail Tour,” created by Tales of the Cocktail founder Ann Tuennerman, celebrates the Crescent City’s long love affair with spirits and inebriation. Get the low-down on the city’s most famous—and infamous—watering holes, and enjoy a few beverages along the way. Just make sure you can still stand by the end of this “walking” tour.
Hot Tip: Request Joe Gendusa as your guide. The historian is a veritable trove of first-hand stories about life in New Orleans.

The Draw: History buffs will appreciate how Toronto’s storied past comes alive in vivid detail.
The Scene: Free tours of Toronto’s historic downtown neighbourhoods are scheduled from May through October and focus on the city’s architecture, politics, and rich multicultural legacy. Long-term residents and visitors alike will appreciate knowing more about Yorkville, University of Toronto, Kensington Market, and Yonge Street.
Hot Tip: Show up for the “Whisky, Wharf, and Windmill,” which reveals the widespread influence of Gooderham & Worts Distillery on the city.

Also discover the Best City Tours in CHI   DC   LV   LA   MEX   NY   SF

INS and OUTS (NIGHT+DAY’S Latest Recommendations)

Top 5 New Restaurants

CHICAGO • COOBAH • Cuban Fusion
coobah.com
This Cuban, Asian, Mexican, and Latin hybrid restaurant is located in the swank Southport section of Lakeview. The intimate dining space seats guests at aged wooden dining tables closely nestled next to each other. full review Mon–Thu 5–10pm, Fri 5–11:30pm, Sat 10am–3pm and 5–11:30pm, Sun 10am–3pm and 5–9:30pm. $$ 3423 N. Southport Ave. (W. Newport Ave.), 773-528-2220.

D.C. • KUSHI IZAKAYA & SISHI • Japanese
eatkushi.com
An emerging hip pocket of DC, so newly become a destination that few know the neighborhood’s name (“Mount Vernon Square,” north of Penn Quarter, east of the convention center), is home to the effortlessly jaunty Kushi. Combining a grill room, sushi bar, sake pub, and oyster house, the enormous dining room endlessly entertains… full review Mon–Wed 11:30am–2:30pm and 5:30–11pm, Thu–Fri 11:30am–2:30pm and 5:30pm–2am, Sat noon–2:30pm and 5:30pm–2am, Sun noon–2:30pm and 5:30–11pm. $ 465 K St. NW (Fifth St. NW), 202-682-3123

LAS VEGAS • BAR MASA • Japanese
arialasvegas.com
This über-modern space feels a bit like an airport hangar, but, stark ambience aside, chef Masa Takayama is serving up some of the city’s most creative Japanese food. The menu can be a bit hard to navigate on your own; your best option is to tell your server how much you want to spend, describe your likes and dislikes, and let the chef prepare you a tasting menu. full review Thu–Mon 5–11pm. $$$$ Aria Resort & Casino, 3730 Las Vegas Blvd. S. (Harmon Ave.), 877-230-2742.

LOS ANGELES • STARRY KITCHEN • Pan-Asian
starrykitchen.com
If you orbit the LA foodie universe, you know the story: Word leaks on a husband and wife’s private dinner parties; they turn their creations into an underground dining phenomenon; the health department shuts them down; and the feisty upstarts regroup and go legit, opening a Pan-Asian restaurant in downtown LA’s Financial District. full review
Mon–Fri 11am–3pm, Thu–Fri 6pm–9pm. $ 350 S. Grand Ave. (Fourth St.), 213-617-3474.

SAN FRANCISCO • PUBLIC HOUSE • Gastro Pub
publichousesf.com
What was once Acme Chophouse is now San Francisco’s trendiest gastropub, courtesy of Traci Des Jardins. And though it is housed in AT&T Park, it’s not all baseball, all the time. In fact, the place opens at all kinds of odd hours for other sporting events, such as the World Cup (6am).
full review Daily 4–11pm. Bar daily noon–midnight. Open for lunch during Giants day games. $$ 24 Willie Mays Plaza (Second St., AT&T Park), 415-644-0240

The Night+Day Promise
Night+Day writers and editors use the same high standards in selecting and researching venues to be included in our Ins and Outs updates as we do for our books. Our local correspondents determine which new hot spots are the real deal and which are simply hype—just as you’d expect from Night+Day—to provide the kind of reliable information you needto make the best possible choices.

In 2003, James Goeke left his roots in Missouri to put his degree in Mass Marketing to work in the Windy City. He now graces Chicago with his Southern charm as the go-to Special Events Planner.

For the past three years, Goeke has spearheaded the design of the must-attend social events throughout the city. He’s worked closely with premiere city publications—Time Out Chicago, CS Magazine—as well as fashion moguls and hotels to orchestrate exquisite events that make the heart of the social scene beat at full rate. His knack for throwing parties has always been a passion, and his ability to create the perfect party is a natural consequence of knowing what works. “There's nothing like the electricity in the air of a really great event. The most important element is making the guests understand why they are there,” says Goeke.

Many of his endeavors are philanthropic, and the one closest to his heart is Vital Bridges, an organization that provides nutritious meals to low-income men, women, and children living with HIV in the Chicago area. Goeke co-founded the junior auxiliary board that dovetails with the youth generation’s interest in helping raise money for the project. He created “Vital Nights,” a series of happy hours for young professionals that has helped raise about $25,000 in the last year. He believes that what makes Chicago stand out from other metropolitan areas is its Midwestern core values. As he puts it, “Collectively, the people of Chicago have great hearts and an intrinsic need to give back to society.”

Recently nominated for “One Man Chicago,” an award dedicated to career- and charity-focused men, Goeke is one of the most successful faces of the burgeoning Chicago scene.

Talk about the cart before the horse! Three months ago, my wife won a two-night stay at the Grand Regent Hotel in Bordeaux at a charity auction. As a result, we made a stop in Bordeaux on a quick trip that would have otherwise only included Paris and London. I’ll tell you more about Bordeaux in our next e-letter, but suffice it to say that it is impossible to go there without having wine (and for me, wine festivals) top-of-mind.

Lest we forget, wine was humankind’s first cocktail, predating both cider and beer. Wine has been the boisson de preference of the social elite and the proletariat’s substitute for drinking water. It has anointed the bodies of pharaohs and enlivened the feasts of Roman kings. As the story goes, the world’s first wine appeared around 8,000 years ago when a Prussian man hid wild grapes in a jar marked “poison,” only to have the fermented fruit discovered by a suicidal concubine. In Egypt, only nobles and pharaohs were worthy of this venerable liquid that dissolved the day’s troubles. With the domestication of the vine came the birth of the wine industry, whose production and trade grew with Western civilization.

The world’s love affair with wine is evidenced not only by the profusion of wine-growing areas, but also by tastings, auctions, trade shows, and street fairs. The Greeks praised the god Dionysus for wine, thanking him each December with some of the world’s first festivals. Although many wine festivals today are exclusive events aimed at the trade, some are open to the public and loads of fun. Perhaps the best wine events are the street parties in the world’s greatest grape-growing regions, where everyone’s invited and few are sniffing corks.

At the bi-annual Bordeaux Wine Festival, begun when the city launched its rebirth 15 years ago, hundreds of thousands of people celebrate with music, fireworks, and a tasting of what is arguably the world’s best wine and food. For more than 70 years, party-seekers have gathered in the Tuscan town of Impruneta for the Chianti Grape Harvest Festival (late September, near Florence, Italy), where parades and wine stalls fill the streets, and the finest local vintages are sampled and savored. In the heartland of Spain’s Rioja wine region, six sleepless days are spent hailing the vines with bullfights, fireworks, dancing, and, yes, plenty of guzzling, at the Rioja Grape Harvest Festival (mid-September, Logrono, northern Spain). However, if an all-out wine fight is more your cup of tea (a la the Tomatina tomato fight) you’ll want to go to nearby Haro on June 29 for its Battle of Wine—and from there you can hop over to Pamplona in time (and sufficiently lubricated) for the Running of the Bulls!

In the top wine-growing areas in U.S., the premiere wine events don’t take to the streets, but rather celebrate with embarrassing amounts of quality wine and food. Herewith are the three best:

1. Auction Napa Valley is the crème de la crème of wine events in the U.S., if not the world. Charity is the excuse (this year more than $8 million was raised to support local causes) for a four-day event that includes two winemaker-hosted dinners, an all-day food festival on the lawns of gorgeous Meadowood resort, with music and dancing, and the eye-popping wine auction. Early June, St. Helena (90 minutes north of San Francisco), California.

2. International Pinot Noir Celebration in the heart of Oregon’s wine country, the Willamette Valley, is unique among major U.S. wine events in its focus on a single grape varietal. Compared to the California events, IPNC is considerably smaller in scale, cost, and intensity, with an education component added to the too-much eating and drinking program. End of July, McMinnville (one hour southwest of Portland), Oregon.

3. Sonoma Wine Country Weekend, the poorer
cousin to the Napa Valley event, has upped the ante
by combining two annual events, Taste of Sonoma
and the Sonoma Valley Wine Auction. Still looser and considerably less expensive than Napa, the Sonoma event begins with Friday winery lunches and ends Sunday evening with a charity auction, with some education and the requisite abundance of wine
and food in between. First weekend in September, Sonoma County (one hour north of
San Francisco), California.