New York
If You Have to Ask About This Harlem Dinner Party, You’re Not Invited
The lobby lacks the swirly marble flooring and chandeliers of finer residential buildings. The long hallways are almost dingy. But behind one of the apartment doors on a recent night, the mood was anything but dull.
Butterflied branzino was about to go in the oven. A pan of glistening buns rested on the stove. Fariyal Abdullahi, executive chef at Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant Hav & Mar, and the private chef Nana Araba Wilmot were hovering over the dishes. At the bar, a punch of bourbon, sweet tea, mango juice, ginger liqueur and fresh mint was being poured.
The jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater arrived after a long evening at the recording studio. Her dog, Daisy, a fluffy Maltese-Shih Tzu mix, perched valiantly atop her wheeled suitcase.
The party’s host, Alexander Smalls, perused the scene.
“This is an interesting place to hang out,” he boomed in a baritone that rose above the party chatter.
The guests erupted in laughter.
In New York, members-only clubs with steep fees and private restaurants in luxury towers have become powerhouses for socializing and networking over food and booze. So many have opened in recent months that the monetization of community seems practically like a new business strategy.
But there are some spaces you can’t buy your way inside. Mr. Smalls’s cozy apartment in West Harlem is one of them, its own humble seat of power. There, guests find a setting for community and connection. They can generate buzz for a new idea or project and sometimes even find investors who are eager to listen.
“The Vanderbilts used to do that, and the Astors,” said Mr. Smalls, a well-known chef and former opera singer. “They created these enclaves of power and elevated air to breathe. They relished in bringing in creatives. The celebrities, they all pass through here on their way somewhere, and I feed them and nurture them.”
Last month’s dinner party organized by Mr. Smalls was partly a celebration of his new cookbook, “The Contemporary African Kitchen,” and partly a birthday bash: He had just turned 73. And it was a chance for Mr. Smalls to let two chefs, Ms. Abdullahi and Ms. Wilmot, show off their skills (he made one dish himself, a black-eyed pea and poached-pear salad). The guests were successful or up-and-coming painters, dancers, curators, musicians and chefs, many of whom have multi-hyphenate titles.
But mostly, it was just another evening at the home of an artist whose work in both cooking and music has earned James Beard, Tony and Grammy Awards.
“I live to throw parties,” said Mr. Smalls, outfitted in dark-rimmed glasses, a black suit jacket and Dolce & Gabbana slip-on loafers.
When Mr. Smalls was a child living in Spartanburg, S.C., he wanted so badly to entertain that his father built him a clubhouse in his backyard so he could invite friends over and make food for them. That impulse endured though his early career in opera.
“When I moved to New York and got my apartment, the parties began. It was my way of creating community,” he said. “What I learned as a child is the person with the spoon wielded the power.”
When his opera career took him to Paris and Rome, he held dinner parties there that attracted fashion designers, actors and dancers. His voice coach at one point told him that if he didn’t ease up on the dinners, he would never have a career in opera. Eventually, he felt like he had hit the glass ceiling as a Black man in opera.
He shifted his focus to food with the aim of making sure Southern cooking had a place in fine dining. He had five restaurants in New York: Café Beulah, Sweet Ophelia’s, the Shoebox Cafe, the Cecil and Minton’s Playhouse, which he helped to reopen.
“I opened my first restaurant so someone else would pay for dinner,” he said. “Entertaining was an addiction. I almost forgot what it was like to eat alone. I had to find a way to support my habit.”
His establishments drew Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. George Clooney and the cast of “Saturday Night Live” showed up at Café Beulah one evening. Catherine Deneuve would sit at the bar. Glenn Close was a regular.
Mr. Smalls closed his last New York restaurant in 2018. He has written cookbooks and a children’s book and opened an African food hall in Dubai. He plans to start a similar food hall in Harlem. And he hopes to create a nonprofit, Smalls House, which will provide hospitality training and a community kitchen.
Meanwhile, he’s still throwing dinner parties. His aim these days is to elevate lesser-known Black chefs and chefs from the African diaspora, letting them do most of the cooking. He curates the party playlists and the guest lists.
“I speak the language of music and food,” he said, “and through those conversations I am able to introduce that circle to new chefs, artists and creatives.”
The setting — his apartment — is practically a museum, covered wall to ceiling with framed restaurant reviews, a plaque from Ms. Morrison and paintings, some of which are portraits and caricatures of Mr. Smalls by friends. Tables are piled with art books, cookbooks and novels stacked seven deep. It’s the kind of place that begs for annotation, which Mr. Smalls willingly provides.
As he divulged family secrets, the photographer Dario Calmese was chatting in the living room with Elijah Heyward III, a scholar of Southern African American culture, and Dr. Darien Sutton, an ABC medical correspondent. Conversation among another set of guests shifted to chatter about the chef and author Lazarus Lynch. Did you hear he plans to get his master’s degree in sociology?
“He went to Buffalo State, and I went to Fredonia College,” said Nia Drummond, a jazz and opera singer.
Mr. Smalls, hovering nearby, perked up. “I made my debut with the Buffalo symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas in the late ’70s. The photo is right there,” he said, pointing to the wall displaying a photo of the famed conductor and Mr. Smalls. “I was 24 years old.”
“I didn’t know he was in Buffalo,” Ms. Drummond said.
Mr. Smalls looked at his empty glass.
“I need some more bourbon before I tell you that story,” he said.
At about 8 o’clock, Mr. Smalls stood and beckoned guests toward the dining room hidden by green velvet curtains that he pulled back.
“Please, ladies, take it away,” he said to the chefs who were standing before the table.
“We have quite a spread for you guys tonight,” said Ms. Wilmot, whose parents grew up in Ghana.
Among the dishes on the table: Ghanaian buns bread made with nutmeg and evaporated milk, omo tuo (rice balls), nkate nkwan (peanut butter soup) and Ethiopian gomen (collard greens). The branzino was dressed half with Ghanaian green shito pepper sauce and half with doro wat, the national dish of Ethiopia.
“We wanted to create a dish that represented both of us,” said Ms. Abdullahi, who spent her childhood in Ethiopia, the other side of the continent from her co-chef’s family ties to Africa. “As gorgeous as this is, it tells a story of East meets West.”
“Can we eat now?” Michelle Miller, the “CBS Saturday Morning” co-host, interrupted, and everyone laughed.
Guests spread out across the two small living rooms with plates in their laps. A late arrival slipped in, a coconut cake in her arms, prompting whispers. Was that the soprano Kathleen Battle, the one who commanded a standing ovation last year at the Met? (It was.)
Plates were cleared, and Jim Herbert, a fashion consultant, slid behind the piano and started playing. Mr. Smalls sat down in the living room and began to riff along.
“This is out of a book,” said ruby onyinyechi amanze, an artist who spells her name in lower case. She had driven from Philadelphia to attend the dinner and marveled at the scene.
After a few minutes, Ms. Drummond walked into the room.
“You know, I feel like I want to take the piano. Jimmy, move your ass,” she said before sitting at the keys and launching into a Billie Holiday song followed by a spiritual.
She finished and stood up to a stunned room.
“Let the church say amen,” Mr. Smalls said.
In unison, the partygoers responded: “Amen.”
This summer’s World Cup will bring millions of soccer lovers to stadiums across North America. But whether it lives up to organizers’ lofty expectations could come down to fans like Brett Shields and John Milce of New South Wales, Australia.
Both men are longtime supporters of the Socceroos, their country’s men’s national soccer team, and both have traveled to the World Cup before. But only one is planning to go to this year’s tournament, which runs from June 11 to July 19 in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Mr. Shields, 59, is coming. He already has the proper travel authorization from past visits to see his daughter, who lives in San Francisco. He plans to stay with her and attend Socceroos matches there and in Seattle.
Mr. Milce, 76, who has been to six World Cups since 1966, is staying home. He said he had made comments online about President Trump’s policies and feared that he could be denied entry at the border because of the administration’s proposed social media checks and broader immigration crackdown.
“I’m not a poor man, but with the costs involved, it was too much to risk,” Mr. Milce said.
With the first kickoff less than 60 days away, tourism and hospitality leaders in the 11 U.S. host cities are watching international fans closely. The United States was the only major nation to register a decline in international tourism in 2025, and hints of lackluster demand have anxiety running high.
The research firm Tourism Economics projects that more than 1.2 million international visitors will travel to the United States for the World Cup. That includes nearly 750,000 who would not have otherwise come, amounting to a roughly 1.1 percentage point increase in international arrivals.
Still, the firm this month revised down its forecast for the rate of recovery from last year’s drop in tourists. Visa restrictions, fears of immigration agents (including at World Cup matches), an increase in phone searches at borders and, for fans, the exorbitant costs of match tickets and transportation are just some of the barriers keeping people away.
Mr. Shields said that if he didn’t already have his travel authorization and a free place to stay, “I doubt whether I’d probably travel over to the World Cup in the current climate.”
Safety Concerns and Travel Bans
The World Cup, which drew 3.4 million spectators in Qatar in 2022, is a blockbuster pretty much by definition, and organizers expect a large share of bookings, both domestic and international, to come in the final two months.
The U.S. Travel Association said this month that the World Cup has “extraordinary potential to deliver major economic gains” across the United States, but added that “safety concerns, policy perceptions and entry barriers could limit America’s ability to fully capitalize on the opportunity.”
In Seattle, the number of expected domestic World Cup visitors has grown by 30 percent since 2024, said Michael Woody, the chief engagement officer for Visit Seattle. At the same time, the expected number of international visitors has fallen by 17 percent, driven by a particularly sharp drop-off in Canadians.
Fans coming from countries like Haiti and Iran, on a list of 19 countries whose citizens Mr. Trump has barred from entering the United States, won’t be able to attend their national teams’ group stage matches at all. Supporters of soccer powerhouses like Ivory Coast and Senegal, among the 14 African nations whose citizens face tight visa restrictions, could be forced to post bonds of up to $15,000 to enter the country.
Adem Asha, 32, a Turkish citizen who lives in Slovakia, obtained a U.S. visa last year in order to watch Lionel Messi, of Argentina, and Cristiano Ronaldo, of Portugal, in what could be their last World Cup. But Mr. Asha, who was born in Syria, worried he could still be targeted by immigration agents. He decided this spring to call off his trip, a conclusion that left him “disappointed but also relieved.”
“I really don’t feel like going there, or spending that much money to go there, and then being denied at the port of entry,” said Mr. Asha, who said he did not consider going to Canada or Mexico because the matches he wanted to see, and the other sites he hoped to visit, were all in the United States.
Banking on Late Bookings
U.S. host cities are pinning their hopes on last-minute travelers. Zane Harrington, a spokesman for Visit Dallas, said he expected “a majority” of fans heading to the city to book their stays in the two months remaining before kickoff — or even during the tournament as teams advance out of the group stage.
Martha Sheridan, the chief executive of Meet Boston, the city’s marketing and tourism organization, said ticket sales for Gillette Stadium’s seven matches were “robust,” and that they were split roughly in thirds among New Englanders, domestic visitors from the rest of the country and international travelers.
Demand for hotels in Boston in June is up about 11 percent compared with the same period last year, she said. That increase was smaller than what her team had expected to see by this point when it began planning in 2024, she added, but she felt “very optimistic” that bookings would continue to rise in the coming weeks.
FIFA in recent weeks released blocks of thousands of hotel rooms across the three host countries, while local host committees downsized fan festivals in locations including New Jersey, San Francisco and Seattle, fueling discussion over whether demand was falling short of expectations.
But Jamie Lane, the chief economist and senior vice president for analytics at AirDNA, a company that collects and analyzes short-term-rental data, said it was common practice for major event hosts to scale back their room blocks as they make final preparations for staffing and sponsorships, and that the changes were not a sign of sluggish demand.
A spokesman for FIFA said the changes to fan festivals were not made in response to demand, noting that some of the events will now take place in several neighborhoods rather than in a large central location.
A Bigger, Less Predictable Event
Data published this month by AirDNA shows a rise in short-term-rental bookings, to varying degrees, in every host city. Bookings on group stage game days were up the most in Monterrey, Mexico, rising 564 percent, on average, compared with the same dates last year.
Bookings were up 209 percent in Mexico City, 171 percent in Kansas City, 152 percent in Miami and 52 percent in Toronto, according to AirDNA.
A range of factors, including which teams are competing and to what extent cities regulate short-term rentals, influence those figures. In San Francisco, where short-term-rental bookings were up 28 percent on group stage game days, Anna Marie Presutti, the chief executive of the San Francisco Travel Association, said she thought demand didn’t rise to its full potential because the war in Iran is complicating travel for fans from Jordan and Qatar, two teams that are playing there.
In New York, where short-term rentals are tightly restricted, hotel bookings during the World Cup period are “more or less the same” compared with the same period last year, said Vijay Dandapani, the chief executive of the Hotel Association of New York City.
International travelers generally stay longer and spend more money than Americans, giving them an outsize economic impact. An analysis published by Airbnb in February found that non-Americans coming to the United States for the World Cup planned to visit more destinations and travel three nights longer, on average, than Americans.
Sylvia Weiler, the president of global destinations at the travel marketing and data company Sojern, said the revamped structure of this World Cup — spread across three countries and featuring a record 48 teams — made it hard to project how travel patterns would play out as the tournament approached.
“We talk about what was expected,” Ms. Weiler said. “I would always put a slight caveat, because we did not know what to expect.”
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2026.
A 76-year-old man died on Friday after being shoved down the stairs at the 18th Street subway station in Manhattan, and the police arrested a suspect who had been arrested multiple times in recent months and had been discharged from Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward just hours before.
The victim, Ross Falzone, landed on his head at the bottom of the stairs and suffered a traumatic brain injury, a fractured spine and a fractured rib after a stranger rushed forward and pushed him, the police said.
Mr. Falzone had been walking north on Seventh Avenue toward the subway station in the Chelsea neighborhood on Thursday evening, said Brad Weekes, assistant commissioner of public information for the Police Department. Walking about 30 yards behind him was the stranger, according to surveillance footage from the scene, Mr. Weekes said. As Mr. Falzone reached the station, the man rushed forward and pushed him down the stairs. He was taken to Bellevue where he died shortly before 3 a.m. on Friday.
The death sparked outrage at City Hall. Mayor Zohran Mamdani quickly called for an investigation into how Bellevue handled the discharge of the suspect and suggested that institutional problems at the hospital might have led to the random attack.
“I am horrified by the killing of Ross Falzone and the circumstances that led to it,” Mr. Mamdani said in a news release on Friday, in which he ordered “an immediate investigation on what steps should have been taken to prevent this tragedy.”
Police identified the suspect as Rhamell Burke, 32.
In the three months preceding the attack, Mr. Burke was arrested four times, Mr. Weekes said, including an arrest on Feb. 2 in connection with an assault on a Port Authority police officer.
Mr. Burke’s most recent interaction with the police began at around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, when he approached a group of N.Y.P.D. officers outside the 17th Precinct station house on East 51st Street, Mr. Weekes said. He grabbed a stick from a pile of garbage on the street and approached the officers, who told him to drop the stick. When he did, officers placed Mr. Burke in a police vehicle and drove him to Bellevue, where he was admitted to the emergency room at around 3:40 p.m., Mr. Weekes said. Mr. Burke was taken to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program for evaluation and treatment, Mr. Weekes said, and was released from the hospital one hour later.
He was just a mile and a half from the hospital when he encountered Mr. Falzone at around 9:30 p.m. Thursday.
On Friday afternoon, police officers found Mr. Burke in Penn Station, where they arrested him. He was in custody on Friday evening. It was unclear Friday if Mr. Burke had a lawyer.
The mayor said he had requested help from the New York State Department of Health, which will investigate the decision to release Mr. Burke from Bellevue and conduct a review of similar cases at the hospital. The state agency also will investigate psychiatric evaluation and discharge procedures across NYC Health and Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, according to the news release.
Mr. Falzone was a retired high school teacher who lived alone for many years in an apartment building on the Upper West Side. His friends were in shock on Friday about his death. They shared memories of an affable but private man who rarely spoke about his family or personal life.
Mr. Falzone had been recovering from a recent surgery and seemed more mobile and happy, said Marc Stager, 78, Mr. Falzone’s next-door neighbor on a tree-lined block of West 85th Street. He was known as a cheerful “yapper,” said Briel Waxman, a neighbor. He was the kind of New Yorker who enjoyed chatting with neighbors about historical details of his building and seeing performances at Lincoln Center with friends.
“He was always out and about,” said Ms. Waxman, 35, who often returned to her apartment at midnight or 1 a.m. to find Mr. Falzone arriving home at the same time. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m proud of you or embarrassed of myself,’” she remembered telling him.
Mr. Falzone had wide taste in music — opera, classical, jazz, pop — and neighbors could tell he was home when they heard notes escaping from under his apartment door, Mr. Stager said.
He was “a helpless old guy,” said Mr. Stager, who added that he was “disappointed and shocked, frankly, that somebody could do such a thing” as shove such a defenseless person down the stairs.
When Ms. Waxman moved into the building five years ago, Mr. Falzone was among the first people to welcome her, she said. He once brought a package to her door that had been delivered to the wrong unit and shared that what is now a blank wall in her apartment had once been a fireplace.
Ms. Waxman sat in her living room on Friday and cried as she talked, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She remembered Mr. Falzone as “just overall, nice, talkative, genuine human.”
A suicide note purported to be written by the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein while he was in jail in 2019 uses language that in some cases echoes his past writings to friends and family.
One phrase found in the apparent suicide note — “No Fun” — also appears on a handwritten page found in Mr. Epstein’s jail cell at the time of his death, as well as in emails he sent over the years.
And another saying in the suicide note — “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin!!” — appears in emails that Mr. Epstein had written to people close to him.
A cellmate claimed that Mr. Epstein left the suicide note before he was found unresponsive in their cell weeks before his death. The New York Times reported on the note last week and successfully asked a federal judge to unseal it.
If authentic, the note gives a view into Mr. Epstein’s mind-set before he was found dead at age 66 in August 2019. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
‘NO FUN’
A different handwritten note was found in Mr. Epstein’s cell when he died, and investigators believed it was written by him. In that document, Mr. Epstein complained about jail conditions — burned food, giant bugs and being kept in a locked shower. He concluded it with the underlined phrase, “NO FUN!!”
Mr. Epstein also used the phrase in emails when describing things he was unhappy about, or situations that had not gone his way.
‘watcha want me to do — bust out cryin’
Mr. Epstein used the phrase “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin” with friends, and in messages to his brother, Mark Epstein.
Like the note released by the judge, Mr. Epstein’s emails were often short, with staccato phrases and erratic punctuation. The emails were contained in millions of pages of documents the Justice Department released in response to a law passed last year requiring disclosure of records pertaining to Mr. Epstein.
-
Michigan56 seconds agoMichigan Lottery Daily 3, Daily 4 results for May 9, 2026
-
Massachusetts7 minutes agoThe Massachusetts beach towns better than Cape Cod, per Condé Nast
-
Minnesota13 minutes agoGame Four Preview: San Antonio Spurs vs. Minnesota Timberwolves
-
Mississippi19 minutes agoRyan McPherson injury update, Mississippi State star hurts ankle, exits Auburn game
-
Missouri25 minutes ago
Missouri Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 winning numbers for May 9, 2026
-
Montana31 minutes agoMontana Vista residents question impacts of proposed Pecos West energy project
-
Nebraska37 minutes ago
Nebraska Lottery results: See winning numbers for Powerball, Pick 3 on May 9, 2026
-
Nevada43 minutes ago“We lost a true champion”: Educators, lawmakers remember Joyce Woodhause’s legacy after her death