“New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down … New York, you’re safer, and you’re wasting my time …” LCD Soundsystem’s Big Apple anthem was my earworm when I was in New York in 2019, about 45 years ago. New York felt stalled. The city that never slept was in a self-induced money coma. It wasn’t just the international flutes at the next table at successive dinners, but NYC was bloaty and predictable. Manhattan had become Succession with Billions dialogue.

Maybe it was Hudson Yards. I couldn’t find a New Yorker without a vested interest with a good word to say about the vacuous midtown project that looked like it could be a mega yacht-chic repurposed Olympic Village for games that never happened. 2019 was also Peak Lists. The city’s food guides had painted themselves into a myopic corner that made New York seem small and samey. During lockdown I missed places that could only exist in that town, mostly diners and bar counters. Maybe it’s down to the lack of tourists but today’s Manhattan is in flux, has shed its samey skin – it’s purring again and unpredictable.

ARRIVAL

After being tortured by aerial shots of the city on TV for the last couple of years, I wanted to be high up, so I stayed in the new MODERNHAUS SOHO, my room being my own private box for the daily Downtown performance. After check-in, go to ATLA. Cosme’s casual little brother isn’t cheap but their food is better. Order light as it’s 3am belly time. Or don’t eat at all, just run from your flight into the arms of their margaritas and chilaquiles, armed with melatonin in your pocket – your first night already a perfect ten.

DAY ONE

Some beloved diners have closed or been gussied up by people who don’t get the certainty of what a real diner brings. HECTOR’S DINER hides under the HIGH LINE and is easy to miss, one of the few remaining independent formica sanctuaries where you start your day sifting through pounds of local broadsheet, with grapefruit in a teensy glass dish that’s too flash for the gaff, followed by home fries and eggs with hot sauce and pints and pints of diner coffee, mixing with meatpackers and spent clubbers. Then head out into that not-Irish sky and play the game of just-one-more-block that ends up being 25,000 steps. If you need a pitstop and some greens with a glass of something white and cold or a cacio e pepe and a negroni, grab a stool at the silver linings of the marble and zinc bar in the mighty VIA CAROTA. Finish your day walking the High Line, starting with your back correctly turned to Hudson Yards. Time your walk to end at the almost too-perfect LITTLE ISLAND, looking from afar like next-gen CGI or part of a model railway set, a new curvy uplifting park that looks like it surfaced from the ocean pristine, ready for its first guest. The park’s two amphitheatres overlook the Hudson and are free business class seats for watching the sun go down over Jersey and light up Manhattan.

While you are watching that sunset you will be staring unbeknownst at your dinner across the river. Just a quick subway ride over to Jersey’s Grove Street, to Brooklyn 20 years ago, will bring you to an extraordinary restaurant. Dan Richer’s RAZZA isn’t just better than anything in NYC but blasphemously as good as anything in Italy. This claim coming from a lad whose last pre-lockdown trip was pizza college in Naples and who years ago spent a few days at the insane World Pizza Championship in the spa town of Salsomaggiore Terme, a deadly serious international pizza competition that is bizarrely linked to Miss Italy. Still, I went for the pizza. If you want a silent supper, then Razza is Jiro Dreams of Pizza. We sipped our negronis but mostly ate in silence – too good to interrupt. Their pizza with fresh mozzarella, local hazelnuts and honey was the single best thing I ate on a trip of many good things.

DAY TWO

Get to the Met and walk in the park. I’m not sure how many times I was that clown who took CENTRAL PARK for granted. Any time of the year is great – mornings are delicious. After dark it’s you and the rustle of a gazillion rats. If you need to vaporise a hangover the joyous KATZ’S DELICATESSEN is still unmatched. Bring a newbie and watch them puzzle their way through an ordering system not unlike a 1950s communist country holding a national lottery. Order the matzo ball soup, a pastrami on rye, ogle those Hulk-like pickles and take communion with the little teaser of pastrami at the counter before sitting down to one of New York’s finest. Sit at the OYSTER BAR in Grand Central between lunch and dinner, watching the staff turn one of the world’s great dining rooms into their canteen for an hour, downing oysters and Bloody Marys before heading upstairs for a dirty martini with free Gothic mansion vibes in the magnificent CAMPBELL APARTMENT.

Stop by Thai Diner, the worthy successor to the late UNCLE BOONS. Most Irish people will see its star dish, Disco Fries, and say aha, curry chips. Irish chippies though don’t do crinkle chips with massaman, red onion, peanuts and coconut cream, or funky Asian train car booths with bamboo walls. From tongue-twisting cocktails, egg sandwiches and buttery roti to chopped chicken liver with pineapple and Thai herbs, this is a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey menu that is perfect and the comfort food anchor this town needed. Around the corner there is a show every evening in MOTHER’S RUIN, where the stars are its bartenders, one a giant Viking lashing out pristine cocktails to a full bar on his tod without a bead of sweat, but on your last night in New York you need to finish on a high.

And oh my is OVERSTORY that high – 800 feet above street level on the 64th floor in a building that opened at same time as the Empire State, and looks like its baby brother. The ambition that I missed in NYC 2019 is spectacularly realised in Overstory, aiming to be the best cocktail bar in the world. Overstory feels on top of it. After lockdowns, with an exquisite drink in my paw, it was almost emotional gazing down at all five boroughs, and an island that has changed again and beautifully stayed the same.

Follow Tim on his travels and on Instagram and Twitter @manandasuitcase