Touching the cosmos
NYC's hottest new restaurants, Palace Hotel Tokyo, Hotel Okura, Trunk Hotel, New Orleans real estate, Selvadolce, MORE
ABOUT FOUND • Help Wanted
We’re newly on the search for an editorial assistant. It’s a fractional job requiring 5-10 hours per week, and includes organizing FOUND’s editorial calendar, communicating with contributors, updating FOUND’s website, and if you please, some writing. The position’s remote, though the ideal candidate is based in a FOUND city.
Speaking of, the wheels are turning on new FOUND cities. We’re looking for contributors based in Chicago, New Orleans, Hawaii, plus Sydney and Melbourne. These are very flexible freelance roles that don’t necessarily require a professional writing background — mostly passion about FOUND categories along with impeccable taste. Is that you, or a friend?
We need a paid social guru to manage a small spend.
If any of these opportunities excite you, drop us a line at found@itsfound.com and tell us a little bit about yourself.
REAL ESTATE • First Mover
Speaking of New Orleans, three for-sale properties in the Crescent City that came to market in the last 30 days.
→ 6226 St Charles Ave (Audubon, above) • 9BR/9.2BA, 7992 SF house • Ask: $3.1995M • one block from Audubon Park, 1903 home, first time to market in 75 years • Days on market: 7 • Annual tax: NA • Agent: Shaun Talbot, Talbot Realty.
→ 1812 Palmer Ave (Audubon) • 6BR/5.1BA, 760 SF house• Ask: $3.35M • ‘The Jewel of Palmer,’ fully renovated in 2023-24 • Days on market: 4 • Annual tax: $20,914 • Agents: Neil Maki & Brent Talavera, McEnery Residential.
→ 2727 St Charles Ave (Garden District) • 10BR/10.1BA, 7671 SF house • Ask: $3.2M • currently configured as B&B w/ top-floor owner’s suite, JazzFest posters not included! • Days on market: 29 • Annual tax: $24,340 • Agent: Brittany Picolo, Keller Williams.
GETAWAYS • Tokyo
Tokyo zigzag
The thirsty greenscreeners of luxury travel Instagram would have you believe there’s no other place to stay in Tokyo than the Aman. Sure, the hotel is genuinely excellent. It’s also filled to the brim with some of the world’s most annoying people.
Pan out, and the city’s luxury hotel landscape (if you know where to look) is one of the world’s most interesting. Tokyo’s always rewarded curious travelers looking just past the consensus. Three properties in particular deserve more of that conversation.
At the edge of the Imperial Palace East Gardens, Palace Hotel Tokyo occupies about as prime a position as you can get in town. It’s also perfectly placed for an early morning run among the immaculately-clad Japanese runners on a park loop that holds up in all seasons (start very early in Tokyo’s summertime furnace heat, however). The Palace isn’t trying to impress you with volume or spectacle. It’s old-school, attracting passionate staff who don’t tend to defect to other brands.
That starts with the guest experience: built on restraint and precision, rooted in anticipatory service, with a sense of formality that never tips into stiffness. A quick survey of the breakfast room confirmed that, get this, there are still Western travelers with decorum who understand that Ex Officio outfits from REI might be inappropriate for all occasions. The rooms looking onto the moat and pines are among the finest urban views available at any price point in Asia; be sure to opt for one with a balcony (one category up from the entry room). This is what traditional Japanese luxury looks like when it’s assembled by people who actually believe in it.
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Hotel Okura‘s Heritage wing is a different kind of argument. The lobby was immaculately restored to its original 1962 glory, and remains one of the great interior spaces in the city: pendant lamps, latticed screens, hexagonal motifs running through the furniture, all showcasing postwar Japan’s attempt to synthesize Modernism with its own design traditions (also see: the elegant Seiko world clock). The location is steps from the American Embassy in Toranomon. Given the proximity to the Ginza Line, it’s also among the best in the city for anyone whose Tokyo visit is also a working one.
Selected suites in the Heritage Wing include steam rooms, a grace note easy to overlook in the booking process, and difficult to forget after that first time you climb into it, fresh from Haneda. Take a morning stroll into the perfectly manicured park adjacent to the hotel, then settle in for breakfast at Yamamoto, the hotel’s Japanese restaurant. It’s the kind of meal that makes you reconsider your assumptions about what a hotel breakfast can be: grilled fish, dashi, pickled vegetables, perfectly cooked rice, immaculate staff in traditional dress. There’s a reason Thom Browne stays here.
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On the edge of Yoyogi Park, Trunk Hotel is the outlier in this trio. Where the other two trade in heritage and institutional gravitas, Trunk is unambiguously contemporary, a design-forward property that’s solved a problem most boutique hotels can’t: how to have a genuine point of view that doesn’t get in the way of a good night’s sleep. The pool overlooking the park’s canopy (above) is the knockout differentiator, especially in autumn, when you can watch the leaves turning (let alone the spring bloom).
Rooms are designed by people who appear to have actually stayed in many hotels and thought carefully about what they would change. The location, adjacent to Yoyogi, gives the property a residential feeling miles away from corporate luxury. Eat an excellent Neapolitan pizza on site at L’ombelico, then take a short walk around the corner for an espresso and people-watching at Fuglen. Book early, as the property regularly sells out.
Clearly, this city doesn’t have a hotel problem; far from it. It’s got a recommendation problem. Some of the city’s best stuff isn’t impossible to find, and only requires turning your head just a few degrees past where everyone else is looking. –Colin Nagy
→ Palace Hotel Tokyo (Chiyoda City, Tokyo) • 1 Chome-1-1 Marunouchi • Rates from $451/night.
→ The Okura Tokyo (Minato City, Tokyo) • 2 Chome-10-4 Toranomon • Rates from $650/night.
→ Trunk Hotel, Yoyogi Park (Shibuya, Tokyo) • 1 Chome-15-2 Tomigaya • Rates from $500/night.
GOODS & SERVICES • Big Ticket
Select answers to the FOUND Routine query, What’s a recent big-ticket purchase you love?
→ EYAL SHANI, chef, Good People Group (Miami): I recently purchased the Leica M6 film camera. I’ve always loved Leica as a brand for the quality, the history, and the precision. There is nothing quite like it. I had my eye on the M6 for many years, but I was never generous with myself. Last week, I decided to change that and allow myself to indulge. What makes it special is the way it teaches you to see. You have to train your brain to work manually, to be patient, to be precise, and in doing so, you begin to tell stories in a new way.
→ SYLVIA WHITMAN, bookshop owner, Shakespeare and Company (Paris): A special Paris treat is a facial at AIME.
→ SARAH LEWITINN PATTERSON, co-owner & guest relations, Jacaranda (LA): To be honest, the most recent big-ticket purchase I made was this freaking restaurant. I can’t stress enough how expensive opening a restaurant with your own money can be. I guess before that, I spent the very last of my remaining money on getting 80 units of Botox from my neck up. I asked the nurse to “freeze my fucking face and neck.” Thankfully, that was still good by the time we did our press photos.
GETAWAYS LINKS: The global private club boom has a blind spot • Auberge debuts in Africa with 9 luxe safari lodges and camps • Anticipated new resort Siari, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, opens on Mexico’s Pacific coast • Nantucket v Aspen • The West Country of England’s food renaissance • What’s the current deal with hotel booking sites?
GETAWAYS • Italy
Message in a bottle
Through a gate, up the hill, around the turn, and, suddenly, the Selvadolce estate reveals itself. A breathtaking view of the sea stretching as far as the eye can reach, vines facing the sun, rows lined with bright green grass dotted with small yellow flowers. It leaves you momentarily speechless. As Selvadolce’s proprietor Aris Blancardi puts it: how could you make bad wine from a place like this?
And yet: Blancardi tasted the wines made here before he converted the family vineyard from conventional farming to biodynamic, and couldn’t believe the difference. The same land, the same grapes, yet entirely different expressions. One is shaped by control, almost fear; the other, by trust in nature.
He believes many winemakers in the region, by the French-Italian border, struggle to trust their land. Liguria is not easy, with its steep terraces, dry conditions, and constant exposure. But still, Blancardi says, “If the French had Liguria, they would have made a second Burgundy.” Standing there, facing the sun and the sea, mountains at your back, the idea of the cosmos suddenly feels tangible. –Candice Chemel
GOODS & SERVICES • London
Tactile experience
Present & Correct is obsessively ordered in a way that would make Wes Anderson swoon. The Islington shop lines pens, notebooks, files and rulers with fittingly geometric precision, each item resting in its place as if part of a diagram. Colours are muted, materials chosen for tactility and balance, and everything from paperweights to staplers is arranged to maximise visual symmetry.
There’s a quiet satisfaction in moving through the aisles: The layout imposes calm, and even the smallest decision – testing a pen, flipping a notebook, stroking brush bristles – is, inasmuch as it can be, a bliss-inducing retail experience.
Among the stationery lie little ephemera Easter eggs: 1980s Crayola bags or 1970s Dutch Summer stamps. It shows how mass-produced tools of daily life can, with time, acquire the weight of cultural artefacts. In bringing together the utilitarian and the collectible, the shop underscores how design history is not only preserved in museums but also in the overlooked objects we once used daily (and now in the technological age, perhaps took for granted). –Amy-Rose Holland
AROUND FOUND • Other Notable Intel & Recs
→ NY: In a downtown increasingly crowded with concept restaurant openings, Cleo works as something simpler (and arguably, harder to pull off): a genuinely good restaurant that turns neighbors into regulars, and makes visitors wish they were neighbors.
→ LA: Opened late last year on a quieter stretch of York in Highland Park, self-proclaimed “Japanese brunch bistro” Ine is a polished, attentive izakaya, with modern touches and some restrained fusion from chef Sang Tae. The dining room is a respite on a cool evening. Mostly two tops and bar seats, it provides an intimate setting for close conversation.
→ SF: Sol Bakery owner Marisa Williams grew up in the Haight, then started baking her way through SF. She spent several years mastering croissants in Copenhagen before swinging back to the Bay, where she launched Sol Bakery as a pop-up in 2024. In April, she debuted a permanent space in NoPa. At 8a on a recent Friday, the queue ran down the quiet residential block.
ASK FOUND
One PROMPT for which we seek your intelligence:
What’s your favorite restaurant that you’ve visited on your travels?
More answers or questions? Hit reply or email found@itsfound.com.
RESTAURANTS • The Nines
Hot new restaurants, NYC
The Nines are FOUND’s distilled lists of the best of the best.
Marcel (Upper East Side), mostly French cooking from La Mercerie team inside Breuer Building’s dramatic downstairs setting, intel