Cozy Canal Outing

Little Canal is a cafe and bar on the Lower East Side featuring specialty coffee, breakfast, lunch, bar snacks, dinner and craft beer and wine. The restaurant is located at Essex/Rutgers Street, right next to the F Train stairwell. Big windows on two sides create a fishbowl effect, offering customers a view of the bustling street scene. There’s a turntable behind the coffee bar. You can expect to hear music from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The cafe offers a vegetarian-centric menu with meat options to satisfy the carnivores. Look for egg sandwiches in the mornings and breakfast bowls, sandwiches and salads for lunch and a “vaguely Italian” menu for dinner. The place is built to feel like a comfortable, casual hangout. The owner, Jereme Barnas has lived on the Lower East Side for the past eight years, so he’s got a good sense of the neighborhood.

CW Pencil Enterprise pays homage to the pencil. First established as an online shop by Caroline Weaver in 2014, it opened on the Lower East Side in 2015. The shop is speciality shop dedicated to sharing a love and nostalgia for the freedom of a simple tool. The shop is known for carrying a lot of smaller brands that are really hard to find as well as sharing stories and an immense amount of knowledge about the makeup and history of the things that we sell. People come here for great pencils but also for the story behind them.

Cervo’s is from the people behind Hart’s, a Bed-Stuy classic. The tiny and bustling little place is known for Portuguese/Spanish home cooking. The restaurant offers tasty, unpretentious Mediterranean-inspired dishes. A fish centric menu offering lots of small plates, like sardines with radishes, a “crispy” egg with anchovies, and a plate of clams in a white wine sauce.

Enjoy delicious dishes like their tuna with hazelnuts topped with olive oil, white prawns la plancha and the swordfish conserva.