This secret garden in Soho is a cherry blossom oasis
Admiring the pink petals of cherry blossom trees is a treat in itself, but now you can take that spring splendor to the next level with pink macarons and cherry blossom lattes at Ladurée in Soho. The patio of the French bakery and cafe on West Broadway is packed with cherry blossom trees, which are currently in full bloom.
To get in on the pretty pink experience, book a table in the cafe's outdoor garden. Fair warning that reservations tend to go quickly, though there are still a few available in the coming days. If you miss it this year, set a calendar alert for next April now.
What's magical about the garden is that you can't see it from the street. Even if you've walked through Soho hundreds of times, you might have missed this charming spot. To find it, you'll enter the pistachio green doors of Ladurée, then head past the patisserie counter and through the dining area to the hidden back garden.
Once in the garden, you'll find a collection of marble-topped cafe tables with cushioned green chairs. Look up to gaze at the pink blooms above—if you're really lucky, a gust of wind might even blow some pink petals into your hair. It's all very Instagrammable, so you might just want to wear a pink outfit to match the trees.
Whether you're visiting for brunch, lunch, afternoon teatime or just a sweet treat, the menu is packed with French favorites, like the croque-monsieur, vol-au-vent and the pain perdu french toast. The teatime menu includes pastry, scones, savory tartlets and more. No matter when you visit, ordering macarons is a must—especially a pink one or two. The sweet cherry blossom latte is a perfectly pink accompaniment.
Whether at Ladurée's garden or across the city, the fleeting nature of cherry blossoms is part of what makes this season so special. It's hard to predict exactly when they'll bloom and exactly when they'll be done for the season. So while the blooms are still here, go find some and snap some photos to remember on those blustery cold NYC days that will come back once again.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scottish Sun
an hour ago
- Scottish Sun
Nepo baby with rock star dad and Hollywood A-list mum releases song moaning about being rich – can you guess who she is?
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) IT'S a hard life being part of Hollywood royalty – and this nepo baby pop star-in-the-making wants to make sure everyone knows it. But can you guess who this star's famous family are? 7 Romy Mars sends up life as an A-Lister in her new single Credit: YouTube / Romy Mars 7 The 18-year-old is primped by stylists in the clip Credit: YouTube / Romy Mars 7 The pop singer is the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola Credit: AFP In a cheeky parody of life in the limelight, new single A-Listers gives the highs and lows of being rich, from someone who has lived in it from the start. Romy Mars, 18, dropped the song and music video this week, with A-Lister's lyrics talking about how empty fame and fortune actually is. She croons in the first verse: 'Grant all of my wishes, riches to riches, and one day I'll be bored with everything that I've got. 'Get out of fancy clothes right after they get the shot, Recreate scenes from Titanic on a flying bridge yacht.' Romy knows the feeling better than most thanks to her famous family on both sides of her genetic line. Her mother, Sofia Coppola, is a film director best known for Lost in Translation and Virgin Suicides. She follows in the footsteps of her own father, the legendary Godfather director, Francis Ford Coppola. Romy's father is French musician and Phoenix frontman, Thomas Mars, whom Sofia met on the set of the Virgin Suicides in 1999 but got together with in the late 2000's. The pair have been married since 2011, and have two daughters, Romy and Cosima, both of whom have picked up their creative flair. In the accompanying music video, Romy is seen being primped and pampered for a photoshoot, in between scenes of a runaway marriage, fighting through a crowd of paparazzi cameras, and spending a day by a pool in a mansion. The Bling Ring - Teaser Trailer 'I love this golden sunny West Coast, sceney plastic world,' she sings. 'I miss being a real girl, sure, but I'm not a real girl anymore.' After watching the video, fans commented that it reminds them of Paris Hilton's music career. Her launch into music comes two years after she went viral TikTok, making a vodka pasta sauce while declaring: 'I'm grounded because I tried to charter a helicopter from New York to Maryland on my dad's credit card because I wanted to have dinner with my camp friend.' The video racked up millions of views before it was eventually deleted, with her parents banning the then-16-year-old from having public social media accounts. She's since leaned into her privileged image, releasing an EP last year titled Stuck Up. 7 Romy is one of Sofia Coppola's two daughters Credit: Getty 7 The teen got in trouble at 16 for 'trying to charter a private jet to see her friend' Credit: Getty 7 Romy got her musical flair from her dad, French musician Thomas Mars Credit: Getty
Western Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Western Telegraph
Milford Haven school trip to Normandy brings history to life
Year six students from Milford Haven Community Primary School enjoyed a packed itinerary in the north of the country focused on culture, history and language. The group of 31 pupils, who were based in the magnificent Chateau du Baffy, sampled French delicacies such as frog legs and snails, visited a caramel factory and toured the iconic Mont Saint-Michel. They visited the Bayeux tapestry, Caen and D-Day sites, including Omaha Beach, a German battery at Longues-Sur-Mer and British and American memorials. Head teacher Stephen Thomas said: "This really was a wonderful experience and opportunity for our year six pupils to bring their learning about the war and the cultures of another country to life. "We are embarking on an exciting journey with our curriculum at the school and opportunities such as this are just the start to bring learning to life for our children in Milford Haven." Fundraising efforts reduced the cost of the trip with a bingo evening and a sponsored cycle on spin bikes at Tesco in the town that covered the distance of Milford to Normandy, raising more than £2,000.
New Statesman
5 hours ago
- New Statesman
Sharing a bed with Edmund White
Photo by Peter Kevin Solness / Fairfax Media via Getty Images For a time, Edmund White and I slept in a bed reputed to have belonged to Walt Whitman. We were both living in New York and teaching at Princeton. When we had to stay the night, we were hosted by a friend who lived on the edge of the campus. In his guest room was a dark wood bed purchased in the 1950s from an antique dealer who produced the story of its connection to the 19th-century American poet. Whatever the truth, on our separate nights, Edmund and I both slept in 'Whitman's bed', smoothing the unchanged sheets in the mornings to maintain the fiction that it had not been slept in by anyone else. Eventually, Edmund wrote a poem about it, describing himself, an aged gay novelist, chastely reading Chekhov's stories, and a British PhD student who was the object of his erotic fantasy, both sharing the great gay poet's bed. 'My first poem since 1985', he told me untruthfully in an email. Edmund, who died this week at the age of 85, was perhaps America's greatest living gay writer. The author of more than 30 books, including novels, memoirs, and biographies of Proust, Genet, and Rimbaud, he occupied a unique position in American literature. I first met Edmund in Princeton, where he was a professor of creative writing until 2018, at a weekly dinner that he hosted with the owner of 'Whitman's bed' – the philosopher George Pitcher. The evening before Edmund taught his class, he and his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, would travel down to Princeton, stay with George, and take a group of PhD students out to dinner at a local restaurant. The dinners were a finely honed ritual: George, then in his early nineties, would use a flashlight on his key ring to inspect the menu. Someone would order a bottle of white wine. And the PhD students would attempt to keep up with Edmund and Michael's wit. Edmund was a conversationalist of the kind I associate with 18th-century philosophers: intellectually curious but also a master of levity, ranging from minor French literature to celebrity gossip. He once recalled a dinner with Michel Foucault to which he had also invited Susan Sontag. When she went to the bathroom, Foucault hissed at Edmund: 'Why did you invite her? She only ever talks about work!' Edmund's life informed his literature in a special way. In The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (2025), his last published work, he writes: 'I'm at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them – for me it would be thousands of sex partners.' This is another connection with his 19th-century predecessor, as his Princeton colleague Jeff Nunokawa points out: 'Ed believes with a Whitmanesque unabashedness that sex is an instrument of knowledge.' His promiscuity gives his work an epic quality. His oeuvreis, in one sense, a story of America in the second half of the 20th century: its husbands and hustlers observed in their most intimate moments. In The Loves of My Life, he writes: 'I remember a big Southerner who fucked me as I wiggled my butt to show passion, though he kept saying in his baritone drawl, 'Just lay still, little honey.' More wiggling and he'd say, 'C'mon, baby, just lay still for me.' I thought his bad grammar proved he was a lifelong top. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe There is also an unignorable darkness in Edmund's account of desire. As a child, he was sent to a Freudian therapist who pronounced his sexuality pathological. His most well-known book A Boy's Own Story (1982) features a boy who seduces his teacher, only to betray him. To readers who complained that this was unbelievable, Edmund wrote: 'how could the product of an oppressive culture not be deformed?' In time, he outgrew the belief that his desires were curable. He witnessed the Stonewall riots, in the summer of 1969, after a police raid on a popular gay bar. Recalling the laughter, Edmund called it 'the first funny revolution', but emphasised its importance: 'Stonewall inaugurated an epoch when partners of the same sex could claim, maybe for the first time in history, their common humanity.' Like Whitman and the American Civil War, this revolution required its writers, and Edmund would be one of them. After becoming HIV positive in 1984, Edmund was found to be a 'long-term non-progressor', a condition affecting 1 in 500 people infected with HIV. It meant that he would not die from AIDS. Instead, he watched his friends and acquaintances die, and his own writing became a record of the disease and the political intolerance that met it. In Artforum in 1987, he wrote: 'I feel repatriated to my lonely adolescence, the time when I was alone with my writing and I felt weird about being a queer.' Unlike so many gay writers of his generation, Edmund lived long enough to see himself be celebrated as a legend. He spent his summers in Europe and winters in Florida. He was made the director of creative writing at Princeton, until, according to his friend and colleague Joyce Carol Oates, he realised that he would not be able to spend the first week of every January in Key West. At this point, he 'graciously resigned'. Success, inevitably, brought criticism. A review of The Loves of My Life by James Cahill in The Spectator called it 'lurid.' Edmund had cleverly anticipated this, noting in the book's introduction that 'sex writing can seem foolish, especially to the English.' It is his openness to and about sex that will grant Edmund's work its enduring significance, and which makes it feel vital for an era threatened both by a new puritanism and an even more repressive 'anti-wokeness'. His funny, detailed, historiographical writing makes sex appear motivated more by curiosity than appetite. 'I always feel as if I don't really know people unless I've gone to bed with him,' he claimed. I loved visiting Edmund and Michael's apartment in the West Village, the walls stacked to the roof with books. The dinner conversations were full of warmth and wit and smut. I simply expected to see him again. His long life and many books are something to be grateful for and amazed by. My friend Amelia Worsley, who visited him at home a few days before his sudden death, writes: 'I was amazed when Stan, one of Edmund's first loves, stopped by the apartment. We talked about the glamour of New York in the 1960s and the AIDS crisis that followed. 'It's a wonder that I am still alive,' Stan said to Edmund, 'And a wonder you are too.'' [See also: Alan Hollinghurst's English underground] Related
