Harlem Jazz & Soul Food
In Harlem, you can do heritage tours, or gospel tours, swing street tours, hip hop tours, or just make like an ordinary tourist and visit the Harlem Heritage Tourism & Cultural Center on 104 Malcolm X Blvd in the very heart of Harlem. But at the end of the day, Harlem was, and is, about jazz and soul food. And that's something you do after the sun sets. So here's a note of advice - Do the rest of the attractions in New York - Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Ground Zero, etc in the day.
Leave the things to do in Harlem for the late evenings and nights. And don't eat a heavy lunch. If you like it, soul food and iced tea has a funny way of filling up every pore of your body, and you'll be left groaning and sweating if you started out not so hungry. Now there's two ways to do this. Either you seperate the food and jazz, and eat first and then go to a jazz club. Or you find a restaurant which has live jazz.
The point is that in the first case, you can choose the best of both worlds, and enjoy the finest soul food in Harlem and then the best club. On the other hand, if you select a restaurant with live jazz, it might not be as good as a club, but you do get to enjoy soul food with jazz, and linger over your food. And that's one of the secrets of enjoying a night-out in Harlem. Even if there's no live jazz, most restaurants have juke-boxes belting out the stuff, and you can just hang around, enjoying the food and the atmosphere. You know, if more New York hotels started offering restaurants with live jazz, it'd be a heck of a lot more like Chicago. Right now, its restricted to Harlem, and its more of a, how do we say - A cultural statement, rather than entertainment, as it is in Chicago.
Anyway, here's some suggestions. Soul food at Slyvia's (328 Lenox Ave) or Amy Ruth's (113 W 116th St) or Londel's (2620 Frederick Douglass Blvd.). Sylvia's has live music on weekends. Saturdays its a jazz brunch and Sunday is a gospel brunch. You might also want to visit the Apollo Theater (253 W. 125th St.), which ain't nowhere near as good it was before, but its still a heritage tour spot, so you can kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. Another noteworthy place is the Cotton Club (656 West 125th Street), which is not the original one (that one closed a long time ago), but this one still offers up a place to swing with a full band and vocalists.
