We’ve officially made it to the final week in NYC before I’m back in California for (at least) a month. How surreal is that?

This week, I feel like an eight-year-old sitting in a plastic chair, elbows digging into a wooden desk, balled-up fists holding my head up by each cheek, craning my neck towards the clock hanging above the classroom door, counting down the literal seconds until the last day of school. That final bell, that sweet sense of release, of freedom, the end of one chapter and the start of a new one. Can’t you just feel the childlike anticipation? You know, when something is so close and yet so far away? Are we there yet? Why is it taking so long? My god, it’s so painful…

Except, I’m not waiting for a final bell, nor the last day of school. I’m waiting for an Uber to pick me up and take me to JFK, where I’ll board a plane, fly six hours to LAX, and finally get our wedding week started.

But it’s that same sense of excruciating waiting, knowing that something so wonderful is just days away and yet, you can’t make time pass as quickly as you’d like it to. Instead, you still have silly assignments and remedial errands and tasks you have to complete in order to reach that threshold.

But it’s so close—I can practically taste the wedding cake.

Are you sick of hearing me count down to my wedding yet? Because I know I am.

So, let’s distract ourselves with a little monthly roundup of everything I’ve been loving lately: things I’m eyeing, buying, wearing, eating, watching, reading, and planning for.

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Eyeing:

• DÔEN Bethilde Dress: Every once in a while, DÔEN drops something that ends up haunting my dreams. Right now, it’s this dress. The luminous silk satin, the dainty floral pattern, the lace edges, the just-fancy-enough-but-also-casual cut. If I wasn’t spending all my money on wedding-specific items right now, she’d be coming home with me in a heartbeat. There’s also a chance I may stop at the Montecito Country Mart on my way up to Los Olivos next week, just to see if she’s there IRL... you know, leave it up to fate.

• Reformation Sale: I’m always a sucker for the Ref sale. Of course, I like to wait a few days and let it set in, leaving it up to fate because that 30% off starter always, inevitably, turns into 50% off. I’ll admit, browsing their sale section has been perhaps the only thing to make me feel even remotely excited for fall (though I know once that first leaf changes, I’ll be all-in on the coziness). My top five picks:

  • Calia Top: you can never own too much chocolate brown. The perfect throw-on top.

  • Cashmere Boyfriend Sweater: I’ll never say no to $99 cashmere.

  • Louisa Silk Twill Dress: $99 and could be worn in LA with ballet flats or NYC with boots this fall. I love a bicoastal piece.

  • Anelis Dress: darling little pre-fall transition piece for LA or NYC.

  • Cary High Rise Slouchy Wide Leg Jeans: I miss wearing jeans. It’s been too damn hot. These slouchies look dreamy.

  

• Wedding Perfume: A few weeks ago, I asked all of you for recommendations for a wedding-day perfume (thank you for all of the comments!). After some research and IRL scent testing, I’ve narrowed down my options but have yet to pull the trigger... I’ll let you know where I land (really waiting until the last minute here!):

  • Diptyque Eau Duelle: Bourbon, vanilla, orchid, cypriol

  • Le Labo The Noir 29: Black tea leaves, bergamot, fig, bay leaves, cedarwood

  • Jo Malone English Pear & Freesia: Fresh fruits, freesia, patchouli

  • Dedcool Xtra Milk: Bergamot, white musk, warm amber

Buying:

• Wedding Day Purse: I spent way too much time thinking about my wedding-day purse. Many of my friends didn’t carry one, but I’m such a purse girl. I need my lip gloss, my trusty Mason Pearson comb, and other little bits and bobs on me at all times. After browsing The RealReal for months and losing out on some stunning vintage gems, I decided to take matters into my own hands and find something new that still felt classic (and wasn’t insanely expensive). This deMellier Small Leather Tote ended up being exactly what I was looking for. She just got here over the weekend, and I’m obsessed. The perfect size, understated and timeless, and just structured enough.

• Wedding Weekend Swimsuit: The hotel where we’re getting married has a pool, so of course, I needed to think about my pool outfit in tandem with the one million other in-between outfits I’m wasting way too much headspace on. I settled on the Monday Swimwear Florence One-Piece because it felt chic and flirty but also comfortable enough to wear around relatives. The quality is also so high, I know I’ll have her for a long time. You just can’t go wrong with Monday.

• Wedding Weekend Earrings: I’m not a huge earring girl, so huggies and smaller styles that still feel elevated are important to me. Once I saw these double bezel white sapphire earrings from Aurate, I knew they were a must-get. I can’t wait to wear them (and they’re on sale right now).

• Home Comforts: As we’ve been waiting for the wedding, we’ve minimized our travel and a lot of our plans, keeping us fairly homebound as of late. To keep things feeling bright and summery, I’ve been flooding my house with the scent of heirloom tomato thanks to Flamingo Estate. Their candles (+ their olive oil, balsamic, and basically everything else they make) have a permanent residence in my home.

• Travel Shoes: I linked these White Nike Sneakers a few weeks back, but after wearing them for a few days, it’s safe to say I love them. Such an easy throw-on staple to wear with athleisure or even with a little skirt or denim.

Wearing:

• Aritzia Summer Dresses: I’d been sleeping on Aritzia for a few months, but these dresses brought me back into the fold. As is on-theme with my previous summer recommendations, I’ve been all about light, flowy, billowy dresses for my first sweltering NYC summer. Luckily, these pieces translate quite well to early LA fall (which, as Angelenos know, often feels more like summer than June and even July).

  • Daisychain Satin Dress: on sale for less than $100, comes in a few colors and a few sizes left!

  • Acreage Dress: a few M’s and L’s left across each colorway, I’ve been loving this throw-on piece over the past few weeks!

• Nuuly Summer Dresses: I recommend Nuuly to any girl who has somewhat of a shopping problem like I do. Being able to mix and match pieces and take a gamble on certain styles, knowing you’re only paying a low monthly fee, gives me the freedom to be a little more adventurous with my wardrobe. Of course, that’s not exactly happening right now because I have wedding blinders on and can only seem to pick out things that are white. Nevertheless, here’s my referral code if you want to try it out.

  • Faithfull Clementina Mini Dress: my current favorite LWD.

  • Avantlook Lace Camisole Dress: I’ve rented this dress a few times, and even wore it to our first venue tour back in September 2025. I’m not familiar with the brand, but I keep coming back to this retro-feeling, drop-waist little dream. It also comes in brown and green.

• Gap Summer Essentials: I’ve always been a Gap girl. Their 40% off sitewide sale is going on right now, and I snagged these double-knee barrel pants for our flight to LA—but I’m already living in them. They have other great sale finds right now, which I rounded up into a shelf HERE.

Bicoastal Eating (+ Drinking):

• Los Angeles: A few weeks ago, we spent a long weekend in LA to get some final pre-wedding errands done and visit with family. Of course, we made time for some good bites, too. Here are my top three from the weekend:

  • Hatchet Hall: As previously stated in my guide to West LA restaurants, Hatchet Hall strikes the perfect balance between Southern comfort and classic California, which was exactly what we were looking for during our quick trip back. We hadn’t been since our engagement party in October 2025, and it felt like a lifetime had passed since then. Still, the cornbread tasted just like it always has.

  • Force of Nature: Situated unassumingly above Only The Wild Ones on Abbot Kinney, this is a tiny but totally lovely wine bar with an open-air patio overlooking the street. It was the perfect little spot to sip a glass of wine with my best girlfriends and catch up.

  • Badmaash: Following Force of Nature, we headed to the opposite end of Abbot to try Badmaash, a newly opened Indian restaurant with an impeccable vibe. I loved the naan, the clams, and, of course, the butter chicken. Their wine program was stellar, too.

• New York: Since we know we won’t be back in NYC until late September at the earliest, we’ve been making the most of our NYC bites (and the least of our wedding diets). Some of our favorite bites from the past week:

  • Rolo’s: Had to run it back for the burger one more time before departing. It hit just as much as it always does. If you’re not familiar with how much I love Rolo’s, give my Brooklyn dining guide a read.

  • Esse Taco: Tried out the popular taco spot in our neighborhood on Saturday night, and it didn’t disappoint. I was a big fan of the ribeye steak taco with onions, cilantro, and scallions. Plus, there’s nothing better than a mini Diet Coke.

  • Oh Mercy: Our longtime favorite coffee shop in Greenpoint. We walk here almost every Sunday for a coffee and to split a breakfast sandwich. My two favorites are the Sage & Eggs and the Sweet Revenge, though the latter is quite difficult to split given its messiness. We douse both sandwiches in the hot sauce they offer, too. It’s the best way to start your day.

Watching:

• Lost: My fiancé has long sworn up and down that Lost is one of the greatest shows of all time, and I’ve been resistant to watching it—not because I didn’t believe him, but because I was scared of all the plane-crash fallout. We’re halfway through season two, and I have to admit I’m completely hooked. It has that old, grainy, nostalgic feel of shows you used to sneak a peek at in the TV room after your parents put you to bed. It’s got romance, drama, mystery. At the end of every episode, I say, “Well, we obviously have to watch the next one.”

• Sterling Point: This is currently my solo, guilty-pleasure watch—and I’m loving all the sickeningly sweet teen romance of it all. I’m a sucker for shows like this. Highly recommend.

• Old Vanderpump Rules: Whenever I’m stressed out (like right now), I turn to my favorite comfort show, my security blanket, if you will: reruns of Vanderpump Rules. As chaotic as it is, this show is my safe space. They’re like my super-messed-up LA family.

Reading:

• Famesick by Lena Dunham: I’m also very late to this party (but, y’know, wedding stuff), but I’m such a fan of Dunham’s: her prose, her descriptors, her honesty. There’s such a stark difference between what spectators see and perceive of celebrities and what’s actually going on in their lives. It’s fascinating and it’s heartbreaking. Reading this just proves I’m massively overdue for a Girls rewatch. Perhaps after Lost.

• Everyone Is Lying To You by Jo Piazza: Downloaded this for my various upcoming flights. It came recommended after reading (and loving) Yesteryear. Will report back!

• Home Front by Domino Magazine: Now, I may be biased because of my career, but I’m a huge fan of everything Domino Magazine produces. Their Substack, Home Front, has been such a wonderful resource for design inspiration, trends, and tips—both professionally and personally. If you’re a design or interiors lover, this is a must-follow.

Traveling:

• Admittedly, my own travel planning has taken a bit of a backseat (for obvious reasons), but we have a few seasons and trips on the horizon that will be here sooner than we realize. So, I’d love to ask you all, my lovely community, for recommendations for the following spaces and places!

  • NYC in the fall: We’ll be back in NYC around late September/early October, and I’m hoping to squeeze out as much cozy, autumnal joy as I can before the big, bad winter returns (I’m not ready). Please feel free to recommend any boutique hotels, day trips, or activities you think are worthwhile from September through November!

  • Paris in November: We’re going to Paris with some of our closest friends for Thanksgiving this year, and I couldn’t be more excited. I haven’t been back since 2022, so I’d love to hear any must-hit restaurants, bars, vintage shops, or anything else you’d recommend.

  • Japan in Spring 2027: Once the wedding wraps, we’re going to start (slowly) turning our attention towards our honeymoon in Japan. This is an area I’ve researched very little, so I’m very open to any recommendations, must-visit pockets or neighboring towns, or anything else! We’re so excited.

Now, I’m not sure how much more time I’ll have to write once the wedding kicks off, so I’m going to try to pump out as much as I can over the next week and a half. Not because I’m trying to bombard you, but because this little outlet keeps me sane. Feel free to leave a comment with any further recs, wisdom, or anything in between!

xx

HR

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It was July 2024 when we first discovered Los Alamos, California. I use the term “discovered” loosely because this little town was already a destination-level mecca for immaculate hospitality, and because it was actually suggested to us by my fiancé’s brother and sister-in-law, who had long been visiting for day trips (they have always given us the best recommendations).

The first time we visited, it was the day after the Fourth of July, and we had time to kill over a long weekend. The trip came together on a whim as we were searching for a new region of California to explore after we’d wrung out every last golden drop that Santa Barbara proper had to offer us.

What we didn’t know was that this one-road pocket of the Central Coast would become so much more than a casual escape for us; how deeply we would fall for its unpretentious charm, its warm sense of community, its unparalleled food and wine scene. Very quickly, Los Alamos became woven into the fabric of our lives.

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Nestled in the Santa Ynez Valley about an hour up the highway from Santa Barbara, Los Alamos is just one square mile in size, but it puts every last inch of it to good use. While it’s no longer much of an if-you-know-you-know type of spot (Vogue even wrote about it in 2022), it still feels like California’s best-kept secret, like you’ve stumbled upon something glorious, as if you were being rewarded for taking a wrong exit on your way up the coast.

Los Alamos is just cool. Its historic Western roots blend beautifully with its laid-back, understated aesthetic. It’s equal parts rustic and relaxed, elevated and easy. While it feels fresh in many ways, so much of its energy harkens back to a simpler time—back when everything you needed was on the same block, back when road trips were the entire vacation. It’s nostalgia in the present. It’s the best of California, all bottled up like the first sip of natural wine on a warm day.

I’ve lost count of how many days we’ve spent there. We’ve brought back our siblings, friends from LA, friends from out of town, and of course, have gone many times just the two of us. While I have many “happy places” on this earth, Los Alamos sits quite high on that ever-growing list.

I would recommend Los Alamos to pretty much anyone, but here’s what I think it’s best for: if you live in LA and are looking for an escape that feels just far enough away without having to commit to an airplane; if you’re already in Santa Barbara for the 100th time and are looking for another way to spend a Saturday; if you have friends visiting from the East Coast who want to see something completely unlike what they have at home; if you’re in a relationship that’s getting serious and are looking for a destination for your first trip away; if you like great food and great wine; if you’re a human being who enjoys a really good weekend.

And while there is truly no bad option in Los Alamos, I’ve rounded up my absolute favorite places to stay, eat, drink, and linger below.

Stay:

Skyview Los Alamos: The very first glimpse you’ll catch of Los Alamos as you pull off the highway comes from the towering yellow MOTEL sign that signals you’ve arrived. The sign, and the Skyview itself, sit perched above the rest of town, with sweeping views of sprawling vineyards on either side. The Skyview is your quintessential roadside stay: equal parts retro and contemporary, blending the best bits of vintage Americana with elevated hospitality. For a reimagined motel originally built in 1959, it’s refreshingly high-end. The rooms are spacious and thoughtfully designed, and every last detail is considered, from the artisan goods in the minibar to the striped chaise lounges on the back patio. The adults-only pool is its own little sanctuary, dotted with striped pool floats and scalloped turquoise umbrellas. You can order drinks directly to the pool from the property’s restaurant, Norman, and spend an entire day soaking up the Central Coast sun. It’s a bucket-list stay, in my humble opinion.

Alamo Motel: The first time we visited Los Alamos, we stayed at the Alamo Motel. This is another lovely (and affordable) option for visitors, and I’d especially recommend it for anyone who plans to, well, indulge a little irresponsibly in the town’s natural wine scene, because it’s directly across the street from Bell’s, Bodega, and practically everything else you’d want to be within walking distance of. Owned by Shelter Social Club, the team behind some of my favorite California boutiques, the Alamo Motel is another roadside stay that is no-frills but very well executed. Similar to something you might see in a film about Route 66, there are only a dozen or so rooms arranged in a U-shape, with parking directly in front of each.

Eat:

Bell’s: I’d put Bell’s within the top five of my all-time favorite restaurants. With a five-year Michelin Star run and a female head chef, Bell’s is a family-run French-meets-ranch bistro tucked inside a historic, chalky-white building standing proudly on Bell Street. To me, it feels like the crown jewel of Los Alamos.

The interior of the restaurant feels impeccably imperfect: beautifully done, but not overly manicured, with worn checkerboard flooring lined with beautiful vintage rugs and a flurry of copper cookware hanging above the kitchen. Bell’s offers a seasonal, prix fixe menu, so the meal will be slightly different every time you go, but you can (almost) always expect it to begin with Santa Barbara uni and finish with a knockout steak au poivre.

When we escaped LA during the Palisades fires, we booked my fiancé’s birthday dinner here at the last minute during a week of unrest. The staff gave him an extra dessert and a not-for-sale staff sweatshirt that he still wears proudly. That’s the kind of people they are.

My tip: make sure to book a few weeks in advance, because this place fills up quickly. And while the lunch menu is amazing (their egg salad sandwich is famous), I’d always recommend trying for dinner.

Priedite BBQ: While I have dozens of photos of this spread, I figured one singular shot would be enough to sell you on Priedite. Located inside Bodega Los Alamos (more on them later) is a weekend pop-up serving an array of meats smoked over local oak, from brisket tacos to house-made ranchero sausage, accompanied by some of the best sides you’ve had in your life: picante pickles, fennel-jalapeño slaw, and tallow tortillas.

Priedite takes its influences from California ranch culture, and surely does it justice. What I love about Priedite is that, while there’s often a long line, the bar at Bodega is already open, so you can sip a natural wine or a cold beer while you wait. It makes the whole experience feel slow-paced but not antsy. If you can, do this for lunch and save Bell’s for dinner. It’s a 1000/10 every single time.

Hot tip: get in line no later than 10:45. It opens at 11, but queuing up beforehand will guarantee you get your food sooner, even if the waiting itself isn’t so bad (because the line can stretch well out the front door of Bodega and leave you hungry).

Bob’s Well Bread: Bob’s is the ultimate next-day savior. While we rarely hit it on our way into town given the lineup of food we have coming for us, we always, always stop there on our way out. This small-town bakery feels reminiscent of a simpler time, when the cashier stops to chat with every single patron (yes, it does make the line move a little slower, but it’s part of the experience) and each pastry is made fresh that morning. We love their scones, bagels, cinnamon rolls, and, of course, their coffee. The best hangover cure.

Drink:

Bodega: If Los Alamos is my happy place, Bodega is the epicenter. If I were a millionaire, I would buy a house with a big backyard and hire a landscaper to recreate the exact vibe of Bodega at my house.

Once the site of a 1920s farmhouse, the masterful team at Companion Hospitality transformed the space into an open-air beer and wine garden with an unparalleled level of understated charm I’ve found in very few other places. There’s always light music playing, there’s always a place to sit, there’s a mini bocce ball court in the corner, and there’s a windowless, white-walled greenhouse filled with fragrant flowers and plants.

Swaying oak trees tower over you, providing reprieve from the inland California sun. The staff is warm and friendly and always asks where you’re visiting from and why you’re in town. The natural wine by the glass is just the right amount of funky. Every time I sit down at Bodega, I get the goofiest smile on my face. I just love it there. I could spend an entire day there, and at times, I have.

We’ve driven up for their outdoor movies and game nights and even wanted to have our wedding welcome party here (it was sadly booked). That isn’t stopping us from grabbing a drink there ahead of our rehearsal dinner… guess where that will be?

Lo-Fi Wines: Lo-Fi is a must-do every time we’re in town. You may have been able to guess by the name of this wine label, but the minute you walk into their intimate tasting room, you’re greeted by the sweet sound of vinyl spinning on a retro record player. But it’s not just the music that makes this place special—each of their wines is superb, and every last bottle has a backstory.

The tasting room manager is always down for a deep conversation, no matter the topic, and he’ll tell you every last little detail about each sip you’re enjoying. We’re wine club members here and bring bottles of Lo-Fi to friends often, whether for birthdays or dinner parties. Our personal favorite is the Cabernet Franc. My fiancé brought a bottle to San Ysidro Ranch to have them pour right after we got engaged, so it’s especially sentimental to us.

Dovecote Estate Winery: Unassumingly tucked amongst the valley’s rolling hills and vineyards, pulling into Dovecote’s estate feels like stepping into another world: an almost dream-like, blindingly beautiful blue-and-green landscape, with small covered seating areas designed to keep the number of guests low.

Often when we visit, there are no other patrons, other than perhaps another party arriving as we’re wrapping up. The staff keeps it this way, intentionally intimate, with more classic wines if the funky stuff isn’t quite your speed. If you’re willing to venture a few minutes outside of town, Dovecote is well worth it.

Bar Alamo: While you won’t miss walking by Bar Alamo when you’re in town, it might be easy to not realize that you can actually hang out there. Where the Alamo Motel really shines is its communal courtyard, centered around a charming little cabin-style bar surrounded by fire pits, board games, and card games.

Sitting outside the Alamo Motel is one of my favorite in-between moments while visiting: a slow afternoon, drink in hand, and nowhere else you need to be, watching other visitors and locals breeze by with smiles on their faces. Something about sitting there reminds me of camping or being at summer camp as a kid, which, if you know me, you know is one of my favorite forms of nostalgia.

Activities:

Vintage Shopping: If you find yourself getting sick of all the eating and drinking (yeah, right), Los Alamos also offers a variety of vintage markets, complete with home decor, retro finds, gifts, and everything in between. We usually take at least an hour or two to peruse every time we visit. We’ve bought many loved ones gifts here (our nephew has a small blue elephant sculpture we found there in his bedroom), and we have a framed sketch of the Santa Barbara Courthouse that we found nestled inside our favorite shop, Sisters Gifts and Home. Even if you’re not a big natural wine fan, Los Alamos worth the visit if you’re a treasure hunter—it’s an antique lover’s paradise.

Neighboring Towns: What’s great about Los Alamos is that you’re only a stone’s throw away from the other pretty pockets the valley has to offer. Drive ten minutes and you’re in Los Olivos (which I’ll be writing about soon), where you can find one of my other favorite restaurants, Bar Le Cote, Bell’s seafood-forward sister restaurant. Solvang is nearby, too, offering a fun, more kitschy version of Wine Country, designed to look more like a Danish village than a place in California. Alisal Ranch is out there, too, a gorgeous, sprawling property with more adventurous activities like horseback riding. There’s also the town of Santa Ynez proper, where you’ll find famous institutions like S.Y. Kitchen and Maverick Saloon (a must-hit for line dancing whenever we want to keep the party going).

Essentially, there is so much more to uncover and explore the more time you spend on the Central Coast.

Neighboring Wineries: Trust me when I say, you don’t need to get into a car once if you’re planning to spend a few days in Los Alamos. You can focus your itinerary on that small stretch, utilize the bikes at the Skyview, and stay sweetly inside your little bubble for a few days. But if you’re looking to squeeze the most out of the experience, there are a few other neighboring wineries I’d recommend:

• Presquile: A gorgeous (and gigantic) family-owned property in the Santa Maria Valley, we’ve been there a number of times for their cool-climate wines. We also love grazing on their signature chef’s mezze in between our larger meals.

• Brave & Maiden Estate: We visited this stunning, small-production winery during one of my best friend’s bachelorette parties up in the region. It’s quite fun for groups, with some serious winemaking chops—a great option for more classic wine lovers.

• Dragonette: A town staple, this tasting room is nestled in the heart of Los Olivos and offers a great afternoon tasting. It’s a perfect stop if you’re strolling through town and want to sit back and relax for a bit.

If it isn’t abundantly clear at this point, I love Los Alamos like I love my own home. Being so far away from it in NYC hasn’t been easy, but we’ll be there very, very soon for our wedding festivities. I can’t wait.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve been and what your experience was, and if you haven’t, let me know if this might inspire you to visit!

xx

HR

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I wouldn’t say that I’ve been dreaming of my wedding day since I was a little girl. Weddings were a foreign concept to me; they weren’t something I regularly attended or spent much time imagining. Sure, I dreamt about being married—rose-colored thought bubbles floating above my head filled with innocent ideas about the kind of guy I’d end up with. But the wedding itself was never quite on my radar. I guess I just didn’t have a frame of reference.

Of course, as I got older—and eventually met my fiancé, who I knew pretty early on I’d probably spend the rest of my life with—the concept of an actual wedding started to take up real estate in my daydreams. Weddings became a topic of conversation, as they naturally do. We attended both of his brother’s weddings together. I watched as all my young 20-something best friends became fiancées and then wives. Then, all of a sudden, all I could think about was my own wedding. It became something of an unhealthy fixation.

And now, here I am, three weeks away from my welcome party, holding on for dear life, ready to get this show on the damn road.

I want to be very honest here, and say that in my opinion, the wedding industrial complex has somewhat gone off the rails. No part of having a traditional “wedding” is easy or affordable. It’s a months-long (if not years-long) process with expanding budgets, impossible expectations, and one million teeny, tiny decisions.

I’ve had to embrace it, because frankly, it’s just the way things are now—and because I know that having a capital-W Wedding is an incredibly beautiful, wonderful privilege. But I won’t lie to any newly engaged women and say that wedding planning is a total breeze.

A wedding asks a lot of you. So many people have varying expectations of you, and so many questions you’d never even think to ask. For some, it can bring up uncomfortable family dynamics. At a basic level, it’s a tall order to ask people to travel far and wide just to celebrate you.

And while I’m not going to sugarcoat the complex layers and emotions that go into wedding planning, I am here to tell you that, if you’re someone who dreams of having a big wedding, just do it. Difficult or not, it will be one of the most worthwhile experiences you’ll ever pour your energy into.

Here’s the thing: despite it all, I don’t physically think I could be more excited for the last weekend of August to finally arrive. I mean that. Even if I tried, I don’t think there’s a bone in my body that isn’t already rattling with nerves and anticipation and overzealous joy. Our wedding is so us—every last detail was considered, because that’s just who we are, and I cannot wait to see my friends and loved ones notice all the small things and go, “Oh my god, I had a feeling you were going to do this…”

I already know it’s going to be the best day of our lives.

I’m also very lucky to have a supportive village of women around me; friends and loved ones who graciously bestowed their wisdom throughout this tumultuous season of life. Now that the finish line is finally in sight and I can feel the wedding creeping around the corner, I figured I’d round up the advice they gave me and pass it along to anyone who’s newly engaged or soon-to-be engaged, just in case it’s helpful to hear from someone who’s in the thick of it.

• Put you and your partner’s wishes first

  • Once the high of the engagement wears off and you start to sit down for wedding planning, you are going to find yourself faced with a flurry of questions from every angle. What’s your timeline? Two summers from now might work best for me… What location? I’m not sure if I can travel internationally next summer… Where do you want to do your bachelorette? We should go here… Oh my god, it would be so cool if you did this… This dress would look so good on you… Take it all with a grain of salt. Your people are excited for you, as they should be. And input is helpful when it’s welcomed! But don’t let any knee-jerk reactions, requests, or assumptions guide your initial planning process. Sit down with your partner and really discuss what you envision, not what people expect of you. And if your partner has a specific idea, let him (or her) at least explore it—don’t go shooting things down until you evaluate the possibilities. Even if you have a specific dream, remember that it’s just as much their day as it is yours.

• Be very upfront about budget

  • Before you commit to anything—seriously, anything—chat with your partner, your parents, or anyone else who might be contributing about what they feel comfortable putting forth. This can get off the rails fast, so having financial transparency is probably the most important thing you can do.

• Venue first, everything else after

  • The venue will inform every last tiny detail that goes into the wedding weekend, so start there. Whether it’s a beach, a ranch, or a high-end hotel, those all call for different decor, different food, and, of course, a different dress. If you’re someone who’s detail-obsessed (like me), you’ll want to ensure that the small decisions honor the big ones to keep the wedding feeling seamless and cohesive.

• Be prepared for “no” RSVP’s—even from people who might surprise you

  • This was a big one for me. Everyone, and I mean everyone, who got married before me told me, “You’ll be surprised at the number of people who can’t make it and their reasons why.” I didn’t buy it. Some drop-off, sure, but there were a few no’s that were really hard for me to get over. Silly as it sounds, I had to remind myself that not everything revolves around my wedding and that it’s okay for people to have other priorities. Try to keep your ego in check, even if it’s painful.

• Give back to your people where you can

  • Your friends show up for you more consistently during the wedding era than they probably do at any other time in your life. They book more flights, hotel rooms, Airbnbs, and excursions; they cover the bar tab at your bachelorette; they dress in specific (and oftentimes silly) themes. If you’ve been a bridesmaid, you know. And if you’ve been a bride, you know even more. Your people are bending over backwards for you. Try to find ways to honor them back—whether it’s an actually thoughtful bridesmaid proposal gift or a goodie bag on the bachelorette, or something more substantial, like paying for their hair and makeup or their bridesmaid dress. Finding little moments throughout the process to give back to my girls has been very important (and frankly, rewarding) to me.

• Give yourself a “deadline” to be done with wedding planning

  • A friend told me this the other day, and I hadn’t even thought about it until she said it. “Pick a day,” she said, “a week or two before the wedding, where you decide that you’re done. You stop looking at emails, reading contracts, going over itineraries, and you just lay back and trust that it’ll all go to plan. You’ll go into the wedding week a lot more present and excited if you’re not obsessing over the little things.” It was like a lightbulb when off in my head. A deadline! I can work with that. I immediately put the day in my calendar. I will be having at least a few glasses of wine on that day.

• Practice being present beforehand

  • Multiple brides have told me this. Practice turning off your phone and being present in your conversations at casual dinners or group hangs (more than you normally are). Do everything you can to bake reminders into your mundane daily routine to slow down, be present, and take mental pictures. Try doing this a few times before the actual wedding day—because once the day comes, if you haven’t practiced being present, you’ll be more focused on “trying to be present” than actually doing it. Mind games, people. Mind games.

• Do not leave your partner’s side on the big day

  • This piece of advice seemed silly to me until we had our engagement party. We were both running around like we were crazy, making sure we were chatting with everyone as equally as we could, and naturally found ourselves gravitating towards our own people. Of course, you try to co-mingle where you can, but we looked up and realized the party was almost over and we hadn’t even so much as held hands. I’m obviously not going to handcuff him to me at the wedding, but we are going to do our best to greet our guests together, so that we make the memories together.

• Your energy sets the tone for the weekend

  • This one is crucial, and I’ve heard it many times. If the bride and groom seem stressed, their guests are going to be stressed. It’s not always easy, but just try to have fun. This is a party for a reason. Every last detail was chosen by you, so enjoy it! Don’t worry about always looking composed for the photographer or making sure the schedule stays on track to the minute. The better time you’re having, the better time your guests will have. I don’t always need a reminder to let loose, but in this case, it’s been a helpful guidepost.

• Don’t focus on the “regrets” or negatives post-wedding

  • TikTok will tell you that you need to make a list of “everything you would have done differently” at your wedding. Trust me, I’ve watched dozens of those videos. But a friend wisely told me recently: don’t make your own list. That list will be what sticks with you when people ask about the wedding, not the amazing memories. It is inevitable that certain things will go awry. But those things make for great stories, and the tiniest details that get missed are never noticed by your guests. Try focusing on everything you loved the most in the week after your wedding, when the inevitable emotional comedown comes knocking at your door.

If you’ve received any pre-wedding advice that I didn’t cover here, please comment or message me! I’d love to hear it (and potentially add it to this running list).

Wish me luck—we’re in the home stretch now!

xx

HR (soon to be HP)

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I can’t remember a month in my life that has gone by faster than July 2026.

One minute I was in the Hamptons on my company’s brand trip, and the next I was checking the calendar and realizing we’re less than a month (!!!) away from our wedding weekend officially kicking off.

Time is a thief that only becomes more masterful with age.

There is something about July that feels so fleeting, so wonderfully finite, that you can hardly wrap your arms around it before it’s already slipping into August. It’s a reminder to slow down and savor the chapter you’re in, because if you don’t, it’s gone in an instant.

July is a crisp white t-shirt, a cold glass of lemonade; a bursting firework, a burning campfire. It begins in summer and ends in summer. There’s no transition, no anticipation of another season waiting around the corner. The ocean is already warm, your skin is already sun-kissed. You don’t have to settle into anything except a beach chair and a good book.

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Usually, July brings many adventures and travels for me—so many places to go, things to see, people to visit. But this was the first month in what feels like forever that I did not set foot on an airplane. My July was entirely devoted to New York and its surrounding areas; an exercise in sitting still.

We intentionally adapted to a slower pace this month as we approach our wedding. What will I have to talk about when this whole wedding thing is over?! Aside from all of the last-minute details, decisions, and calls with our planner (I saw someone on TikTok refer to wedding planning as having homework again, which, yes), we wanted to head into our wedding week feeling as healthy and refreshed as possible.

For us, that meant working out daily, committing to fewer plans, and, of course, less drinking.

That isn’t to say we didn’t make the most of our July. Our version of laid-back is probably someone else’s version of jam-packed. Something my fiancé and I have in common is that we don’t particularly love to sit still (unless it’s the end of a long work day and we’re crashed on the couch with a show to binge). We’ve just had to be intentional in savoring these final bits of normalcy before we throw the biggest and most intricate party of our lives.

Because once the wedding arrives, we’re officially on a hot streak: Los Angeles to Los Olivos to Mexico, back to LA, back to Santa Barbara, and back to LA once more. We likely won’t be back in New York until early October (such is life as a semi-bicoastal).

So, here’s everything I did, ate, bought, and enjoyed during this past lovely, slow July:

Activities:

• 4th of July in Connecticut: My first East Coast 4th! We took the train out to my fiancé’s friends’ house, had lobster rolls and a dozen oysters for lunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon on the water. We docked at beach bars and had one final little “hurrah” before tightening the reins on our pre-wedding indulgences.

• World Cup Madness: I’ll be the first to admit that I’m somewhat of a bandwagon fan, no matter the sport. Still, crouching in a crowded bar and jumping up and down in glee when the team you’re rooting for scores a goal is an activity I’ll never decline. Something I’ve learned to love about New York City is that every event, big or small, becomes a group activity. If you want to get involved in something—whether it’s sports, art, culture, or food—there are one million other people looking to do the exact same thing. It’s the least lonely place I’ve ever lived.

• Writing, Writing, Writing: My goodness, I can’t even express how grateful I am to have started Substack at the end of June. My only regret with starting this newsletter is not starting it sooner. This month, I gained over 200 subscribers (which may sound like a small number, but imagine 200 people showing up in a room to hear you share your thoughts!). I’ve never felt so creatively energized or so uplifted by a supportive community. Thank you all for being here.

• The Odyssey: On one particularly rainy Saturday, we went to see The Odyssey in theaters—which, say what you will about Nolan’s adaptation, I absolutely loved. I was captivated the entire time and so moved by each performance (hot take, but Tom Holland stole the show for me). It reminded me how fascinated I’ve always been by Greek mythology, and a friend recommended Circe by Madeline Miller as a must-read after seeing the film. It’s downloaded on my Kindle and waiting for me this week.

Dining:

• Bar Susanne: One thing I’ve loved about slowing down is allowing ourselves to stumble upon new places instead of planning weeks in advance. A few weeks ago, we snagged a Friday reservation at Bar Susanne, a newly opened raw bar tucked along the waterfront just beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. Their menu is seasonal, but the seafood tower was a standout—I especially loved the Razor Clam Ceviche topped with passionfruit jelly.

• Rude Mouth: Okay, okay, I said less drinking, not no drinking at all, okay? I met a friend for happy hour at Rude Mouth in Williamsburg and instantly fell in love with the back patio. I asked our waitress so many questions about how long they’d been open and whether they ever host events that she offered to connect me with their marketing manager. (I assured her I was just genuinely curious because I loved the space so much.) I opted for a chilled red while my friend sipped a funky orange, and we split the burrata, topped with haricot verts and chardonnay vinaigrette, served alongside a delightful baguette. A perfect little Thursday evening. I’ll definitely be back.

• Lilia: With no plans on a Friday night, my fiancé and I found ourselves doom-scrolling Resy to see what we could snag for dinner. We’d been meaning to try Lilia ever since we moved here—another masterpiece from Missy Robbins and her expert team—but had never made it off the notify list. Then, suddenly, a 7:30 p.m. reservation opened up. We booked it and practically ran over. From the grilled clams with breadcrumbs and Calabrian chili to the grilled artichoke with orange and Parmigiano, every bite was better than the last. We ordered three pastas—the Mafaldini, the Sheep’s Milk Cheese Agnolotti, and the Lamb Sausage Fettuccine—then finished with soft vanilla ice cream drizzled in extra virgin olive oil and topped with sea salt and honey. Everything you could possibly want from a meal.

• Margot: We ventured out to Fort Greene to join some close friends for a Saturday night dinner at Margot, a neighborhood restaurant with a lovely seasonal menu. The energy was fantastic, and the staff were warm and knowledgeable. My favorites were the heirloom tomatoes with stone fruit and yuzu kosho, the Zuni chicken with pine nuts, arugula, Castelfranco, and panzanella, and the hanger steak with charred cipollini onions and brown butter vinaigrette.

July Product Favorites:

• 1. DOEN x Garrett Leight: I’ve been eyeing these for months and might finally pull the trigger before the wedding. Tried them on in-store and they’re perfect. They’re almost sold out, so if you’ve been considering them, don’t wait.

• 2. Aurate New York Tennis Bracelet: I’ve been mapping out my wedding weekend jewelry and was pleasantly surprised by the price of this beauty. Instant must-have.

• 3. Sea New York Carlotta Bag (White): Picked this out for wedding weekend as well. Such a fun little finishing touch to my various outfits.

• 4. Abbode Bridal Waffle Pouch: I got this as a bridal shower gift and I’m delighted every time I look at it. Seeing my (almost) new last name sitting on my bathroom counter has eased me into the change of it all. It’s a lovely little teaser for what’s to come.

• 5. White Madewell Mini: I’ve linked this before, but only because it’s that good. I’ve worn it everywhere this summer—dinners, walks, errands. It won’t fail you.

• 6. MERIT Five-Minute Morning: These are pretty much the only beauty products I’m using right now. Everything MERIT makes works so well on my skin, and this set is perfect for looking put together for Zoom calls without feeling overdone.

• 7. gorjana Banks Huggies: I’m such a gorjana girl when it comes to earrings. My everyday jewelry is pretty simple, so having everyday hoops I never have to think about is the best. These are just slightly different in shape from a normal hoop, which makes them feel elevated and classic but not overly basic.

• 8. Nike® Moon Shoe OG women's sneakers (White): I was due for a fresh pair of white sneakers anyway, but figured wedding season was the best excuse. Spotted these at J.Crew in Williamsburg and was immediately sold.

And just like that, we’re in wedding month!

The next few weeks will probably pass even faster than July did. I’m trying incredibly hard to slow down and savor it all because, if there’s one thing my friends and every former bride have told me, it’s how quickly it all flashes by. I can’t wait to bring you along for it.

Good news for my Angelenos, too: we’ll be back in California for most of August and September before eventually making our way home to New York in October. So if you’ve been missing a little West Coast content around here, don’t worry—it’s on the horizon.

Until next time, don’t let August get away from you.

xx

HR (soon to be HP)

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I remember the first time I ever felt homesick. I was eight years old, spending a week at sleep-away summer camp on Orcas Island in Washington State.

The feeling didn’t set in instantly. The first day was filled with childlike adrenaline, the kind that makes it feel like you’re the oldest and wisest you’ve ever been, like you couldn’t possibly ever be more mature. I said goodbye to my parents, boarded a charter bus with a group of kids my age, took a ferry across the crystal blue Pacific Northwest waters through the San Juan Islands, and settled into a wood-paneled cabin with no electricity, no doors, and no one I knew.

At first, I was enthralled—so completely captivated by that liberating sense of isolation. My parents had no idea what I was up to, what my schedule looked like. I looked into the eyes of strangers and realized it was the first time no one knew anything about me, no preconceived notions or childhood memories. I could be whoever I wanted. And I absolutely loved it.

After a jam-packed day of orientation and getting to know my bunkmates, I woke the next morning to the sound of waves washing gently against the rocky shoreline, the wind rustling the sun-bleached grass, sunlight slipping through the cabin windows.

I can still smell that summer, even now.

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As we settled into the dining hall for breakfast, plastic pitchers of lemonade flying across the round wooden table, our counselors walked us through the week’s itinerary: horseback riding, ropes courses, bonfires, talent shows, kayaking across the Sound. Everyone was giggling with glee at the freedom we’d been bestowed. It was like we’d gotten away with something.

And then it hit me. I still had six full days before I’d see my family again. I had no way of contacting them unless there was an emergency. At that point in my life, it was the longest we’d ever been apart.

I felt something foreign take over—a sharp, unfamiliar twinge in my chest, a heaviness I’d never known. I couldn’t quite place it. It felt like my body and my mind were in two different places, like some primal instinct was pulling me backward, urging me toward my house, my parents, my stuffed green turtle that I took everywhere with me at the time; something, anything, that felt familiar and safe.

I confided in one of the camp counselors, who seemed impossibly wise (though she couldn’t have been much older than eighteen). She listened patiently as I stumbled through a jumbled, half-baked explanation of what I was feeling.

“You’re just homesick,” she said, her fabric lanyard covered in enamel pins swaying as she smiled. “It’s normal, especially for first-time campers. It’ll go away after a day or two.”

Homesick. I’d heard the word before, of course, but until that moment, I’d never needed to place it in the context of my own life.

She was right. Even at eight years old, I understood that what I wanted wasn’t really to leave camp. I just wanted the certainty of home. I wanted to collapse onto my own bed, surrounded by my things, knowing everything I needed was just down the hall.

Back then, homesickness was so black and white: the home it referred to was literally my childhood house, and the sickness was that feeling of being far away from it.

Of course, by the end of camp, the homesickness had dissipated. So much so that I returned every single summer until I was fifteen.

Then I was sixteen, and along came long-weekend trips with friends to Lake Chelan, where we sneaked sips of decades-old liquor and listened to endless streams of country music as we worked on our sun-tans. That summer, I even spent two weeks in Europe with a very posh friend of mine and her British family, roaming the overcast hills of East Sussex in England and wandering through La Rambla in Barcelona, all but unaccompanied.

With every bigger, longer, more momentous trip, I eventually got good at leaving. I even sought it out. I loved exploring, being a nobody in a new city; seeing all of the different faces, spaces, and places the great big beautiful world had to offer.

But then it was time for a more permanent kind of change: college.

I was very excited to go to college. I got into the University of Colorado on my eighteenth birthday and committed the very same day. I had no real ties to the state of Colorado or to Boulder when I chose it. Being completely honest, I think I fell in love with the Flatirons mountains and let my gut feeling guide me. It was one of the first times in my life that I fully gave in to my instincts and took a leap of faith without really knowing how it would work out.

What I didn’t properly grasp at the time was that college would be my first adventure without a fast-approaching expiration date. Four years, at a minimum. I don’t think I truly appreciated the severity of it until I was actually standing on campus that August.

I’ll never forget the feeling of watching my parents and my sister get into their rental car and drive away from my dorm after helping me unpack. It was similar to that liberating sense of isolation I first felt at summer camp as a child—but this time, I was (legally) an adult, and there was no one coming to pick me up in a week. Starting then, and forever after, I never had to tell anyone where I was going, what I was doing, or when I’d be coming back. I was completely and entirely untethered.

Also like my arrival at summer camp, the first few weeks of college were so beautifully disorienting that I didn’t have a single second to process my new reality. I was lucky enough to meet my best friends almost immediately. We quickly fell into a rhythm: classes, dining halls, parties. Before I knew it, it was mid-September.

I woke up one Sunday morning after a particularly rambunctious game day, and that pain in my chest had returned. It had been so long since I’d felt it—my body an entirely new version of itself than when I was eight—that it took me a moment to recognize it. Then it settled in, my memory affirming what I couldn’t immediately identify.

Homesickness. Hello, old friend.

But I don’t think I was missing my literal home that time. I think I was grieving the first chapter of my life, my childhood. The sweet absolution of any actual responsibility. The comfort of knowing someone would catch you when you fall.

There I was, eighteen years old, having to make every last little decision for myself—getting out of bed in the morning, handling my coursework, making responsible choices (or at least trying to, as a freshman in college). The finality of it terrified me.

That was the first time I realized homesickness wasn’t always about a physical place. Sometimes it was about a version of yourself that had slipped through your fingers before you even realized it was passing you by. I would never be a kid again.

Eventually, the yearning passed, like it always had. By the end of my first semester, there wasn’t a force strong enough on earth that could’ve removed me from Boulder. And it stayed that way well into senior year—it wasn’t until graduation was on the horizon that we acknowledged we couldn’t stay in our raucous little bubble forever.

When I think back to those final days of college, I remember the laughs and the joy and the feeling of accomplishment we shared, but I also remember the silent sense of dread we passed back and forth like an open bottle. We knew it was all coming to an end, but we didn’t really look the ending in the eye. We just kept partying until we found ourselves at the Denver airport, all charting off in opposite directions.

When I landed to Los Angeles, I felt out of place again. But this time, I was slightly more equipped with previous life experience. I kept telling myself, you’re just homesick, it’ll pass.

As I repeated that mantra to myself, I realized my homesickness had evolved again. It wasn’t really about wanting to go back—not to a place, or to a version of myself. It was more about fearing I’d never feel certain ways again. Would I ever feel as young and free as I did in college? Would I ever feel as close to my girlfriends? Even if you can return to a place, can you ever return to the life you had there? If I ran back to Boulder, would I find home, or would I just be chasing ghosts of memories past?

That was when I understood homesickness and nostalgia are close relatives. Different definitions, sure, but the same ache. One longs for an actual place you’ve left behind while the other longs for a passed moment in time, but both come from the same realization that something you love is now far out of your reach.

Eventually, Los Angeles became home, because of course it did. I learned that leaving one home behind didn’t mean I’d never find another. Very quickly, I was settled. Seven years passed, and I’d almost forgotten what homesickness felt like.

Then I moved to New York, and it felt like I’d completely forgotten everything I’d taught myself. At least for a few months, anyway.

When I was shivering in my new apartment, surrounded by boxes, I wondered if homesickness was something we ever truly outgrow, or if it simply continues to change shape as we age.

Maybe every version of ourselves we think we leave behind actually stays with us, influencing the decisions we make and the stories we tell. Maybe nostalgia is just the museum we build inside our minds, wall-to-wall with grainy photographs and artifacts from the lives we once inhabited. Perhaps that’s what homesickness really is: the evidence of a life fully lived, proof that we’ve collected enough beautiful moments to feel their absence when they’re gone.

I know I will never be ten years old again, weaving friendship bracelets beneath Washington’s towering evergreen trees.

I will never be nineteen again, sharing twin-sized bunk beds in a sorority house.

I will never be twenty-two again, laughing through a hangover with my best friends while recapping the hilarities of the night before.

I will never be twenty-five again, drinking wine on the roof of our bright yellow Venice house, watching the sun dip down beneath the palm trees.

I’ll never be twenty-seven again, anxious and excited to move in with my then-boyfriend for the first time.

Hell, I’ll never be thirty again, planning a wedding and getting settled into a new job and new coast at the same time.

There are so many ordinary moments that I didn’t realize I would miss until I was years past them. But I think I’m okay with that. And every once in a while, sometimes more often than not, I take a stroll through that little museum in my mind. And instead of feeling sad, I feel grateful. Feeling nostalgic for your own life is an immense privilege—it means you’ve built something worth mourning, worth curating into a highlight reel on the back of your eyelids as you try to fall asleep.

Now, I think of homesickness as the realization that every version of yourself was real, and every life you once inhabited mattered. And instead of avoiding it, I’m learning to see it as a gift.

xx

HR

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If you couldn’t tell from everything I’ve written so far, I miss being a full-time Angeleno in a way that is truly, excruciatingly, embarrassingly deep.

It’s embarrassing because I know how lucky I am to be in New York, especially this summer. Between the Knicks’ legendary run, my first trip out to the Hamptons, and all of the East Coast fun in between, I should feel completely spoiled. And I do. I really do. I love being here. Every day I feel a little more grounded. My life has grown infinitely bigger; my heart and mind have stretched to make room for new places and people. But I’d be lying if I said I’m not counting down the days until we get to spend more than a month back in Los Angeles this fall.

My emotional yearning for LA has turned into a literal hunger. Once I knew we’d be spending the month of September there, I started making dinner plans before I even booked my flights. I texted my friends to figure out what nights they’re free, planning much too far in advance for a casual Friday hang. I knew I had a problem when I caught myself staring at photos of my favorite LA dishes with the kind of longing usually reserved for movie montages of someone’s dead wife.

So naturally, before I write about where to stay or what to do in LA, I’d like to write about (and recommend) my favorite places to eat. However, I’m starting exclusively with restaurants on the Westside, because LA is simply too sprawling to cover in one list. I’ve always said LA isn’t really a city—it’s more a collection of distinctly different neighborhoods, stitched together into one beautiful, complicated, starry-eyed patchwork quilt. Trying to distill LA’s food scene into a single list would do it a disservice.

Having bounced between Santa Monica and Venice for years, I feel confident about my Westside recommendations. I will say, there are a few places I’m intentionally leaving off the list—not to gatekeep, but because my fiancé has made it abundantly clear that if they ever become too hard for us to get into, he’ll be heartbroken (and I can’t blame him, we all have holes-in-the-wall we’re fiercely protective over).

So, without further ado, here are my favorite Westside restaurants, in no particular order (and don’t worry, the Eastside and beyond will come very soon!).

Cobi’s (Santa Monica)

Nestled right at the start of Main Street Santa Monica, Cobi’s is a neighborhood gem with some of the best Southeast Asian-inspired dishes you’ll find in LA. But if the Michelin-recognized food isn’t enough for you, the ambiance is impeccable—the flower-lined ceiling in the entryway, the patterned pink wallpaper, the vintage rugs, the dish ware, the olive green curtains—so beautifully curated, it’s an interior enthusiast’s dream. The back patio is also the perfect place for a dinner with friends, where you can settle in and order a bottle (or two) from their incredible natural wine list. Must-orders: the curry puffs, crispy pork belly salad, the kingfish, and the butter chicken.

Night + Market SAHM (Venice)

If you want really good, really spicy Thai food—look no further. SAHM has become one of our go-tos over the years, having been there for casual evenings, countless double dates, and of course, the occasional take-out order. I prefer dining in, mostly because of the bright, eclectic vibe they’ve curated with the animal print tablecloths and killer wine list. It feels more like a party than a restaurant at times, but between the loud music, the fun decor, and the incredibly rich flavors of each dish, this is a place that will no doubt become one of your comfort spots after you visit for the first time. Must-orders: spicy larb salad, tom khar gai hot pot, and the pad see ew.

Cosetta (Ocean Park)

Cosetta is a newer favorite that opened just before we left LA. While its physical location is a bit confusing (tucked in an office park on Ocean Park Blvd.), once you get settled into your seat, you completely forget your surroundings. The staff is incredibly knowledgeable, and each dish is somehow more flavorful than the last. I also love their wine list (are you sensing a theme here?) and it’s one of those rare places that you don’t really care if you sit inside our outside because both have the same upbeat and laid-back energy. Must-orders: scallops with Sicilian ponzu and marcona almonds, guanciale pizza with chili crisp, and the chicken milanese.

Shirube (Santa Monica)

Tucked into an unassuming block on Wilshire (don’t let the proximity to a gas station fool you), Shirube is one of those places you visit and immediately wonder why it’s still possible to get a reservation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very glad it’s still somewhat accessible, but this Japanese Izakaya restaurant deserves all the hype. It’s perfect for a date night or dinner for two, with an easy-to-navigate menu, fantastic cocktail program, and intimate vibe that makes you feel like you’re friends with the staff. Must-orders: the corn ribs, sashimi mori, and smoked miso black cod.

Hatchet Hall (Culver City)

We love Hatchet Hall so much that we decided to throw our engagement party there last October. We first fell in love with the Culver City restaurant back in 2021 when we dined on the back patio and were blown away by the famous cornbread they’re so lovingly known for, but we’ve returned for many occasions. Hatchet Hall strikes the perfect balance between Southern comfort and classic California, with an approachable menu that knocks it out of the park every time. If it’s the weekend, I also highly recommend ending the night with a few drinks over at the Old Man Bar, which is connected to the restaurant. Must-orders: cornbread (of course) and the braised beef rib.

Dudley Market (Venice)

Dudley Market is just cool. It’s one of those places that, sure, you have to wait a ridiculously long time for your table, and, sure, that table might only be available to you for a strict 90 minutes—but who doesn’t enjoy sitting on the sidewalk with a glass of natural wine, a view of the beach, and a few of your closest friends? Besides, by the time you’re seated, you’ll be hungry for everything on the menu, and everything is good. Dudley Market is California cuisine in a clamshell (get it, instead of nutshell?). The menu changes daily, but it’s seafood forward—with a knockout burger, of which I stole a photo of from The Infatuation because I usually eat it too quickly to snap a photo. This place is quintessential Venice Beach, and a must-visit for any out-of-towners.

Ghisallo (Ocean Park)

Ghisallo is like if your coolest friend had a really cool backyard...and also happened to be a world-class pizza chef. I love places like Ghisallo because you can come in, split a pizza and a salad, not have to think much about your order because you know whatever you pick is going to be incredible. They also have great wines, kind staff, and the perfectly unpretentious energy you just can’t help but love about coastal California. Must-orders: get either the arugula or caesar and 1-2 pizzas to share; the diavola is my favorite.

Gjelina (Venice)

Oh Gjelina, my beloved. Every girl who has ever lived in Venice will tell you how much she loves Gjelina. One time, my friends fought over who should be able to name their firstborn daughter Gjelina. It was one of the very first “elevated” restaurants that we frequented as a friend group, back when nice dinners were few and far between and we had to save up and splurge on a big night out. What I love about Gjelina is its consistency—every time I’ve ever gone, the food is just as good as the last time. As I’ve gotten older, Gjelina’s wood-fired, vegetable-forward cuisine has only become a bigger staple in my life. We even went to the NYC outpost for Valentine’s Day this year and felt perfectly at home. Must-orders: the Japanese sweet potato, charred broccolini, and the beef cheek bolognese.

Le Great Outdoor (Santa Monica)

Le Great Outdoor is really unlike anything you’ll find on the Westside. Hidden inside Bergamot Station (a bit of a random location), this backyard-barbecue style experience invites guests to gather around a massive open-fire grill and select various proteins, vegetables, and flame-charred side dishes that taste flavorful and fresh. There’s also a great selection of natural wines (basically a prerequisite for me at this point), but for me, what I love about it is the intense smell of burning wood and olive oil. It feels inviting and familiar and wonderfully comfortable. Must-orders: the menu changes often, but I recall loving the charred goat cheese, shishito peppers, and chicken skewers.

R+D Kitchen (Santa Monica)

R+D Kitchen is my safe space. The first time I went there, I had lived in LA for about a week and I thought I was just about the coolest girl in the world. When I started dating my fiancé, he introduced me to Hillstone (not just a restaurant group, but truly a way of living) and we explored its’ various sister restaurants together—but R+D has always remained at the top of my list. Perfectly nestled on the most lovely block of Montana Avenue, we could walk to R+D from our old apartment and get in just about whenever we wanted to. It’s a limited menu, because everything is so solid. The interior is moody and masculine without feeling too much like a sports bar, and the staff is impeccably trained—the Hillstone way. Must-orders: the Newporter Salad, Ding’s Crispy Chicken Sandwich, the Dip Duo, and the fries with seasoning salt.

Felix Trattoria (Venice)

Felix has always been one of my fiancé’s favorites, and it’s the kind of place we take friends or parents when they’re visiting from out of town. It’s hard to get into, for good reason—it’s made a name for itself as one of the best Italian restaurants on the Westside. Tucked at the tail-end of Abbot Kinney, Felix is equal parts high-end and comforting, with a knockout menu that you can’t really go wrong with. I’ve spotted a number of celebrities here, too—which always makes for a fun LA evening. Must-orders: the focaccia bread, the squash blossoms and the linguine al limone.

Farmshop (Brentwood)

Have you ever wanted to feel like a wealthy Brentwood housewife? It’s okay to admit it, because I have, too—and the best place to do so is at the Brentwood Country Mart. I won’t pretend like the Country Mart isn’t easy to make fun of (because oh, it is), but it’s also quite lovely and quaint, especially on a winter LA day. Farmshop is another one of those places I discovered early on. I had a lunch meeting here for one of my very first PR jobs, and felt like I had “made it” in the big city. It’s a place I kept going back to over the years, either for a cozy mid-week date night, lunch with my future in-laws, or brunch with my sister. I love the adjoining market where you can browse overpriced pantry goods and dream of one day hosting a dinner party complete with artisan cheeses and breads sourced from their curated shop. Must-orders: poached chicken salad, seared king ora salmon, wood-fired bread, and octopus ceviche.

Bonus: Broad Street Oyster Co. (Malibu)

I can’t not bring up Broad Street Oyster. While it is technically “West”, I wasn’t sure if Malibu would be considered Westside or its own little pocket entirely, but nevertheless, we’re throwing Broad Street in here. Broad Street Oyster Co. was a defining staple of our lives back in LA. When we didn’t have any plans on a sunny Saturday, we’d go to Broad Street. When we were driving home from Santa Barbara and didn’t want the weekend to end, we’d pull over to Broad Street. And, almost every single time, we’d only order oysters. Either a dozen to share, or on our more adventurous days, two dozen—one for each of us. I love their oysters, their drinks, the picnic tables in the back where you can stretch out and enjoy the last remnants of a beach day. Their lobster rolls and fish tacos are great too, but my only must-order for you here is that sweet, sweet dozen oysters.

As I mentioned, I’ll be back in LA quite a bit this fall—so if there are any new restaurant openings, places I’ve missed on this list, or anything else you’d like to recommend to me, feel free to shoot a message or leave a comment! Happy dining.

xx

HR

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There are many things I know I am without question: a sister. A daughter. A publicist. A writer (if you count this Substack). And, while I’m not always proud to admit it, I am also, undoubtedly, a consumer.

I love buying things. I love being chronically online. I love being part of a pop culture moment—standing around the metaphorical water cooler convincing everyone what they should see, do, or buy next. I’m the opposite of a gatekeeper. Call it being an open book, or just someone who can’t keep her mouth shut, but it’s simply who I am.

So, in between essays, musings, and recommendations across Los Angeles and New York, I figured I’d use my captive audience here (kidding... mostly) to share everything I’ve been buying, wearing, eating, watching, reading, and planning this month.

Eyeing:

• Jane Birkin-esque basket bag—I’m hardly unique in considering Jane Birkin a style icon. But instead of cutting fringe bangs six weeks before my wedding, I’ve decided the safer way to channel her is through her iconic wicker basket bag. As Vogue put it: “Overflowing with keys, makeup, the occasional baguette, and often touted alongside an armful of market finds, magazines, pastry boxes, and a fading cigarette…” Who doesn’t want to channel that? A few I have my eye on are:

  • This highly accurate Etsy Version (only 2 left, tempting!)

  • The Clare V. Pot De Miel (note quite as aligned, but perfect for summer)

  • The Jane Bag by Pamela Munson (aptly named, but fairly pricy…)

• Better workout sets—For obvious reasons, I’ve been taking my health a lot more seriously lately. I’ve somehow become one of those people who goes to Pilates almost every day (Practice Room if you’re in NYC, I can’t recommend it enough). However, due to this uptick in my fitness routine, my tired basic workout sets have been put through the ringer—and I’m starting to feel like I deserve more elevated studio wear. What I’m into right now:

  • The Ella Airweight Set from Splits59 (Top + Capris)

  • The Layered Bra and Core Shorts from FORM (I like the espresso color)

• DISSH Summer Collection—I only have a few weeks left to really milk this whole “bridal white” thing, and I’m incredibly tempted to order a handful of items from DISSH’s new summer launch. We’re going to Mexico a few days after the wedding, so maybe that’s enough justification for a little resort wear? (Someone please stop me.) The pieces I’ve saved:

  • The Elisa White Cotton Sheer Set (Top + Skirt)

  • The Halo Natural Knit Maxi Dress

  • The Zaira Mini Dress

Buying:

• The Costine Dress from DÔEN—I bought this as a potential option for one of my wedding weekend events, and while it isn’t the quite right fit, I’m heartbroken to have to return it. It’s so frilly and fun and made me feel like I was going to walk into a saloon or jump on a carriage. I need a western bride to wear this!

• The Dove Dress and the Perlina Cotton Dress from Few Moda—I bought both of these dresses as my “in-between” wedding outfits: running errands before guests arrive, driving up to the hotel, grabbing coffee before everything kicks off. I don’t want to make a single decision that week if I can help it, so pre-planning these felt like one less thing on my ever-growing to-do list.

Wearing:

I have essentially been exclusively wearing lightweight mini dresses since this treacherous heatwave plagued New York City. I thought I knew what hot felt like until I walked out of a heated Pilates class into a 95-degree New York afternoon and somehow felt even warmer. So, I’ve been avoiding jeans (or anything with a sleeve) and opting for breathable, lightweight fabrics. Some of my favorites right now include:

• The Forever Yours Mini Slip Dress from Free People—deliciously lightweight but also feels elevated. Comes in four colors, I’ve personally been wearing the brown.

• The Gilda Midi Dress, also from Free People—I wore this around SoHo last Sunday and got complimented by an effortlessly chic woman working at the Buck Mason store, so I’d consider that a win.

• The Ilya Cotton Dress from Few Moda—the perfect little white dress. I reach for it constantly.

Eating:

• The Eighty Six (West Village)—We snagged a late reservation here last Sunday and it completely lived up to the hype. I recommend the famous waldorf salad, the rib cap, and if they have it, the hamachi crudo (it was on the specials, but it really should be a staple).

• Bar Susanne (Williamsburg) —Chic new riverfront raw bar past Domino Park. We settled in here for a casual Friday date night and highly enjoyed it. You have to get one of the seafood towers, and the highlight was the razor clam ceviche.

• Taqueria Ramirez (Greenpoint)—You won’t find a better taco in Brooklyn. At least, I haven’t yet. I honestly regret not putting this place on my top ten list. The bottled coca-cola is just the cherry on top.

Watching:

• The Bear—We have two episodes left and keep putting off the finale—not because we don’t want it to end, but because this season has been such a disappointment (maybe a hot take?). I love The Bear, but making almost the entire season unfold over a single day felt like an easy shortcut. I’ll always maintain that “Forks” is one of the best episodes of television ever made, which maybe means I’m just grieving what this show used to be.

• Love Island—one of my (many) vices is reality TV. I’m obsessed with it. I also firmly believe smart people watch reality TV. To me, It’s less mindless entertainment and more an anthropological study; something to dissect, gossip about, without having any actual ties to the people themselves. All that is to say, this season of Love Island was strange because one of my guy friends from college was a bombshell. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. Not sure I recommend.

• Mad Men—we recently finished a start-to-finish watch of Mad Men (me for the first time, my fiance for maybe the 3rd). I can confidently say it’s now my favorite show I’ve ever watched. If you haven’t watched it all the way through yet, let that be the one takeaway you get from this newsletter today. PLEASE.

Reading:

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke—I’m late to this conversation, I know. But I finished it months ago and still find myself thinking about it constantly, returning over and over again to the subtext and emotional undercurrents. My sister and I spent almost an hour discussing it over the phone the other day. Burke is brilliant, and I’ll read whatever she publishes next.

• Scammer by Caroline Calloway—I can’t form an opinion on Caroline Calloway. But given her recent return to the internet, I found myself listening to her audio book on Spotify (perhaps the only way you can actually consume her book, given she’s known for not shipping copies)—and while I find her morally questionable, I do find her prose massively captivating. Then again, I’ve been in this niche rabbit hole for years, ever since I stumbled upon the infamous essay in The Cut.

• Because of Marketing—as a PR professional, one of the most valuable tools I’ve invested in is a paid subscription to Because of Marketing, my favorite newsletter on campaigns, trends, and highlights. They have such a strong finger on the pulse of what’s actually interesting across the marketing world, and I find myself consistently turning to their insights for inspiration.

Traveling:

• Nayarit, Mexico—we just booked the One&Only Mandarina for a few days post-wedding (don’t call it a mini-moon). We haven’t planned a proper honeymoon yet—that’s a 2027 problem—but a few days on the beach feels like exactly what we’ll need after the wedding. Besides, one thing we miss most about living in LA is how easy it was to escape to Mexico, so we’re taking advantage while we’re on the West Coast. If you’ve stayed here, I’d love your recommendations.

• Upstate New York—One thing I’m especially looking forward to after the wedding is exploring more of upstate New York. I’m manifesting a misty, leaf-covered autumn weekend that feels like it belongs in a Taylor Swift music video. The Henson and The Six Bells are both high on my list. I have a weakness for beautifully designed boutique hotels, and I have a feeling this will become a recurring tradition.

If any of these recommendations resonate—or if you violently disagree with one of my takes—I want to hear about it. Send me your own recent favorites, wishlist items, restaurant recommendations, or TV opinions.

xx
HR

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Last night, my fiancé and I were walking through the West Village at dusk, fresh off the L train and on our way to a hard-to-get-into dinner reservation (in other words, our dream date). As we wandered down the tree-lined streets, admiring the brownstones glowing beneath their “gas” lanterns (I know they’re replicas, but I can’t help appreciating the old-world charm), we were delighted by the sound of a lone saxophonist playing soft melodies for the locals, either ending or just beginning their own evening adventures.

The scene felt more like an evening in Paris or a quiet European town, with a warm golden glow cast over the sidewalks, the whole world taking on a softer, dreamier hue. It was moody and romantic and impossibly lovely, and suddenly, I wasn’t just in New York. I was a character in a movie about New York, stepping into a version of the city I had imagined long before I ever lived here—the cinematic version, the fictionalized version, the one that only exists if you can fully commit to the art of over-romanticization.

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Of course, this got me thinking about all of the movies and popular culture I had consumed about New York long before I became a resident. Growing up, I’ll admit I was something of a romanticizer (let’s be honest, I still am), and one of the many imaginary places I’d often lose myself in was none other than New York City itself.

The New York obsession, for many of us non-New Yorkers, starts quite young. There are the Christmas movies: Miracle on 34th Street, Elf, Home Alone 2, which teach you to associate the city with the most magical, whimsical time of year. There are the romantic comedies: When Harry Met Sally, The Devil Wears Prada, 13 Going on 30, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days—films that convince you you’re destined to become a magazine editor and that your soulmate is hiding somewhere beneath Manhattan’s towering skyscrapers wearing a chunky cable-knit sweater or a blue-and-orange Knicks jersey.

And then, of course, there are the binge-worthy, award-winning TV series of our youth: Gossip Girl, which had me convinced I should, for some reason, be drinking martinis at hotel bars at sixteen; Sex and the City, which I probably had no business watching at sixteen at all; and Girls on HBO, which I discovered in college, a cultural rite of passage that, in my opinion, every woman should experience at some point in her life. With the exception of Girls (which did its very best to give me a more honest depiction of life in New York), most of the media I consumed painted a beautiful, albeit unrealistic, picture of what I could (or should) expect.

In so many of these movies, these shows, New York isn’t just the backdrop; it’s a living, breathing, supporting character. On screen, New York is as a chaotic, magical, dream-like painting filled with blurred brushstrokes of taxis speeding through intersections and the shifting colors of every season—crystal-white snowfalls, blinding blue waters, burnt-orange autumn afternoons. Every frame is carefully composed to leave you yearning for a life you’re convinced you’re meant to live.

Recently, I devoured Not Suitable for Work, Mindy Kaling’s latest project. And like so many others, I found myself captivated by FX’s Love Story, which transformed the very real and very tragic story of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette into a portrait of 90s Manhattan—one that sparked a longing for a version of the city that may or may not have ever even existed—but I guess that’s beside the point.

While I adored both shows, they struck the same chord: everyone seems to be working harder than anyone you’ve ever met while somehow still finding time for endless lunches, late-night plans, parties, and spontaneous side quests. Between that and the iconic blue-and-white Anthora coffee cups I’ve never been able to actually find, New York always seems to transform into an aspirational version of itself, one that exists almost exclusively on the TV.

Of course, I was 29 when we moved here, and I was acutely aware of what New York was actually like after countless visits throughout the previous decade. I knew about the rats, the piles of garbage lining the sidewalks, and the suffocating heat trapped underground on a subway platform after missing your train.

But beyond the romanticization—the deliberate omission of the dirt, the crowds, and the financial realities of living here (I won’t even try to justify my credit card statements)—I do think New York earns the mythology built around it, simply because of its energy.

Last night wasn’t the first time I’ve caught myself feeling like some-girl-from-some-movie. It happens when I walk along the water in Williamsburg and watch the sunset fade behind the Empire State Building. When I settle into a bistro table at a neighborhood restaurant and become one of the women I once walked past and wondered what they did for a living. When I see kids running through fountains in neighborhood parks on hot summer days. And at each of those moments, I’m reassured that the magic is very much real. Sure, it exists alongside the chaos and the inconvenience, but doesn’t that make New York what it is?

I guess that’s the beauty of it. The New York you imagine before you arrive and the New York you experience once you’re here are not entirely separate, they simply coexist. The fantasy gives you a reason to look for the magic and the reality gives the fantasy something to hold onto. And like so many parts of life, having a healthy balance of reality and fantasy is what helps us feel alive.

Naturally, this also got me thinking about the popular culture I had consumed over the years about Los Angeles and what those portrayals had taught me. And the strange thing I realized was that I could think of countless versions of New York that had been carefully packaged and sold back to me, but I couldn’t think of a single version of on-screen Los Angeles that felt like the city I knew.

Looking back on my adolescence, there actually wasn’t a ton of LA-specific content I was consuming on a regular basis. Sure, many things were physically set in LA, but was the city ever the anchor of a narrative, the cornerstone of a character?

The first thing that comes to mind is The Hills, which I wouldn’t necessarily point to as a perfect portrayal of LA life in your early 20s, although I was always steadfast in my position on Team LC. In college, my friends and I became obsessed with Vanderpump Rules (which I will argue is one of the greatest reality shows of all time and remains a part of my daily lexicon), but even that, or any of the many other LA-based reality shows that dominated the era, never made me think I need to live in Los Angeles someday.

There was always Clueless, of course, which my mom introduced me to when I was in elementary school. I loved the glitzy glamour and the silly sort of levity that Paul Rudd and Alicia Silverstone brought to the screen. My aunt took me to see 500 Days of Summer in theaters when I was in middle school, a movie that became a defining part of my 2010s twee-meets-indie era. But did those movies make me romanticize LA itself, or was it simply being a teenager in Seattle, longing for a life that felt a little cooler than my own?

As I got older, I naturally gravitated towards kinds of content you associate with LA: Californication, The Bling Ring, and countless other stories set against the backdrop of Hollywood. But at some point, I found myself thinking… wait a second. Does Los Angeles get an unfairly bad reputation in popular culture? Are all works about LA just cautionary tales about giving into the corrupt fame and fortune that a once-shimmering Hollywood had long ago promised?

Don’t get me wrong, I loved watching episode after episode of Entourage with my girlfriends in our Venice Beach house during COVID. But looking back, it’s fascinating how few of these fictionalized Angelenos had a strong moral compass, and how few of these portrayals captured even a semblance of the LA I eventually fell in love with.

Maybe that’s why I adore La La Land so much. It felt like one of the few movies that was genuinely proud to be set in LA. It celebrated the quieter, more understated beauty of the city: the history, the golden-hour light, the magic of two people chasing their dreams in an impossibly ambitious town. Of course, many people think it’s a highly-fictionalized version of LA that doesn’t actually exist, but isn’t that a privilege we’ve been affording New York all this time? Can you think of any other movies where LA serves as that same sort of supporting character? (Seriously, not asking rhetorically, I’d love to know!)

Before you ask, the answer is yes, I binged I Love LA, which I found well-written and incredibly relevant to a very specific LA microcosm. But none of my friends in LA are influencers (at least not in the traditional sense, though they influence me every day). We weren’t going to parties at celebrities’ houses every single weekend. The biggest takeaway I got from it was the reinforcement that I had never really seen my version of Los Angeles reflected back at me.

I say this with a grain of salt, because I’m not claiming to have some singular, once-in-a-lifetime experience of LA. The Colorado-to-California pipeline is a well-worn path, with many Buffalo alumni settling down in Santa Monica post-grad. We went to popular restaurants and popular bars and laid our towels down among a sea of millions on the beach. My life there was, in many ways, a very ordinary one. But with California now in my rearview, I’ve realized that the beautiful, wonderful life I’m so homesick for is a story that hasn’t really been told yet. Perhaps that’s part of why I feel so compelled to write about it.

Maybe popular culture doesn’t romanticize Los Angeles in the same way it romanticizes New York because Los Angeles is where so much of that mythology is created in the first place. The people making these movies and shows aren’t imagining LA from afar because they’re already living inside of it. The city is less a fantasy they’re chasing and more the backdrop they move through every day, for better or for worse.

And maybe that’s also why I loved it so much. It was never a place the entire world was trying to convince me to love. In many ways, it simply exists, almost saying, “Here I am. The traffic’s bad. Take it or leave it.” And maybe that’s why only certain people really understand its magic. Before I moved there, I remember family members questioning why I’d ever want to live there. Are you trying to become an actor? Isn’t it so vapid, so expensive, so competitive? If only they knew.

I’ve said it before: I loved, and still love, LA, but not because of some fantasy version of it. I love it because it was the place I discovered on my own, the home I built for myself. I didn’t have to search for the magic of Los Angeles because it revealed itself to me constantly, in a hundred small moments every day.

Would love to hear from you all about any movies, shows or books you love about either NYC or LA—leave a comment or send a message! Thank you, as always, for reading.

xx

HR

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When we officially decided we were moving to New York, I very quickly became convinced that I wanted to live in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan. Many people told us we should spend at least a year in the heart of the city, just to cross it off the bucket list and dive headfirst into the chaos before eventually settling somewhere a bit more quaint. But I ignored them. Call it women’s intuition or just a gut feeling, but I had my heart set on Brooklyn from the start.

I was drawn to Brooklyn for the obvious reasons: we were aging out of the West Village bar scene (seriously, it’s like wading through a sea of well-dressed college kids) and wanted a little more bang for our buck, square-footage-wise. But beyond the practical reasons, it was also a sense of place. Every time I visited friends in New York, I felt like I could finally take a deep breath the second I crossed the Brooklyn bridge. The streets are wider, the buildings are shorter, the trees feel more alive. There’s a neighborhood sensibility that reminds me of my childhood home in Seattle, with endless coffee shops, art fairs, antique stores, and alternative hairstyles around every corner.

Sure, Williamsburg is absolutely not what it once was (and our apartment is dangerously close to what is lovingly referred to as “gentrification square,” complete with an Apple Store, Whole Foods, Sephora and Equinox). I would have loved to see it in its heyday of hipster millennial optimism rather than walking past the Hermès store on my way to the waterfront. But as we were facing so much uncertainty, and there were only so many things I could control, I was adamant that Brooklyn was where I would feel most like myself.

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I was also fairly certain the Brooklyn food scene would justify the move, given that it’s a culinary destination in its own right. Besides, if there’s one thing my fiancé and I can commit to, it’s planning an entire weekend around a single dinner reservation. When we first met, I was a vegetarian and had probably only been to a dozen restaurants in all of Los Angeles that my friends and I rotated between. He made it his mission to expand my worldview—or at least my view of LA—through the restaurants he grew up loving. Our relationship evolved through trying new places together, and before long we became amateur foodies, eating and drinking our way up and down the California coast (more on that later).

So, once our lease was signed and our move became imminent, we started obsessively researching the restaurants we wanted to try in and around our new neighborhood. It became an exercise in familiarizing ourselves with Brooklyn: its neighborhoods, its people, its culture, and the restaurants that bring them all together.

I’m a big believer that dining is more than just good food—it’s a universal language rooted in community and hospitality. I’m not sure if dining could be considered a hobby, but I’d consider it one of mine. I love taking charge of the menu and ordering for the table. I love wine pairings and menu specials and asking waiters for their recommendations. And now that I’ve got eight months under my belt, I feel as though I have a pretty solid (though always expanding) list of restaurant recommendations that speak to the dining scene in Williamsburg and it’s surrounding areas.

My current favorites, in no particular order:

Misipasta (Williamsburg)

You’ve likely heard of Misi, the famous South Williamsburg restaurant known for its handmade pasta and highly photographed ricotta toast. But its smaller sister restaurant, Misipasta, is the one we keep coming back to.

It’s primarily a shop, where you can buy fresh pasta and pantry staples for your own cooking, but they also offer limited seating, complete with a gorgeous patio that feels like your cool friend’s backyard. While the menu is much more limited, it’s approached with a sort of “trust me” mentality. You get the sense that if it’s on the menu, it’s there for a reason. Chef Missy Robbins is also behind the wildly popular Lilia (which I’ve yet to try thanks to the elusive nature of Resy), so you know you’re in good hands.

Our favorites include the Cotechino sausage sandwich, the lemon spaghetti, and the littleneck clams.

Tonchin (Williamsburg)

We more or less stumbled upon Tonchin, given it’s literally less than thirty seconds from our apartment. It was one of the first places we ate after moving to Brooklyn, and we were immediately blown away by the space. The ramen is obviously the standout (our favorite is the spicy tan tan), but there’s a whole laundry list of reasons we keep coming back: the dimly lit ambiance, the natural wine selection, and the small plates like oysters, gyoza, and chicken wings. It’s a safe haven on a cold New York day.

The good news is that there’s also an LA location. We haven’t made it there yet, but if it’s anything like the Williamsburg outpost, I highly recommend checking it out.

Rolo’s (Ridgewood)

Even though Rolo’s is well outside our walking radius, it’s the restaurant we’ve been to the most since moving to New York (I’ve been five times, my fiancé has been six). It’s the kind of place you want to tell everyone about, where you could happily spend four hours lingering and never get tired of the atmosphere. The space is warm, effortlessly cool, and centered around a large wood-fired grill. The seasonal menu highlights ingredients at their peak, transforming simple dishes into something memorable without overcomplicating them.

Here’s the thing about Rolo’s: its famous burger is elusive. The first two times we went—once for dinner and once for lunch—it had already sold out. They make a limited number each day, and if you don’t time your reservation right, you’re out of luck. Our hack: arrive right at 5 p.m., no matter what your evening plans are.

If you miss the burger, though, don’t fret. The wood-fired polenta bread, fried green tomatoes with tuna tartare, asparagus and ricotta ravioli, and sheet lasagna verde bolognese are all standouts.

And if I haven’t gushed enough already, you have to stick around for dessert. The salted caramel chocolate mousse and passion fruit crème caramel are both incredible, but it’s the housemade ice cream that pushes every dessert over the edge. It’s truly no wonder Rolo’s has developed such a devoted following.

The Four Horsemen (Williamsburg)

You knew this one was coming. I don’t think any Williamsburg dining list is complete without a nod to The Four Horsemen. Yes, it’s popular and notoriously difficult to get into, but for good reason. You can almost tell from the outside how special it is, from the understated logo to the collection of empty natural wine bottles lining the front window.

The Four Horsemen changes its menu daily, so you never quite know what you’re going to get—but that’s part of the magic. It gives you a reason to keep returning, and somehow every meal feels even better than the last. It’s laid-back, elevated without being fussy, and so, so delicious. You can tell that the culinary team truly honors each ingredient and has a passion for combining flavors that might not make sense on paper but come together beautifully on the plate.

If I had to recommend one must-try restaurant to any visitors coming from California, this would likely be it.

Di An Di (Greenpoint)

Greenpoint has no shortage of great restaurants, and once we felt like we had gotten the lay of the land in Williamsburg, we started casting our net a bit wider. We first tried Di An Di while my fiancé’s parents were in town and loved it so much that we returned just a few weeks later for a double date with friends. The space is airy and filled with plants, so much so that even on a rainy day, it feels like you’ve stumbled into a bright little pocket of the city.

We have a few go-to orders, including the papaya salad and the rice cake omelette, but the star of the show is by far the grilled pork sausage skewers. They come with rice paper, fresh herbs, dipping sauce, and all the fixings to make your own wraps at the table. Interactive dishes always leave an impression on me, even if they tend to get a little messy.

The cocktails are also excellent. I recommend the Rabbit Hole, a mezcal and tequila cocktail with ginger and citrus.

The Snail (Greenpoint)

I f*cking love The Snail. Another Greenpoint gem, this is one of our favorite places for group dinners simply because we can’t help ourselves—we end up ordering almost everything on the menu. One of the best parts is that it’s mostly walk-in only, so instead of fighting for a reservation weeks in advance, you can put your name in, grab a drink at a neighboring bar, and let the rest of your night revolve around the Parisian-bistro vibe it has to offer. I recommend sitting outside if you can.

While the entrées are undeniably great (we love the burger, the steak frites, and the flat iron chicken), it’s the shareables that steal the show. You can’t leave without ordering the chips and ham, the caviar hash browns, the parmesan-covered Caesar salad, the oysters, the ceviche, and of course, the escargot. (See what I mean about needing to bring a group?)

Bernie’s (Greenpoint)

Just around the corner from The Snail, Bernie’s is another Greenpoint institution. It’s also walk-in only, but not quite as easy to plan around—we were turned away at 6 p.m. on the dot the first time we tried to put our name in. When we finally made it back for dinner, we planned ahead and put our name in at 4:30, but were seated almost immediately. It didn’t matter, though, because we’d always wanted to experience the restaurant’s iconic take on comfort food, which was executed exactly as comfort food should be. Between the red leather booths and checkered paper, Bernie’s feels like a nostalgic return to Americana.

Of course, the burger is a must-order, but the standouts for us were the wedge salad (I firmly believe all wedge salads should come with a slab of thick-cut bacon), the eggplant Parmesan, and the towering, cherry-topped sundae. A shrimp cocktail never hurt anyone, either.

Maison Premiere (Williamsburg)

Walking into Maison Premiere feels like walking into a different city entirely. It’s equal parts New Orleans and Paris, with a horseshoe-shaped bar, a lush garden, and an old-world atmosphere that feels both moody and romantic.

If you had told teenage me that raw oysters would become one of my favorite foods in adulthood, I never would’ve believed you. But now, I practically revolve my dining schedule around a raw bar, and Maison Premiere is one of my favorite places to settle in for a dozen oysters and a cocktail. Their bread and butter service is fantastic, and the lobster roll has the perfect balance of butter and lemon. The back garden is also the perfect setting for private dining or events—my best friend helped me plan my bridal brunch here, which makes it feel even more special whenever I return.

Vinegar Hill House (Vinegar Hill)

Maybe it’s because both times we’ve been to Vinegar Hill House, it’s been with siblings (once with Jeff’s older brother and sister-in-law, and once with my sister), but this place feels like a warm hug. The first time we visited, we sat on the outdoor patio in the middle of a heat wave—and even in the sweltering weather, we couldn’t help but appreciate how intimate it felt. The second time was on a cold winter day, tucked into the front window inside, where we got to soak in the homey atmosphere they’ve so thoughtfully created.

We’ve only been for brunch, so I can’t speak to the dinner menu (yet) but I’d highly recommend making a day of it. If you only order one thing, let it be the seasonal sourdough pancake. The lettuces and sandwiches are also wonderful, but that thick pancake filled with seasonal fruit is the kind of dish that you’ll remember forever.

L’Industrie (Williamsburg)

Listen, New York has no shortage of pizza. And while we’ve tried plenty of it, we keep returning to one place and one place only: L’Industrie in Williamsburg. I don’t want to get ahead of myself and declare it the best pizza in Brooklyn (or all of New York), but right now, it certainly feels that way.

It’s not a sit-down restaurant. You wait in line, order your slices, and either eat standing inside, standing outside, or take them home. We always opt to eat there, though, because the pizza is simply too good fresh out of the oven. My two favorites are the burrata and the fig jam & bacon, while my fiancé is unwaveringly loyal to the L’Industrie slice.

For a stretch this past winter, we went nearly every Sunday. It became our little tradition, and I feel confident that I’ll never grow tired of it.

Bonus: Radio Bakery (Greenpoint)

Okay, it’s not a “restaurant”, but I couldn’t finish this post without one final bonus shout-out to Radio Bakery. While I’ve been hesitant to declare anything my ultimate “favorite” on this list, I can confidently say this is my hands-down favorite bakery in New York. It’s probably no coincidence that we love this place, given it’s run by the same team behind Rolo’s, but I jump at every opportunity to sprint over to Greenpoint and wait in this bakery’s ridiculously long line.

I’ve yet to order something I didn’t absolutely love. You can stop by for breakfast or lunch, and they’ll knock it out of the park every single time. If you’re there in the morning, don’t miss the cinnamon bun, the Earl Grey morning bun, or the scallion sesame twist. If you catch them between breakfast and lunch, grab a slice of the tomato and garlic focaccia. And if you make it there for lunch, the turkey sandwich, ham sandwich, and tuna salad are all lights out. I would eat here every day if I could.

A final disclaimer: I’m still very much a transplant finding my footing, so consider this a first edition. The list will only get longer (and hopefully even better) as I continue eating my way through the city. If you have a restaurant I need to try next, please leave it in the comments—I’m always looking for recommendations.

xx

HR

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Our wedding is 53 days away, and I’m starting to panic. Not the bad kind of panic, necessarily, but the creeping realization of oh my God, this is actually happening.

For the better part of the last year, our wedding has existed somewhere in the distance. Rather than an actual event, it’s felt more like a concept; a never-ending stream of mood boards, spreadsheets, contracts, and decisions. But now that summer is in full swing and the wedding is now in “next month” territory, it’s no longer this abstract thing we’re planning toward. There’s only so much left to do. It’s becoming real, tangible, close enough to touch.

The funny thing is, amidst all the stress, planning this wedding has also become something of an anchor. Through all of the change the last year has brought, the wedding has been one of the only constants in my life for me to focus on—something to pour myself into and, at times, obsess over.

Now that the finish line is in sight, I find myself torn between counting down the days and grieving the end of this chapter before it’s even over. I’m ready to stop thinking about paper goods and furniture rentals while I’m trying to fall asleep, but I also know that, like all wonderful things, this season will slip through my fingers faster than I want it to.

So, I want to revel in it a little longer by writing about it. And while I can’t wait to wax poetic about every last detail of the wedding weekend itself, I figured I’d start with the outfits I’ve worn across my bridal era.

I want to provide an important disclaimer here: I’m not a fashion expert by any stretch, but I love clothes. I love the way a new outfit can make you feel—how they become souvenirs for different seasons of life, carrying memories long after occasions have passed.

So as I built my bridal wardrobe, I looked for pieces I’d want to wear long after the wedding—things that fit naturally into my closet instead of announcing themselves as “bridal.” Here’s a look back at everything I wore along the way.

1: Our Engagement

Long before we got engaged, this was the first DÔEN dress I ever bought: the Enya Midi. It was a gift to myself after accomplishing something at work, and I remember marching straight into the Montecito Country Mart store on our way up the coast after staring at it online for weeks.

I was so excited to buy it, but I didn’t end up having an occasion to wear it until a few months later, when we headed back to Santa Barbara for what, unbeknownst to me, would become our engagement weekend. My fiancé had planned a surprise stay at San Ysidro Ranch, the dreamiest hotel in all of California (and perhaps the entire world), where he got down on one knee in the rose garden. It was the best day of my life.

Little did I know at the time, DÔEN would become a staple in my bridal wardrobe.

Unfortunately, it’s no longer available on DÔEN’s site, but I found it on the RealReal in a size S. There are similar silhouettes available on their site as well, like the Quinn Dress (or the Quinette Dress for a little pop of color).

2: Wedding Dress Shopping

Maybe I got lucky, but I only went to four wedding dress appointments before committing to my dress. This might also be a controversial opinion, but I found wedding dress shopping to be the easiest part of curating my bridal wardrobe.

You think it’s going to be anxiety-inducing, trying on dress after dress in front of your friends and family, until you realize these gowns were thoughtfully crafted by designers who dedicate their lives to the art of making women feel their most beautiful. The only thing hard about finding the actual wedding dress was having to narrow down between so many options that I loved.

To lean into the frivolity and girlish glee of wedding dress shopping (one of the last true opportunities we have to play dress-up), I went for dresses that felt elevated yet practical. The first dress I wore was the lovely Reformation Naira Dress. While the polka dot version is no longer available, the “Dolly” colorway would make for a fun, non-bridal bridal moment. I also found the polka dot version on the RealReal (size M/8), and a comparable version on Revolve (I hate the word “dupe,” so we’re calling it “comparable.”)

The second dress was my perfect errand-running outfit: the Aelia Midi Dress, which I ordered through Revolve (it looks like there are still a few left in sizes S and M).

I honestly can’t even remember what I wore to the other two appointments because I didn’t take any photos. In hindsight, I think that’s actually a good reminder (even to myself): not every moment needs to be documented to be meaningful.

3: Our Engagement Photos

We went back and forth on whether we even wanted to take engagement photos, until we went to build our wedding website (a necessary evil in today’s online world) and realized we didn’t have a single photo that felt high-quality enough to print on the back of a save-the-date.

Don’t get me wrong, we have hundreds of photos together. But most of them are blurry, or they’re grainy selfies, or we’re laughing, or we’d been drinking, or they require a lengthy backstory to understand. In many ways, those photos are probably a more accurate representation of our relationship than anything perfectly posed could ever be. But, we were being practical, and we wanted something our relatives could proudly pin to their fridge.

We ended up finding an open afternoon, in the middle of packing up our apartment, to head out to Malibu. Thankfully, my best friend lent me her stunning GUIZIO Leila Twill Dress, which looked perfect against the beachy, golden hour glow of the sand. From there, I changed into a simple Gap Cardigan (the one I had is no longer available, but I linked a similar style) and my all-time favorite pair of jeans that I’ve had for years: the AGOLDE Riley High Rise Straight Crop.

We took our engagement photos the day before our engagement party, which was two days before our flight to New York. I often feel dramatic when I talk about just how chaotic the past year has been, but looking back at the actual timeline of these milestones reminds me that the whirlwind was very real. Still, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

4: Our Engagement Party

Of all the things we’ve done so far during this season, the engagement party has been one of my favorites. In many ways, it wasn’t even an engagement party so much as a going-away party ahead of our move. We gathered an intimate group of our closest people for a night at Hatchet Hall in LA, complete with their famous cornbread and non-stop pours of natural wine.

I wore my dream piece—the DÔEN Coraline Dress (which is currently only available on Net-A-Porter, but there’s a similar version on DÔEN’s website HERE). It was slinky and silky and made me feel so special.

I remember waking up the next morning wishing I had prioritized getting a better photo of my outfit. But after getting the five disposable cameras we brought to the party developed, I was so happy that the memories of the night lived in photos of us surrounded by the people we love—not a perfectly composed solo shot of me.

Besides, I’ve already re-worn this dress to another event (a white party at a friend’s wedding) and plan on getting even more use out of it during the NYC heat this summer and, of course, on our honeymoon.

5: Bridal Brunch in NYC

Remember what I said about DÔEN being a staple? Well, we’re not done with her yet.

Before I officially left Los Angeles, my best girlfriends promised they’d find a time to visit. I hadn’t even been in New York for a week before they all bought flights out for my 30th birthday in March. Never in my life have I needed my friends around me more than I did that weekend, and they showed up, like they always do.

We kicked my fiancé out (don’t worry, he stayed with a friend) and had a three-day, slumber party-style takeover of my apartment, complete with a birthday dinner, various five-star meals, and a bridal brunch at the lovely Maison Premiere in Williamsburg, filled with oysters, champagne, and games. To be honest, I could’ve worn a potato sack and had the exact same wonderful time. Another good reminder: the clothes are fun, but the company is everything.

Like my other DÔEN finds, I stalked the Emerence Dress for weeks before finally pulling the trigger. I visited the brand’s busy, bustling West Village store with my friends in tow, and the moment I put it on, I practically raced to the cashier to purchase it. I love, love, love it, and have re-worn it twice already. DÔEN just gets me.

6: Family Bridal Shower in Seattle

My lovely mother and sister were kind enough to throw me a second shower in my hometown of Seattle. My grandmother hosted at her beautiful home overlooking Lake Washington, and multiple generations of women gathered to share stories of weddings and traditions past. We played games, opened presents, and I got to explain to my 5- and 8-year-old cousins what their responsibilities would be as my flower girls.

By this point in my journey, I was craving a little bit of a change-up. Trust me, I will never get sick of wearing white, but the Reformation Briony Dress was one I’d had my eye on for a long time. It was comfortable, modest without feeling frumpy (important for family events), and made me feel completely like myself.

7: The Bachelorette Weekend

I recently wrote about my bachelorette and how important it was to me (you can give that a read HERE) so I won’t take up too much space gushing over my friends, Sonoma, or Scribe Winery. But I will happily gush about the two dresses that made me feel absolutely beautiful that weekend.

First up, the dreamiest For Love & Lemons piece: the Adrift Maxi Dress. I’m not easily influenced by celebrities, but I saw a photo of Barbara Palvin wearing it and immediately knew I needed to find a way to incorporate it into my bridal wardrobe. I wore it with my favorite Freja handbag (a birthday gift from my friends) and my beat-up cowboy boots—the perfect wine tasting ensemble for long days in the sun.

The second outfit was my first swing at trying Few Moda, a membership-based marketplace that promises high-quality fashion at cost. I was skeptical at first, but after trying on the Ashlyn Linen Dress, I was pretty convinced. It was timeless, comfortable, and breezy without being see-through.

Finally, I ordered the Amanda Uprichard Kaycee Dress as a contender for my welcome party. I loved it but it didn’t feel quite right, so instead of returning it (which would have been the smart move) I decided it would be fun to keep it and rock it that weekend to dinner. Life’s short!

8: Our Final Venue Visit + Food Tasting

Our last (but certainly not least) stop in this bridal journey—until the wedding itself—was our final visit to our venue, The Inn at Mattei’s Tavern. I had done my hair and makeup trial earlier that day, so I knew I wanted something comfortable but still special. The Hill House Ashlyn Nap Dress was perfect, and it was in those final moments at the venue that I really realized: holy sh*t, we’re throwing a gigantic party here in August.

By the time we made it to the pool, I threw my favorite new little white mini—the Few Moda Iyla Cotton Dress—over my swimsuit and enjoyed an Aperol Spritz in the sun, basking in the feeling that we’d made it this far through the wedding process. The next time I’d be sitting in that pool chair, it would be with the wedding weekend finally unfolding around us.

I can’t wait to share the final wedding weekend looks once the time comes. Thank you for reading, and let me know if you end up sourcing any of these pieces for your own bridal journey!

xx

HR

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I’ve always loved the month of June. Its arrival has always marked a series of milestones: the turning point of the year, the last day of school, the first whispers of summer. No matter where you live, June feels like a homecoming, a nostalgic return to easier living—melted popsicles streaking your hands, stringy ringlet curls from spending all day in the water, the dueling smells of charcoal and sunscreen.

I was especially excited for June this year. New Yorkers have an acute awareness of the seasons that Angelenos don’t really possess. It feels reminiscent of my childhood in Seattle, where summer always felt like something you had to wait for; enduring months of grey skies until the clouds finally lifted and the Pacific Northwest could actually be enjoyed. As a kid, that waiting was what made summer feel so special—back when sleep-away camp and cheerleading practice were my biggest responsibilities.

I lost that feeling in LA. When beautiful weather is always available, you stop marking your memories by time of year. One of the unexpected gifts of moving to New York has been experiencing all four seasons again, and the return of anticipation that comes with them. By the time June rolled around, I’d been yearning for it for months.

I spent the first half of June in California and the second half in New York—a nearly perfect split between the two coasts—something I’ve learned is surprisingly hard to pull off. Usually, one place gets more of me than the other. But this month, I had enough room to appreciate both without comparison. For the first time, it felt less like being stuck in between and more like I’d finally found a steady balance. Just like I said: June and its milestones.

In the span of thirty days, I went from Los Angeles to Sonoma to Los Olivos to Los Alamos, back home in Brooklyn, and then out east to Amagansett and Montauk. Between airport terminals, long drives, and unpacking the same suitcase for what felt like the tenth time, I kept reminding myself to slow down and be present, even when I was running on fumes; to not lose sight of the privilege of getting to juggle it all.

Here’s how it unfolded.

Part 1: Sonoma (my bachelorette)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I would not survive this chapter of life without my girlfriends. My female friendships are my entire personality. So, part of my anticipation for June was really just anticipation for my bachelorette weekend in Sonoma, with eleven of my dearest girls. I’ve known every woman on that trip for over a decade. They’ve seen me through college, breakups, career shifts, and every version of myself in between. They’ve been my roommates, my confidants, my sounding boards; there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t talk to at least a few of them. The bachelorette weekend will be one of my most cherished memories of my bridal journey, second only to the wedding itself (and even then, it’s a close call).

The weekend was a collaborative effort between my co-maids of honor: my sister Emma and my best friend Jenna. They would’ve easily planned the entire thing on their own (and executed it flawlessly), but my obsession with travel and hospitality made it impossible for me not to get involved. We started with an early morning flight from LA to Santa Rosa, then made our way into town for afternoon wine tastings and lunch at El Dorado Kitchen. From there, we checked into our Airbnb—complete with early-2000s Tuscan kitchen energy, every square inch covered in cheesy, HomeGoods-style signage (my personal favorite: “please give me coffee to change the things I can, and wine to accept the things I can’t”). That night, we had dinner under bistro lights at Layla, the farm-to-table restaurant inside MacArthur Place Hotel, and eased into the weekend with a few rounds of “Layla’s Garden,” a pickle brine and chili oil martini I’m still dreaming about.

Once everyone arrived the next morning, we were off to the wine-tasting races. Of course, no bachelorette weekend is complete without at least one logistical misstep: on the way to our first winery, our party bus drove us 45 minutes in the wrong direction. Still, it didn’t phase us—we recovered quickly, laughing our way through it, knowing it would become a funny story one day. Eventually, we made it to Frog’s Leap—a stunning, laid-back property that was worth every minute of that morning’s misadventures. We worked our way through bottles of rosé before heading to Yountville for lunch at Bottega. We ordered half the menu, swapped wine for espresso martinis to keep the energy flowing, and then—at my request—walked through town to Honor Market, which is essentially Hillstone’s version of a gas station and, to me, absolute heaven.

After heading back home, we played games in the backyard until it was time for dinner at Valley Bar & Bottle in downtown Sonoma, which was one of the weekend’s brightest highlights. If you know me, you know I love Michelin Guide-level dining that still feels unfussy, and this place knocked it out of the park: elevated but relaxed, unique but not pretentious, and of course, the big three (great food, great wine, and great service).

The next day was intentionally slow. I had only one request, which was to spend a relaxing afternoon at Scribe Winery. Unlike the grand, chateau-esque estates you might expect in wine country, Scribe feels like you’ve been personally invited into someone’s very cool, very curated home—coastal California aesthetic at its peak, with sprawling gardens, fruit trees, and a historic hacienda all blending into one striking landscape.

The wine tasting was paired with seasonal dishes prepared on-site by their culinary team, utilizing ingredients grown on property. I’m telling you, you will never eat a better vegetable than what they serve you at Scribe. Each course matched perfectly with the wines, and as the experience came to a close, the staff encouraged us to linger a bit longer by laying out blankets and sprawling on the lawn beneath the stalky palm trees. So we did. We ordered a few more bottles, slipped our shoes off, and let the sun wash over us, easing into the kind of mellow afternoon that only certain pockets of California can promise.

That night, we barbecued at home, dipped in the pool, and ended the weekend with a game and costume night: dressing up as reality TV stars. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard. See for yourself HERE.

The bachelorette was exactly what it needed to be: silly and fun, but also sentimental and easy. My friends knew exactly what I would’ve wanted and somehow made it even better. My only complaint is how fast it all went by.

Part 2: Santa Ynez Valley (wedding planning)

Thankfully, the emotional come-down from the bachelorette weekend was short-lived, because I turned my attention to our plans for the following weekend: a trip up to Santa Ynez wine country to knock a few things off our wedding planning list.

Our wedding is coming up fast. Like, less-than-two-months-away fast.

As any bride will tell you, wedding planning is equal parts wonderful and overwhelming. It’s a constant stream of decisions, budgets, and design choices, all while trying to distill our entire relationship into one very specific day. We’ve taken it in stride, and I’ll share more on the process as we get closer. But this month, we got to do the fun part: food and beverage tasting at our wedding venue.

Knowing this would be our last time in the region before the wedding, we turned it into a jam-packed 24 hours, squeezing out every last bit of the California coast. I’ll keep this part brief—I’m saving a more in-depth love letter to Santa Ynez Valley for a future post. It’s my favorite place on earth. My fiancé and I have lost count of how many times we’ve driven up for “only for the day” and ended up staying the night.

The trip started with my hair and makeup trial in Santa Barbara, where I sat in a mirror trying different shades of lip gloss and briefly forgetting this was actually my life, not just a game of dress-up. From there, we drove up to Los Olivos. The light shifted the second we turned off the Pacific Coast Highway—all rolling hills, golden grass, and valley oak trees. Soon, we arrived at our beloved venue: The Inn at Mattei’s Tavern, nestled in the center of it all. After checking in and indulging in a poolside Aperol Spritz, we headed into the barn for our tasting—finalizing a menu built around local ingredients, artisan cocktails, and a live oyster shucking station (a defining staple of our relationship).

After the tasting, our cheeks warm from wine and sun, we wandered through town—popping into our favorite local shops before settling into Bar Le Côte for happy hour. BLC is a true gem, a perfect encapsulation of everything good about the Central Coast. The Peruvian scallops were so good, we ordered a second round the minute we polished off the first.

That night, we squeezed into a last-minute counter seat at Bell’s in Los Alamos. Again, I’ll share more on my love of this restaurant later, but for now, I’ll just leave you with this: there is nowhere else in all of California that I’d rather have dinner.

We left the next morning wishing we had more time, already counting down to being back with all of our favorite people. On the way out, we stopped in Santa Barbara for a smash burger and a beer at Third Window Brewing—another non-negotiable whenever we’re in town.

The Central Coast has become a part of me over the years. Being away from it has been one of the harder parts of this chapter. Instead of letting it make me sad, I’ve been trying to think of it fondly; knowing that it will always be there, waiting with open arms whenever I make my way back.

Part 3: East Hampton (the dreamiest work week)

It’s strange to sit here and think about how much I’ve squeezed into the last month, but one of the most recent (and maybe most exciting) chapters was a work trip to Amagansett in East Hampton. Back in April, I started my dream job leading PR for Lulu and Georgia, a brand I’ve known and loved for years. We recently partnered with The Reform Club in Amagansett as the hotel’s official outdoor furniture partner, reimagining its hedged-off, hydrangea-lined grounds with our best-selling Lanata collection—anchored by that quintessential summer green-and-white stripe.

I had never been to the Hamptons until we first visited the property back in April, when we went up to install the furniture and shoot the campaign. While I was taken by the property on that first brief visit, I had no sense of what it would feel like at the height of late June. It was more magical than I ever could’ve anticipated.

Last Sunday, we returned to the property to prepare for our first East Coast brand trip, hosting ten creators and their guests for a two-night stay. The premise was simple: step away from the pace of everyday life, linger with a glass of wine on a chaise lounge, and kick off the summer with an itinerary designed to feel more like a vacation than an obligation.

While most of it was “work”, we had a window before guests arrived to really take in East Hampton. After the drive out of the city, we stopped for lunch at Rosie’s, where we inhaled chopped salads and crisp Diet Cokes with oversized lemon wedges. We wandered through town, popping into local stores, picking up jars of artisan jam at Jamagansett and admiring hand-painted ceramics at Il Buco Vita. That night, we kept it simple with pizza and salad from Fini (a Brookylyn staple), planning and prepping for the days ahead while settling into the rhythm of being away from our computers.

The next day, we prepped each suite with in-room gifting and welcomed guests with a cold glass of Avaline bubbly. The trip unfolded from there: a garden cocktail hour, a rustic three-course dinner, a morning mat Pilates class in the sunken garden, and a full day of lawn games, ending with a clambake on the beach.

That night, as I sat in the sand, roasting s’mores and watching the sun sink below the horizon, I started to see New York differently. I’d understood it intellectually, but I’d never really felt it until then: so much of what I loved about California had a different, but equally wonderful, East Coast counterpart. Neither was better; they were just different expressions of the same feeling.

I found myself thinking about how easily it all could’ve been reversed, how much of it comes down to geography and timing. If I’d grown up on the East Coast, I’d probably defend this way of living just as fiercely as I’ve always defended the West. I would’ve found the same comfort in the Atlantic as I always have in the Pacific. I would’ve built an entirely different life around it and still ended up with the same feeling of home.

I realized that, all this time, maybe I’d been too hard on New York—subconsciously putting it in second place because I didn’t yet have the memories or emotional ties I had with California. Maybe I just hadn’t given it a fair chance.

On the final day, after we packed up and said our goodbyes, my lovely boss and I stopped at Round Swamp Farm in Montauk for a quick lunch (and I finally understood the TikTok hype) before returning to the city. Once I was back in my apartment, I felt both exhausted and somehow enlightened. Maybe this move didn’t need to feel like a departure from everything I loved, but instead, it could be an opportunity to make space for even more. Not everything has to point backward. Some things can simply be new, and unfamiliar, and worth staying open to. And, y’know, I feel like I’d be doing myself a disservice by not staying open to the Hamptons.

In-between: LA & NYC Comforts

Between each trip, of course, we made time to eat our way through both cities.

While we were in LA, we stopped by a few local favorites:

• Father’s Office (Santa Monica): I mean, you don’t really need my recommendation here. It’s the burger. It’s always the burger.

• R+D Kitchen (Santa Monica): Will I find a way to bring up R+D in everything I write? Maybe. Start with a perfect martini and fries for the table (make sure they bring the seasoning salt). From there, the dip duo or chicken meatballs if you’re hungry, but I will always order the Newporter Salad and a hefty pour of Sauvignon Blanc. If you’re sharing, split that with the Ding’s Crispy.

• Cosetta (Santa Monica): a newer favorite that arrived right before we left LA. The highlights: scallops with Sicilian ponzu and marcona almonds, the Cosetta Caesar (why stray), guanciale pizza with chili crisp, and the tomato-covered chicken milanese.

Back in Brooklyn, we also established a few new go-to’s:

• The Snail (Greenpoint): we come here with friends because we have no self-control when it comes to the menu. Chips and ham, escargot, agnolotti are all non-negotiables. And the caviar hash browns are, without exaggeration, a must.

• Fish Cheeks (Williamsburg): my first time here was at a friend’s going-away dinner, and I’m still thinking about the coconut crab curry and corn salad.

• Di an Di (Greenpoint): a Vietnamese favorite we’ve now gone back to twice. The grilled pork sausage skewer platter is the star of the show—rice paper, herbs, lettuce, and all the components needed to build your own little wrap.

• Apollo Bagels (Williamsburg): my current favorite bagel in the city—simple, chewy, consistent. I’m a butter-and-jam girl, but the heirloom tomato is also wonderful.

Finally, some June product favorites (links below):

1. For Love & Lemons Adrift Maxi Dress: my favorite dress from the bachelorette, which I wore to Scribe. Comfortable, elevated, and looks amazing with cowboy boots.

2. FREJA Mercer Bag in Oat Croc: my best friends gifted this to me for my 30th birthday, and it’s basically been my exclusive bridal bag across the bachelorette, dress appointments, tastings, and everything in between. (It’s also on sale!)

3. Hill House Ashlyn Nap Dress: wore this in 85-degree weather for 14 hours and could’ve easily kept it on the next day. Perfect for my hair and makeup trial—easy to slip on and off.

4. gorjana Crew Huggies: haven’t taken these off all month. They go with everything.

5. Mason Pearson Detangling Comb: I do not leave the house without this comb. As someone with naturally curly hair, summer humidity is not exactly my friend—but this keeps me looking (somewhat) put together.

6. Crown Affair Leave-In Conditioner: see above re: the comb, but for actual styling support (and the most heavenly scent).

7. Lorna Murray Hat: we gifted these to guests on our brand trip, so naturally I had to get one for myself. It saved me from fully melting in the July sun.

8. MERIT Instant Glow Serum: I’ve been a MERIT loyalist for a few months now, but I only recently discovered this serum and it completely changed the way my makeup sits on my skin. I’ll be using it forever.

9. DOEN Emerence Dress: bought this for my bridal shower in New York and loved it so much I re-wore it in the Hamptons. Frilly, feminine and perfectly DOEN. My favorite brand in the world.

This turned into another incredibly long post (I’m sorry, I can’t help myself!). I haven’t felt this creatively energized in a long time, and as you can probably tell, I’m really diving headfirst into this whole Substack thing.

Thank you again if you’ve read this far. I can’t believe I’ve gained almost 50 subscribers in less than a week—it genuinely means so much to me. If there’s anything you’d like me to go deeper on (restaurants, hotels, city guides, or anything else), I’d really love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment or send me a message. I have a lot already in the works, but I’d love to focus on what resonates most.

xx

HR

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I can’t remember the last time I felt more vulnerable than I do sitting down to write this, though I’m sure hitting “publish” will only intensify my nerves. I’d like to think I’m fairly self-aware (I know, I know, that’s something only non-self aware people say), so it’s not lost on me that the world doesn’t need another newsletter about the passage of time or the musings of yet another girl who moved to New York in her late twenties. But I think I need this, and shouldn’t that be reason enough to do it?

I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, even if I’ve never officially published anything personal. As a publicist, I tell other people’s stories for a living. I guess you could say I did the same thing in college, when I wrote other people’s papers for cash so I could afford to go to Coachella (for legal purposes, this is a joke). The Notes app on my phone is littered with creative ideas, late-night manifestations, and excerpts from novels I hope to write one day—nestled between aspirational grocery lists and Venmo calculations from bachelorette weekends, of course—but I swear, there’s some good material in there. My best friends will tell you I’m a great writer, even if they haven’t read anything I’ve written in years (and especially after they’ve had two martinis).

Does all of that actually make me a writer? I’m not sure. But I’ve long felt a pull to create a space like this, to finally give the words that ring between my ears a place to live. Writing has always been my preferred coping mechanism in the face of adversity. More than that, it’s been my comfort amidst the chaos of my fast-paced life; my greatest tool in unraveling the tangled web of thoughts forever racing through my mind. So, here I am, putting myself out there, doing something I love to ease life’s growing pains.

What growing pains, you might ask? Well, it’s been eight months since my fiancé and I left our beautiful, comfortable life in Los Angeles to settle into Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Even now, it still doesn’t fully register—my mind has quite synced up with my geography just yet. Rather, my reality feels more like a push and pull between both coasts; a long-distance relationship with my former life.

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I’ve never, at least not in adulthood, been a “grass is always greener” kind of person. When I lived in LA, I often listened to friends wax poetic about the great elsewhere: the promise of a life that would finally click into place if they simply moved away. Sometimes elsewhere was close, like the inevitable pipeline to Orange County or up north to San Francisco; sometimes it was far, like the East Coast or abroad. Some of those dreams remained dreams, but some friends actually packed their boxes, shedding one version of themselves in search of another, convinced their purpose existed beyond the 405.

Maybe I understood that impulse once, back when I was a restless teenager, daydreaming about escaping Seattle’s ever-present rain clouds. But once I settled down in Los Angeles, that was it. The deep, unrelenting pull toward elsewhere simply never arrived. Don’t get me wrong, travel is one of the great loves of my life, but there’s a difference between loving to visit somewhere new and wanting to build a home there. The latter was never something I seriously considered.

The truth was, I liked my grass. I’d always watered it well.

So, when my fiancé and I decided to uproot our lives and replant ourselves in New York City, I was heartbroken by the thought of leaving behind a life I had worked so hard to grow. Of course, it wasn’t a decision we made lightly. An incredible opportunity opened up for him, and we chose to pursue it together, even while knowing it would be the hardest thing we could’ve done at that point in our lives.

I was conscious when I agreed to it, fully aware that I was willingly, albeit reluctantly, choosing this path as we reached the metaphorical fork in the road of our future. But at the time, we had months to avoid it. We had just gotten engaged, and with a delicious California summer at our fingertips, it was easy to pretend like our impending departure was a myth. I shielded my eyes with beach towels and nestled deeper into the sand until reality grabbed me by the bikini straps and buckled me into an airplane seat. It wasn’t until we were shivering in our empty new apartment that I realized what was actually happening.

At that point, wrapping my head around it was a futile effort. I couldn’t focus on how much I loved New York, how quickly I’d fallen for its charm every time I visited; I couldn’t revel in the fact that I was about to embark on a chapter so many people only dream about. All I could think about was how much I would miss.

When I say I’ve always loved New York, I mean it. As a child, I wrote in my diary that I was meant to live here one day. I’d never been, but I wanted to be a stage actress, and Broadway felt like the only logical conclusion. The first time I visited, I was seventeen, on an “educational vacation” with my sister and my grandparents. We did the SNL studio tour, took a boat out to the Statue of Liberty, and waited outside the TODAY show studio in the early hours of the morning. I loved every second of exploring the city, even though it was painfully and adorably tourist-y.

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I returned. As an adult, New York tethered itself to my life through work—public relations thrives more in Manhattan than anywhere else in the world, and every work trip added another layer to my admiration. I loved the extreme seasons, the late night dinner reservations, the constant hum, honk, and whirl that never paused outside my hotel room window. I stretched trips longer than necessary, tagged along to events I probably didn’t need to staff, and slept on friends’ couches just to linger a little more.

So yes, I adored New York. But that love was more like a flirtation or a summer fling; it was fleeting, open-ended, something you cherish and look back on fondly without ever wondering what might have been. Never once did I think I’d live here. Never once did I hear that restless, nagging whisper trying to convince me I’d regret it if I didn’t eventually trade the West for the East.

I lived in California for three quarters of a decade, the entirety of my post-grad life. When I arrived in LA, it felt less like a stepping stone and more like a crash landing. I fled Boulder in a fever dream, desperate to find my purpose after the four-year high of college, unsure I’d ever be able to replicate that fix. I told everyone I moved to LA for my career, but really, I knew I was moving to be close to my friends. What I didn’t know, though, was how deeply I would fall for LA itself—that gigantic, sun-soaked, smog-ridden city.

I loved—love—LA (and not in the Rachel Sennott kind of way). I loved everything about living there. I really mean that. I loved wearing light-wash jeans and ballet flats in the dead of winter. I loved walking all the way down Montana Avenue, smoothie in hand, just to inhale the entirety of the coastline at Palisades Park. I loved sitting in traffic to try a new East Side restaurant that I’d rave about but never return to. I loved cosplaying a rich housewife at the Brentwood Country Mart, thumbing through sweaters at Sezane and eating an overpriced salad at Farmshop. I loved gossiping with my friends at rooftop bars beneath Hollywood’s pink-hued, movie-set skies. I loved living in the same place as my little sister.

I loved driving to Montecito for an afternoon: a crisp Sauvignon Blanc at Honor Bar followed by seasonal pizza at Bettina. I loved napping on Manhattan Beach, pretending I applied enough sunscreen but secretly delighting in the pink tan lines that would blossom that evening in the shower. I loved drinking laughably large beers at Big Dean’s and begging my friends to ride the ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier (which never worked, but I always enjoyed trying). I loved spending hours strolling aimlessly through Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, even on a rainy afternoon. I loved spotting the back of some D-list celebrity’s head over a gimlet at The Ivy. I loved booking a staycation at the Malibu Surfrider, drinking coconut crusted cocktails on the rooftop and watching the sunset fade into twirling ribbons of orange and lilac.

I loved it all—the dated strip malls, the cracking castle-like architecture, the colorful shoebox apartments with names like The Palms or The Tudor. The gaping sapphire skies. The briny sea-salt air. The hushed lullaby of palm fronds swaying in the warm winter wind. God, I could bottle it all up and wear it like perfume.

To make it even dreamier, most of my girlfriends in LA were in the same phase of life as I was. After years of chaotic nights losing our phones and closing down bars, we’d found a rhythm that kept us close and healthy. Fridays were reserved for early dinners at local restaurants, hamachi crudo and arugula salad and fries for the table. Partners were (sometimes) welcome, and 10 p.m. was a reasonable curfew. We’d still order the bottle instead of a glass; we weren’t dinosaurs. But somewhere along the way, we swapped the rush of being young for the comfort of being ourselves—always knowing what to say, when to say it, and why. Besides, after a few drinks and a number of belly-aching laughs, is there anything better than hearing your best friend say, “oh my god, I have the craziest story to tell you…”? I get chills just thinking about it.

None of this is groundbreaking, I know. I’ve moved before, I’ll move again. Everywhere I’ve landed, I’ve built a life. But this time, I think I recognized just how intentional I’d been about it all. I had been the architect of my reality, fine-tuning my life so meticulously that the concept of elsewhere didn’t just seem abstract, it seemed silly.

I’m not naive to the fact that it’s only this hard right now. I know myself well enough to guess that by the end of the summer, I’ll probably laugh at how seriously I took all of this. So whenever I’m feeling especially down about my long-distance relationship with LA, I remind myself how lucky I am to have a place worth feeling homesick for. Besides, as they say, time heals all wounds… even California-sized ones, right? (The “New York or Nowhere” types reading this probably think I am insane.)

I won’t sugarcoat it: the first three months in New York were tough, record-breaking snowstorms aside. I found myself waddling through my new neighborhood like a toddler, always somehow over or underdressed, dining at restaurants my friends wouldn’t dare set foot in, convinced I had a sign on my forehead that reads, “NOT FROM HERE.” If my comfort zone was a subway station, I had somehow boarded the express train going in the opposite direction and fallen asleep.

The last few months have been worlds better. Once spring began to bloom, the blurred edges of the city started to come into focus. I no longer start every day feeling like I woke up on the wrong side of the country. When someone asks what my favorite restaurants are, I actually have answers (and will be writing about that later). I have incredible friends out here, who have made the transition infinitely easier. They are busy and bold and always juggling five parties, dates, or dinners on any given evening, and I love getting caught in their jet stream. My fiancé and I have met new people and reconnected with old college buddies. We’re staying up later than we’re used to, eating more pizza than LA ever allowed… and it’s fun. Okay? I’ll admit it, we’re having fun!

Pieces of LA still live inside of me. I still panic at 10 a.m. on Mondays wondering if I remembered to move my car for street sweeping (I sold my car in October). I still think about when and how I could get away with wearing flip-flops outside (so far, it’s only to pilates and back). I still yearn for the Newporter salad at R+D Kitchen in ways I’m not proud to admit. But maybe that’s what being “bicoastal” really means—not belonging halfway to two places, but carrying pieces of both wherever you go.

I’m also being extremely dramatic—because since I’ve moved, I’ve spent over a month cumulatively in LA, spread over the course of weeks-long trips, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Chief among the reasons for our pseudo-bicoastal lifestyle: our wedding, this August (yes, two months from now). I want to make a joke about moving cross-country and planning a wedding at the same time, but I won’t. I can’t complain about these beautiful, wonderful things, even when I’m so excruciatingly overwhelmed.

More good news: this Substack won’t always be as personal as this first entry was. Yes, I’ll still find time to muse about my “long distance” lifestyle, but my real goal is to create a guide to living (somewhat) bicoastally: restaurant lists, weekend getaways, seasonal reflections, style guides, love letters, and anything else that feels somewhat relevant between two of the greatest cities in the world. I’m flexible on the content matter, and hope you will be too. I’ll always be moving between worlds, so there will be something in here for everyone (well, everyone on the coasts, at least).

I appreciate anyone and everyone who has taken the time to read this far. Even if it’s just my sister and a few of my friends, thank you (and hi, I love you!).

P.S. the em-dash isn’t going anywhere. She’s been my girl long before AI tried to take her from me.

xx

HR

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