Time Out Love New York Awards 2014: The Bronx

Irina Brandler closed her storefront bakery on City Island two years ago to focus on wholesale business, but with the help of her chef brother, Alex Pertsovsky (Vong), it’s now reopened for brunch. Breakfast items like sour-cream pancakes are on the menu alongside heartier dishes, such as buttermilk fried chicken, and, of course, cake.

Located deep in the Bronx’s historic Little Italy—where red sauce runs as thick as blood (Robert De Niro discovered Joe Pesci here)—is the best indoor bazaar that most New Yorkers have never heard of: the Arthur Avenue Retail Market. A product of the city’s initiative to get pushcart peddlers off the street in 1940, the bustling market of 20-odd vendors has sold sausage links, cigars, flowers and fruit to locals for decades. Last month, neighborhood-bred brothers Anthony and Paul Ramirez shook the dust off the tradition-bound institution and opened a fresh-faced beer bar, whose on-trend offerings (cider, half-pints, canned craft beers) and handsome, modern digs (salvaged-wood counters, white-tile walls) have provided a jolt of youthful energy to this uptown fixture. ORDER THIS: Five taps pour a rotating selection of all-local brews (of course), including two from nearby Jonas Bronck’s Beer Co.: an earthy, dry Big Apple cider ($6) and a crisp, mildly spiced Woodlawn Weiss ($6). For a richer sip, the creaminess of the Keegan’s Mother Milk Stout ($6) from the Hudson River Valley conceals a coffeelike bitterness. Alongside the drafts, David Greco—also owner of the market’s beloved Mike’s Deli, where he worked as a boy under his father—oversees an extensive menu stocked with vendor goods. A thick, meaty beef-liver sausage ($7) comes with mix-and-match sides, like tender shredded cabbage; a sirloin-and–filet mignon burger ($12) arrives inside a crusty, flaky bun on a birch wood pla