No fancy amenities, but great lattes in the hotel's popular street-level cafe.
Those bricks, covered for decades with linoleum, now make up the floor in the lower-level cafe.
There's also a classy street-level cafe that gets lively at night, marble bathrooms, and a roof terrace with Jacuzzi.
And while a street-level cafe called South at SFJazz won't open for business until next month, it will be run by Charles Phan, the influential chef and owner of the Slanted Door restaurant group.
A stair, in the same marble, ascends to a mezzanine-level cafe that overlooks the street through floor-to-ceiling windows: a kind of interstitial zone floating just above the city.
And so, curious visitors at a friends-and-family debut of Preserve24 were able to do more than ooh and aah at the $4 million bi-level cafe, bar and restaurant on the Lower East Side that was designed to look as if it had been there for more than a century.
His plans for the blocklong property include renovating an abandoned warehouse and four low-rise loft buildings for work-live residences, street-level cafes and shops.
From just outside we took a river cruise, which chugs under Oporto's five impressive bridges, one of which was designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, and caught the tram to Foz to walk along the seafront and watch the sun set into the ocean from one of the beach-level cafes.
To the northwest of the theatre is a three-story, 15500 sqft building built into the hill that contains the museum store on the lower level, a cafe on the second level, and a private dining room on the top level.
With outdoor seating amid a sea of red umbrellas one floor up from street level, the cafe has an atmosphere evocative of Paris, a world away from the despair that once made this block infamous.
