GGTV by Ghetto Gastro
Since its founding in 2012 by Jon Gray (the guest on Ep. 2 of Time Sensitive), Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker, the Bronx-born culinary collective Ghetto Gastro has grown into a cultural force, merging food, fashion, music, art, design, and storytelling to amplify underrepresented communities and creatives shaping the world from the ground up. With their newly launched YouTube channel, GGTV, the trio brings their mission and vision to the audiovisual realm. Through a style that’s “real, raw, and rooted,” to use Gray’s words, the platform revolves around three main series: Les Is More, a borough-hopping show where Walker takes viewers to unsung culture-shaping spots that have yet to make it onto “best-of” lists (a recent video featured Cocina Consuelo, a Mexican restaurant in Harlem that serves mouth-watering masa pancakes); Pasta Planet, a soulful cooking series in which chefs explore pasta and noodles through their own cultural lenses, from West Africa to East Asia; and Time & Taste, a stripped-down conversation series that examines the rituals, aesthetics, and philosophies of global tastemakers. (The latter, Gray says, is inspired by Time Sensitive.) In our hyper-commoditized world, GGTV’s global, grassroots approach is nothing short of a form of resistance. “We’re building a platform that celebrates the underground architects of culture—the aunties, the uncles, the outliers,” Gray says. “By highlighting diasporic excellence and celebrating immigrant ingenuity, we’re reminding folks where flavor, rhythm, and style really come from. This isn’t just content—it’s communion.”

“The Shakers: A World in the Making” at the Vitra Design Museum
A religious group born out of Quakerism and founded in North West England in the late 18th century, the Shakers emigrated to the American colonies in 1774, where they created 18 distinct communities that stretched from Kentucky to Maine. Within these establishments, they crafted a practical, minimalist design approach for furniture, domestic objects, and architecture that soon garnered attention for its radical simplicity and seemingly inevitable constructions. While the group’s contributions to design and architecture are still lauded today, they are often reduced to mere aesthetic value. Organized by the Milan-based studio Formafantasma, the exhibition “The Shakers: A World in the Making” at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, on view through Sept. 28, digs deeper, tracing how Shaker design was inextricably linked with the group’s religious practices and beliefs surrounding community, labor, and social equality. Structured through four thematic sections, each named after a Shaker quote—including “The Place Just Right,” “When We Find a Good Thing, We Stick to It,” “Every Force Evolves a Form,” and “I Don’t Want to be Remembered as a Chair”—the exhibition culls together more than 150 original Shaker objects, including furniture, tools, architectural elements, and commercial goods, and puts them in dialogue with new research and commissioned works by seven contemporary artists and designers. More than just a visual survey, “The Shakers: A World in the Making” serves as a window into the complex social, material, and spiritual context underlying these vernacular designs that still resonate centuries later.

EAT: Easy, Affordable, Tasty
At a dinner during Frankie Celenza’s freshman year at N.Y.U., a friend’s mother ordered in perfect Italian, and he was forever changed. That moment would alter the course of Celenza’s life, spurring him to learn the language and spend a summer cooking alongside his uncle in Italy, returning to school with a newfound zeal for food and the culinary arts. In 2009, he launched a YouTube channel, on which he began posting low-budget cooking videos. This led to television opportunities, including with the media company Tastemade, where he has hosted shows such as Struggle Meals and Frankie Cooks and earned multiple Emmy awards along the way. (Celenza’s fourth Tastemade series, Let Frankie Cook, premieres this month.) Now, Celenza brings his culinary talents and no-frills approach to print with a just-released debut cookbook, EAT: Easy, Affordable, Tasty (Union Square & Co.). Spanning pastas, soups, salads, “secret weapon” sauces, desserts, and drinks, the 100 recipes in EAT follow three simple rules: easy (no more than 20 minutes of active cooking), affordable (no expensive, one-time-use ingredients), and tasty (no explanation required). The result is an approachable cooking guide that doesn’t sacrifice taste for budget constraints and encourages home cooks—whether college students, young professionals, or budding gourmet chefs—to take more risks and waste less food.

Waking up to the bells of the nearby Munttoren clock tower, it dawns on you: You’re at the De L’Europe Amsterdam. A sense of delight sets in. Drawing open the weighty, burnt-orange velvet curtains, your eyes adjust to take in the early glints of sun across the Amstel River below, where the passersby stroll and cycle along as if in a Renoir cityscape. Canal cruisers and water taxis float by and, on the near side of the river, a kite made to resemble a hawk soars this way and that. Perhaps the hotel concierge has helped arrange a private boat that will pick you up from the downstairs terrace after breakfast, or maybe you’ve reserved one of the hotel’s bicycles to explore the city on your own time. A breezy, effortless day is about to ensue.

Initially constructed in 1482 as a medieval fortress, Het Rondeel, the property was repurposed as an inn in 1638 before officially opening its doors as Hotel De L’Europe in 1896. In the 1950s, after decades of expansions and refurbishments, the hotel was paid a visit by a certain Alfred “Freddy” Heineken, the grandson of Gerard Adriaan Heineken, who founded the family’s namesake brewing company. Enamored by the establishment’s history and charm, Freddy became a frequent guest and eventually decided to purchase the property. The 107-room hotel has been owned by the Heineken family and company ever since—with Freddy’s daughter, Charlene de Carvalho, serving as the current proprietor—making it not only one of the city’s oldest independent family-owned hotels, but also one that’s constantly evolving.

Handsomely appointed by Dax and Joyce Roll of the local design studio Nicemakers, the interiors throughout the more traditional “Rondeel” part of the hotel incorporate a rich material palette, regal colors, and both antique and bespoke furniture, creating an elegant, highly tactile environment. In the lobby, past the revolving door, a verdant, oversize bouquet of tulips, peonies, or hortensias provides an instant breath of fresh air. Four multitiered chandeliers hang above an open seating area of plush, pistachio-green sofas and flax-colored armchairs, while gold-framed 17th-century artworks from the Heineken family line the walls. The serene river stretches out beyond the panoramic rear windows, with the Dutch National Opera & Ballet visible to the left and the famed eight-sided, open-spired Munttoren clock tower to the right.

But don’t be mistaken: While De L’Europe cherishes its history and old-world grandeur, the hotel simultaneously brims with creativity, experimentation, and verve. This energy comes in large part from its newest wing, ’t Huys—an old spelling of het huis, Dutch for “the house”—which it presents as the “gateway to Amsterdam.” Built on the foundation of the former 19th-century Theodoor Gilissen Bank, the wing now houses 14 one-of-a-kind suites, each designed in partnership with an Amsterdam-based creative or brand and brought to life by the design studio D/DOCK. Among these spaces are the Harper’s Bazaar Suite, curated by Miluska van ’t Lam, the editor-in-chief of the magazine’s Dutch edition; the Amsterdam Fashion Week Suite, curated by AFW’s initiator, the stylist Danie Bles; a suite by the renowned Dutch design firm Kokke House; and the Van Gogh Museum Suite. In the latter, a museum edition of the fourth version of the famed Dutch painter’s “Sunflowers” painting hangs above a marigold-yellow desk, while rare facsimiles of the artist’s letters and illustrations are kept in a side table for guests to peruse.

Served in the lobby lounge, Dutch high tea at De L’Europe includes smoked eel, Old Amsterdam cheese, rye bread, and the traditional tompouce pastry, a twist on the classic mille-feuille. On any given evening, guests can dine at the Italian Trattoria Graziella, the classic French brasserie Marie, or the Michelin-starred fine-dining Restaurant Flore, with fare inspired by nature and a menu that changes weekly, depending on what chef Bas van Kranen finds at the market or forages for in nearby forests—whether cherry blossoms or black truffles. Guests can also grab a snifter at the Chapter 1896 speakeasy or a Dutch jenever cocktail and bitterballen at the laid-back Freddy’s Bar.

Four years ago, for De L’Europe’s 125th anniversary celebration, the hotel hosted a property-wide gala with more than a thousand guests, multiple dance floors, a cabaret, and even an opera singer: a larger-than-life affair that could have sprung from the pages of a Gilded Age novel. That’s precisely what it feels like to stay here. Down to the “bedtime stories” that the housekeeping team places on guests’ pillows every night—featuring tidbits about the stroopwafel, the country’s agricultural history, or the evolution of the metro system—each day reads like a chapter of an unforgettable book, one you want to revisit again and again.

This is a condensed and edited excerpt of a text by Emily Jiang, published in the new book Culture: The Leading Hotels of the World (Monacelli), with editorial direction by The Slowdown.