Park Slope

A shop on Fifth Avenue selling capes, grappling hooks and tins of gravity, with a secret door at the back that opens onto 826NYC's free tutoring and writing center for kids. The shop funds the center. The staff will not break character, which is the whole transaction.

Tue to Sun, noon to 5pm. Closed Mondays

A small espresso bar tucked onto Berkeley Place off Seventh Avenue, with a zinc-topped counter, a few stools and newspapers people actually read. It does espresso and a short list of pastry and nothing else. The name is a joke about being the northern branch of a café six blocks away.

Every day, 8am to 4pm

Brooklyn's oldest operating bookstore, on Seventh Avenue since 1971, with a garden behind the shelves that you can sit in. The front is new fiction and the back is where the staff recommendations get interesting. Readings happen here often enough that the calendar is worth a look on its own.

Mon to Sat, 10am to 7pm. Sun, 10am to 6pm

A long narrow diner on Seventh Avenue with a counter down one side and booths down the other, doing eggs all day and a dinner menu nobody orders from at breakfast. The prices sit below everything else on the avenue. It opens at eight every morning and runs to ten on weekdays, which almost nothing else in Park Slope does.

Mon to Fri, 8am to 10pm. Sat, 8am to 9pm. Sun, 8am to 4pm

A corner slice shop at Seventh Avenue and 8th Street that sells plain, Sicilian and grandma by the slice out of the case. There are a few tables and a counter you eat standing at. It is open past midnight every night of the week, which in Park Slope is rarer than it should be.

Mon to Thu, 11am to 12:30am. Fri and Sat, 11am to 1:30am. Sun, noon to 11pm