Two-man shop
WORK • Tuesday Routine
NOAH DAVIS • co-founder • Three Point Four Media
Neighborhood you work in: Carroll Gardens
It’s Tuesday morning. What’s the scene at your workplace?
I’ve always been a work-from-home person. I make some coffee and head to the office (the half of the living room table that’s closer to the window). My Three Point Four Media business partner and I have a standing morning Zoom meeting, so I spend from about 7:30 a.m. until our chat catching up on emails that came in overnight, prepping for the day, and reading a variety of newsletters (Stratechery, Puck, One Thing, After School, Cultivated, and FOUND, of course) and the news.
What’s on the agenda for today?
Bill and I are both former freelance journalists who launched Three Point Four Media in 2017 as a way to use the skills we developed to help companies and organizations tell their stories. We’re the only two full-time employees, leading every project and pulling in freelancers on a project basis. We work on a range of stuff.
Today, I’m coordinating timing for an interview I’ll be doing later in the week with a U.K.-based actor, building out and organizing the content plan for a company called 11VEN, finalizing part of a naming project for a well-known outdoor recreation company’s upcoming line, talking to a tourism client about a potential project, keeping tabs on a website we helped launch recently, and writing our twice-a-month company newsletter.
While I mostly work from home, I’ll occasionally spend a couple hours at Principles in Gowanus. Or walk to Dae (best cappuccino around) or Nili (best blueberry muffins; my snack of choice tends towards kindergartener-with-disposable-income tastes) for a break. Today, I went to Laurel because I had been wanting to go and I was writing a newsletter about making myself look cooler than I am. The pain Suisse was exceptional.
Any restaurant plans today, tonight, this weekend?
Popina in the Columbia Waterfront District has my favorite backyard within walking distance, and I haven’t had a disappointing dish since they opened. Bonus points for The Hop Shop next door, good for a pre-dinner drink. I’m also a fan of Popina spinoff Gus’s, now with pasta, in addition to burgers and steaks and chophouse fare. I have a soft spot for the good people at Aromi since stumbling in during a driving rainstorm last year. They made space for me at the bar on a totally slammed night and poured an exceptional Negroni. My Lower Manhattan go-to is Epistrophy in Nolita — a simple, solid, affordable place that hasn’t changed since I first moved to the city.
How about a little leisure or culture this week?
Summer is Governors Island weather. If the mood strikes, I like running a race with NYC Runs — the most approachable and fun 5k and 10ks in the city — then, staying on the island for the day. Or skipping the run thing, going to Governors for the afternoon, ferrying back to Red Hook, getting pizza outdoors at Hoek, and watching the sun set at Louis Valentino, Jr. Park, or having a drink at Seaborne if we can figure out when it’s open. (Sporadic hours make a bar feel homey.) I go to a fair amount of movies: Cobble Hill Cinema or Nitehawk Prospect Park for less spectacular features; Regal Essex for anything with explosions.
What’s a recent big-ticket purchase you love?
On the recommendation of a friend, we went to this wild restaurant in the middle of Mallorca, the type of place where each (excellent) dish features multiple ingredients that have been fermenting in pine straw for 24 months. Just outside the bathroom was an enormous and amazing photograph of Buttermilk Channel and the Red Hook terminal shot from a pier in lower Manhattan. I asked the chef, Edu Martínez, about it, telling him that it more or less showed where we live. He said he took it on a trip in 2001. When we got back home, I emailed Martínez and asked if we could buy a print. Despite being a chef and not (yet) a professional photographer, he was willing. Now, after spending far too much on a frame in Brooklyn, we have a little bit of the nearby waterfront via Mallorca on the wall in the living room.
What NYC store or service do you love to recommend?
Crow’s Massage. As someone who works out a bit too much and warms up/stretches far too little, an occasional massage from Michael Croes goes a long way toward working out the accumulated knots and tightness. You’ll walk out feeling looser and lighter, and Croes will even suggest some quick and easy things to do at home to prevent whatever issue he worked out from returning. The man is a genius, and a nice dude, too.