A Romantic—and Comprehensive—Guide to New York City’s West Village

New York City ’s West Village neighborhood is often touted as its most romantic: the urban grid of concrete numbered avenues and streets slowly dissipates into a jumble of cobblestone ones with names like Grove, Charles, and Perry. Skyscrapers give way to 18th-century brownstones and mews houses—which, in the springtime, have blooms bursting from their flower boxes. Independent stores are more common than chain ones, and nearly every restaurant feels like a quaint hole-in-the-wall (until you find out it has a Michelin Star and a Resy waitlist in the thousands).

So for those visiting the idyllic area—whose boundaries are roughly Hudson River to the west, 14th Street to the north, 7th Avenue to the east, and West Houston to the south—where to eat and shop? (You can’t really stay—there ar