New Haven: In the Big (Ivy) Leagues

Remove Yale University from New Haven and you better have a thing for craters. To come to "NHV" is to go to Yale, walk through Yale, take a picture of Yale (I took more than 500) -- and eat, drink, and be merry at places that more or less survive because of Yale. This isn't a bad thing.

The university's brand recognition goes across the board; the location, on-site restaurant, and high thread count sheets make it stand out on its own, but my hotel was still called "The Study at Yale." When another lux hotel, the Omni, moved in, it modeled its lobby after an old-school Yale library, and has the best view of the campus from its top-floor (and top shelf) restaurant.

Brits and Brontosaurus

Yale's 315 years of prestige extends beyond its hallowed halls. For a small town (New Haven's population hovers around 130,000), museums loom large. An association with an institution whose endowment is more than $25 billion has its advantages.

Barring that sculpture of Samson whacking a Philistine with a donkey jaw, the Yale Center for British Art could have drifted out of a Jane Austen novel, but the Yale University Art Gallery is not nearly so restrained. Its standard-setting collection gleefully sweeps across Ancient Greece and Mesoamerica to Jackson Pollock and Georgia O'Keeffe in a building resembling a Tuscan palace.

But for true nerdgasms, head over to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Heralded as the "Sistine Chapel of Evolution," due, in part, to one of the world's most famous dinosaur murals, I faced off with Deinonychus, Ichthyornis, Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus rex and lots of other towering creatures I'm glad are extinct. It's not just in funding where you feel Yale's presence, most of the Peabody exhibits are owed to Yalie scientists; contributor Charles Darwin, a British brain, is the odd man out.

Student Bodies

All are within walking distance of The Study at Yale, but I chose the hotel for less cerebral reasons: it is a block from the gay clubs.

Here is an interesting chain of circumstances. Smallish New Haven has only two gay clubs, but they pull in every LGBTQ between New York and Providence; they are always packed, always mixed. And always "seasonal." At Partners (dance-y, lounge-y) and the 168 York Street Cafe (pub-y, shmooze-y) you get two different faces depending on Yale's academic year: Summer brings out the locals. The academic year sees an obvious spike in the student population. New Haven is mindful of the switch; its Gay Pride kicks off in September, rather than June.

Off Campus

It was actually reassuring to find aspects of town flourishing outside the university's reach. Did you know the hamburger sandwich was invented here?

It was at Louis' Lunch, when in 1900 a patron in a hurry demanded lunch on the go. Proprietor Louis Lassen slapped a patty between two slices of bread and voila! The eatery still stands, still family-owned, still serves hamburgers on slices of bread -- NOT BUNS -- and still uses the same broilers from a century ago.

Across from my hotel was Atelier Florian, clearly where you go to impress a date or visiting sultan. However, because of so many budget-minded students, the town is chock-full of econo-foodporn; the organic and sustainable menu at Claire's Corner Copia is tailor-made for wallet-/health-minded millennials. Much of New Haven cuisine is stylishly "downmarket": hamburgers, beer, birch beer, and most of all, pizza. I am a New Yorker by way of Philadelphia; for New Haven to claim the best pizza in America is asking for it.

And I got it; humble pie, especially if it's Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana's original tomato pie, never tasted so good. Or the white pizza, or the quattro formaggi pizza. Totally worth every accolade, prize, and all-out binge-eating extravaganza.

"Humble" seems to be a theme; with hotspots disarmingly named BAR and Ordinary (whose mashed potato pizza is anything but), plus rubber duckies -- not lying -- bobbing in the cocktails at Elm City Social, it's hard to maintain a 'tude.

That's for after graduation.

Getting There
Amtrak and Greyhound both run to New Haven, as does MetroNorth from New York City. Tweed New Haven Airport provides services to 330 destinations.