By Yepoka Yeebo
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — A celebration of the season is bringing fall flavors to Harlem.
Merchants' association Harlem Park to Park has organized Oktoberfest events including a Harvest Festival on October 9th at 116th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, and the Harlem Restaurant and Bar Crawl along Frederick Douglass Boulevard on October 28th.
"We are doing a butternut squash risotto with sage foam - it's absolutely delicious," said 5 and Diamond co-owner Lia Sanfilippo, of the restaurant's menu special, which celebrates the year with a $20.10 price tag.
"The entree is a Senate Farms chicken with a Vermont goat cheese potato puree, and the desert - well, we're known for our donuts," she added.
For the bar crawl, she promised seasonal cocktails - a chipotle margarita, dark and stormys and pear Bellinis at the restaurant at Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 112th Street.
Sanfilippo said the neighborhood's merchants were only too happy to club together. "Harlem is an unbelievable community of people, everyone here has been under-served for so long," she said.
"We have the potential to have as much foot traffic as the Meatpacking District."
Further uptown, Louis Gagliano, co-owner of flower store Harlem Flo on 123rd Street near St. Nicholas Avenue, said the cooperation between retailers showed they were only too willing to work together for the common good.
Gagliano said the flower store's $20.10 item would be "tight, modern, whimsical bouquets," full of seasonal colors.
"They could be dahlias, they could be carnations, they could be mums," he said of the flowers.
Some of the proceeds from the month-long celebration of Harlem businesses will be donated to UNICEF for continuing earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.
