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The third season of Master of None has just been released on Netflix after a four year hiatus. For those looking for more of what came in earlier seasons may be surprised, both in terms of the main stars and the filming locations. Aziz Ansari, who plays Dev, returns only briefly and the show is focused on Denise (Lena Waithe) and her partner Alicia (Naomi Ackie) and their journey using IVF try to get pregnant while living in upstate New York. Ansari co-wrote the season with Waithe, who appeared in previous seasons as Waithe. Accuracy in portraying the IVF experience was important to the creators, and the production had IVF specialists consulting in person and remotely and medical advisors for all hospital scenes.
If you’re curious where Master of None filmed in upstate New York, you are in for another surprise: the whole season was shot in the United Kingdom! The house that Denise and Alicia live in was actually built on a soundstage, conceived by production designer Amy Williams with paintings on the walls by artists from whom Lena Waithe has collected works, including Bria Murphy, Robert Pruitt, Courtney Webstar, and Carrie Mae Weems. If you are catching up on the first two seasons of Master of None now, you can check out all the fabulous filming locations in New York City below!
In November 2015, Master of None quickly become an over-weekend sensation (we admit, we binge watched the whole first season). The New York City-set comedy stars Aziz Ansari with a cast of hilarious regulars like Noël Wells from SNL, Eric Wareheim, Kelvin Yu, and Lena Waithe, and guest stars like Claire Danes, Busta Rhymes, Noah Emmerich, and Colin Salmon. Attacking relatable subjects like dating, immigrant parents, children (or lack thereof) and more, the show brings a levity to even difficult subjects clearly close to the hearts of creators Ansari and Kevin Yang, from debates about minority casting in television to politics (even finding a way to cleverly diss Bobby Jindal in a funny way).
Equally fun for us has been tracking down the film locations in Master of None, featuring some of our favorite spots in New York City. What we love about the Master of None locations are that they all feel like neighborhood spots Ansari and his team probably already hang out at, rather than some all out film scouting affair.
After season one debuted, the New York Times interviewed us about the show’s film locations that took popular culture by storm. And now that season two has been released, we’ve updated the below list with new locations.
Without further ado, here are the locations in season one and two!
Season two of Master of None begins in Italy, nearing the three month mark after the close of season one. Dev (Aziz Ansari) has broken up with his girlfriend Rachel and books a one way ticket to Italy to learn pasta making. At the opening of season two, we learn he has come to the small town of Modena. (In real life, Ansari really did go to Modena, learned pasta and Italian to prepare for the role). In episode 1, Dev and Arnold go to Osteria Francescana in Modena, run by chef Massimo Bottura for Dev’s birthday. . It’s been named one of the fifty world’s best restaurants and featured in the Netflix show, Chef’s Table.
By episode three, Dev has finished his apprenticeship in the pasta shop and decides to head back to New York City.
The third episode is titled Religion, and the opening sequence covers the age-old spectacle of parents dragging their children to important ceremonies – across a wide range of religions. The very first scene takes place at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, located on North 12th Street in Williamsburg, built between 1916 and 1921, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s notable exterior is matched by a colorful and ornate interior.
In the Religion episode, Dev and his family meet a more devout Muslim family for dinner. They go to Oleander’s, a mid-century style tropical themed restaurant inside the McCarren Hotel and Pool on North 12th Street. According to the restaurant’s website, the design concept by Heather Maloney at Definition:Design, features “classic bentwood chairs, comfortable banquettes, over-scaled Tiffany chandelier lighting and soaring accent wall – covered in the evergreen shrubs that are its namesake – complement the copper clad bar and checkerboard floor for an overall relaxed atmosphere.”
Naveed and Dev go to Slick Willie, a cafe and bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn where Dev gets the pork cubano sandwich. Naveed tries a taste and is hooked on onto pork. Slick Willie is located at 179 Meserole Avenue.
Dev introduces family friend Naveed to pork and they head to Smorgasburg to check out Ticklers, the fictional Nashville BBQ joint that Dev and Rachel go to in Nashville (actual film location in the first season was at Hometown BBQ in Red Hook). Smorgasburg is located in East River State Park along the Williamsburg waterfront, which it used to share with Brooklyn Flea, though it was just announced that the later will move locations due to overcrowding concerns.
The scene finishes with Dev and Naveed eating, overlooking the skyline of Manhattan from the park.
Dev heads to Thai Villa on the second family friend dinner, located at 5 E. 19th Street in the Gramercy neighborhood. The impressive interior with ornate wood carvings, dramatic light fixtures, and tiled floors makes for an impressive film location.
The final montage in episode three makes a link between Dev, and the community he finds with his friends, and the religious community with his parents, cutting back and forth between Dev at Sauvage, a Greenpoint, Brooklyn oyster bar from the team at Maison Premiere at 905 Lorimer Street, and his parents at a mosque.
In the episode, “First Date,” we see Dev bring multiple dates to the same locations. He begins the night at The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at 395 Grand Street. This wine bar was started by James Murphy of the band LCD Soundsystem and his wife, a wine expert. True to his musician background, Murphy is said to have designed the bar with good acoustics. According to Eater, “Murphy designed the acoustics for the wine bar as if it were a recording studio. He gave the space a Scandinavian minimalist touch, combining cedar slats (because it’s a softer wood than oak) with artisanal burlap sacks to great, Williamsburgian effect.
There’s another bar in Williamsburg that was also designed with great thought to its acoustic properties: La Milagrosa, a speakeasy hidden behind a bodega.
Dev ends the first date at the rooftop bar, the Westlight, at the William Vale Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Apart from the cocktails, the most impressive thing at this bar are the views of Manhattan.
Dev takes Francesca, his Italian friend from Modena, to the Brooklyn Museum while she waits for her boyfriend Pino to finish up his work (in the tiling industry). The Brooklyn Museum is located in Prospect Park, and the duo visit The Dinner Party, a work by Judy Chicago and the title of this particular episode of Master of None.
Set up as a triangular dinner party, the table settings are suggestive of female anatomy and the museum states that the work is “an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organized.”
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At the Italian restaurant Carbone on 181 Thompson Street in Greenwich Village, Dev and Jeff, an investor in Dev’s show Clash of the Cupcakes, meet. Jeff, host of the show “Jeff’s Table” invites Dev to a dinner party at his apartment on Friday night, where John Legend shows up and plays a song. Dev, unsure of who to take, particularly after the second date with Priya goes badly, ends up inviting Francesca.
Dev’s date with Priya begins at the speakeasy Please Don’t Tell (PDT) in the East Village. Though this might be one of the city’s worst kept secrets, it’s still an impressive place for the speakeasy newbie. You enter through a vintage phone booth inside the hot dog joint Crif Dogs, accessing the space through a red telephone. But don’t let the kitschiness fool you, the cocktails here are legit.
Check out some of the best hidden bars in NYC, based on a guidebook written by Untapped Cities editors!
For dinner, Dev takes Priya to Il Buco, an Italian restaurant on Bond Street in Noho with a notable wine cellar. They sit for dinner in this lower level, but conversation with Priya continues to be painful.
The episode “New York, I Love You” is a framed as a mini movie capturing the lives of every day New Yorkers – like a doorman, taxi driver, bodega worker, and more – and how they might all, literally, bump arms with each other, in the city. The episode begins in the fictional pre-war apartment building The Clebourne, which Dev, Arnold and Denise walk by. We follow the life of Eddie, who balances all of the quirky demands of the residents. This building is located on 105th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. The story shifts as we follow a fellow doorman who goes to a bodega on West 104th Street and Broadway where we meet a deaf worker in the shop.
In the storyline with the deaf woman, the sound goes silent, telling the story from her perspective. We see her in a park and then she heads to the store Fishy’s Eddy with her boyfriend/fiancé to shop for a gift. Here, she and her partner get into a sign language argument about their sex life and encounter a “pizza scarf” for sale.
On 10th Avenue and and 17th Street, just north of the Meatpacking District is Avenue, a club that serves as the stand in for the fictional club “Envision.” The cab drivers head there after they are rejected from the club 1 Oak. Built in the style of clubs like Marquee, this bottle service type spot is certainly for a very different crowd than the taxi drivers in the story it has recruited in (who live off the Chauncey Street stop in Bedford-Stuyvesant, near East New York, Brooklyn), and the type of spots frequented by Dev and his friends.
The taxi drivers, turned off by the $800 bottle service, wander down 23rd Street near 8th Avenue. They run into a group of girls who are looking to get into Lucky’s Famous Burgers after hours for some fries. Turns out, the taxi drivers’ roommate works here and a dance party ensues inside. Then, they go next door to the Cinépolis Chelsea movie theater to catch the fictional movie “Death Castle,” (starring Nicholas Cage, Emma Watson, and Tyrese Gibson) where Dev and his friends are also taking in the film, along with the rest of the characters we’ve seen in this short film.
In the episode “Thanksgiving,” which tracks the Thanksgiving dinner over the years in Denise’s family, her and her mother go to a diner in 2006. Denise comes out to her mother here, which is the Goodfellas Diner (formerly Clinton Diner) in Maspeth, Queens. This location was most recently featured in the last season of Homeland. It has also been in Goodfellas, the Good Wife and other shows.
Brian and his dad walk down the street in South Williamsburg, chatting about his father’s dating life. In the first scene, Brian’s dad decides to break up with Linda, a Korean woman he’s dating, but later finds himself unable to do so because her stew was too good. They walk down South 2nd Street, and turn on Havemeyer Street. In the background, you can see the elevated Brooklyn Queens Expressway.
Chef Jeff asks Dev to take him to his favorite Indian restaurant, which is Agra Taj Mahal in Greenpoint located at 1005 Manhattan Ave. It’s one of the more affordable restaurants frequented this season.
Francesca comes back for a month to New York City with Pino, who is now her fiancé. He is here for work, as usual, and leaves her mostly to her own devices. Dev takes her to the Spanish tapas restaurant Tertulia on 6th Avenue in the West Village run by chef Seamus Mullen. This restaurant has since closed and was replaced by a dry cleaner.
After dinner, Francesca and Dev walk through Washington Square Park and sit at the fountain in front of the arch. He decides to play a game where they pretend to be an arguing couple, yelling at outrageous things. Halfway through, Dev is recognized by fans of Clash of the Cupcakes.
The floral wallpaper and the floral couches are the giveaway here at the Jia bar in the Hotel on Rivington, where Francesca throws a birthday party for Pino who is only interested in talking to his potential tile client.
Pino bails on Francesca for a trip to Storm King, a sculpture park located in the Hudson Valley. It was one of the main excursions she was looking forward to so she asks Dev to go instead.
Arnold is DJ’ing at The Good Room in Greenpoint, so Dev and Francesca head there except she is clearly not herself. This club at 193 Meserole Avenue in Greenpoint has several rooms and a large dance floor.
Dev and Francesca’s friendship has taken an awkward turn but she asks if they can take that helicopter ride together, from the gift Dev received from his team at Clash of the Cupcakes. The helicopter takes off from the West 30th Street Heliport, along the Hudson River.
The last episode of season two shows Chef Jeff and Dev heading to Okonomi | Yuji Ramen, the Japanese restaurant in Williamsburg for an episode of their new show, BFF (Best Food Friends). Located at 150 Ainslie Street, this spot by chef Yuji Haraguchi serves traditional Japanese fare for breakfast and lunch, and then ramen in the evening. If you’ve been feeling that Chef Jeff is modeled after Anthony Bourdain, the episode of BFF is the final piece of proof you need.
Dev goes to take in a two-man play called The Hammond Estates at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village at 38 Commerce Street. It is considered the city’s oldest continuously run off-Broadway theater, converted from a box factory into its current use by writer Edna St. Millay, who lived nearby in the narrowest house in Manhattan, and members of the Provincetown Players.
If you’ve been rooting for Dev and Francesca this season, you’ll be pleased with how this season ends! Continue on for film locations in season one of Master of None!
There is actually a street called Tennis Court in Brooklyn, south of Prospect Park. Whoever had the cleverness to make this type of pun deserves some credit, but the charming Victorian development that once sat on this street was razed for big apartment buildings. In Master of None, Dev (Aziz) attends the birthday party of his friend’s kid, runs into an old friend and gets invited back to her place. They walk past Tennis Court to her house, Dev ends up spending the day child-sitting and comes to the realization he’s glad he doesn’t have kids yet.
When Dev and his good Taiwanese-American friend Brian (Kevin Yang) hang out, they always seem to be walking the streets of New York City. In the second episode, Dev discovers with dread he has to hang out with his dad and his friend Dr. Ramusami and invites Brian along. Dev meets his dad at El Ray Coffeeshop and Luncheonette. Dev and Brian also return to Nolita later in this episode.
After their tea with Dr. Ramusami and Dev’s dad, Brian and Dev are seen again walking – this time in the park between Chrystie and Forsyth navigating between a group of Chinese ladies dancing just down the street from the bar Happy Ending. They discuss the things they learned about their parents over this tea and decide to invite their parents to dinner. Brian gets a text that Happy Ending is “poppin’ off” so they decide to head over there.
Dev and Brian invite their parents to Shun Lee Palace for dinner on East 55th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. You see traditional Peking Duck being prepared in the scene, but its discovered that Dev’s mom hates Chinese food. After a hesitant start getting their parents to tell stories, the parents laugh over some shared experiences and other stories (like Brian’s dad eating his pet chicken).
The crew of friends, Dev, Arnold, Denise and Brian head to dinner and drinks at Hotel Delmano, in Williamsburg. Dev has two tickets the “super secret show” folk singer Father John Misty is playing and is figuring out who to take. It’s decided that Dev should take Alice, the waitress at Hotel Delmano so Dev asks here. Over the next few days, he agonizes while she doesn’t confirm or turn him down and he asks some backup girls. Alice says at the last minute she can make it, so he cancels on another girl.
The Father John Misty Show is cancelled but Bone Thugs-N-Harmory play instead, so Dev and Alice go anyway to the show at Baby’s All Right, a music venue in Williamsburg. Alice turns out to be nuts and gets thrown out for stealing a leather jacket, and Dev bumps into Rachel, the girl he had a failed one-night-stand/Plan B incident with in the first episode.
Rachel invites Dev to the after-party for the secret show, which is taking place at Achilles Heel in Greenpoint on the corner of West Street and Green Street. They hang out and dance, but then Rachel breaks it to Dev she’s trying to work things out with her ex-boyfriend who just moved back from Seattle.
Dev bumps into his friend Ravi at an audition for a new television show and they grab coffee at Marlow & Sons in Williamsburg after where they debate about imitating Indian accents to get roles Dev believes are stereotypes of Indians.
In episode 5, “The Other Man,” Dev meets a food critic, played by Claire Danes, at a work party thrown by Denise but then discovers she’s married while they’re hooking up. He decides not to hook up with her but then runs into her husband, who cuts him off while on the line for Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side and takes the last King Kong Banana Split special for the day. After this incident, Dev decides to just go ahead with the affair.
Before heading off to Nashville on their 24-hour date, Dev and Rachel stop by the pop-up Parlor espresso bar in Persons of Interest Barbershop in Williamsburg. If you’re wondering where the BBQ joint is in Nashville, it’s actually filmed at Hometown Bar-B-Que in Red Hook, next to the also fabulous Crab Shack on Van Brunt Street. But exterior scenes were filmed in Nashville, as you can see in the behind the scenes photo above.
Dev and Arnold get a drink at 169 Bar on East Broadway, and have difficulty being served. The tiki-themed bar will be recognizable to many New Yorkers, as the bar has been in this location (under various different names) for over a century. Dev’s co-worker in the Garden Depot advertisement he’s shooting is also at 169 Bar, but he doesn’t see her.
Denise and Dev make a citizens arrest on the G train, after seeing a guy jerking off in the subway car and take video for evidence. They get out of the station at Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg where they are met by police offers.
The cast of the Garden Depot commercial meet for drinks at the dive spot Ace Bar on East 5th in the East Village. This is where Dev tells the director about the stereotypical nature of the ad with the women in the background. The next day, Dev discovers that he’s been taken off the ad because the director has done a rewrite of the narrative to feature the women instead.
Though Rachel says her grandmother is in an elderly home in the Bronx, she and Dev visit Mary D’s Housing for Seniors, inspired by the recent passing of Arnold’s grandfather. The external location, Mary D’s Housing for Seniors is actually located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on Dupont Street.
Rachel’s grandmother convinces Dev to sneak her out of the home and they go for an Italian dinner at Bamonte’s Bar & Grill in Williamsburg, during which she escapes to her favorite jazz club. Bamonte’s is not only one of the locations of a vintage phone booth in New York City, it’s also a featured film location in the television show Gotham.
Rachel and Dev attend a wedding at Liberty Warehouse on Conover Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The brick building located on Pier 41 was constructed before the Civil War. The vows given by the couple make Dev start to question whether he and Rachel will be together forever.
At the premiere of The Sickening, the movie Dev has been working on, he discovers he’s been cut from the film. At the after party at the Jane Hotel Ballroom, Rachel confronts the director, leading to a fight between Dev and Rachel. The Jane Hotel is one of the numerous remnants of New York City’s nautical past, built originally as the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailor’s Home and Institute, built in 1908 by William A. Boring, the architect of another very nautical destination – Ellis Island. It also housed survivors of the Titanic in 1912.
Dev contemplates his split from Rachel with the words of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar in voiceover while walking down Hudson River Park. He realizes he still wants to be with her and gives her a call to meet up.
Dev meets up with this The Sickening co-star in Washington Square Park, where the latter gets recognized from a commercial. After this Dev decides to take a risk and book a one-way ticket to Italy, a place he’s always wanted to go.
We are super excited for the next season of Master of None. Next, also check out Film Locations for the show Gotham. Get in touch with the author @untappedmich.
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