It’s only mid-March and already “Sleeping Beauty” Bordeaux seems to be waking from her winter slumber, shaking off confinement, curfew and coronavirus like a bad dream. Despite 3 million currently infected in France and an excruciatingly slow start to the vaccine rollout, a 20°C sunny day will send hordes of Bordelais out to the Garonne…
Well, it finally happened. After 4 years spent living just 100 meters from TentaziOni, I finally decided I couldn’t survive another day without eating there. I had heard just about every one of my Italian friends praise the restaurant’s menu with a kind of passion they normally reserve for denouncing “pâte à la carbonara à…
I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. Unmotivated, lethargic, unhappy. Stuck in an enforced hibernation in my lonesome Bordeaux bubble with a soul-crushing curfew, starving for places and faces, both familiar and new. I sometimes re-read my old articles about the street food of Mongkok, the asados in Argentina, the 18-course tasting menu…
My favorite meal of 2020 was by far this lunch at Restaurant Les Clos de Paulliles in Port-Vendres on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Just a half hour before being handed our menus my travel companion and I had been stretched out on sun loungers on the pool deck of our Argelès-sur-Mer resort, an…
Cooped up in Bordeaux for Confinement: Part II during autumn, the season that already makes me particularly homesick each year, I’ve been thinking about my last trip to the US in February. My annual visit to the Harvard Square T-Mobile for a temporary SIM card with a side of deliciously smiley American customer service. An…
One of my favorite new discoveries in the neighborhood is HEIKO on Rue Fondaudège, perfect for a quick solitary lunch on work-from-home Wednesdays. They specialize in poke bowls and “sushi burritos” inspired by Hawaiian, Japanese and Mexican flavors. At 11.90€ a bowl and 10.90€ a burrito, this is a pretty great deal. (Considering the quantity…
“Wholesome” is how I feel on Saturday or Sunday mornings at Marché des Capucins with my bae. There’s something so therapeutic, so comforting about picking out one’s ingredients for the rest of the week, pointing at the avocado, the tomato, the radish that will make it into my weekday lunch, choosing the corn-fed, yellow-skinned poulet…
I don’t know too much about Harlem, about its history or the many nuanced perspectives on its gradual gentrification. I do understand that Red Rooster has been an important part of that story, and that those who know more than I do have strong opinions on the role it has played in the process, for…
Sprawling terraces packed with tired parents and their up-too-late children, dramatically lit ice cream stands and a make-shift amusement park surrounded by stands offering fried stuff and noise with a view of stinky ships in the port. The usual suspects. Tired from a morning spent roasting poolside, followed by a 3-hour lunch and a series…
A ride together around the sun, a year spent building a home and then being confined in it. Our noces de coton. To celebrate our first wedding anniversary we decided to try out a restaurant that we had walked by many times on the olde Rue du Palais Gallien, one whose name we had said…
We didn’t stray far from home for our first restaurant meal after déconfinement. That 1km max running radius seemed to set in deep psychologically and for the first time we really opened our eyes to the many fantastic options on Palais Gallien. Yes, nearing Gambetta, it turns into kebab country and the suffocating odor of…
With the essence of the crispiest pork still lingering on our palates, we arrive to the end of a Chelsea Market corridor to what feels like a noisy open-aired taqueria next to some seafood market somewhere on the coast. It’s the surfer-chick sister restaurant of Los Tacos No. 1. A few sandy-looking picnic tables, a…
The sheer volume of options is what struck me most on this past trip back Stateside exactly one month ago. “I’ll have whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want” is a concept that takes some time getting used to when you’ve grown distant from it. And after an entire uninterrupted year of “croissant…
I guess at some point in the early 2000’s, the world found out about Dubrovnik. And then, it became GOT’s King’s Landing, which certainly did not help keep mass tourism at bay. Eventually what was a rather affordable, relatively “untouched” gem of a port city became the setting for grand yacht parties. The charm it…
To be honest, I was barely there for this dinner at Madame Pang on New Year’s Eve, at the brink of the new decade. I arrived at the finish line for 2019 like an out-of-shape long-distance runner, dry-heaving but with a smile plastered across my face for show. “We made it!” 2019 was a busy…
