Entertaining Expert Suzanne Pollak on Living More Beautifully at Home

Entertaining Expert Suzanne Pollak on Living More Beautifully at Home

Suzanne Pollak is preparing a frisée salad for our lunch. She adds bacon (“You do eat pork?” she considerately asks), grinds some of her new-favorite pepper mélange, and tops the bowl with the largest, toastiest, most geometrically precise cubes of croutonsRead more

French Cooking with Chef Jean-Marc Villard in Provence

French Cooking with Chef Jean-Marc Villard in Provence

I watch in awe at the precision and speed with which Provençal chef Jean-Marc Villard peels and cores a Gala apple. The chef is demonstrating how to make a single-serving-sized tart tatin. He spoons granulated sugar into a ramekin toRead more

California Baker Tracy Mattson Is One Smart Cookie

California Baker Tracy Mattson Is One Smart Cookie

Maybe the brown T-shirt imprinted with the eye-catching COOKIE…take a bite! logo that Tracy Mattson is wearing signifies super powers, something like the “S” emblazoned on Superman’s chest. Inside the 400-square-foot commercial kitchen of Tracy’s boutique, artisan bakery in Santa Rosa,Read more

London’s Historic Borough Market Beckons Food Lovers

London’s Historic Borough Market Beckons Food Lovers

Bundled against London’s late December chill, the woman staffing Kappacasein’s cheese stall at the Stoney Street entrance to Borough Market, London’s oldest food market, assembles our order of two toasted cheese sandwiches. For each, she begins with two thin, rectangular-shapedRead more

Chef Bruce Moffett’s Barrington’s Restaurant Stars in Charlotte

Chef Bruce Moffett’s Barrington’s Restaurant Stars in Charlotte

The sound system in the kitchen at Barrington’s restaurant in Charlotte, NC, plays “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” as I observe owner and executive chef Bruce Moffett wield a hefty knife and trim excess fat and other unwantedRead more

New SFMOMA Dazzles as Showplace for Modern and Contemporary Art

New SFMOMA Dazzles as Showplace for Modern and Contemporary Art

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s newest patron wears a fuzzy pink onesie. The baby girl is strapped face forward, arms and legs dangling, into a supportive carrier on her father’s chest. Dad holds a bottle up to his daughter’sRead more

Wine, Women, and Napa Valley’s Michaela Rodeno

Wine, Women, and Napa Valley’s Michaela Rodeno

Michaela Rodeno and I are standing in the light-filled kitchen of her cube-shaped home in Oakville, CA, which also doubles as the tasting room of her family’s Villa Ragazzi winery. She hands me a bottle of their flagship Sangiovese wine andRead more

Day Tripping to Bodega Head on the Sonoma Coast

Day Tripping to Bodega Head on the Sonoma Coast

Sixty-eight. Sixty-seven. Sixty-six. The countdown is under way as Bill and I drive the winding, two-lane Bodega Highway toward Bodega Head on the Sonoma Coast of California. Bill is at the wheel. He steals frequent glances at the thermometer onRead more

Personal Chefs Serve Up Feasts on St. John

Personal Chefs Serve Up Feasts on St. John

Personal chef Erin Hraster is drizzling olive oil over nine eight-ounce Caribbean lobster tails in the kitchen of Vida de Mar, our rental beachfront villa on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Erin is comfortably dressed in black, stain-obscuringRead more