My springtime
by Giorgia Eugenia Goggi
We admire Giorgia’s cooking skills and her being in-house chef at one of our favourite places, Masseria Moroseta. There is no menu, each dinner is unique and depends on her daily inspiration and on the vegetable garden’s yield…
Hija de Sanchez
Copenaghen, Denmark
Whoever decides to tell Rosio Sanchéz’s story will have to start from the phone call during which René Redzepi offered her a job as Noma’s confectioner. She begins, instead, from her childhood in Chicago and her precocious passion for sweets, which has its origin in a family kitchen where Mexico and the USA met…
Leon’s Oyster Shop
Charleston, United States
To us, Charleston is a bridge over River Ashley, a storm in the Southeast, a dusty cloth shop, and a sage-green Victorian façade. And also a Saturday night at the corner between King and First where young people from the neighbourhood drink beer together at the pub while a team of thirty-year-olds prepares and serves perfect bowls of Raw/Grilled Oysters, Fried Chicken, Shrimp Roll and Cole Slaw in an old garage renamed Leon’s.
Broholm Castle
Fyn, Denmark
Thirteen generations of the same family. Seven hundred years. Nineteen rooms, six hundred and twenty hectares of vegetable garden, forest and gardens. Apricot-coloured bricks, high clouds and woods. Quiet ducks, busy insects, waterlilies…
Casa Lisa
Nonza, Corsica
Last June, during the latest edition of LeMiami, Dawn Goldworm, a professional perfumer and the co-founder of agency 12.29, talked about the importance of perfume when designing a special place. Casa Lisa smells of a Mediterranean summer…
SanBrite
Veneto, Italy
Pinecones and branches come from the wood, the vegetables from the home garden, cheese, butter and milk from the in-house dairy, and the fresh pasta from the family’s malga. SanBrite is, first of all, an act of love towards one’s own land and roots…
Niedermairhof
South Tyrol, Italy
It was probably on a Saturday afternoon, at the special time when the sun disappears behind a mountain. There were two rooms in our name at Niedermairhof. Helmut and Kathrin were in the courtyard, and he was sitting on the tractor holding their ecstatic son on his lap…
Vanira Lodge
Tahiti, South Pacific
Tahiti is an island and, at the same time, a people always keeping an eye on the ocean and another one on the mountains. They pray to the water and then to the forest, as if they were two symbiotic beings. Vanira lodge lies on a hill, steep enough to plunge into light dawns and deep sunsets, high enough to touch star-quilted night skies, close enough to Teahupoo’s waves to hear them rumble, close enough to the mountains to climb them. A green hill on the southern coast of Tahiti Iti, la Presqu’île, the wild part of the island, the one we love more. Evening comes quickly with the taste of lobster with honey, and morning comes quickly with the smell of coconut bread and banana and mango jam. ‘Fare’ is the word for ‘house’…
Woodspoon
Los Angeles, California
Our friend Carl suggested Woodspoon when one of our favourite restaurants in Little Tokyo closed. ‘Do you know where you can eat tonight? At Woodspoon’. The lovely lady owner of this small ‘Brazilian country kitchen’ is a close friend of his. We google it quickly to find Jonathan Gold’s opinion, which reads: ‘It may be a little strange to start a review by praising a restaurant’s tap water, but Wood Spoon’s really is the best in town: triple-filtered, no doubt, served sharply cool, and flavored with whole cinnamon sticks, which give the water a delicate fragrance and tint it the color of dilute oolong tea.’…
Le Polveri
Milan, Italy
The sister of Helios – the Sun – and of Selene – the Moon, in Greek mythology Eos, or Aurora, was the goddess that opened the gates to the light of day. Homer often calls Eos ‘the rosy-fingered goddess’. Aurora kneads dough, cooks and bakes every day but Mondays. Her tiny artisanal bakery with open laboratory is called Le Polveri (Powders), like the fine flour left on fingertips and the dark crumbles scattered on cheeks and tablecloths. Holidays are sweetly spiced and smell like cardamom, cinnamon and nutmeg. We love the abundance of big-sized breads and paddle pizzas, we love the delicacy of sweets you can hold in one hand – all made with mother dough, slow rising, and flours from small organic mills. You do not come here simply to buy bread; you come here knowingly to confirm Aurora’s skill to create a small world of calm, beauty and imagination.
Burrow
Brooklyn NY, USA
After Manhattan’s wonderful noise and eccentricity, you look for Burrow’s composure and silence. You will admire the symmetric sweets display with puff-pastry elephant ears, toasted-green-tea biscuits, nostalgic cherry granola, and almond croissants. Here, everything is reduced on a perfection scale and enjoyed in a tiny aesthetic peace. The owner and chef Ayako Kurokawa goes in and out the kitchen in her indigo linen apron, refilling trays with sweet and savoury morsels. She was born in Hokkaido, and she cannot tell how long she has been cooking these French, Breton, or simply Japanese delicacies in New York City. In the small lobby of the offices at 68 Jay Street, Dumbo, Williamsburg, NYC.
Manuela
Los Angeles, California
Maybe LA’s Arts District exists as a neighbourhood since Hauser & Wirth, a sophisticated contemporary art gallery as large as a couple of museums, opened at 901, East 3rd Street. Manuela opened one year later as the perfect rendezvous. ‘Whitsell’s rural sensibilities settling into one of the most urban spaces on the West Coast’ (Jonathan Gold, Los Angeles Times). Chef Wes Whitsell comes from the South, from Texas, his bag full of verbs that suit perfectly a small future meal: in-house smoking, fermenting, preserving, pickling. There are a chicken house where twelve rare-breed chickens live, and a planting garden where home vegetables grow. All this inside the walls of an ambitious art space…
My Springtime
by Nadja Buseck
Nadja grew up in a hotel in the Austrian Alps. She studied the history of art, the theory of photography, and dance in Berlin, London, and Vienna, but left academia during her PhD on contemporary dance photography. After gaining international experiences in the arts –from interning at a gallery in Buenos Aires to managing exclusive culture trips– she decided to follow her own vision and founded Where About Now in late 2017…
La Rustita
Marche, Italy
Empty beaches, closed chalets, deserted promenade. In autumn, the Adriatic Sea is tepid and good-natured, vaguely sad, and only belongs to a few. Above all, to those who live there and can enjoy the last days of sun sitting in the courtyard of a port trattoria at lunch. In Fano, young people love to meet at La Rustita, and so do we. We eat seafood salad, grilled squids, fried fish, mixed salad and white wine of the house between white wood and salty breeze.