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…
Taverna della Rocca
Marche, Italy
La Taverna della Rocca has the fragrance of my childhood Sundays: long tables and meals that resembled a ritual; the smell of dense meat sauce – cooked slowly – and of hand-rolled egg pasta that characterised the holiday; the smell of grilled meat. The only ‘eccentricity’ here are the piade sfogliate grilled and served with wild herbs and local toma cheese (the house women are quite proud of them). An ode to dedication and simplicity.
Confiteria Bristol
Buenos Aires, Argentina
A boy and a girl walk on via Esmeralda. At the end of February, though the summer is about to end, the air in Buenos Aires is still torrid. They have just arrived and today they have no destination. The small Confitería Bristol is the address they are not looking for. The girl orders two vegetarian empanadas, and the boy three with meat, with no hesitations. In front of the convex windows of the confectioner’s that since 1952 lives on the domestic rituals of the local upper middle class, they speak with the man at the counter – a Peruvian who learnt the trade as a boy – and with a distinguished woman whom the confectioner introduces promptly as a regular customer and granddaughter of President Avellaneda. These delicious turnovers of crumbly wavy pastry – the girl will learn to mould them with greater and greater skill – are the main course of an improvised picnic on a bench in the small park in front of the Palacio de Relaciones Internacionales. She bites them slowly, while he wolfs them and smiles with eyes wide open, as he did when he was caught doing some prank as a child. Buenos Aires was his world back then; now it is the city where he goes back and takes his new love.
La Bamba de Areco
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Only the pampas’ prairie beyond Buenos Aires’ north-western suburbs can silence the enthusiasm that Big Sur glaciers stirred in us. We have just left them. It is a summer Sunday; the wind pampers the trees’ foliage with deep hypnotic caresses. At the end of a dirt road, a young gaucho awaits us near the gate, as sculpturesque and fierce as the horse he controls with minimal moves. We follow him up to the entrance of a purple residence edged in white, along an intimate procession that cuts in half the neat land at sunset. Everything in this maternal rural landscape seems to be cautiously dancing with ancestral moves. The grass is greener, and the sky is airier and higher. This Land has become, also for us, a promise of happiness…
Hub Porteño
Buenos Aires, Argentina
‘All happy mornings resemble one another’ – Here I am, Jonathan Safran Foer. We woke up at Hub Porteño with a discreet and innocent jolliness, which even the passing rain drumming on the veranda could not disperse. The wall garden at our back, we sat on the striped sofa and sipped coffee in decorated china, while waiting for our daily medialunas to come out of the oven, stately and fragrant. The historical neighbourhood families resumed their classic routine while the sun dried the smaller puddles. In our spare time, we exercised our idea of luxury: we idled on the roof terrace, a private Eden among building tops, lingered in the big marble bathtub and, when snack time came, treated ourselves to a portion of homemade cake and a mate, while resuming that book about enchanted estancias.
Oviedo
Buenos Aires, Argentina
It is summer in Buenos Aires; lunch regulars start sitting down in Oviedo’s radiant dining room and greet with familiarity the waiters, busy with the last preparations. We get quickly used to ceremonious gestures, faint pleasantries, courtesy, and whispered conversations over spotless tablecloths. A classic world with no imperfections, where a small dose of peculiarity is allowed on the big canvases hanging on the walls, and on the dishes. The chefs’ knowledge and inspiration get to the tables as polished compositions, sometimes geometrical, sometimes more fluid. Every course is a variety of unusual, clear flavours, whose balance surprises you at every bite. A character that takes shape between sober creativity and tradition, between eternal and unconventional.
Big Sur
Buenos Aires, Argentina
“The question I will try to answer is, ‘Why do men wander rather than sit still?’” – wrote Bruce Chatwin to Tom Maschler once. I travel looking for what I know and for what I still don’t. I am certainly looking for my first Paris, the prows where I hid as a child, the luxury palmchat nests and the Sardinian clouds, Hudson River when it leaves behind the last New York City blocks of flats, and the Caribbean after Cape Town…
Proper
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Some inclinations are already evident when you are young. Like Heinrich Harrer’s (Hüttenberg, 6 July 1912 – Friesach, 7 January 2006), who as a boy won the World Student Championship in downhill skiing and as a grownup, on the other side of the world, after perilous adventures and misfortunes, became master and staunch friend of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, as per his bestseller ‘Seven years in Tibet’.
Masseria Tagliente
Puglia, Italy
If I had a masseria, I think I’d want it like this one: a luxury family residence with a big, spotless white, Spanish-style façade and five balconies on the piano nobile to see if the black wild horses are back from the woods, if the goats have gone into the shed, and if Brindisi and the Ionian Sea are glittering in the evening. The corner kitchen tiled with majolica ends in a big roof terrace, near St. Martin’s statue…
Masseria Schiuma
Puglia, Italy
‘Schiuma’ (foam) is a splendid word. It quickly calls to mind high waves’ foam, soft soap bubbles and their rainbows, soft milk, shaving foam that smells like pungent cologne, the lightness of childhood, an adolescence-like goliardic spirit, and an ephemeral consistency that leads you to play at any age. There is a street named Schiuma that from national road S90 – Monopoli to Savelletri – going south, takes you away from the sea and into an unexpected countryside. Masseria Schiuma’s name comes from it. In my opinion, its owners – a sincere Danish couple, graceful and beautiful, Pernille and Lars – love simplicity so much that they did not want to add any more frills or meanings to this place, a temple of private and shared spaces. Every movement of hosts and guests is free and mature…
Palazzo Penelope
Puglia, Italy
‘32 sq. m. of sea’. Water is the primary element that always fascinated Pino Pascali. The artist re-created his own sea in zinc tubs, each one containing a tone-on-tone variation of the colour of the sea. Pino Pascali, the greatest Apulian artist, was born in Bari on 19th October 1935. His parents came from Polignano a Mare. Very soon, his works emphasized his Mediterranean culture…