42 essays tagged “food”.
Split, Croatia
I have left Split a hundred times in twenty years. Every single time the plane banks over the Brač channel on the way back, I tremble. This is the only city in the world I do that for. Here's what to do with mine.
May 20, 2026
Lisbon, Portugal
I came to Lisbon in 2008 for a long weekend, came back in 2011 for a month, and in 2019 stopped pretending and rented an apartment. Most of what is now said about the city — that it is hot, crowded, expensive, complicated — is true. None of it is the whole story. This is the rest of it.
February 14, 2025
Paris, France
Everyone arrives in Paris with a list. I did too, in 2004, and I crossed almost none of it off. What I learned instead was that Paris doesn't perform for tourists in the afternoon. It performs at 7 a.m., at 11 p.m., and on Mondays when half the city is closed and the other half has finally exhaled.
September 12, 2024
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo is large in a way that defeats the standard travel rhythm. It is not one city; it is twenty-three wards, each a small city, each with its own grammar. The right pace is to do less, daily, and to do it more carefully.
August 19, 2024
Copenhagen, Denmark
Copenhagen doesn't try to impress you. The city's pleasures are small and structural — a bike lane that works, a harbour you can swim in, a city built at human scale and against the temptation to grow taller. Most great visits start by hiring a bike on day one.
June 17, 2024
New York, United States
Most first-time visitors to New York spend three days running between the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, and a Broadway show. The better trip picks one neighbourhood per day and walks it until you have a coffee place by Thursday.
May 23, 2024
Singapore, Singapore
Singapore has, for two generations, been written off by travel writers as too clean, too efficient, too engineered. They were almost always passing through. Stay a week and you discover a small, dense, multi-ethnic city of profound urban design intelligence and one of the best hawker-food cultures on earth.
April 29, 2024
Hobart, Australia
Tasmania is Australia's island state, the size of Ireland, with one of the largest temperate-wilderness reserves on earth and a small population concentrated on the eastern coast. The walking, the food, and the genuine emptiness are the reasons to come.
April 15, 2024
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona is a city that has been loved nearly to death and is, slowly, recovering. You can still have a beautiful week here. You just need to skip half of what the guidebooks insist on, and learn the names of three or four streets that aren't on the tourist map.
April 8, 2024
Seoul, South Korea
Seoul is most itself between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The bbq restaurants are at full smoke. The streets in Hongdae and Itaewon are full of office workers on a third bottle of soju. The 24-hour everything is open. The city that took ten years to be discovered by Western tourists became, almost overnight, the most influential cultural city in East Asia.
March 12, 2024
Oaxaca, Mexico
Oaxaca is the small colonial-era capital of the Mexican state of the same name, and the centre of one of the deepest regional food cultures on earth. The seven moles, the day-old corn tortillas, the dozens of indigenous languages, the mezcal — Oaxaca rewards a long, slow week.
February 9, 2024
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Chiang Mai is what Bangkok was, possibly, before the expressways. A small grid of moated streets, three hundred temples within walking distance, the smell of charcoal and lemongrass in the evenings. It also has the best curry noodles in Thailand.
January 30, 2024
Bangkok, Thailand
Bangkok is, for most visitors, a transit city — a 48-hour stop on the way to a beach. Done at that speed, it is overwhelming and exhausting. Given a full week, it becomes one of the most rewarding urban experiences in Southeast Asia.
December 4, 2023
Mexico City, Mexico
Mexico City was, for a long time, written off by Western travellers as too big, too polluted, too dangerous. The decade since 2015 has rewritten that conversation. The city is now, by most measures, one of the best food capitals in the world.
November 30, 2023
Melbourne, Australia
Melbourne is the second-largest Australian city and, by most metrics that matter to a traveller, the more rewarding one. The laneway coffee culture, the food, the small-bar scene, and the Australian Open in January make for a city that punches well above its harbour-less weight.
November 12, 2023
Sydney, Australia
Sydney is one of the most photogenically sited cities on earth — the harbour, the opera house, the bridge, the beaches at Manly and Bondi. The city becomes legible through its coastal walks, which connect the urban grid to the Pacific in a way few capitals can match.
November 4, 2023
Hoi An, Vietnam
Hoi An's central trading town, the old port on the Thu Bon river, is one of the most architecturally preserved towns in Southeast Asia. It is also, on lantern-festival nights, a crowded selfie corridor. The trick is the early morning, the rainy afternoons, and the bicycle to the beach.
October 22, 2023
Hanoi, Vietnam
Hanoi is a city of small plastic stools. They are on every pavement. They appear at dawn, around the noodle carts, and disappear at midnight, after the last beer. They are how you eat in this city. They are how you watch the city. Get comfortable on them.
October 15, 2023
Istanbul, Turkey
Istanbul cannot be done in a long weekend. The city is fifteen million people, two continents, two thousand years of capital-city memory, and a Bosphorus that runs straight through the middle of all of it. Plan for a week. Plan, also, for the ferries.
September 4, 2023
Vancouver, Canada
Vancouver is a small, wet, west-coast Canadian city with a serious mountain range starting two kilometres north of downtown. The city's gift is the immediate access — you can be in old-growth rainforest within twenty minutes of a downtown apartment.
August 8, 2023
Ubud, Indonesia
Bali is several different islands depending on where you stay. The Bali of crowded south-coast resort beaches is real. So is the rice-terraced Ubud Bali. So is the surf-village Bali of the east. The trick is to pick the one you actually want.
July 18, 2023
Beijing, China
Beijing is a city of axes — the great north-south central axis from the Bell Tower through the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven — and of pockets. The pockets are the hutongs, the grey-brick alley neighbourhoods, and they remain, in the surviving sections, one of the most distinctive urban textures on earth.
July 7, 2023
Shanghai, China
The Shanghai of the headlines — Pudong, the LED-skinned skyline, the supertall towers — is real and worth seeing once. The Shanghai of the *longtang* lane houses, the morning markets, and the plane-tree-lined French Concession streets is where the city actually lives.
June 30, 2023
Cartagena, Colombia
Cartagena's old walled city is one of the most architecturally complete colonial-era Spanish ports in the Americas. The Caribbean climate, the food, and the post-conflict tourism boom have made it a Latin American travel staple.
June 4, 2023
Rome, Italy
Rome is a city that asks you to surrender, and the surrender takes about three days. On day one you fight it. On day two you photograph it. On day three you eat too much. On day four, if you're lucky, you simply walk in it. This piece is for day four.
May 22, 2023
San Francisco, United States
San Francisco is geographically tiny — 7 miles by 7 miles — and topographically intense. The city's gift is that almost every walk involves climbing a hill, and almost every hill ends at a view.
April 20, 2023
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Hong Kong's verticality is famous. What's less famous is how walkable it remains. The Mid-Levels escalator alone covers 800 metres of climb. The city is layered — street level, podium level, rooftop level — and the trick is to keep moving between them.
April 4, 2023
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Buenos Aires runs on a particular timetable: lunch at two, drinks at nine, dinner at eleven, the milonga at one in the morning, breakfast back at the apartment as the sun comes up over the Río de la Plata. Adjust your sleep schedule before you arrive.
January 18, 2023
Florence, Italy
Florence is the Renaissance city: small enough to walk across in twenty minutes, dense with paintings and buildings that changed Western art forever, and now reliably packed by mid-morning. The trick is to be up earlier than anyone else.
August 22, 2022
Tbilisi, Georgia
Tbilisi is the rare capital that feels genuinely undiscovered for its quality. The old town has the sulphur baths and the wooden balconies; the wine culture is one of the oldest on earth; the country beyond the city is dramatic and almost empty.
July 28, 2022
Stone Town, Tanzania
Zanzibar splits cleanly in two: Stone Town, the densely woven Swahili-Arab-Indian trading city, and the white-sand beaches and spice plantations of the rest of the island. Most safari travellers tack on three nights on the beach. The better trip gives Stone Town three nights of its own.
July 19, 2022
Vernazza, Italy
The five villages of the Cinque Terre — Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore — are now famous past the point of comfort. The trails between them, however, are largely empty after 10 a.m. when day-trippers cluster in the villages. Walk between them.
June 15, 2022
New Orleans, United States
New Orleans is the rare American city that is structurally not American. The Creole, French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean inheritances combine into a culture — and a cuisine, and a music — that exists nowhere else on the continent. Skip the French Quarter early in the day; the city is bigger than its postcard.
March 26, 2022
Cape Town, South Africa
Cape Town has a Table Mountain at one end and an ocean at the other. The city in between has the most varied food, wine, and walking on the African continent — and a daily set of contradictions you cannot honestly ignore.
December 12, 2021
Marrakech, Morocco
Marrakech is a city built for confusion. The medina was designed in the 11th century as a fortified labyrinth, and the design has held. The riad — the inward-facing courtyard house — is built around a small fountain and a fragment of sky. The streets are narrow on purpose. Surrender to it.
November 30, 2021
Bruges, Belgium
Bruges has, for fifteen years, been a kind of cautionary tale about overtourism — a town of 20,000 in the old centre that absorbs 8 million visitors a year. In November, all but a few thousand of those visitors are elsewhere. Bruges in November is one of the most beautiful walking weeks in Europe.
November 8, 2021
Havana, Cuba
Havana is a city of crumbling baroque facades, 1950s American cars, the most particular post-Soviet political economy in the world, and a daily life that does not, despite the photo-tourism economy, perform for the camera. A short guide to the city's depths.
October 19, 2021
Oia, Greece
Santorini between 6 p.m. and 9 a.m. is a different island. The cruise ships are at sea. The day-trippers are on the ferry. The whitewashed villages, which spend the daylight hours being photographed, finally exhale. This is the island worth flying to.
June 4, 2021
Seville, Spain
Seville is a city where the afternoon doesn't really happen — it's too hot — and the evening doesn't really begin until 9. Plan accordingly. The four hours between then and midnight are when everything that matters in this city actually happens.
April 22, 2021
Jerusalem, Israel
Jerusalem is, for the visitor, two things at once: an extraordinary historical city of stone and light, and a place of unresolved political conflict that no honest writer can ignore. A guide that tries to do both.
March 8, 2021
Kochi, India
Kerala is the antidote to the intensity of northern India. The state is greener, slower, and structurally different — Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish historic religious mix, a 100% literate population, a houseboat culture that lets you sleep on a rice barge in the canals.
February 28, 2021
Reykjavik, Iceland
Reykjavik in November has four hours of usable daylight, average temperatures hovering around freezing, and a small-town feel that disguises its position as the cultural capital of the North Atlantic. Pack for it; show up anyway.
December 15, 2020