Travel
D R E A M D E S T I N AT I O N
The Highlands TANZANIA
Just eight luxury tents make up Asilia’s The Highlands camp, located on the slopes of an extinct volcano to the north of Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. A stay here encompasses game drives, meetings with Maasai warriors, hiking, star gazing and unwinding in the camp, where dinners are lavish, threecourse affairs, and a whisky bar keeps night owls talking into the wee hours. A hot drink of choice is delivered to your patch of paradise every morning. Tatyana Leonov FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE
Alto vistas BY
Amelia Lester
ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON LETCH
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AST YEAR, the chef Hiroshi Kimura left his thriving business in Hawaii for Palo Alto in California. His new restaurant in the heart of Silicon Valley would serve one particular clientele: the very rich. Thanks to the tech boom, Palo Alto is teeming with billionaires. There were 50 of them at last count, as well as tens of thousands of multimillionaires. More are created all the time. When Facebook went public in 2012, it created six billionaires in one morning. Kimura could see what these young men – and they are mostly young men – want. That is, to spend lots of money, and to spend it quick. The big draw of his $500, 10-course tasting menu is a Wagyu steak sprinkled with gold flakes. “The gold is more for show,” his general manager admitted in a recent interview. “It doesn’t impart any flavour.” What does life look like in a place where people eat gold for the hell of it? I recently went to see for myself. My many years in the US had been confined to the east coast: Boston, New York, Washington D.C. There’s no shortage of wealthy people in any of those cities, either, but the general feeling is that they’re more refined than
In Silicon Valley, it’s impossible to tell who is wildly wealthy and who is perfecting their elevator pitch.
their west coast counterparts. Old money prefers to wear their precious metals. Yet when I got to Palo Alto, I couldn’t believe I was at the birthplace of the iPhone, the cradle of innovation, the epicentre of American ingenuity. It all seemed so ordinary! Turns out that was the idea. After World War II, growing families fled hedonistic San Francisco for cheap bungalows – Eichlers, after the builder Joseph Eichler – half an hour up the road. With their glass walls, open-floor plans and flatroofed carports, the Eichlers must have been the very zenith of modernity in the late 1940s. Today their neat lines seem a little naive, a reminder of that post-war moment in which Americans were willing to countenance the idea of an equal society. Still, the tech titans haven’t changed much. The only sign of an especially wealthy owner might be a slightly taller hedge, or a discreet extension to the side. The average house price is now more than $2.5 million; an address in the area is calling card enough. The inoffensive, uniform look extends to city’s University Avenue. Just about everyone is outfitted in the same quarter-zip, navy blue fleece jacket, and in a sea of orthopedic-
friendly footwear it’s impossible to tell who is wildly wealthy and who is perfecting their elevator pitch. The message, in all these aesthetic choices, is that function trumps form. The Valley’s only dogma is data, and its cognoscenti preach the importance of “impact,” “scale” and “analytics”. Yet to be super-rich in Palo Alto is perhaps also to feel conflicted. Take patron saint Mark Zuckerberg. The university dropout with a gift for coding is, at 33, the fifth-richest person in the world. But – the story goes – Facebook is not just an incredibly successful company, and Zuckerberg is not just another CEO. It is instead a vehicle for “connectedness”, and credible rumours suggest its founder is preparing for a presidential run in 2020. For all the smooth talk there are real tensions in the tech industry between idealism and greed, social status and hard work. Maybe that’s why Kimura doesn’t tout his gold-flecked steak in any of the usual ways. His storefront is studiously unremarkable, and you’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there. The only indication of a restaurant is the sign announcing hours are “by appointment only”. If you have to ask, you can’t afford karats with your steak. n
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