d6 hdt by selenafresgo

Eat Drink

Explore The Food Issue

ARRIVING JUNE 24

RWL ASVEGAS.COM

UNR IVALED SPACE AT SEA™ The luxury of personal space is central to the promise of An Unrivaled Experience® with Regent Seven Seas Cruises®. It provides the extravagant freedom guests need to explore and relax to the fullest. As the preeminent luxury cruise line on the ocean, we pride ourselves in offering some of the largest balconies and most spacious suites at sea. Our wide range of specialty restaurants, al fresco and in-suite dining options, exquisite lounges, bars and expansive spaces are perfect to rest and celebrate in, knowing there is never a queue or a crowd and that every detail is taken care of and every amenity is included. Join us and discover how — with our unrivaled space at sea — we will exceed your loftiest expectations of comfort and personalized service for a truly unforgettable experience aboard The World’s Most Luxurious Fleet™.

START YOUR JOURNEY AT RSSC.COM CALL 1.844.473.4368 OR CONTACT YOUR TRAVEL ADVISOR

For the latest details on our health and safety protocols, please visit RSSC.com/HealthSafetyProtocols

EVERY

LU X URY INCLUDED

C O N T E NT S

Departments 8 Letter from the Editor 12 Discoveries Pull up a barstool at one of Milwaukee’s retro cocktail lounges; create table settings that will transport you around the world; sip sparkling wine in Oregon; spice up your life with global seasonings; and more. Experiences

SHELLING OUT The new

PLAYING WITH FIRE

oyster-farming industry in Delaware is yielding tasty results. 40 A BRETON BITE Mastering the art of crêpe making in Brittany, France.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

The opening of a winethemed entertainment district in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, is luring visitors away from Porto.

Features 70

NO PLACE LIKE VERACRUZ

AN APPALACHIAN HARVEST

BELLE OF THE BALKANS

SAVORING SACRAMENTO

A rich agricultural heritage has given rise to the California capital’s restaurant scene.

59 Intelligent Traveler Embracing shoulder season, the growing popularity of group travel, planning a familyfriendly wine-country trip, why Mexico is having a moment, and more. 4

Handmade tortillas at Acuyo Taller, in Veracruz, Mexico (page 70).

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

History and innovative gastronomy make for a perfect pairing along Mexico’s southeastern coast.

Farmers and homegrown food artisans are exploring their culinary roots in West Virginia. Croatia’s low-key Istrian peninsula is a melting pot of cultures—bringing the best of each to the menu.

SECRET SAUCE

It’s not just about barbecue anymore—a diverse food scene awaits in Kansas City, Missouri.

104 Your Best Shot Reader Brett Feinstein photographs a cherished getaway in Puerto Rico.

ON THE COVER Perfect peaks of lemon and stracciatella gelato from Gelateria Italia, in Rovinj, on Croatia’s Istrian peninsula (page 86). Photograph by Jaka Bulc.

ANA LORENZ ANA

Harnessing the elements in the name of sustainable cooking in New South Wales, Australia. 48 A FULL PLATE A snapshot of Hainanese Western food—a singular Singaporean tradition.

While you may not be transitioning your business and sharing a new passion with your granddaughter — your life is just as unique. Backed by sophisticated resources and a team of specialists in every field, a Raymond James financial advisor can help you plan for the dreams you have, the way you care for those you love and how you choose to give back. So you can live your life.

BELL E O F TH E BALK ANS

NO P L ACE L IKE VERACRUZ

(P. 86 )

(P. 70)

“Istria, Croatia, carried an aura—languorous, ancient, decidedly un– jet set—that toppled my expectations in the best way,” the writer says about his spring reporting trip. Erace found himself moved by the fact that he, “an American, was traveling abroad again.” The East Coast–based Erace’s latest book, The Cocktail Workshop (Running Press), hits shelves next month.

Meeting cookbook author and anthropologist Raquel Torres Cerdán in her kitchen left an impression on Lorenzana. “Her work is so important for Mexico. The dishes she cooks, with ingredients from Veracruz, use the techniques of the Indigenous communities she has been studying her whole life,” the Mexico City–based writer says. 5. AN APPALACHIAN HARVEST

(P. 78) S ECRE T SAUCE (P. 9 4 )

Petrow was thrilled to shoot the food scene in her hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, for this issue. “We have a beautiful ‘community over competition’ mentality here that particularly shines through in the hospitality industry,” she says. “All the folks I met are big cheerleaders for each other.” 3. A F ULL P L ATE (P. 4 8)

The London-born photographer became aware of Hainanese Western food on one of his visits to Singapore, which became his home in 2020. “Exploring the menus made me realize just how rich and special this type of cooking is,” he says. “Colbar’s chicken merry land dish was a highlight.”

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

“I had no idea that so much of West Virginia remains untouched,” says the cookbook author, who ate her way through Appalachia in May. “It’s a dreamy destination for outdoor recreation. Not to imply that nothing good goes on indoors—there is amazing food.” Castle’s cooking show, The Key Ingredient with Sheri Castle, will debut on PBS North Carolina this fall. 6. S ECRE T SAUCE

“To connect with so many people who felt like family made all the difference,” says the writer, who lives in New York City, about her food-focused visit to Missouri—her first travel assignment in the COVID era. “The ginormous soaking tub at Hotel Kansas City helped, too.”

CLO C KW ISE F ROM TOP : C OURTE SY O F ADAM ERACE; CED RIC ANGELE S/C ORTE SY OF FARIS MUSTAFA ; SHARON BRODY/C OURTE SY OF SHERI CA STLE ; C OURTE SY OF O SAY I EN D OLYN ; GUILL AUMA GUE VAR A /C OURTE SY O F ANA LO RENZ ANA ; C OURT E SY OF ANNA P E T ROW

C O N TR IBU TOR S

c o u n t ry r oa d s ta k e m e taste testing.

Fall has a flavor all its own. And West Virginia’s New River Gorge — and beyond — is serving up Appalachian dining with unmatched flair. Drop in on charming small-town eateries with something

for

every

palate.

From

barbecue to lamb chops to native rainbow trout, our food scene is a sight to see. Plan your road trip today.

WVtourism.com

LE T T ER

wrapped up a tour of the one-acre garden at Angama Mara (angama. com; tented suites from $1,250 per person, all-inclusive), a tiny lodge with outsize views of the Masai Mara National Reserve, in Kenya. What grows here, among the tidy rows? Spinach, parsley, lettuce, rosemary, green peppers—I could go on. William Kituyia, the 24-year-old head gardener, led me and my family on a walk through this immaculate plot of land, inviting us to pick flowers, lemons, and finally carrots, which we washed at an open-air sink and bit into while standing on a wooden deck. They were tangy, sweet, and crisp. We had seconds, then thirds. Maybe it had to do with the view of the Mara—we had to keep our mouths busy, mimicking the elephants who grazed in the distance. Or maybe it had to do with the company. We had an engaging, patient host in Kituyia, who showed us the chicken coop, the traditional plants that the Masai use for healing, even a compost station (a hit with my son). And we had each other. Food is part and parcel of traveling. The beauty is in discovering those unexpected flavors, in those unexpected places. In this issue, our editors celebrate the palates, cultures, and cuisines that surprise us, nourish us, and make our world go round. Pepperoni rolls and tomatoes topped with just-harvested salt in West Virginia. Savory crêpes in Brittany, France. Freshly caught seafood and edible flowers in the coastal state of Veracruz, Mexico. Vietnamesestyle coffee in Kansas City. Briny oysters in Delaware—as well as in Istria, Croatia, which also has pizzas that rival those found in Naples, Italy. Food has layers to it. Layers of history, of people moving and adapting and expressing the best part of themselves in the kitchen and on the plate. I hope, as travelers, that we all slow down, savor each bite, and take a closer look at what’s put in front of us.

@jacquigiff jacqui.gifford@meredith.com

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Jacqui with chef Mashama Bailey and restaurateur John O. Morisano at the Grey Market, in Savannah, Georgia.

FROM MY TRAVELS We all have “destination” restaurants on our lists of where to go, the places that garner rave after rave. On a recent trip to Savannah, Georgia, I spent time with James Beard Award–winning chef Mashama Bailey and restaurateur John O. Morisano, the team behind the Grey (the greyrestaurant.com; tasting menu $75)—a destination restaurant if ever there was one. At their more casual Grey Market (thegrey mkt.com; entrées $8–$20), which serves standout burgers and frosé, we discussed the challenges restaurants faced this past year—and how the Savannah community pulled together. (For more on their story, read the book Black, White, and The Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Friend-

ship and a Beloved Restaurant.) On nearby Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, I spent time with chef B. J. Dennis, whose cooking reflects his Gullah-Geechee roots. (You may have seen him on Netflix’s High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America.) He made me a Lowcountry meal of shrimp-and-tomato stew, okra purloo, and yellow squash at Mitchelville (explore mitchelville.org), site of the country’s first self-governing community of people freed from slavery. Dating back to 1863, Mitchelville is now an open-air museum with replicas of a praise house, toolshed, and fishing boat; expansion plans are in the works. It is a landmark that will stay with you, long after returning home.

C O URT E SY O F JAC Q UEL I NE GI FF ORD

S I WRITE this letter, I’ve just

E DI TO R I N C H I E F

S E N IO R V IC E P R E S I D E N T, G R O U P P U B L I S H E R

Jacqueline Gifford

Giulio Capua

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Flora Stubbs EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR Paul Martinez MANAGING EDITOR LaToya Valmont PHOTO DIRECTOR Scott Hall EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CONTENT STRATEGY

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Kathryn Banino Bano ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, MARKETING Kerri Fallon

Miles Stiverson

DIGITAL CONTENT DIRECTOR Deanne Kaczerski FEATURES EDITOR Peter Terzian SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR John Wogan ARTICLES EDITOR Paul Brady SENIOR EDITORS Lila Harron Battis, Sarah Bruning DEPUTY DIGITAL EDITOR Nina Ruggiero SENIOR DIGITAL EDITOR Alisha Prakash WINE AND SPIRITS EDITOR Ray Isle ASSOCIATE EDITORS Elizabeth Cantrell

Hannah Walhout ASSISTANT EDITOR Scott Bay DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR Christine Burroni DIGITAL EDITOR Tanner Saunders SOCIAL EDITOR Samantha Lauriello ASSOCIATE DIGITAL EDITOR Elizabeth Rhodes EDITORIAL OPERATIONS MANAGER Erin Agostinelli EDITORS AT LARGE David Amsden, Jeff Chu Kevin West SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS Sarah GreavesGabbadon, Heidi Mitchell, Gisela Williams INTERNATIONAL EDITOR Paul Ordonez ART DESIGN DIRECTOR Christine Bower-Wright ART DIRECTOR Fryda Lidor

PHOTO PHOTO EDITOR Skye Senterfeit DIGITAL PHOTO EDITOR Mariah Tyler ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITORS Ebba Pero, Devin Traineau ASSOCIATE DIGITAL PHOTO EDITOR Alessandra Amodio

BRING HOME

INSPIRATION Whether creating the perfect backdrop to showcase artwork from your travels or turning a drab kitchen into a bright space for globally inspired meals, painting can transform your space into a feel-good haven.

TURN YOUR DREAMS INTO REALITY WITH BEHR DYNASTY™ INTERIOR PAINT Keep walls looking beautiful with our most advanced scuff and stain repellent paint. Get the job done quickly with our fastdrying formula.*

PROD UCT IO N PRODUCTION MANAGER

Griffin Plonchak

C O PY AND RESE ARCH COPY AND RESEARCH CHIEF Kathy Roberson ASSOCIATE RESEARCH EDITOR Kevin Ford

F INAN CE VICE PRESIDENT Keith Strohmeier EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Dave Hooks ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR Rosemary Garcia ASSOCIATE MANAGER Kimberly Ko BUSINESS MANAGER Diane Umland MEREDI TH C O RP O RAT IO N CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Tom Harty CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Jason Frierott CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER John Zieser PRESIDENT, MEREDITH LOCAL MEDIA GROUP

Patrick McCreery

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES

Dina Nathanson

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CHIEF COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER

Choose from more than 1,000 colors with our one-coat hide guarantee.*

SALES EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GLOBAL SALES Vince Kooch NEW YORK Caroline Donohue, RW Horton, Breana Tolla CHICAGO Hillary Pavia LOS ANGELES Lewis Newmark MIAMI Jill Stone, Eric Davis NORTHEAST Jennifer Palmer PACIFIC NORTHWEST AND SAN FRANCISCO Tricia Baak WINE REPRESENTATIVE, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA Steve Dveris SOUTHWEST Jennifer Fan HAWAII Laurie Doerschlen LONDON Katherine Galligan, Vishal Raghuvanshi MILAN Paolo Cassano PARIS Guglielmo Bava MEXICO Pablo Glogovsky CANADA Lori Dodd ASIA Scott Thoreau INDIA Rachna Gulati, Namita Sahu MIDDLE EAST Mamta Pillai STRATEGIC VISION Peter J. Bates ASSISTANTS Maria Garza, Alexandra Scelzo, Tara Stacy MAR KE T I N G EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BRAND MARKETING Amanda LaFontaine DIRECTORS, BRAND MARKETING Antonia LoPresti Giglio, Kristi Naeris BRAND STRATEGY DIRECTOR Cara Wolf Erwin ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, BRAND MARKETING Robert Sampogna SENIOR MARKETING PROJECT MANAGER Krista Finne SENIOR MANAGER, BRAND MARKETING Doug Murphy MANAGER, BRAND MARKETING Michelle Pallotta Calcagni MARKETING ASSISTANT Catherine Weppler CONSUMER INSIGHT DIRECTOR Richard Zartarian V IC E PR ES I D EN TS , DIGI TAL CONTENT STRATEGY AND OPERATIONS Melissa Inman BUSINESS OPERATIONS Karla Jeffries GROWTH Andrea Reynolds PRODUCT Meghan Schoen C O NSUM ER MAR KE T I N G AND C O M MUNICAT ION S VICE PRESIDENTS Ann Marie Doherty, Yvonne Gerald

Eric Szegda, Melissa Mahoney

SENIOR DIRECTOR, COMMUNICATIONS Elizabeth Marsh DIRECTORS Agnes Cronin, Jennifer Schiele, Beth Ifcher ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR Caroline Baron SENIOR MARKETING MANAGERS Zak Carrazzone, Jennifer Flynn MARKETING MANAGER Katie Pisano ASSOCIATE MARKETING MANAGER, RETAIL Christine Symecko ASSOCIATE MARKETING MANAGERS Sofia DiPersia

Christine Menchaca

MARKETING COORDINATOR

O PERAT IO NS PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Melanie Stoltenberg SENIOR PRODUCTION MANAGER Stacey Edmundson DIRECTOR OF QUALITY Joe Kohler PREMEDIA TRAFFICKING SUPERVISOR Ryan Meier COLOR QUALITY ANALYST Heidi Parcel IMAGING SPECIALIST Tony Jungweber

Erica Jensen

VICE CHAIRMAN

Mell Meredith Frazier

For all advertising inquiries, please e-mail advertising_contact@meredith.com.

Jess Berko

M ER EDI T H NAT IONAL M EDI A G RO UP PRESIDENT Catherine Levene PRESIDENT, MEREDITH MAGAZINES Doug Olson PRESIDENT, CONSUMER PRODUCTS Tom Witschi PRESIDENT, MEREDITH DIGITAL Alysia Borsa EVP, STRATEGIC AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Daphne Kwon E XEC U T I VE V IC E PR ES I D ENTS CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER Michael Brownstein DIGITAL SALES Marla Newman FINANCE Michael Riggs MARKETING AND INTEGRATED COMMUNICATIONS Nancy Weber S EN IO R V IC E P RES I D EN TS CONSUMER MARKETING Steve Crowe CONSUMER REVENUE Andy Wilson CORPORATE SALES Brian Kightlinger FOUNDRY 360 Matt Petersen PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY Justin Law RESEARCH SOLUTIONS Britta Cleveland STRATEGIC PLANNING Amy Thind STRATEGIC SOURCING, NEWSSTAND, PRODUCTION Chuck Howell V IC E PR ES I D EN TS BRAND LICENSING Toye Cody, Sondra Newkirk BUSINESS PLANNING AND ANALYSIS Rob Silverstone CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS Jill Davison FINANCE Chris Susil STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENT Kelsey Andersen STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS Alicia Cervini VICE PRESIDENT, GROUP EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Stephen Orr CHIEF DIGITAL CONTENT OFFICER Amanda Dameron DIRECTOR, EDITORIAL OPERATIONS AND FINANCE Greg Kayko

DISCOVER BEHR DYNASTY™ INTERIOR PAINT ONLINE OR IN-STORE

*See product label or visit behr.com/behrdynasty for more details Choose from modern hues like Half Sea Fog N470-3 (shown above)

EDITORIAL OFFICE 225 Liberty Street, New York, NY 10281, 212-522-1212. TRAVEL + LEISURE is published

monthly by TI Inc. Affluent Media Group, a subsidiary of Meredith Corporation. TRAVEL + LEISURE is a trademark of TI Inc. Affluent Media Group, registered in the U.S. and other countries. Customer Service and Subscriptions For 24/7 service, please use our website, travelandleisure.com/customerservice. You can also call 800-888-8728 (813-979-6625 for foreign subscribers) or write to TRAVEL + LEISURE at PO Box 37508, Boone, IA 50037-0508. We may make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you prefer we not include your name, please call or write us at the customer service information above. The magazine assumes no responsibility for the safekeeping or return of unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, artwork, or other material. To order back issues, call 800-270-3053. To order article reprints of 500 or more, call 212-221-9595. Printed in U.S.A.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Dilley

GIVE YOUR WALLS OUR BEST INTRODUCING BEHR DYNASTYT

Our most stain repellent, scuff resistant, fast-drying, one-coat coverage paint. Now all in one can.

T R A V E L

L E I S U R E

A G LO BE TR OT TER ’S GU I D E TO T HE L ATE ST I N TR AVEL Edited by HANNAH WALHO UT

This season, T+L is celebrating the simple pleasures of gathering around a table—or even just getting together again. Sample these trip-worthy tastings, big-ticket hotel openings, and memorable spots for a soul-nourishing family reunion.

Oregon, On the Bubble

Innovative winemakers are shaping this state into the next big destination for sparkling wine—and isn’t it time we all popped a few bottles? BY VALERIE STIVERS & HANK ZONA

THE WILLAMETTE VALLEY is known

for its sought-after Pinot Noir, and increasingly, for Chardonnay—the two main base grapes used to make champagne. Now, after decades of quiet development, local winemakers are creating traditional méthode champenoise wines and creative pétnats with an “only-in-Oregon” feel, priming the state to become a world leader in sparkling production. Since many of these bottles are small-batch or limited releases, the ideal (and sometimes, the only) way to try them is to visit. Read on for some of the best, all within an easy hour’s drive from Portland. Newberg

Start in this small university city on the Willamette River, home to ROCO Winery (rocowinery.com) and its cofounder, Rollin Soles—the first person to champion age-worthy sparkling wines in Oregon. His bottles have the perfect amber color and eau-de-bakery yeasty aroma of a true champagne-method wine. Try the sparkling flight for a selection from multiple vintage years, all disgorged (separated from the yeast) specially for guests: an unusual opportunity to taste the wines in their first moments.

Fall colors in full swing at the Sokol Blosser Winery vineyards in Dayton, Oregon.

PHO NG NGUYEN /C OURT E SY O F S OKOL BLO S SER W I NERY

SIP

Downtown at the Painted Lady (thepaintedladyrestaurant.com; tasting menu $115), owners Allen Routt and Jessica Bagley compose pretty plates of seasonal fare and DINE

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

Head next door to the exclusive-use Painted Lady Guest Cottage (thepaintedladycottage.com; from $250), or to the nearby Allison Inn & Spa (theallison.com; doubles from $445) for tranquil rooms and an extensive treatment menu. STAY

Dayton and Dundee

Drive 20 minutes southwest and you’ll hit these two vineyard-heavy townships, both in the Dundee Hills AVA. Domaine Serene (domaineserene.com), long synonymous with the Oregon wine-country good life, has a grand, Tuscan-style clubhouse in the Dayton countryside. In 2018, the winery opened a new facility devoted solely to its expanding white and sparkling program, which includes a “multi-vintage” brut, a brut rosé, and a demi-sec, with several new styles coming out over the next few years. Sokol Blosser (sokolblosser.com) has a Modernist, woodpaneled tasting room nearby; the rosé and blanc de blancs have notes of brioche and nuttiness, and the Bluebird Brut emphasizes fresh, bright citrus. Two emerging must-know sparkling producers are Mellen Meyer (mellenmeyer.com) and Corollary (corollary wines.com), both available in pop-up tasting spaces at Winter’s Hill Estate (wintershillwine.com). SIP

A selection of still and sparkling wines at Soter Vineyards.

Outside Dundee, Furioso Vineyards (furiosovineyards.com) pairs wine with wood-ﬁred pizza in a dramatic glass-walled tasting room. DINE

The hilltop Black Walnut Inn (blackwalnutvineyard.com; doubles from $380) has elegant rooms, vineyard views, and a seasonal tasting menu. STAY

Carlton The Carlton Winemakers Studio, a winery collective and tasting room.

This former logging town is often called the wine capital of Oregon. The star attraction is Lytle-Barnett (lytle-barnett.com), the joint venture of four prominent wine-industry ﬁgures; taste their méthode champenoise bottle on pour at the SIP

Carlton Winemakers Studio

(winemakersstudio.com). LytleBarnett winemaker Andrew Davis founded the Radiant Sparkling Wine Co. (radiantsparkling.com), an incubator program that has helped launch many smaller producers in the region. Another leader is the biodynamic Soter Vineyards (soter vineyards.com) on Mineral Springs Ranch, known for its gorgeous rusticminimalist tasting room. (Try the brut rosé known affectionately as “Soter pop.”) At Soter’s MSR Kitchen (tasting menu $125), former Top Chef contestant Sara Hauman cooks with ingredients from the property’s farm. DINE

Sleep in repurposed grain silos at the countryside-chic Abbey Road Farm (abbeyroadfarm.com; doubles from $325). STAY

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

F RO M TOP : CH ERYL JUE T T EN/C O URT E SY O F S OT ER V I NE YARD S ; C L AY MACL ACHL AN /C OURTE SY OF THE CARLTON W I NEMAKER S ST UDIO

D I S C O V E R I E S

curate a varied wine list that includes several Oregon sparklers.

Unlimited double miles. Unlimited destinations. With the Capital One Venture card, you can earn unlimited double miles wherever you shop and redeem them on any travel purchase.

D I S C O V E R I E S

A Global Table

When travel became impossible, the pair behind one of the country’s most inﬂuential design studios decided to get creative. BY PI L AR GUZMAN

“WHERE ARE WE going today?

And what are we going to eat?” This was a daily refrain for Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, the founders of the New York–based design ﬁrm Roman & Williams (romanandwilliams.com), during their 14 months of isolation in Montauk, at the tip of Long Island. The couple are well known for creating spaces that are at once immersive and theatrical—like Veronika, the restaurant at Manhattan’s Fotograﬁska photography museum, which is reminiscent of the grand cafés of Europe. In a normal year, they would spend some 200 days on the road overseeing design projects, sourcing their wares, and meeting artisans around the world. So when lockdown hit, instead of spinning into a Groundhog Day–esque mealplanning cycle, the pair decided to bring their favorite places to life at the dinner table each night. In some ways, this stay-at-home project was the ultimate proof of concept for Standefer and Alesch’s work, which, they say, is all about making global connections through objects and entertaining. “We think of the Guild as a kind of community of people and artisans and traditions around the world,” Standefer says. “For us, the ritual of setting a table came to replace the ritual of travel.” Here, Standefer shares some of their favorite internationally inspired tablescapes, all styled with products available at their SoHo home-design store, RW Guild (rwguild.com). 16

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

A COMFORTING JAPANESE MEAL “People in the U.S. tend to think about Japanese food as super refined, but our favorite Japanese cooking is the kind you find in the countryside, where simple, elemental soups, stews, and rice dishes are served out of the donabe, a versatile and efficient clay pot. We cook everything in it— including sides for good old American Thanksgiving. This table is about embracing nature in all its wild imperfection, and using what’s around you. I just snipped branches off some evergreens and stuck them in a vase.” RW Guild Original Designs Montauk candelabra ($325); Stemware Taper Collection water glasses ($200 each) and wineglasses ($180 each); Kumoi Gama donabe (from $450); Dorakugama donabe (far right, $950).

AN INDIAN FAMILY FEAST “We’ve spent lots of time in India and I am always struck by how simultaneously glamorous and humble everything is. Nobody does celebration like they do. In fact, for my 50th we did an Indian feast—there is something about a bright table that telegraphs ‘special occasion.’ Marigolds are ubiquitous in India; I bought some in Jamaica, Queens, and played up the tension between the orange and the blue, which are opposites on the color wheel, to heighten the drama. And these beautiful dishes, which are earthy but have bright flecks of gold.”

ADRI AN G AUT/C OURTE SY OF ROMAN AND W I LL I AMS GUI LD

Organic Sheep longhair sheepskin ($275); RW Guild Original Designs wine cooler ($780) and enzyme-washed linen napkins ($28 each); St. Louis Caton Collection handmade crystal goblets (from $150 each); KH Wurtz Dinnerware Collection ceramic plates and bowls (from $80 each).

LUNCH IN THE FRENCH COUNTRY “From June until November, we mostly use herbs and vegetables from our own garden. That’s one of the things we love about a Provençal table—the simplicity of it, eating what’s seasonal and comes from close by. Grilled chicken, a hunk of bread, a beautiful bottle of red wine. This is not about precious, expensive roses. The Queen Anne’s lace was going wild when we did this table so there wasn’t much else that needed to be done! The vases are actually filled with weeds— you can make a sweeping gesture with wild plants.” RW Guild Original Designs enzyme-washed linen napkins ($28 each) and table runner (from $120), Franc table (from $19,900), and Stockholm dining chair (from $2,800).

D I S C O V E R I E S

SHORE LEAVE

AS OUR SEAPLANE swooped in to land

at Emerald Maldives Resort & Spa, my kids pressed their faces against the windows. We could see palm trees, a white-sand beach, and a long crescent of overwater bungalows hanging above the glassy sea off the Raa Atoll. “I can’t wait to stay in one of those little rooms,” said my 11-year-old son, Apollo. I replied with a vague smile, prompting my defense-attorney wife, Courtenay, to ask: “Um, honey, what exactly is the room situation?” I felt my face get a little hotter. “You did get us an overwater bungalow,” she shouted over the roar of the engine, “didn’t you?” I had been so busy in the weeks leading up to the vacation, I had totally forgotten to ask what kind of accommodation we’d have. 18

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

I gulped as the seaplane bumped down in a ﬁt of spray. The doors swung open and we stepped out onto a deck. A couple of guys were banging on drums; another held a tray of glistening champagne cocktails. Courtenay took a sip and smiled, but I could tell I was on thin ice. Our guide Schwaib (code name Dave), who would become our chaperone for the week, announced: “I have a great room for you guys. You’ll be staying in a family beach villa!” The whole family glared at me. Apollo whispered to his little brother, “Daddy’s in trouble.” As it turned out, our accommodations were just one of many ways Emerald managed to exceed our expectations. After months of being cooped up in our apartment, trapped on Zoom,

we were desperate for a beach vacation. It’s impossible choosing a resort in the Maldives—they all look spectacular. But Emerald, which opened just two years ago, has already shot up the Tripadvisor rankings and won several awards. The Maldivian government has instituted a strict coronavirus-testing regime for all travelers; each island is essentially its own bubble. You get off that seaplane and trade your N95 mask for one you wear with snorkel and fins. It feels wonderful. The first thing we did was get the lay of the land. Dave loaded us up in a golf cart and gave us a quick tour of Emerald’s private island, around 50 acres (the equivalent of nearly 38 football fields and bigger than most of the country’s resorts). Like all atolls in the Maldives, this one is as

C OURT E SY OF EMERALD MALDI VE S RE S ORT & SPA

After months of stress, screens, and altogether too much seclusion, JEFFREY GE T TLEMAN and his family ﬁnd their island in the sun.

F RO M TOP : G ALLERY STO CK ; LO O K-F OTO/SUPER STO CK

Overwater villas at Emerald Maldives Resort & Spa.

Sundowners beside the Indian Ocean. Below: The archipelago is a prime snorkeling spot.

flat as a stingray, with 60 beach villas positioned around the edge and 60 overwater bungalows stretched like a tail into the sea. The Italian family that owns Emerald did a smart thing, or rather, they didn’t do a dumb thing: they left the jungle standing, banyan trees dripping with vines and bushes thick with birds. The instant we stepped inside our villa, the kids’ faces lit up. The place was exquisite, like something Frank Lloyd Wright might have designed for the tropics: two spacious rooms, two huge bathrooms, lots of glass, lots of light. We had our own infinity pool (long enough for laps) overlooking a private stretch of beach. We later checked out the overwater bungalows and the family’s verdict was unanimous, finally exonerating stupid Daddy: the beach villa was a much better fit for us. Another surprise was how interesting the Maldives is. Though its population is just over 530,000, its language has its own script, which intrigued me the instant I saw its mysterious, oval letters on a sign at the airport. Scattered between India and Africa, its 1,200 coral islands have for centuries served as way stations for thirsty sailors to restock, resulting in an intriguing blend of cultures. We could have easily stayed for two weeks. One Russian guy—in the Maldives, there are a lot of Russian guys—lingered at Emerald for two months. The Internet here is shockingly fast, which means that if you had to, you could work remotely from the middle of the Indian Ocean. But who wants to do that, when you could be sampling the whole nine on offer at Emerald? There’s watersports, a dive center, yoga, tennis, a gym, and a beautiful Balinese-style spa. We spent as much

of our days outside as possible, swimming in our pool, riding the zipline at the kids’ club, digging holes in the sand on the beach, and playing soccer on a beautiful turf field. But the real draw is the marine life. We took snorkeling trips to other islands, but honestly, the coral reef right off our room was just as good. Each morning we padded out in snorkel and fins and plunged in. It was like sticking your head in a warm aquarium. We swam alongside purple parrotfish, needlefish that looked like strips of aluminum foil with eyes on either side, angelfish, lionfish, and harmless blacktip reef sharks. Meals were another delight. Each night our plates were evidence of a logistics miracle. Chef Aldo Cadu came from Italy. The Tajima steak, one of the juiciest and tastiest that I’ve ever had, anywhere, had been flown in from Australia. The lettuce

came from Europe. This is how all the Maldivian resorts I’m aware of operate, and it’s not great for their carbon footprint (or this nation’s efforts to stay above water—climate change is a very real threat here). But Emerald seemed diligent about sourcing what it could locally, like bananas, papayas, ﬁsh, and Maldivian lobster, which shouldn’t be missed. On our last night, as we rode our individually assigned bicycles home on a white sand road, gigantic fruit bats soaring above the trees and the jungle around us ﬂooded with moonlight, our nine-year-old, Asa, turned to me and asked: “Dad, what would you give this place?” “I’d give it a ten,” I said. How often do you say that? How often would you do the whole thing all over again, in exactly the same way? emerald-maldives.com; doubles from $700.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

A growing number of boutique brands are specializing in ethically produced seasonings and straight-from-the-source international ﬂavors. HANNAH WAL HO UT rounds up her favorite culinary souvenirs.

Burrata, roasted peppers, and pita chips dusted with New York Shuk za’atar; recipe available at nyshuk.com.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

NEW YORK SHUK

Warm, rosy baharat for a big bowl of couscous. Earthy hawaij for fresh Yemeni coffee. And, of course, za’atar ($10)—the pungent blend of Syrian oregano, sumac, and sesame that can be found on tables from Jeddah to Jerusalem. New

York Shuk cofounders Leetal and Ron Arazi draw on their family’s roots in Morocco, Lebanon, Israel, and Turkey (and now, New York City) to bring the fundamentals of a Middle Eastern pantry to a wider audience. nyshuk.com. BURLAP & BARREL

This company, cofounded by Ethan Frisch and Ori Zohar, specializes in single-origin spices from small farms and cooperatives around the world, like a savory-sweet smoked

P HOTO GRAP HS BY AYA BRACKE T T

PROP ST YL IST: AYA BRAC KE T T. F O OD ST YL IST: BRI T TEN SH EL S O N

D I S C O V E R I E S

The Spice of Life

On Location at Montage Los Cabos

Imagine those memorable moments where everything comes together. mon tage .com D E E R VA L L E Y

H E A L DSB U RG BIG SKY

discov er life , w ell li v ed |

K A PA L UA B AY

L AG U N A B E AC H

( 80 0 ) 70 0 -9977

LOS CABOS |

( Opening in 2021) | B A H A M A S ( Opening in 2023)

PA L M E T T O B L U F F

pimentón paprika

($8) from the Spanish region of Extremadura. In 2021, Burlap & Barrel is releasing a new product about once a week: look out for wild Timur peppercorns, harvested with the help of a Nepalese nonproﬁt, and dehydrated ramps handpicked in the Adirondacks. burlapandbarrel.com. ESSIE SPICE

To create this Mekko dry rub

($10), Essie Spice founder Essie Bartels channeled her childhood in Ghana through roasted peanut and grains of Selim— the Xylopia aethiopica tree’s pungent seedpods, common in West African soups and stews. But her ﬂavors wander far and wide, with other internationally inﬂuenced products like a tamarind-guava-vanilla marinade and a mango-onion relish spiked with Jamaican Scotch bonnets. essiespice.com. MOONFLOWERS

This new company specializes in one thing, and one thing only:

premium-grade saffron threads (from $13) carefully harvested on a family-owned estate in Afghanistan’s Herat province. Founder Tahmina Ghaffer, who was born in Kabul, hopes to bring attention to the country’s “red gold” while supporting the women who make up 80 percent of its saffron farm workers. One percent of profits go to Skateistan, a nonprofit that has provided recreation and education for kids in Kabul since 2007. moonflowers.com. DIASPORA CO.

It all started with turmeric. In 2016, Mumbai-born Sana Javeri Kadri realized that this golden powder was 22

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

becoming increasingly trendy—but that the Indian farmers who harvested the plant saw little proﬁt, since the country’s muddied supply chains remained rooted in colonial structures. A year later, Diaspora Co. launched its ﬁrst product: Pragati turmeric ($12) grown in Andhra Pradesh by organic farmer Prabhu Kasaraneni. The company now offers 21 spice varietals sourced from India and Sri Lanka—all purchased directly from family-owned producers. diasporaco.com. SPICEWALLA

The brainchild of chef Meherwan Irani—founder of Chai Pani and other beloved restaurants in Asheville, North Carolina— Spicewalla ships in bulk to restaurant kitchens across the country. But home cooks, rejoice: the website stocks practically every blend you can think of. (Five spice? Chai masala? Herbes de Provence? They’ve got it.)There’s also an impressive selection of whole spices in consumer-friendly sizes. Try these fruity, fragrant pink peppercorns ($8) for a pop of color on your next dessert. spicewallabrand.com. VILLA JERADA

Founded as an importer of highquality olive oils from owner Mehdi Boujrada’s native Morocco, Villa Jerada has since expanded to seasonings, spreads, and rubs from across North Africa and beyond. After adding harissa and preserved lemons to your cart, try their take on the ubiquitous (and rather free-form) Maghrebi spice blend ras el hanout ($10), here made with rose petals, anise, nutmeg, and nearly a dozen other aromatics. villajerada.com.

IT’S YOUR HEART THAT TAKES YOU PLACES We make your travels to some of the world’s most magical destinations possible. But it’s your endless passion for discovery that leads you there. #sailonpassion E XQ U I SI T ELY C R A F T ED C U I SI N E . C U R AT ED T R AV EL E X PER I EN C E S . S M A LL S H IP LU X U RY. C ALL 855 - OCE ANIA (855 - 623-26 42) | VISIT OCE ANIACRUISES.COM / TL | CONTAC T YOUR TR AVEL ADVISOR

Platinum Card® Members can take advantage of the Cruise Privileges Program* from American Express only when they book with American Express Travel. To learn more and to book, contact Platinum Travel Service at 800-525-3355 or refer your travel professional to Platinum Travel Service and pay with an eligible American Express® Card.

*Valid for new bookings of voyages of at least ﬁve nights made through American Express Travel and eligible Travel

Associate Platform agencies. U.S. Platinum Card Member or Centurion Member must travel on itinerary booked. Program beneﬁts may not be available to residents outside of the contiguous United States. To obtain beneﬁts, travel agents must visit americanexpress.com/asdonline. See americanexpress.com/cruiseprivileges for Cruise Privileges terms and conditions. Ships’ Registry: Marshall Islands. American Express Travel Related Services Company, Inc. is acting solely as a sales agent for travel suppliers and is not responsible for the actions or inactions of such suppliers. Certain suppliers pay us commission and other incentives for reaching sales targets or other goals and may provide incentives to our travel consultants. For more information visit www.americanexpress.com/travelterms. California CST#1022318; Washington UBI#600-469-694

Cook the Book

THAT’S THE SPIRIT

Raise a glass to a stylish new hotel from one of Mexico’s best mezcal labels. BY MAYA KACH R O O -LEV INE

WO THINGS you can

expect in Oaxaca: a warm welcome, and plenty of mezcal. And that’s especially true at Casa Silencio, a six-suite hotel that opened this summer on the grounds of the modernist Mezcal El Silencio distillery in Xaaga.

Founders Fausto Zapata and Vicente Cisneros tapped Mexican architect Alejandro D’Acosta, known for his work in the Valle de Guadalupe, to design the property—the ﬁrst high-end hotel to open in a working Oaxacan mezcal operation—with interiors by designer Martina D’Acosta that feature Oaxacan textiles, furniture, and artwork by local painters and sculptors. Outside? Nine-and-a-half acres of sunbaked, mountainous desertscape. Both originally from Mexico City, Zapata and Cisneros grew up visiting Oaxaca with friends and family: spontaneous weekends full of great food and even better mezcal. “We always looked forward to eating and drinking and feeling the energy,” Zapata explains. During a tasting at their distillery, rare mezcals are paired with sophisticated snacks—cheese and guava, cacao ganache—by Top Chef Mexico winner Rodolfo Castellanos. The hotel’s on-site restaurant will serve Oaxacan fare from Daniel Robles and a rotating list of visiting guest chefs. “Oaxaca is a little bit of mischief, a little bit of improvisation,” Zapata says. “We want to give people some of that magic.” casasilencio.com; rates not available at press time. The solar-powered grinding wheel at El Silencio distillery. Above: A guest room at Casa Silencio.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

THE LATIN AMERICAN COOKBOOK BY VIRGILIO MARTÍNEZ The Peruvian chef behind lauded Lima restaurant Central spent years carefully observing the staple dishes that unite the continent’s varied cuisines, from stews (like Indio viejo in Nicaragua) to empanadas (like a Chilean version filled with wild mushrooms). “While the flavors may change from one place to another,” he writes, “these recipes are our shared identity.” Phaidon, $50. ITALIAN AMERICAN BY ANGIE RITO & SCOTT TACINELLI Many dishes at Don Angie, the authors’ Michelin-starred restaurant in New York’s West Village, have taken Instagram by storm: tightly coiled pinwheel lasagna, for example, or a chrysanthemum Caesar salad hit with a Parmesan blizzard. Their new cookbook reveals the secrets behind these picture-perfect recipes—but more than that, it stakes its claim as a good old-fashioned red-sauce bible. Clarkson Potter, $35. BLACK FOOD BY BRYANT TERRY “These pages offer up gratitude to the great chain of Black lives and to all the sustaining ingredients and nourishing traditions they carried and remembered,” writes the James Beard Award–winning author, who is currently chef-in-residence at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora. Each chapter uses recipes to illuminate a part of the Black experience: crispy cassava skillet cakes in “Motherland,” Jamaicanstyle ackee and callaloo patties in “Migrations.” The book also features essays and art (even a playlist!) by Black creatives and scholars. 4 Color Books, $40.

C LO CKW I SE FROM TOP RIGHT: C OURTE SY OF PHA ID ON PRE S S ; C OURTE SY OF CL ARKS ON P OT TER ; C OURTE SY OF 4 C OLOR B O OKS ; ON NIS LUQ UE /C OURTE SY OF CA SA SIL ENCIO (2)

D I S C O V E R I E S

This season’s releases bring the world to your kitchen. BY S C OT T BAY

The perfect island escape awaits. Bermuda may feel like another world, but this idyllic getaway is just a two-hour flight from the East Coast. With wide-open spaces, pink-sand beaches and turquoise waters, Bermuda is ready to safely welcome you to her shores.

D I S C O V E R I E S

Clockwise from above: One of Ojai Valley Inn’s Mission-style courtyards; the farmhouse on the property; the author (left) with her mother under an oak on the hotel grounds.

Feeling the Love

MY MOTHER, Mary-Anne Westley,

a former model and writer for Mademoiselle magazine, married my father assuming she’d have a life of leisure and tennis lessons. Instead, she soon found herself a single mom raising three daughters, working fulltime to (barely) pay the bills. But our cramped home was full of laughter and hair spray, and decades later, we all text each other constantly. This past spring, it hit me that it had been over a year since I had 28

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

hugged her. My mom’s birthday, typically a huge celebration, had passed with no party. So the moment I was vaccinated I began making plans to reunite in style—booking a trip from my home in Austin, Texas, to meet her and my sisters, Sarah and Liza, at the Ojai Valley Inn (ojaivalleyinn.com; doubles from $499), a Mission-style resort about a 90-minute drive north of Los Angeles. Despite our childhood circumstances, my mom had always

found a way to take us around the world, penny-pinching and staying in budget lodgings. We figured she deserved some luxury. We had tried in vain to figure out ways to connect safely over the past year: Rapid tests? Flying across the country for a masked coffee date? Parking an RV in her driveway? At last, our reunion was imminent. I was the first to arrive, taking in the rolling lawns and sprawling stucco buildings. The inn had recently

C LO CKW I SE FROM TOP RIGHT: C HRISTOPH ER B AGLE Y; C O URT E SY OF OJA I VALLE Y I NN ; C OURT E SY OF L I Z A BENN IG S ON

For a much-anticipated family reunion, AMANDA EYRE WARD and the women in her life decide to treat themselves at a storied (and newly renovated) SoCal resort.

C LO CKW I SE FROM TOP RIGHT: C OURTE SY OF L I Z A BENN IG S ON; C OURT E SY O F F ENT Y BE AUT Y; C O URT E SY OF CUPID P SYC HE; GE T T Y IMAGE S (2); BURT GL IN N/MAGNUM PHOTO S ; GE T T Y I MAGE S

unveiled an extensive renovation, updating the guest rooms and adding new villas around its fountain-dotted courtyards. We had never stayed at such a lush place; I texted the group, simply, Whoa, then settled in to our suite, exclaiming over the Spanish tiles, the fleece-and-terry robes, the enormous bathtubs. I eyed a plate of local pixie tangerines, then savored a sweet slice, filled with gratitude. When my mom arrived two hours later, she smelled, as always, of Lubriderm and lipstick. My sisters burst into the room soon afterward, and we fell into the banter that had defined our childhoods as we prepared for dinner, the sound of hair dryers and gossip filling our suite. In the morning, we headed into downtown Ojai with Ventura Food Tours (venturafoodtours.com). Owner Allison Costa’s itinerary brought us to Heavenly Honey Co. (heavenly honeycompany.com), where we tried varieties made by bees raised among avocado, sage, and clover; Carolina Gramm (carolinagramm.com), where we sampled olive oils and vinegars made by the owner, a former Chanel model; and Revel Kombucha Bar (revelkombuchabar.com), where founder Adam Gallegos explained his brewing process over a bottle infused with ginger and orange peel. On this reunion trip for the ages, it felt only right to get a little decadent. After months cooped up with kids, my sisters and I relished afternoons at the lavender-fringed adults-only pool. At the spa, which I was told had recently undergone a $5 million overhaul, Liza and I had CBD-oil massages; afterward, I was so relaxed I could barely stand. Instead of walking everywhere—it’s a 220-acre property—we hopped on passing golf carts, whizzing through the herb gardens and groves of lemon and orange trees. On the last full day of our trip, we celebrated Mom’s missed birthday at the Oak (entrées $26–$44), the inn’s alfresco restaurant, surrounded by 200-year-old trees hung with lanterns

Mother and daughters enjoy pixie-tangerine margaritas by the pool.

that softly lit our table. We savored black tiger shrimp and rosemary-lime spritzers—plus several glasses of Chardonnay. For dessert: chocolate cake with a single candle. Under the moonlight and clear, star-ﬁlled skies, we sang to our mom, at last. In Ojai, the setting sun casts a reﬂection on the Topatopa

Mountains—a phenomenon called the “pink moment.” We meandered over to an outdoor ﬁrepit to take in the show. Alas, the clouds overhead meant the mountains never changed color. Still, it was glorious to be reunited, and the pinkish buzz of being back together was more than enough.

In Living Color Lipstick is back! These bright shades will strike a celebratory mood, wherever your travels take you.

1. STREET SCENES IN HAVANA Channel the pastel hues of Cuba’s historic homes and antique cars with a pop of bright pink, like Fenty Beauty Slip Shine Sheer Shiny Lipstick in $uga Kiss ($22, fentybeauty.com). 2. SUNSET DRINKS IN PORTOFINO For warm, lazy evenings on the Italian Riviera, pair your Aperol Spritz with a summery coral shade like Cupid & Psyche Beauty’s Aoife ($23, cupidandpsyche beauty.com). 3. ON THE TOWN IN TOKYO Bar-hopping through one of the city’s electric nightlife districts like Shibuya or Ginza calls for a classic, deep red that stays on into the wee hours. Hermès’s Rouge Casaque ($67, hermes.com) supplies the drama. — EL I Z AB E T H CAN T R EL L

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

An iconic Madrid hotel gets a long-awaited update—and even locals are getting in on the fun. BY MAT T G O ULDING

T WASN’T the Belle Époque

staircase that caught my eye, or the refurbished antique furniture. Or the midday Spanish sun pouring through the newly restored glass roof, transforming the atrium into a constantly evolving spectacle of light and shadow. What I noticed immediately in the lavish lobby of the Mandarin Oriental Ritz, Madrid, was the energy of the room itself, teeming, unthinkably, with Spaniards. A group of businessmen worked on their third martinis and second servings of caviar. A trio of women eased into the elaborate afternoon tea service. A young couple cuddled on a

Pictura, the cocktail bar at the Mandarin Oriental Ritz, Madrid. Above: The grande dame hotel, which originally opened in 1910.

plush corner sofa. These weren’t just Spaniards, but Madrileños. In the decade-plus that I’ve lived in Spain, I’ve scarcely seen more than a stray local or two in a hotel— especially ones who are there just for fun. The way the Ritz has shifted the paradigm can be explained, in part, by Quique Dacosta, a dapper chef from the coastal town of Dénia whose namesake restaurant has three Michelin stars. Nowhere is his presence felt more deeply than at Deessa, the hotel’s sanctuary-like restaurant, which channels Dacosta’s special blend of modernism (an edible rose fashioned from apples soaked in beet juice) and minimalism (a single Dénia red prawn gently poached in seawater). Here, and across the hotel’s ﬁve dining venues, is the kind of cooking that demands a city’s attention. The Ritz (purchased by Mandarin Oriental in 2015) has witnessed its

share of history from its privileged perch on Madrid’s so-called Golden Triangle of Art. Opened in 1910, it has survived a civil war, decades of dictatorship, and a rotating fan club of monarchs, movie stars, and artists. In recent years, though, the property was coasting more on reputation than on polish. This renovation, completed in April, has ushered in a heady new chapter. The 100 guest rooms and 53 suites have been expanded, offering city views and a more contemporary feel than the Ritz of Ava Gardner and Yves Saint Laurent. Everywhere, the attention to detail is staggering: the portraits by photographer Paula Anta on the walls of Pictura, the cocktail bar, inspired by famous paintings from the nearby Prado; the Córdoba leather, Greek marble, and glowing mica deployed generously by French designers Gilles & Boissier; the giant jamón ibérico in the lobby that’s carved each morning into thin dominos of porcine perfection. In the wrong hands, this type of hedonism can feel dated, even indecent. But when a hotel gets it all right—both the product and the people—it becomes something more than the sum of its parts. It becomes a part of the fabric of the city. mandarin oriental.com; doubles from $890. Matt Goulding (roadsandkingdoms. com; @mdgoulding) is a Barcelonabased writer and the cofounder of Roads & Kingdoms.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

C OURT E SY OF MANDARI N ORI ENTAL RI TZ , MADRID

D I S C O V E R I E S

PUTTING ON THE RITZ

D I S C O V E R I E S

Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge mixes over 450 drinks, including Anna’s Delight, a cranberry-raspberry Hurricane. Left: At Random specializes in midcentury ice cream concoctions.

OLD SCHOOL Milwaukee might be known for beer, but for a true taste of what the city has to offer, pull up a barstool at one of its retro cocktail lounges. BY EL A INE GLU SAC

SINCE THE 19TH-CENTURY BREWING

boom that enriched the local Pabst, Miller, and Schlitz families, Milwaukee has been one of the Midwest’s great drinking towns. But it’s not just beer that makes Brew City a great place to start a tab—what’s just as distinctive are the dozens of bars and restaurants (some dating as far back as the 1930s) that serve vintage cocktails in frozen-in-time settings. Drink in the history at one of these historic establishments. BRYANT’S COCKTAIL LOUNGE This 1938 bar so convincingly rewinds the clock that a slowly sipped cocktail is needed to take it all in: manual cash registers, velvet-flocked wallpaper, tufted booths, a Sinatra-heavy soundtrack. “People in Milwaukee are just so very loyal, they never let these places die,” says John Dye, the third owner in the bar’s 83 years. Bryant’s invented the Pink Squirrel—an almond-flavored drink with crème de noyau, crème de cacao, heavy cream, and nutmeg—though bartenders often shake up bespoke drinks based on a customer’s flavor preferences. bryantscocktaillounge.com.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

AT RANDOM Dye also operates a second lounge, At Random, so named in 1964 to leapfrog Bryant’s in the telephone book. Where Bryant’s is dim and moody, At Random is bright—thanks to original orange glass globes above the bar—and provocative, with a nude sculpture in the center of the back room. atrandommke.com. KOCHANSKI’S CONCERTINA BEER HALL Polka jam nights at this venue draw

FIVE O’CLOCK STEAKHOUSE At the current incarnation of this 1946 restaurant, dinner has a schedule: Sit at the bar and order a drink (preferably a brandy Old-Fashioned, Wisconsin’s signature) before the waitress takes your order. She will then lead you to a four-top crowded with rolls, butter, relish trays, and tossed salad, reducing downtime at the table. Entrées—including tender filets mignons that come with toyfootball-size baked potatoes—arrive on rolling carts. fiveoclocksteak house.com; entrées $39–$142. JAZZ ESTATE For nightcaps, don’t miss this 1970s basement club, where the band might reprise the work of legendary Romani guitarist Django Reinhardt. fb.com/thejazzestate.

The building that houses Bryant’s started as a corner tavern in the 1800s. Below: Bryant Sharp (pictured behind the bar with his wife, Edna) took over the space in 1936, originally operating it as a beer hall. By 1938 he had switched to serving only cocktails.

C LO CKW I SE FROM TOP RIGHT: J EFF CLE VEL AND /C OURT E SY O F BRYANT ’S C O C KTA IL LOUN GE ; C OURTE SY OF B RYANT ’S C O CKTA IL LOUNGE ; DAN BISH OP/C OURTE SY O F BRYANT ’S C O C KTA IL LO UNGE; MAT T HA A S PHOTO GRAPHY /C O URT E SY O F AT R AN D OM

local accordionists as well as dancers, who are likely as encouraged by the shots of jeżynówka (a Polish blackberry brandy) as by the Christmas lights and lasers. kochanskisconcertina.com.

J U S T T H E R I G H T A M O U N T of W R O N G

A unique luxury resort & casino

@gcalebjones

Georgia isn’t some place you see. It’s somewhere you feel—an experience that’s completely your own. It’s less about snapping pictures and more about making moments worthy of them. Finding new sources of wonder, ready to be explored together. That instant in the mountains where you realize there’s nothing on your mind, but the beauty set before you. The family adventures across the city, leading to stories and shared memories. You’re ready for a Georgia getaway this fall. ExploreGeorgia.org.

T R A V E L

L E I S U R E

T R AVEL ER S ’ TAL E S , F R O M NE AR AND FAR Edited by L I L A HARRON BAT T IS and SARAH BRUNIN G

Oysters on the deck at Bluecoast Seafood Grill, in Bethany Beach, Delaware.

SHELLING OUT It’s been three years since oyster farming started up in Delaware, and the inaugural harvest is ﬁnally hitting menus. REG AN STEPHENS gets to shucking—and discovers that the local bivalves aren’t the only culinary attraction.

P H OTO GRAP H S BY N E AL SAN TO S

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

E X P E R I E N C E S

OUR HUNDRED THOUSAND

oyster seeds can fit in the palm of your hand,” Mark Casey told me as we sat on the patio of his home on Delaware’s Indian River Bay. “But they’ll cover two acres when they’re fully grown.” In 2018, soon after Delaware gave out its first permits for commercial oyster farming, Casey bought 400,000 seeds that would become the family business. Every four days, those nascent oysters—each as small as a grain of sand—would double in volume. Within a month, they had spread the length of a 100-foot wooden dock, the juvenile shellfish housed in a grid of black mesh bags that bobbed on the water’s surface like sentient buoys. At first, Casey told me, they felt like they “were drowning in oysters.” But he and his team—his wife, Lori, plus their children and spouses—survived the first year of ballooning bivalves. They now harvest three different varieties: Blue Hens, Delaware Salts, and Bethany Big Boys. These days, business at Delaware Cultured Seafood (delawareoysters. com) is booming. On a windy weekend last September, I road-tripped from my home in Philadelphia to do some exploring in southern Delaware—a region that locals call Slower Lower Delaware, for its breezy way of life. Though the towns here are home to plenty of year-rounders, Lewes, Rehoboth, Dewey, and Bethany swell with warm-weather visitors who come to experience dune-fringed beaches and all the trappings of a classic seaside vacation. 36

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

In college, I spent a summer serving overcooked lobster dinners at the now-closed Coconuts in Dewey Beach, then a major party town. Coconuts notwithstanding, southern Delaware had an ambitious food scene even then. And now, the region is attracting more and more food-industry talent, who draw from the orchards and family-owned farms that cover more than a third of Sussex County. At Heirloom (heirloomdelaware.com; entrées $29–$35), which occupies a restored Victorian house in Lewes, head chef Matthew Kern has been a James Beard Award semifinalist for the past two years. I understood why when I tasted the hand-pulled burrata layered with pumpkin brittle and shaved apples that kicked off my dinner on the restaurant’s charming patio. Nearby, Lewes fixture Leisa Berlin recently opened the café Station on Kings (thestation lewes.com; entrées $7–$18) with her daughter, pastry chef Laura McKeown. I mulled over the display case—stacks of pastel macarons, doughnuts filled with Honeycrisp-apple jam— before deciding on the icing-cloaked cinnamon bun. Heading south, I ordered a flight at Dewey Beer Co. (deweybeerco.com), known for its tart and juicy sours, and another at Dogfish Head Brewery (dogfish.com), which was Delaware’s first brewpub when it debuted in Rehoboth Beach in 1995. The brand has since expanded to open more restaurants, along with the 16-room Dogfish Inn (doubles from $209) in Lewes. Local ingredients are king at all these places—but until recently, oysters had to be brought in from nearby Maryland or Virginia. Delaware was the last state on the East Coast to

From left: Joe Baker, co-owner of Henlopen City Oyster House, in Rehoboth Beach; bringing in the harvest at Delaware Cultured Seafood.

High blood pressure joint pain? TYLENOL won’t raise blood pressure ®

the way that Advil, Aleve, or Motrin sometimes can. ®1

®1

#1 Doctor Recommended OTC* Pain Relief Brand for those with high blood pressure. Talk to your doctor if you have any questions.

®1

E X P E R I E N C E S

Scallops, bouillabaisse, an oyster po’boy, and other popular dishes at Henlopen City Oyster House.

legalize commercial oyster aquaculture. But the harvesting of wild oysters has deep roots in the region, according to Ed Hale, an aquaculture expert at the University of Delaware. In the 19th century, Delaware oysters stocked raw bars in New York and Philadelphia—so lucrative that they were nicknamed “white gold.” In the mid 20th century, a combination of overharvesting, pollution, and disease caused the population to plummet, and the industry died out. The current renaissance has been a decadeslong collective effort from the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays, among others, to restore habitat, conduct studies, and develop a plan and legal framework for how oyster farming would work. A big reason for bringing this industry back: cleaning up the area’s waterways for other

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

marine life. One adult oyster, Hale explained, can filter up to 50 gallons of water daily, removing harmful nitrogen and phosphorus as it consumes algae. The delicious shellfish is a nice bonus. There are other southern Delaware operations joining the Caseys, many also familyowned. At Tower 3 Oyster Co. (704-641-4273), on Rehoboth Bay, owner Chuck Gifford sometimes gives first dibs to friends and neighbors, right off the back of his boat. Alan Davis, founder of Arrowhead Point Oysters (fb.com/arrowhead pointoyster), grew up working on the water for his dad’s lobster business. “We’re bringing back an industry that’s doing some environmental good, hopefully for decades and more,” Davis told me. “It’s nice to be part of that.” On my visit, Delaware’s white gold was just starting to make its way back onto menus. “To have oysters actually coming from our inland bays—that’s awesome,” said Joe Baker, co-owner of Henlopen City Oyster House (hcoysterhouse. com; entrées $28–$44), in downtown Rehoboth. The sunlit space is filled with butcher-paperlined tables, but I opted to sit at the bar, where an affable shucker named Jasper kept me company while I sampled my way through a half-dozen. “I was blown away by how salty they were,” Baker told me—something of a feat in this region’s often brackish waters. Chesapeake & Maine (dogfish.com; entrées $19–$27), a Dogfish Head restaurant in Rehoboth, will soon feature Arrowhead Points on its raw bar. I found some nearby at Fins Ale House & Raw Bar (finsrawbar.com; entrées $21–$32), which also serves the Casey family’s Delaware Salts—$9 for a half-dozen during happy hour. And at Bluecoast Seafood Grill (bluecoastseafood grill.com; entrées $21–$48), in Bethany Beach, oysters from Delaware Delicious (delaware deliciousoysters.com) come in shooters (with vodka or champagne) or on the half-shell. On the deck overlooking the salt pond, I rounded out dinner with Bluecoast’s “oyster month” special: baked crab-stuffed oysters fragrant with Old Bay. On my last evening in Delaware, I helped the Caseys pull up the day’s harvest. But before heading out on the boat, Lori set a plate on the patio table. There were bacon-flecked baked oysters, raw oysters with thick lemon slices and cocktail sauce, and plump fried oysters breaded with pancake mix and crushed Club crackers, like her dad used to make. The industry here is brand-new, still getting traction. But soon enough, people will once again be bragging about these oysters. I’ve heard they grow fast.

I L LUSTRAT ION BY L ARA CO STAF R EDA

Photographer, Orvis Ambassador, and collaborator on many of our proudest moments, Becca Skinner puts our Tech Flannel to the test outside Emigrant, MT.

WOMEN’S TECH FLANNEL SHIRT

Re-engineered for the future MARINOWUL+™ is an eco-friendly fiber made from recycled plastic bottles and pulverized oyster shells BREATHABILITY for comfort during more rigorous activity THERMO-REGULATING for use in a wider range of temps STRETCH fabric for enhanced mobility

orvis.com

A BRETON BITE

TANDING IN A CIRCLE in a

converted boatyard facing the port of St.-Malo, in the northwestern French region of Brittany, our small group of strangers introduces ourselves. It’s late February 2020, a few weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic will lock the country down, and months before what would typically be Brittany’s summer tourist season. We are here for crêpe school, and my classmates are all locals—a few retirees, a mother and daughter, one high school senior— most of whom are cashing in gift certiﬁcates they’d received at Christmas. 40

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

“I’ve lived in St.-Malo for twenty years and I don’t know how to make galettes,” says Béatrice, a pharmacist, using the Breton name for savory crêpes made with buckwheat ﬂour (regular crêpes are made with white ﬂour and are often sweet). “The last time I made them it was a real catastrophe,” says another classmate, Jacques, a retiree with a walrus mustache. “There was a family petition, and so I’m here,” jokes his friend Jean-François. “I blew the batter, I blew the turning, I blew everything.” Galettes and crêpes are to Brittany what pizza is to Naples: a representative staple, an earliest dining-out memory. Here, momand-pop crêperies are ubiquitous—there are

F RO M LEF T: ROMA IN BUIS S ON/C O URT E SY O F BRE I ZH CAF É; ALUXUM/ GE T T Y IMAGE S

In Brittany, France, crêpes are a treasured local dish—but making them is no picnic, as JAY CHES HES learns when he steps up to the griddle.

some 1,800 establishments specializing in this inexpensive dish. In most savory varieties, the crusty edges ooze with melted cheese, while the sweet crêpes are smeared with Nutella, jam, or chestnut cream. The Atelier de la Crêpe—where I find myself tying on an apron with my new friends in a teaching kitchen early on a Saturday morning— aims to elevate Brittany’s most iconic food. The school has typically offered six-week certificate programs for aspiring professional crêpiers, which include lessons on the history and heritage of buckwheat. It also opens up its battalion of traditional cast-iron Billig griddles to amateurs, who can

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

E X P E R I E N C E S

In St.-Malo, France, crêpes are a way of life. Left: A galette complète, with egg, cheese, and ham.

do four-hour introductory courses like the one I signed up for. The school is the vision of restaurateur Bertrand Larcher, a local celebrity who launched the state-of-the-art facility in the fall of 2018. Larcher has spent almost 25 years promoting Brittany’s food culture with his empire of Breizh Cafés, which can be found in Tokyo and Paris, as well as in St.-Malo and nearby Cancale. These establishments serve contemporary versions of standard crêpes, made with organic flours and top-of-the-line Bordier butter, and pair them with natural wines or small-batch apple ciders. “To seduce the new generation you have to present things in a new way,” he says. Larcher, who grew up on a farm in northeastern Brittany, started his hospitality career in Switzerland. There, he met his Japanese wife, Yuko, a perfumer, and in 1995 they moved to Tokyo, where he opened the city’s first Breton crêperie. Five years ago, Larcher returned home to Brittany with Yuko and their five kids, moving to the coast in St.-Malo. He’s been investing in his new hometown ever since, with help from billionaire benefactor and Brittany native François Pinault, the founder of luxury fashion group Kering (which owns brands like Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, and Gucci). Pinault is now Larcher’s partner in the expansion of Breizh Cafés. The flagship, Le Comptoir Breizh Café, is in St.-Malo; it turns out remarkable, delicate crêpes made from superior ingredients, whether a maki-style roll or a classic complète filled with salty ham, runny egg, and nutty Comté. Larcher also operates a Japanese bistro, Otonali, next door to his St.-Malo crêperie, plus a boutique that sells buckwheat pasta and flour, salted caramels, and honey. Four years ago, Larcher purchased a rambling farm above the sea in St.-Coulomb, just outside St.-Malo, where he is planning an ambitious epicurean retreat, still years from fruition, that will include restaurants, hotel rooms, and a spa, along with acres of farmland to grow food on-site. Larcher has already planted 3,000 apple saplings with the goal of producing cider, and 20 acres of buckwheat for milling into flour for—what else?—crêpes. “This farm, like everything, will be a bit Japanese, a bit Breton,” he says, tromping through the property’s muddy fields in his wellies. “You’ll be able to eat a galette and drink some sake, with a view of the sea.”

St.-Malo Br i t t any

Crêpe-making at Atelier de la Crêpe. Below right: Bernard Larcher in the ﬁelds of his St.-Coulomb farm, 20 minutes northeast of St.-Malo.

While the farm project percolates, the Atelier de la Crêpe remains Larcher’s proudest achievement. He hopes the school will help him make a case for inscribing Breton crêpes on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, alongside other culinary treasures like Belgian beer and North African couscous.

My own Saturday-morning class at the school turns out to be a surprising challenge. Our chefinstructor, Claude Hirlay, shows a hands-on method for whipping up buckwheat batter, rolling up a sleeve, thrusting a forearm into the bowl, and beating the mixture back and forth—whack! WHACK!—until the batter is thick and airy. We get our Billigs smoking hot before ladling on batter. Inching the liquid into an even layer with our rozells (wooden batter spreaders) requires speed and dexterity. The ﬁnished galettes should be almost thin enough to read a newspaper through but solid enough to support lots of ﬁllings, Hirlay tells us. Mine turned out to be a mangled mess— gloopy, misshapen, and falling apart. “It takes practice,” he says. “People think this job is easy. Just imagine if you were trying to handle six orders at once.”

LEARN TO MAKE CRÊPES IN BRITTANY St.-Malo is three hours from Paris by train. L’Atelier de la Crêpe offers fourhour amateur classes on weekends that are scheduled to resume this fall. ateliercrepe. com; $89. WHERE TO STAY Thirty minutes east of St.-Malo in Cancale, Bertrand Larcher operates a small guesthouse above the town’s outpost of the Breizh Café (a great place to see crêpe masters in action). Most rooms have views of the oyster beds in the Bay of Mont-St.Michel, just across the street. breizh cafe.com; doubles from $164.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

PHI L IPPE ERARD

E X P E R I E N C E S

Paris

IL LU ST RAT ION BY L ARA CO STAFR EDA

Where epic reunions happen. Rediscover Arizona

RediscoverAZ.com

As harnessing the elements becomes ever more critical, food purveyors in New South Wales, Australia, are taking steps toward a more sustainable dining culture. KATE GIBB S visits with a Sydney grill master working to ignite change.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

N THE BANKS of the wide

Hawkesbury River, about 90 minutes northwest of Sydney, chef Lennox Hastie stoked the embers of a campfire. Sparks flew into the cool night sky as curls of smoke rose from a whole lamb that was roasting, spread-eagled, above the pit. As he tended to dinner, Hastie told me about the cooking

C LO CKW I SE FROM B OT TOM LEF T: NI KK I TO /C OURT E SY O F TOURI SM AUSTRAL I A ( 3); NI KK I TO/C OURTE SY OF F IRED O OR

E X P E R I E N C E S

PLAYING WITH FIRE

Clockwise from top left: Barbecued mud crabs at Stix Farm, in New South Wales; glamping at Stix; chef Lennox Hastie chats with diners at the Sydney restaurant Firedoor; radicchio on the grill at Firedoor; Hastie roasts a lamb at Stix.

Stix Farm

NEW SOUTH WALES

NI KK I TO /C O URT E SY O F F I RED O OR

Sydney

techniques he uses at Firedoor, his acclaimed Sydney restaurant. The focus of his kitchen is also the country’s most sensitive subject. “Fire is a difficult topic because it has this powerful beauty, yet it can be destructive,” Hastie said, shifting an ironbark log with his boot. Watching him manage the flames, I felt wary. Safe as we were on the grounds of Stix Farm last September, our entire nation was still reeling from the previous summer’s bushfires. In a typical year, Stix supplies 20 to 30 varieties of organic vegetables to some of Sydney’s top restaurants, including Firedoor. But in October 2019 and the hot summer that followed, fire spread over more than 12 million acres in the surrounding state of New South Wales. Across

I LLUSTRAT ION BY L ARA CO STARFR EDA

Stix’s 40 acres, several weeks’ worth of lettuce, kale, and chard harvests were destroyed. As I warmed my hands over the embers of the campfire, it was impossible to miss the irony of taking comfort from something that had recently ravaged this landscape—one of Australia’s original food bowls. Little did I know that the pristine setting would be swallowed by water just a few months later. A riverfront cabin, vegetable beds, livelihoods—all washed away. The flooding was the latest in a series of compounding natural disasters that have bombarded Australia since early last year. But if a silver lining exists, it’s that our country has been jolted into action. The Australian idiom “she’ll be right” expresses a belief that whatever is wrong will correct itself with time. It’s a laid-back attitude deeply ingrained in the Australian psyche, but it can also engender a dangerous apathy. The events of 2020 demonstrated that unless we actively work to protect our environment and the systems that influence it, the likelihood is that, actually, she won’t be right. Chefs and small-scale food producers have been leading the way in making Australia’s culinary scene more sustainable. Early colonial settlers had tamed fertile floodplains along the Hawkesbury into orchards and vegetable plots; now present-day suppliers are battling climate change through biodynamic farming and other responsible practices. Hastie and I had ventured out to the region to get a sense of how these stewards are driving progress—and how the rest of us might do our part. Stix Farm’s owner and chef David Allison and his team have demonstrated a dogged determination not only to adopt eco-friendly methods but also to help educate the public. In 2019, they launched farm tours and overnight glamping experiences. I stayed in a large canvas bell tent outfitted with thick mattresses, wool blankets, a gas lantern, and a jar of Firedoor’s smoked negroni. After waking to birdsong and feasting on Hastie’s eggs, mushrooms, and shaved truffles cooked over yet another fire, I thought, I want to live like this every day. That morning, Allison gave us a tour of the open-air produce enclosures and the greenhouses where seedlings are raised. We picked crisp white-tipped radishes to dip into mounds of house-made tarama, snapped off asparagus stalks and ate them raw, and collected broccoli and pea shoots that Hastie served smoke-kissed and paired with black olives.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

HOW TO BOOK T+L A-List advisor Cassandra Bookholder (cassandrab@ camelback travel.com; 602-889-5902) can coordinate a culinary tour of New South Wales that includes visits to farms like Stix (stix.com.au) and top-tier restaurants like Firedoor (firedoor.com. au; tasting menu $109).

“Farmers are quirky as hell,” Hastie said as he handed me a singed stick holding a coil of damper, a traditional Australian campfire bread he’d drizzled with honey. “But it’s important for a chef to understand the difficulties they face. Gary the prawner has to rely on his methods and what nature brings him.” The Gary he was speaking of is Gary Howard, a second-generation fisherman who has spent 30 years sustainably trawling for wild prawns on the Hawkesbury River from his boat, the Kristy Ann. Howard and his enthusiastic Labrador, Wally, greeted us as we climbed aboard. As we pushed off from the shore, Howard showed me how undersized juveniles can swim through the trawler’s net, along with unwanted catches, so they can continue to grow and reproduce. Australia imports 70 percent of its seafood, forcing local anglers to compete with low prices that perpetuate overfishing elsewhere. “The general public thinks there are no prawns left in Australia, but there’s enough here,” Howard said. Man-made dams are another problem in New South Wales, he added. The structures are meant to direct the natural water flow to the growing population of Sydney, but in the process, they’ve disrupted ecosystems at the river’s source. “We have to find a way to work with nature,” Hastie said with a sigh. “We can set the conditions, but nature will do its thing. The producers we work with are passionate about what they do, and we need to take time to listen.” That’s one reason Hastie adapts his menu to include whatever produce is in season. As I packed for our departure, I wondered

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

why—especially given the increased zeal for farmto-table cooking during the past 20 years—diners still demand tomatoes in winter and expect spring peas year-round. The next evening, back at Firedoor, Hastie worked the grills and trapdoor wood ovens to produce one more meal for me, starting with a snack of kangaroo and malted flatbread, macadamia crumb, and native Davidson’s plum. Even inside this rustic-industrial space in the middle of the city, I could sense the Hawkesbury in the smell drifting through the room and the glow of the open kitchen. Using his fingers, Hastie turned marron (local crayfish) and sprinkled salt over his bonfires, eventually plating the crustaceans with indigenous finger lime (a type of citrus with juice-filled pearls inside) and sea blite (a fernlike coastal shrub). Salty bites of succulents enlivened Murray cod cooked in paperbark. Sugarloaf cabbage from Stix Farm came with charred kale and celeriac. Between mouthfuls, we watched Hastie tame the fire and lamented the ways humans had traded this kind of alchemy for modern convenience. I vowed to buy less from packets and grow more—in balcony pots if I must. As the night concluded, I felt buoyed by what I’d seen over the past couple of days. Maybe she will be right. At times, it seems that all we have Down Under is hope amid the ashes. But perhaps the sheer grit of a few dedicated individuals can be just the spark we need to guide us forward. Kate Gibbs (kategibbs.com; @kategibbs) is a Sydney-based writer and podcast host.

NI KK I TO /C O URT E SY O F TOURISM AUST RAL I A

E X P E R I E N C E S

Stix Farm frequently hosts alfresco meals on its grounds.

© 2021 MyLifeTM. Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. © 2018 Google LLC. All rights reserved. Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google LLC.

4:32 am 6:27 am 10:49 am 1:45 pm 3:46 pm 5:47 pm 8:42 pm 11:07 pm

Your emotions change. That’s why MyLifeTM offers a personalized mindfulness solution, any time of day.

START A FREE 7-DAY TRIAL. DOWNLOAD THE APP TODAY.

E X P E R I E N C E S

A FULL PLATE Writer and photographer FARI S MU STAFA explains why he can’t get enough of Singapore’s Hainanese Western food. ON MY FIRST TRIP to Singapore, I was introduced to Hainanese Western food

in one of the country’s numerous “hawker centers,” or open-air food courts. Being British, I was struck by the familiarity of dishes like “chicken merry land”: a hearty portion of fried chicken, fried banana, fried egg, fried bacon, fried potatoes, and baked beans. This cuisine emerged at the turn of the 20th century, when immigrants from the Chinese island of Hainan arrived in British-occupied Singapore, taking jobs as cooks in military canteens, hotels, and wealthy European households. By the 1930s, many were opening their own restaurants and kopitiams (coffee shops), adopting cooking styles from those Western kitchens. Today, dishes like Hainanese pork chop are considered as Singaporean as chili crab. When I moved to the city-state last year, I explored this culinary subculture with camera in tow, documenting the people and places keeping this tradition alive.

Colbar was opened by the Lim family in 1953, initially serving the British military personnel who lived in the neighboring Wessex Estate, a colonial residential district.

Where to Eat Hainanese Western Food in Singapore British Hainan 75 Carpmael Rd.; entrées $11–$31.

The menu at Colbar is vast. I like to sample Chinese favorites like fried mee in gravy (pictured) or ho fun noodles and sweet-and-sour pork.

Pop-culture artifacts—including a slot machine and posters of Elvis, Princess Diana, and Xi Jinping— serve as decoration at the restaurant British Hainan, run by Frederick Puah, whose Hainanese father worked as a cook for a British family.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Colbar 9A Whitchurch Rd.; entrées $3–$23. Western Barbeque Old Airport Road Food Centre, No. 01-53, 51 Old Airport Rd.; entrées $5–$8. Wow Wow West Genuine ABC Brickworks, No. 01-133, 6 Jalan Bukit Merah; entrées $2–$9. Ye Lai Xiang Tasty Barbecue Maxwell Food Centre, 1 Kadayanallur St.; entrées $6–$16.

The menu at Colbar also includes standard British dishes (such as these cucumber sandwiches) and fish-and-chips.

At British Hainan, I always order the house special, a classic of the HainaneseWestern genre: oxtail stew.

The Western Barbeque hawker stall was founded in the 1970s. Their chicken chop with fries makes a satisfying lunch.

Portions at Wow Wow West Genuine are generous: the chicken cutlet comes with sausage, fries, and coleslaw. In addition to the standard packets of ketchup and chili sauce, an essential accompaniment at Western Barbeque is their famous secret-recipe garlic sauce. I visited Ye Lai Xiang Tasty Barbecue—a stall founded in 1971 by hawker Joel Leong’s late father, a onetime cook for the British navy— for an excellent sirloin steak.

Wow Wow West is a popular stall run by Elizabeth Huang and her husband, Jayden Cheong, both second-generation hawkers.

The Gaia cable car, which runs along the riverfront over the rooftops of the city.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES Look out, Porto: with the opening of a compelling new museum complex, neighboring Vila Nova de Gaia is luring travelers to the other side of the Douro. BY CHADNER NAVARR O

HE PEOPLE OF PORTO , Portugal, like to joke that

the best thing about Vila Nova de Gaia—their lesser-known neighbor on the opposite bank of the Douro River—is its view of Porto. Naturally, Gaia residents don’t take too kindly to that. (As someone who proudly lives across the Hudson River from New York City, I can empathize.) But after last year’s high-proﬁle opening of World of Wine (wow.pt), an entertainment district that champions 50

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Salt-cod fritters, grilled turbot, and garlicky clams at Gaia’s Armazém do Peixe restaurant.

Portugal’s cultural and wine-making legacy, this unassuming city of 300,000 is no longer known merely as Porto’s sleepy little sister. It’s the most buzz Gaia has seen since the great port producers set up shop centuries ago, lured away from Porto by milder temperatures and fewer taxes. The ﬁrst time I visited northern Portugal, in 2012, I stayed at the Yeatman (the-yeatman-hotel.com; doubles from $397), a luxury hotel set on one of Gaia’s riverside hills. The property’s grand reputation preceded it. Everyone I knew in Portugal raved about the Michelin-starred restaurant, the pools, the views. Meandering from one pastel-hued room to another, I was charmed by the Yeatman’s genteel romance. And when I craved a bit of whimsy, I plunged into the pool, a voluptuous, decanter-shaped refuge from the heat of high summer. But everything about the property is oriented toward the imperial city across the river: every table at the

P HOTO GRAPH S BY RO DRIGO CAR D O S O

Porto

Do ur o

Vila Nova de Gaia

Ri ve r

From left: A suite at House of Sandeman; taking part in a tasting workshop at World of Wine.

restaurant, every bathtub, every treatment table at the spa. My days were spent in Porto: searching for the best francesinha, the cheese-smothered Portuguese answer to the croque monsieur; exploring the contemporary-art-focused Serralves Museum (serralves.pt); perusing the aisles of the legendary bookstore Livraria Lello (livrarialello.pt). Yes, I was sleeping in Gaia; my stay, however, revolved entirely around Porto. So maybe the joke was true. In the decade since, the effects of Porto’s booming tourism industry have crossed the river, and investment has begun pouring into

Gaia. But it wasn’t until the opening of World of Wine last summer that Gaia cemented itself as a worthy rival. The size of seven American football fields, WOW is like its own neighborhood, where terra-cotta warehouses seamlessly blend with port caves. There are 12 dining venues, including a restaurant serving traditional dishes such as caldo verde (potato-and-collard soup) and bacalhau com broa (cod with corn bread), a café dedicated to dessert, and even a fish-and-chips bar. There’s also a wine school that offers workshops for enthusiasts of every level. Most game-changing of all, the complex— which took six years and $117 million to complete—houses several world-class art spaces, a nod to the kind of cultural district common in European capitals but previously nonexistent in Portugal. World of Wine’s cultural attractions include Planet Cork, where Portugal’s cork-producing heritage is exhibited through all the things that can be wrought from the material, including a surfboard created by Garrett McNamara,

IL LU ST RAT ION BY L ARA CO STAFR EDA

E X P E R I E N C E S

ATLANTIC OCEAN

E X P E R I E N C E S

conqueror of the skyscraper-high waves off the Portuguese town of Nazaré. The country’s design and textile industry, now on the rise again, is celebrated at the Fashion & Fabric Museum. This restored 18th-century building displays fashion innovations from Portuguese designers, including Olga Noronha’s sneakers made from hair and a porcelain wig by Nuno Gama, alongside frescoes by Baroque artist Nicolau Nasoni. And then there’s the Bridge Collection, where World of Wine CEO Adrian Bridge shows his impressive personal haul of drinking vessels that spans 9,000 years of history. On a recent visit to the city, I wandered the alleys of the Cais de Gaia neighborhood to 7g Roaster (7groaster.pt), a third-wave coffee shop where a vertical garden and warm wood set the mood for ﬁltered coffee made from beans sourced in Colombia and Ethiopia. Upstairs, 7g runs the similarly design-forward 7g Roaster Apartments (apartments.7groaster. pt; doubles from $153), a group of light-drenched vacation rentals with sleek, Scandi-style décor. Nearby at chef José Cordeiro’s Blini (theblini. com; entrées $17–$43), I ate my weight in rice piled with razor ﬁsh and salt cod. I checked in to the three-year-old House of Sandeman Hostel & Suites (thehouseof sandeman.pt; doubles from $85), a partnership between Independente Collective—a Portuguese hospitality group known for chic 52

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

accommodations and bars—and Sandeman, one of the country’s historic port producers. My suite was done up in the vintage-inspired mix-andmatch aesthetic that the brand is known for—a Wes Anderson lite, with gallery walls and record players. Of course, like any Gaia venue worth its salt, there were also plenty of French balconies offering postcard-perfect glimpses of Porto’s skyscape. On the patio, where the property hosts live music events, I sipped crisp Sandeman portand-tonics before crossing one of the six bridges that span the Douro for dinner in Porto. On the last day of my trip, I walked two miles along the river from the hotel to Afurada, a quaint ﬁshing village that’s today part of Gaia, to have lunch at seafood restaurant Armazém do Peixe (afurada.armazemdopeixe.pt; entrées $33–$45). Bright wooden boats glided by, and in the air were plumes of smoke perfumed with sardines as restaurants grilled the day’s catch. On a small lot, women dressed head to toe in black were hanging their laundry out to dry, and lines of clothes billowed under the sun. It was as classic a Portuguese moment as I could think of and—for that evening at least—enough to make me forget there was anything to see on the other side of the Douro. Chadner Navarro (@chadner) is a Manila-born, New Jersey–based writer who has traveled to Portugal more than two dozen times.

The view from the Yeatman, in Gaia, with the Douro River and Porto beyond.

Ready for an adventure with real ﬂavor? Mississippi’s got your order up. Chefs who deliver WOW moments with every meal. Pit masters who really know their way around a brisket. Soul food that truly hits you where you live. Tasty trips down the tamale trail. Unforgettable diners and dives. Basically, this state offers amazing eats all over the place. Hungry? Start planning your Mississippi culinary getaway at visitmississippi.org/goodtimes.

WAIKIKI BEACHCOMBER BY OUTRIGGER

Ocean Inspiration Immerse yourself in Hawaii’s modern creativity at the vibrant Waikiki Beachcomber by Outrigger, a centrally located retreat that celebrates island artists and culture.

AN IDYLLIC TROPICAL LOCALE

Steps from Hawaii’s golden-sand beaches and aquamarine ocean, Waikiki Beachcomber by Outrigger is a craft hotel boasting larger-than-life art, fresh brews, and live music, all handcrafted in the heart of Waikiki. Warmly welcoming guests back to the islands with an inspiring design, spectacular views, and plenty of Aloha spirit, Waikiki Beachcomber is a delightful destination in a prime location. Discover island authenticity and modern amenities throughout this colorful lifestyle property.

EASY ACCESS TO ADVENTURE

Waikiki Beachcomber is a true gateway to the waves and just a quick walk to the ocean. Stroll along the world-famous Waikiki Beach, situated on a crescent of sand against the backdrop of the majestic Diamond Head Monument. Here, you can recline on the shoreline, snorkel, paddle an outrigger canoe, rent a surfboard, and sail on a catamaran at sunset—all in the same day, if you wish. Take a dip in Waikiki Beachcomber’s swimming pool (or slip into the hot tub), and dry off in the hotel’s sprawling outdoor lanai, a sunny oasis any time of day. Sip a tropical cocktail while relaxing on a cushioned lounge chair, and check out the property’s entertaining familyfriendly “Dive-in” movies on Saturday evenings. OCEAN-INSPIRED ART AND DESIGN

Waikiki Beachcomber’s unique design was created by a curated group of local artists, called “Beachcomber Originals,” who contributed to the hotel’s overall aesthetic and exceptionally artsy vibe, inside and out. This creative force of award-winning artisans includes a celebrated printmaker, a professional surf photographer, an expert craft brewer, an internationally acclaimed slack key guitarist, as well as other esteemed creatives based in Hawaii. Admire their brilliantly modern and eclectic take on Hawaiian culture throughout the hotel’s soaring lobby and public spaces. Their influence is also apparent in the stylish, light-filled guestrooms that feature tranquil pastel hues reflecting the ocean, an array of upscale amenities, and all the comforts of home. AN EXCEPTIONAL DINING SCENE

Drift into a tropical vacation mindset as you dine on-property at Hawaiian Aroma Caffe, a funky, airy coffee house with an Italian flair that’s adjacent to the lobby. Choose from a variety of gourmet Kona coffee drinks at this popular and Instagrammable café, along with scratch-made paninis, pancakes, pastries, acai bowls topped with locally grown tropical fruit, and more. For lunch and dinner, head to Maui Brewing Company, an open-air eatery just steps away. This spacious and lively restaurant is home to the island’s largest bar and serves up casual favorites such as fish tacos, gourmet burgers, and large salads. And if you can’t decide on a beverage, order a flight of refreshing beer—all brewed locally. Enjoy Maui Brewing Company’s two happy hours daily and the exciting nightlife scene featuring great live music.

For more information about Waikiki Beachcomber by Outrigger and to book your Hawaiian vacation, visit waikikibeachcomber.com.

E X P E R I E N C E S

A bowl of vegetable udon at Binchoyaki, in Downtown Sacramento.

The private dining room at Canon, in East Sacramento.

Glitzier neighbors like San Francisco and Napa Valley tend to overshadow California’s capital, but the chefs drawing on the agricultural heritage of the region prove that the city is worthy of a visit in its own right. BY JUL IE T I ZON

The Wall Street cocktail at Canon, made with brandy and preserved kumquat.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

NE OF THE MOST magical

experiences I’ve ever had was dining under an early evening sky, on the roadway of a marigoldcolored vertical-lift bridge, surrounded by hundreds of people who shared my reverence for simple, farm-to-table cooking. And no, I wasn’t in Portland, Oregon, or New York’s Hudson Valley, or even Napa. I was in Sacramento, the capital of California, at the annual Tower Bridge Dinner—a multicourse meal prepared by local and visiting chefs to show off the fruits of this agriculturally rich region. The event is a highlight of the Farm-to-Fork Festival (farmto fork.com), which, every autumn, celebrates the farmers, ranchers, brewers, and restaurateurs of the surrounding counties.

Founded in 2013, the festival was conceived by Josh Nelson (his company, Selland Family Restaurants, has five locations in the city) with the aim of bringing attention to the area’s culinary output. Positioned inland and northeast from the more high-profile cities of San Francisco and San Jose, Sacramento has typically been left out of the conversation when it comes to the state’s food hot spots. With more people fleeing the Bay Area’s astronomical cost of living, though, the capital has reaped the benefits: as its population has increased over the past few years, the restaurant scene has blossomed. And many Sacramento chefs championed local produce and products long before doing so was a mainstream trend. It’s no surprise: Sacramento is surrounded by 1.5 million acres of farmland, on which grow more than 160 varieties of crops. With Sacramento’s smaller size (it has a population of just over 500,000), there’s plenty of camaraderie within the food world. “Our community is very close, especially with farmers,” says Allyson Harvie, owner of Notre Ferme, a catering company with a focus on seasonal ingredients, who was formerly chef de cuisine at the Kitchen—Sacramento’s only Michelin-starred establishment. “If there’s a small farm that has an abundance of something, we all reach out to

FRO M LEF T: ERI N ALD ER S ON /C OURTE SY OF CAN ON ; C O URT E SY O F BI NCHOYAK I; C ODI AN N B ACKMAN /C OURTE SY OF CANON

SAVORING SACRAMENTO

cream and crumpets, but leave room for the English meat pie made with braised lamb shank. camdenspitandlarder.com; entrées $26–$48. Binchoyaki

Nearby, Japanese izakaya-style dining gets the locavore treatment at Binchoyaki, helmed by chef Craig Takehara, who co-owns the place with his wife, general manager Tokiko Sawada. The menu is extensive—from poke tostadas to snackable onigiri made with rib eye or shrimp tempura. I especially recommend the lusciously thick mazemen (a no-broth ramen): if you see a version on the specials menu, order enough for the whole table. binchoyaki.com; entrées $15–$31. Bawk!

Camden Spit & Larder, a Britishinspired restaurant on the Capitol Mall.

each other and try to bring it onto our menus.” On my multiple visits to Sacramento, I’ve noticed this neighborly, intimate feeling time and time again. Read on for my picks of the best places to try its culinary treasures.

The Kitchen

FRO M LEF T: C OURTE SY OF CAMDEN SPI T & L ARD ER ; C OURTE SY OF TH E K I TCHEN

Canon

Recent years have seen the return of hometown chefs like Brad Cecchi, who previously cooked at the Michelin-starred Solbar, in Napa Valley, before opening this restaurant in East Sacramento, which is based around the idea of shared plates. “The quality of the ingredients and the freshness out of the ground that we’re able to get here are really unparalleled, even compared to places like the Bay Area,” Cecchi says. This is reﬂected in the menu, which features inventive produce preparations like carrot tempura with kosho dip (a Japanese citrus chili paste) and grilled asparagus with pickled wild mushrooms and black garlic. canoneastsac. com; small plates $12–$18.

One of the most popular of the newer Sacramento restaurants may also be its most casual. Located in the R Street Historic District, Bawk! serves up plates of shatteringly crisp, perfectly salted fried chicken by chef Casey Shideler, as well as sides like “chicken-fried” cauliﬂower bites and collard greens with ham hocks. bawkfriedchicken.com; entrées $14–$20.

Summer corn gnocchi at the Kitchen, which has a Michelin star.

To fully understand the roots of Sacramento’s restaurant scene, book a dinner at this 20-year-old institution, led by executive chef Kelly McCown. The four-hour, eight-course experience is more akin to a performance than to a typical white-tablecloth meal. On my ﬁrst visit, my young nephew was invited to the kitchen to help prep dishes with the chefs. The meal included a plate of gnudi that were so light and creamy that I asked for (and ﬁnished!) an entire second portion. thekitchenrestaurant.com; tasting menu $155.

Camden Spit & Larder

This spot just a few blocks from the State Capitol provides traditional English pub food with a dose of California cool, thanks to chef Oliver Ridgeway, who grew up in the U.K. Try the locally sourced caviar served with sour

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

(855) 886-4824 | firstrepublic.com | New York Stock Exchange symbol: FRC MEMBER FDIC AND EQUAL HOUSING LENDER

T R A V E L

L E I S U R E

T I P S AND TR IC KS TO HEL P YO U TR AVEL S MARTER Edited by PAUL BRADY

NIC OLE FRANC O/ C OURTE SY O F F OUR SE A S ON S RE S O RT TAMARI ND O, M E X IC O

Hotter Than Ever No matter how long it’s been since your last visit, now’s the perfect time for a return to Mexico. M E AG AN DRI L L I NGER reports on the best hotels and resorts to book—and what the country is doing to keep guests safe.

Mexico’s Costalegre is long on Paciﬁc breezes and wideopen spaces.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

Kimberly (casakimberly.

com; doubles from $295) has a glamour all its own—it was once Elizabeth Taylor’s vacation home, after all. The hacienda-style villa sits on a quiet, cobblestoned street and overlooks red-tiled roofs and the Bay of Banderas. On those evenings when the sky erupts in a vibrant sunset, the hotel is illuminated by soft reflections from the crystals of the chandeliers. But on a recent stay I found it even more enchanting, because just six of the nine guest rooms were available due to COVID-19-related capacity limits. I felt as safe as could be—and often had the pool deck all to myself. Mexico has long been an escape for Americans, who are drawn by

La Copa del Sol, one of many art pieces at the resort Careyes, on the Pacific coast.

Casa Kimberly, a nine-room hotel in Puerto Vallarta.

its natural beauty, its huge range of hotels and resorts, and its remarkable food—not to mention its proximity and affordability. While the pandemic curtailed many trips, the country has slowly and steadily reopened. In the first four months of 2021, more than 1.5 million Americans flew to Mexico, though countless others may still be wondering, Is it really okay to visit? “There’s no reason to be nervous as long as you know what to expect,” says Ben Gritzewsky, a Mexico and Latin America travel specialist at the travel firm Frosch who’s based in Mérida, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Travelers will find familiar health protocols in place across much of the country, even as vaccination rates rise on both sides of the border. Hand-sanitizing stations are ubiquitous; temperature screenings are often required when entering hotels, restaurants, and shops; and hospitality workers continue to wear masks and other PPE. Hotel guests, however, often have the choice of whether or not to wear a mask. On my numerous reporting trips to Mexico during the past year, I encountered fewer tourists and observed better adherence to safety measures outside major tourist hubs like Cancún and Mexico City. On the Costalegre, south of Puerto Vallarta, luxury enclaves like Careyes (careyes.com; doubles from $350) and Cuixmala (cuixmala.com; doubles from $550) were designed with outdoor living in mind. The Four Seasons Resort Tamarindo

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

FRO M TOP : C O URT E SY OF CARE YE S ; C O URTE SY OF CA SA K I MBERLY

T R A V E L E R I N T E L L I G E N T

UERTO VALLARTA’S Casa

FRO M TOP : DAV IS GERBER/ C O URT E SY OF CUI XMAL A ; C OURT E SY OF RO SE WO OD SAN MIGUEL DE AL LEN DE

The pool at Cuixmala overlooks a two-mile stretch of beach on the Costalegre.

Luna Rooftop Tapas Bar, at the Rosewood San Miguel de Allende.

Biosphere Reserve and Lake Bacalar continue to see far fewer visitors than more popular places like Tulum. And in the state of Oaxaca, “Huatulco is an up-and-coming destination that has a very different

vibe—it’s super bohemian and a gateway to world-class surf breaks,” says Rabinor, who recommends Villa Escondida (villaescondida. com.mx; buyouts from $1,295), a four-suite escape located on secluded Bocana Beach. Mexico currently has no vaccine requirement for arriving travelers, but upon departure, they must fill out a contact-tracing form. As of this writing, before boarding a flight back to the U.S., passengers must provide the airline proof of a negative COVID test within the previous three days, regardless of vaccination status. On my visits, pre-flight tests were inexpensive and extremely easy to come by: hotels and resorts across Mexico offer them to guests, and many villa-rental agents and Airbnb hosts provide on-property testing kits. It’s a small price to pay for those stunning sunsets over the rooftops of Puerto Vallarta. Meagan Drillinger (drillinjourneys. com; @drillinjourneys) is a New York–based writer who specializes in coverage of Mexico.

(fourseasons.com; doubles from $1,050) is slated to open there later this year. “I’d also consider beach destinations like Los Cabos, Punta Mita, and Todos Santos,” says Zach Rabinor (zach@journey mexico.com), CEO of Journey Mexico and a member of T+L’s A-List of travel specialists. In San Miguel de Allende, authorities continue to enforce mask mandates, and visitors have a wide choice of boutique hotels that emphasize privacy, including the 67-room Rosewood San Miguel de Allende (rosewood.com; doubles from $395), the 14-room Casa 1810 (casa1810.com; doubles from $250), the five-room Hotel Amparo (hotel amparo.com; doubles from $250), and the three-room Mesón Hidalgo (mesonhidalgo.com; doubles from $185). On the Caribbean coast, nature-forward areas like Sian Ka’an

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

T R A V E L E R I N T E L L I G E N T

Three Dream Trips, as Organized by Reco

WILL YOU MEET YOUR NEXT TRAVEL ADVISOR ONLINE? Tripadvisor’s latest venture aims to connect consumers with the vacation ﬁxer of their dreams. BY PAUL BRADY

FOR A WHILE THERE, it looked like

travel agents might go the way of the fax machine and the flip phone. But one of the many things the pandemic has made clear is the value of having a travel advocate in your corner, not just to suggest a solid hotel or score a tough-to-finagle dinner reservation but also to explain new PCR testing requirements or to save the day when a flight is canceled at the last minute. But how to find the right fixer? Travel + Leisure’s A-List (traveland leisure.com/a-list) of the world’s top travel specialists is one go-to, of course, whether you’re planning a Mediterranean cruise, a visit to the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, or a trek through Chilean Patagonia. Now Tripadvisor, the company built on the wisdom of crowds, has launched Reco (helloreco.com), a service to help travelers find their very own vacation whisperer. “There’s a yearning for personal connection in travel planning, particularly for really special trips,” says Erik Ornitz, the general manager of Reco. “People want to get on the phone with someone with expertise.” 62

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Reco aims to find not just an expert, but the right expert, from a network of more than 300 vetted advisors. To start, consumers fill out a survey, choosing their travel “vibe” (examples include chill, fast-paced, and spiritual) and trip style (such as cruise, honeymoon, or friends’ trip), along with proposed dates and budgets. Reco then offers a short list of, well, recommended advisors. The traveler can chat with any of them online before committing to a trip. If there’s a spark, Reco levies a $199 fee and the detailed planning can begin, with the advisor staying in touch all the way through to the trip’s successful conclusion. The service has coincidentally launched, Ornitz says, during a moment when ever-changing vaccine requirements, quarantine rules, and border closures make planning a dream trip more difficult. “If you think about a honeymoon, there’s a lot riding on that trip. You may be a little less willing to do what I did a few years ago, which was show up in Southeast Asia with my wife for a few weeks,” Ornitz says. “Today, that’d be pretty hard to pull off.”

A TWO-MONTH SOJOURN IN COSTA RICA Advisor Irene Edwards planned a long stay in her home country for a solo traveler looking to “just do nothing except be,” she recalls. That included watching the sunset at Guiones Beach, in Nosara, and spending time at a countryside farm—hosted by Edwards’s own mother. Along the way, she secured room upgrades at hotels like Senda Monteverde, in the cloud forest, and made herself available around the clock for last-minute tweaks to the itinerary. A 20TH-ANNIVERSARY TRIP IN PORTUGAL Gonçalo Correia, who is also on T+L’s A-List, helped a couple enjoy a celebratory trip despite the challenges of the pandemic. He recommended a luxurious, hybrid-power yacht for a river cruise through the Douro Valley, a private cooking class in Lisbon, and a stargazing experience guided by an astronomer in the village of Monsaraz, in the Alentejo—all booked just before Portugal reopened to a flood of international visitors. A FAMILY-FRIENDLY JAPAN VACATION Theresa Chu-Bermudez helped a family of five crack the code on getting around in Tokyo, despite the pandemic. She mapped out subway routes, arranged a tour of the Akihabara and Harajuku districts for the crew’s anime-crazed kids, and booked an evening ramen crawl with noodle expert Brian MacDuckston, who pens the popular website Ramen Adventures.

IL LU ST RAT ION BY V IS BI I

Wait, Golf Is Cool Now? Spurred by a new generation of golfers seeking a safe outdoor pursuit, destinations are shaking up the rules of the classic sport. BY KEL SEY O GLE TREE

BRI AN F I NKE

Five Places to Try the New-Look Game DESTINATION KOHLER Kohler, Wisconsin To complement its four existing championship courses (one of which is hosting the Ryder Cup this month), Destination Kohler opened the Baths of Blackwolf Run in June. The 10-hole, par-3 accommodates all skill levels and includes a two-acre putting course. The luxury suites at the American Club and the restorative Kohler Waters Spa, both a five-minute shuttle ride away, are nice postround perks. destination kohler.com; doubles from $389.

OMNI PGA FRISCO RESORT Frisco, Texas PGA of America is moving its HQ to this city north of Dallas, and the organization has partnered with Omni Hotels & Resorts to build a new 501-room resort right next door. While it won’t debut until spring 2023, the destination will have numerous courses, including a beginnerfriendly 10-hole option lit for night play, plus an adjacent entertainment district. “We want to honor the roots of golf but move the game into the modern day,” says Peter Strebel, Omni’s president. omnihotels.com; rates not available at press time. PGA NATIONAL RESORT & SPA Palm Beach Gardens, Florida Best known for its four championship courses just outside West Palm Beach,

THE WHOLE WORLD, it seems, is getting back onto

the links. In fact, pandemic restrictions have given a boost to golf tourism, a market that’s forecast to grow by $5.3 billion through 2024. “People started picking up golf not as a sport, but just as a fun outdoor activity,” says Matt Corey, chief marketing officer for the PGA Tour. Golf courses and resorts have been making changes to attract a younger, more diverse group of players, adding quicker nine-hole options, building more experiences for beginners, and emphasizing the sport as a way to safely hang out with friends. And because walking—rather than riding—a full 18 holes can help you log as much as six miles, the game has attracted many looking to reinvigorate their outdoor exercise routines. The sport is also diversifying through initiatives like Make Golf Your Thing. Launched this spring by organizations including the PGA Tour, the program aims to make the sport more accessible (and affordable) in hopes of drawing newcomers, including those from underrepresented groups such as women and people of color. “Golf isn’t just middle-aged white guys with triple-pleated pants on a perfect fairway,” Corey says. “As long as you have a club and a ball, you’ll be on your way.”

PGA National has added two new, faster-playing ones to the resort. The Staple, a nine-hole, par-3, has a figure-eight design intended to give groups a chance to meet up midround at firepits ringed by Adirondack chairs. The Match is more typical, with 18 holes, but built for match play, in which participants aim to win individual holes rather than the entire course. pgaresort.com; doubles from $250. CABOT CAPE BRETON Nova Scotia This resort with breathtaking views of the Gulf of St. Lawrence added a third course, the Nest, last summer. The 10-hole, par-3 plays much faster than the two existing 18-hole courses, and the greens fees are considerably lower. Cabot has partnered with Breton Brewing Co. and Nova Scotia Spirits Co.

to serve beer, cocktails, and mocktails on the course. cabotlinks.com; doubles from $270. FOUR SEASONS RESORT HUALALAI Kailua-Kona, Hawaii Fresh from a $100 million renovation, this resort has spruced up the golf program, making it much more welcoming to beginners. Its new Hualalai Golf Hale (lodge) offers laid-back training programs with pros who can coach all aspects of the game, plus a Topgolf Swing Suite where players can hone their technique in a simulated game. Four Seasons even offers glow-in-the-dark balls for night play and can arrange an entertaining night of laid-back puttputt with a custom food-and-drink spread. fourseasons.com; doubles from $1,580.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

T R A V E L E R I N T E L L I G E N T

East Hampton Beach, in New York State. Below: A room at Block Island Beach Hotel, in Rhode Island, part of Lark Hotels.

Skip the high-season hassle, and plan an East Coast fall getaway— one that still feels like summer. BY HANNAH SEL INGER

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

EPTEMBER AND OCTOBER are my

favorite months in New England,” says Rob Blood, the founder and president of Lark Hotels (larkhotels. com), which has 26 luxury properties in locations including Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, in Massachusetts, and Kennebunkport, Maine. “I’d much rather go in September than the middle of July,” he adds, because the crowds are thinner and the weather is often just as pleasant. Then there are the rates: at Lark properties, rooms in the fall shoulder season are often 30 percent cheaper than in summer. In the case of Martha’s Vineyard, where the summertime population can often top 200,000, ducking the crowds can be a game changer. It’s easier to score a room at Lark’s 12-room Edgartown Inn (doubles from $420) and its 15-room the Christopher (doubles from $355) in the fall, especially if you’re after a coveted longweekend stay. Shoulder season is also a perfect time to visit nearby Nantucket, says Eric Landt, general manager of the island’s 33-room Wauwinet (wauwinet.com; doubles from $520). Post–Labor Day visitors, he says, can enjoy the Nantucket Arts Festival, September’s Nantucket Restaurant Week, and abundant end-of-season sales.

F RO M TOP : C O URT E SY OF TH E MI LL HO US E IN N; RE AD MCKEN DREE/C OURTE SY OF B LO CK ISL AND B E ACH HOTEL

WHY SEPTEMBER IS THE NEW AUGUST

Cape Cod is more tranquil in autumn, with opportunities to enjoy places that otherwise might be jammed with visitors, says Kara Lachance, director of sales and marketing for the 120-room Wequassett Resort & Golf Club

FRO M TOP : RE AD MC KEND REE/C OURTE SY OF BLO C K I SL AND BE ACH H OTEL ; C OURTE SY OF ROUNDTREE, AMAG AN SE T T

(wequassett.com; doubles from $725). “It is easier to make restaurant reservations, particularly for many of the popular smaller spots,” she says. In Maine, travelers can take advantage of more affordable sails along the Midcoast, says Kristan Vermeulen, public relations manager for the Maine Windjammer Association (sailmainecoast. com; trips from $775 per person for four nights). The collective of nine independently owned vessels operates three-to-six-night charters up and down the state’s craggy coastline. Noah Barnes, who helms one of them, the 12-cabin schooner Stephen Taber, agrees that shoulder season is a prime time for Maine travel. “The whole coast seems to heave a sigh of relief after summer,”

The views from Block Island Beach Hotel.

The Roundtree, Amangansett, in the Hamptons.

he says. The stargazing is often better, too, he adds, thanks to highpressure systems that hold clouds at bay. On terra firma, Maine visitors will “feel like they have the place to themselves in October,” says Matthew Levin, director of hotels and marketing for the Bay View Collection (bayviewcollection.com), which has three properties in Camden. Fall sees lower rates at 16 Bay View (doubles from $340), a 21-room boutique hotel, and the Grand Harbor Inn (doubles from $240), right on the waterfront. In the Hamptons, fall is the ideal time to visit farm stands and wineries, like Wölffer Estate Vineyard, says Sylvia Muller, proprietor of the 10-room Mill House Inn (millhouseinn. com; doubles from $425). At the 15-room Roundtree, Amagansett (theroundtreehotels.com; doubles from $795), rates go down by about 30 percent in mid-September. Even better, you won’t have to fight for a spot on the beach or a dinner reservation. It may be shoulder season, but there’s still plenty of elbow room. Hannah Selinger (hannahselinger. net; @druishamericanprincess) is a Hamptons-based lifestyle writer and mother of two.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

Exploring Goat Rock Beach, in Sonoma County, California.

Wine regions are broadening their appeal with activities beyond the tasting room.

Riding at Jack London State Historic Park, in Sonoma County.

NAVIGATING WINE COUNTRY WITH KIDS? IT’S MORE FUN THAN EVER Wine regions around the U.S. are becoming increasingly family-friendly, offering visitors of all ages plenty to see and do. Here are some tips for planning the perfect long weekend. BY TANV I CH HEDA 66

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Do more than just taste wine.

Even the most impressive tasting rooms can feel cramped with kids, but a growing number of wineries offer outdoor activities, too. In Mendocino County, California, for example, Pennyroyal Farm (pennyroyalfarm.com) is a vineyard, creamery, and farm all in one, meaning parents can sample killer Sauvignon Blancs while young ones pet goats

in Paso Robles, California.

Make time for everyone.

Don’t waste the morning.

C OURT E SY OF S O NOMA C O UN T Y TOURISM. O PP O SI TE , C LO CKW I SE FROM TOP LEF T: MARI AH HARKE Y/C OURTE SY OF S ON OMA C O UN T Y TO URI SM; C O URT E SY OF S ON OMA C OUN T Y TOURISM; TO M D E INI NGER/ C OURT E SY O F S ON OMA C O UNT Y TO URI SM

Paddling on the Russian River is the ideal early morning adventure in northern California’s wine country.

and nibble on cheese. In Sonoma, families are welcome at the pool of the Francis Ford Coppola Winery (thefamilycoppola.com; pool reservations required). In Napa, getting there is part of the fun with an aerial tram ride to Sterling Vineyards (sterlingvineyards.com). In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the sprawling Stoller Family Estate (stollerfamilyestate.com) has games such as oversize Jenga and cornhole.

Set out early for a family-friendly hike in Sonoma’s 805-acre Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve (parks.ca.gov) or marvel at the 19 waterfalls along the 1½-mile Gorge Trail in Watkins Glen State Park (parks.ny.gov), in the Finger Lakes. (An app such as AllTrails can help you pick out age-appropriate hikes.) Many wine regions are also rich in history, and a museum visit can be a great way to round out a trip. Families might opt for the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa (missionsanluisobispo.org), one of the 21 Spanish missions built during the late 18th and early 19th centuries along California’s coast; the Harriet Tubman Home (harriet tubmanhome.com), in Auburn, New York; or the Women’s Rights National Historical Park (nps. gov), in Seneca Falls, New York.

Pick a home base with space.

Stay nimble at mealtime.

In California, new resort properties, such as the Montage Healdsburg (montage.com; doubles from $1,270) and the Four Seasons Resort Napa Valley (fourseasons.com; doubles from $1,400), offer families more indoor and outdoor space, with oversize suites, pools, and kids’ clubs. Glamping-style stays also provide room to roam: check out Vintages Trailer Resort (the-vintages. com; trailers from $100), in the Willamette Valley; Wildhaven (wildhavensonoma.com; tents from $130), in Sonoma; and Firelight Camps (firelightcamps.com; tents from $230), in the Finger Lakes region of New York. And several wineries are opening their own on-property vacation rentals, such as the beautiful farmhouse on the grounds of HammerSky

Yes, part of the appeal of wine country is the food, but high-end dining with young ones can be a tough sell—for parents and restaurant staff alike. Instead, arrange takeout from restaurants and bakeries that embrace the bounty of their surroundings. In Healdsburg, spots such as the new Quail & Condor (quailandcondor.com) and the forthcoming Little Saint (instagram.com/ littlesainthealdsburg), a casual café from the team behind the fine-dining restaurant Silver Thread, are prime for picnic provisioning, as are pop-up farmers’ markets, which often post hours with wine-country tourism organizations like Visit Napa Valley (visitnapavalley.com) and Finger Lakes Wine Country (fingerlakes winecountry.com).

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

T R A V E L E R

That classic rule of family travel—each day, pick one activity for adults and one for children— holds true for wine getaways, too. Balance tasting time with activities like apple picking and hayrides at orchards such as Avila Valley Barn (avilavalleybarn.com), in San Luis Obispo, California. Another option: ride electric bikes along old rail tracks—or take a scenic train ride—through the redwood forests surrounding the Mendocino Railway (skunktrain.com). On rainy or chilly days, look to attractions like the Willamette Valley’s Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum (evergreenmuseum.org) or the Corning Museum of Glass (cmog.org), in the Finger Lakes.

I N T E L L I G E N T

Vineyards (hammersky.com; villa from $600),

Going It Alone, Together

Women are driving a surge in small-group travel, signing up solo for trips designed to build community. BY TANYA A . CHRI ST I AN

WHEN ASHLEY N. COMPANY quit her corporate

job in 2016 to start Jelani Women Travel (jelaniwomen.org), a boutique agency focused on transformative trips for solo women of color, she was ahead of the curve. Before the pandemic, her small-group trips to Africa were selling well, with individual women ﬁnding camaraderie among like-minded adventurers. While COVID-19 put the brakes on some trips, Company says, the appeal of her alone-buttogether getaways has never been stronger. “People have been quickly booking up our year-end excursions, as well as the ones we have planned for 2022,” she says. “They’re saying, ‘I know I have something to look forward to.’ ” 68

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Small-group trips aimed at solo women are taking off, says Cole Banks, who founded Sisters Traveling Solo (sisterstravelingsolo. com), which is exclusively focused on female clients. “More than sixty percent of the women traveling with us are new customers,” Banks says. “Women have realized the importance of getting out, doing what they want, and not waiting on others to join them.” The global outfitter Intrepid Group (intrepid group.travel), which introduced women-only itineraries in 2018, reports that demand for those trips was up 119 percent in 2019. “We chose to do tours in places where it could be difficult to learn about the true female experience in a mixed-gender setting,” explains Intrepid’s managing director Zina Bencheikh, pointing to itineraries to Iran and Jordan as two examples. “We aim to break down barriers, foster discussion, and create immersive local experiences that are ordinarily off-limits.” Other operators are pivoting to meet the market. Insight Vacations (insightvacations. com), which is part of the Travel Corporation, will lead its first women-only tour in 2022. The 13-day journey to Italy and Croatia will kick off in Venice, then hit Istria and the Dalmatian Coast before wrapping up in Dubrovnik. The trip will include meet-and-greets with local women, such as a marine biologist who is making seafood farming more sustainable, the cofounders of a cooperative brewery, and an artist who specializes in traditional silk embroidery. “Our women-only tours are developed for women by women,” says Insight Vacations’ CEO, Ulla Böhler. “We hope to inspire a wide variety of travelers—mothers and daughters, friends, romantic partners, and solo travelers who like being part of a group.” Family-owned Austin Adventures (austin adventures.com) is another outfitter stepping up its women-only offerings. The brand’s newly appointed president, Kasey Austin, will lead an eight-day trip to Costa Rica in October, with visits to women-owned businesses such as a textile cooperative, a rafting outfitter, and an organic farm. “Women-only travel is about community building,” Austin says, “and that is especially crucial now in this new landscape, when we need it the most.”

C OURT E SY O F SI ST ER S T RAVEL ING S OLO

I N T E L L I G E N T

T R A V E L E R

Sisters traveling Solo founder Cole Banks in Dakar, Senegal.

COME TO YOUR Sunshine warms your skin. Sand between your toes. The sip of your first cocktail. Live local music. When you’re ready, come experience the sights, sounds and scents of the Alabama Gulf Coast. We’ve missed you.

877-341-2400

Gulf Shores.com

OrangeBeach.com

Along the Gulf Coast of central Mexico lies a region steeped in history, fed by the sea and forest, and modernized by a new generation of chefs. MICHAE L SNYDE R embarks on an epic road trip to unearth one of the most exciting food scenes in the country—and discovers there is simply no place like…

R The Santuario de la Virgen de la Candelaria, a Catholic church in the town of Tlacotalpan, Mexico. Opposite: A musician at Yambigapan, a homestay in southern Veracruz.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Photographs by ANA LORE NZ ANA

C R U Z

the first peals of thunder rattle the cloud forests of Mexico’s eastern Sierra Madre mountains, white, star-shaped blossoms known as flor de trueno—literally “thunder flowers”—open in dense clusters, marking the beginning of the rainy season in Veracruz. This state, a sickle of hills and beaches along the Gulf Coast, is a place of spectacular abundance year-round, brimming with coffee, vanilla, and honey. But during the summer rains, daily showers raise wild mushrooms from the forest floor and coax dozens of varieties of flowers into bloom. “In Veracruz alone, there are 52 edible flowers. And we eat them—we don’t decorate with them,” said Raquel Torres Cerdán, a 72-year-old anthropologist, cookbook author, and onetime restaurateur, on the balmy April afternoon we met at her home in Xalapa, Veracruz’s state capital. For the past six years, she has used her kitchen to offer workshops focused on the food of her home state, a subject she has studied for more than 40 years. From a young age, Torres visited the hills around Xalapa with her family, extending her travels to more distant corners of Veracruz in her twenties as an anthropology student and employee of the federal government’s Rural Development Program. Though she started working in her father’s restaurant at the age of 13, the diversity of ingredients she encountered in those later trips came as a shock. They reflected not only the wide range of fruits and vegetables, seafood, and wild game in Veracruz, but also the cultures and rituals that have flourished there for three millennia, beginning with the Olmecs, the first major civilization of Mesoamerica. And yet, Torres says, finding expressions of that diversity outside of home kitchens has always been difficult. After she opened her second restaurant in the early 1980s in Xalapa’s historic center, she scoured cookbooks from as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries—and found no recipes that required, for example, those thunder flowers, an ingredient used regularly by Veracruz’s 14 Indigenous communities. “I thought, well, of course, these books were written for people who could read...which is to say, EACH MAY, WHEN

for the rich,” she told me as we sat in her intimate ocher kitchen. “That’s when I became preoccupied with doing something different.” Torres had prepared a half-dozen recipes, all of them representative of the region. She had stuffed pear-green jalapeños, shiny as lacquer, with a pale-yellow mash of sweet plantains, then bathed them in a sauce of goat-milk cheese and cream. Young black beans stewed slowly in a narrow-necked clay pot with masa dumplings, sticky and supple as gnocchi. A pitcher of nectar made from wild capulín, an astringent stone fruit like a cross between açai and black currant, sat on the sideboard, lurid as a bruise and generously spiked with caña, a high-proof liquor distilled from sugarcane. For dessert Torres served a simple dish of zapote negro, the fruit slicked with honey and orange, its flesh black as molasses and unctuous as overripe avocado. For all their simplicity, these dishes defied my expectations of what Veracruzano cooking could be. When I arrived the day before my lunch with Torres, my knowledge was limited to a few emblematic dishes. I’d eaten chilpachole de jaiba, a piquant soup made with chiles and corn and crab, ingredients native to the Sotavento, a region in the state’s steaming south. I’d gorged on gorditas, corn-flour tortillas deep-fried in oil and puffed up like golden balloons. And, of course, I knew fish a

Anthropologist and cookbook author Raquel Torres Cerdán in her Xalapa kitchen. Right: Torres’s pork ribs with chipotle-garlic adobo, vegetables, and stewed black beans.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

la veracruzana, made with pickled chiles, tomatoes, olives, and capers—ingredients with their roots in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. But these dishes, though well known elsewhere in Mexico, tell an incomplete story of Veracruz’s geographic and cultural diversity. As we finished lunch, I asked Torres what, if anything, unified Veracruz’s culinary identity. She shook her head, smiling indulgently. “We can’t speak about a single identity in Veracruz. It’s local cultures, local cuisines, local identities,” she said. “What makes a cuisine unique is who’s cooking, not the things they cook.”

HAD ENDED UP at Torres’s house thanks to

Erik Guerrero Arias. The most prominent chef in the state, his latest restaurant, Namik, opened in early July in the city of Veracruz, known locally as El Puerto. We’d met some months earlier over coffee in Mexico City, where I’ve lived since 2016, to talk about the new project. Over the course of a long, meandering conversation, he extolled the state of Veracruz’s many virtues with an evangelical zeal. In me, he’d found an easy convert. From the time of the Olmecs until the Spanish landed on Mexican shores in 1518, the region had supported a succession of Indigenous civilizations that left behind an artistic and archaeological record of stunning sophistication, from the colossal stone heads of the Olmecs at San Lorenzo, in the southeast, to the monuments and smiling clay dolls left by the Totonacs at El Tajín, in the state’s north. It was here that the Spanish established their first permanent settlements in Mexico, along them El Puerto, for centuries the primary entry point for migrants arriving from the east, and still one of the country’s busiest ports. Guerrero, 38, grew up in Poza Rica, an oil town in northern Veracruz, a region rich with citrus trees and vanilla orchids. He spent his youth helping out at the family snack shop, collecting orders and distributing change while learning how to steam tamales and fry plantains. After a series of restaurant jobs in Mexico and France, he landed a career-making gig in 2011 as the executive chef of Pujol, in Mexico City, before opening his own place, the seafood-focused Dos, in El Puerto. Five years later, he started a sustainable fishing project, Nuestra Pesca (“Our Fish”), working with fishermen to improve the quality of their catch while educating cooks and consumers about the diversity of Gulf species. He met Torres shortly after, and they immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. Guerrero invariably refers to Torres as La Maestra: the teacher, the master. Torres, for her part, treats Guerrero with the affectionate condescension of an older sister. Her jibe about the flowers? That was for his benefit.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Guerrero has not had an easy time expanding the culinary lexicon of his customers. At Dos, he told me, he and his team struggled, at first, to sell fish that most people in El Puerto had grown up seeing as corriente, or common—a complaint shared by his friend and colleague Abraham Guillén Arévalo, chef and owner at the high-end restaurant Mardel, which is on the beach in El Puerto. Harder still, Guerrero says, was convincing clients on the coast that products brought down from the mountains—chayote root, like a smooth-skinned celeriac; lantern-shaped grosella, or gooseberries; long-fingered flowers of the chocho palm—formed a part of their state’s heritage. “People were used to pescado a la veracruzana, their seafood cocktail, their agua de jamaica,” he said. “We would serve this beautiful agua de grosella, and they would complain. We had people get up and leave all the time.” Inspired by Torres, Guerrero decided that, at Namik, he would build a menu to showcase ingredients and techniques that even people who grew up in Veracruz rarely have the opportunity to try. And so Guerrero and I, taking Namik’s menu as a loose guide, traveled through Veracruz’s verdant hills and riparian south, meeting and sometimes traveling with cooks and farmers, scientists and writers—all of them intent on disseminating a more complete understanding of their state’s culinary identity, creating change not through transformation but through excavation.

in Veracruz, I drove out into coffee country to meet Guerrero at Finca Sierra del Mar, an experimental farm owned by Emilio Vélez Quintero. Vélez grows coffee and corn, raises pigs and sheep, and works closely with neighboring farmers to improve the quality and yield of their harvests. At midmorning, the snowcapped dome of Citlatépetl, a dormant volcano, seemed to float over receding hills the color of jade as we sipped dense pulls of espresso redolent of green peppercorn and dried apricot, the coffee that Vélez serves in his shop in El Puerto. Guerrero, for his part, plans to buy not only coffee from Vélez but also fruits and vegetables and whatever else he manages to produce. “As a culture we’ve lost our capacity for symbiosis. I run a restaurant. This guy makes the coffee I serve, but if he wants to grow fruit, I’ll take what I can of that product, N MY FIRST MORNING

Scenes from Veracruz include, clockwise from top left, a vendor selling squash blossoms at the Mercado Unidad Veracruzana; the Catedral Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, in El Puerto; coffee tasting at Finca Sierra del Mar, an experimental farm; fried fish fins, salsa verde with avocado, and salsa de molcajete (made with roasted tomatoes, garlic, and peppers) at the restaurant Namik.

too,” Guerrero said. “Those are the relationships you lose when you start counting pesos.” The next day we drove on to the coast, where El Puerto announces its gregarious urbanity with storage tanks and cranes and an endless sprawl of shipping containers. For centuries this was among Mexico’s most cosmopolitan urban centers, the first port of call for immigrants arriving from Europe and the Middle East and for men and women brought from western Africa as enslaved workers. Rich monastic orders built convents and churches alongside customs houses run by wealthy merchants, who imported luxury goods from Europe and sent back shiploads of cacao and chiles. The morning after dinner at Mardel, where Guillén served us just-caught Gulf fish in three preparations—deep fried, a la veracruzana, and straight off the grill, all transcendent in their simplicity—I woke at dawn for a walk through El Puerto’s historic center. Blocks of coral, long the city’s primary construction material, blazed white, through crumbling layers of plaster damaged by northerly winds and relentless humidity. Austere colonial churches rubbed shoulders with florid 19th-century mansions and Modernist apartment buildings raised on sail-shaped pilotis, all in various states of romantic decay. Outside the historic 76

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

center, I stopped for breakfast at the Mercado Unidad Veracruzana, a Bauhaus behemoth built in 1942. I snagged a seat at a frenetic, 52-year-old stall named for its owner, the formidable Doña Bella, and ordered a gordita dulce made from masa spiked with piloncillo, or unrefined cane sugar, and served in a bath of mole negro. It exhaled a sigh of nixtamal-scented steam as I pulled it apart. Driving out of Veracruz the next morning, we stopped for impeccable cold brew from Antonino’s, arguably the best of the city’s handful of third-wave coffee shops, and continued down the coast past open fields and open ocean, grabbing lunch in the town of Alvarado at the 30-year-old Restaurante Tella. Set in a shabby concrete box, it overlooks the slate-blue Alvarado Lagoon. The brash, bawdy owner, Doña Tella, turned out dishes enriched by the seafood pulled in by the fishermen who live along the water’s edge. Her interpretations of the state’s coastal bounty were humbler than those I’d tried in El Puerto. First came fresh tortillas slicked with lard and refried beans and topped with baby shrimp and shredded crab. The house specialty, arroz a la tumbada, came next, a soupy rice studded with sea snails and flavored with tomato, garlic, and oregano, like a poor-man’s paella. The dish, she told me, has its origins on the old launches

From far left: A waterfall in the jungle of Los Tuxtlas; the shrimp-and-snail cocktail at ¡Ay! Apaa, in El Puerto.

where fishermen would toss whatever they could find in a pot for a quick, easy lunch. “A la tumbada is like a la chingada,” Tella laughed, using an expletive. “It’s something any fool can make.” From Alvarado, we followed the Papaloapan River inland to the village of Tlacotalpan, once an important port where ships would arrive from Europe loaded with almonds and Carrera marble and depart with pineapple, cotton, and sugar. Tlacotalpan fell into decline in the early 20th century, after the Tehuantepec Railroad rendered river transport obsolete. Preserved in the amber of sudden irrelevance, Tlacotalpan’s quiet lanes, unique in Veracruz, are lined by 18th-century mansions painted in vibrant rose and lilac, emerald and cobalt. Older residents open their doors to sell the village’s famous dulces de almendra, an almond sweet similar to marzipan—as much a testament to the town’s historic wealth as the French floor tiles in the charming, if dilapidated, Museo Salvador Ferrando, which is dedicated to the eponymous painter. That night, we settled in at the village’s oldest cantina, Blanca Nieves, for ice-cold beers and toritos, sweet

concoctions of milk, fruit, and hazardous quantities of caña. As the hours passed and seven-ounce Coronitas sweated away on our table, a pair of young musicians played Son (Continued on page 100) Jarocho, the warm, rhythmic folk

Visiting Veracruz Where to Stay

Hotel Emporio This 223-room high-rise in El Puerto has three swimming pools and guest rooms overlooking the harbor and the 16thcentury fortress of San Juan de Ulúa. emporio hotels.com; doubles from $51.

Laguna Encantada. fb.com/ restaurantyambigapan; doubles from $30.

Where to Eat

¡Ay! Apaa A tiny neighborhood seafood joint in Boca del Río with delicious coctéles and ceviches. 103 Calle Antonio M. Carlón; entrées $7–$10.

Los Amigos Comfortable cabins on a mangrove-fringed lagoon in Los Tuxtlas, just inland from the beach. losamigos.com. mx; cabins from $30.

Café Sierra del Mar The El Puerto outpost of Emilio Velez’s farm serves exceptional coffee and a good, simple breakfast. fb.com/fincasierradelmar.

Mesón de Alférez Xalapa A stay at this colonial house in Xalapa comes with a delicious breakfast. pradodel rio.com; doubles from $40.

Doña Bella This stall at the Mercado Unidad Veracruzana serves the finest gorditas in El Puerto. Calle Juan Soto at Nicolás Bravo.

Yambigapan Estancia Rural Owner Nidia Hernández Medel offers cooking classes and two rustic, nofrills cabins on her property in San Andrés Tuxtla, near

I LLUSTRAT IO N BY L ARA CO STAFREDA

Mardel Nab a seat on the terrace overlooking the Gulf of Mexico and order fresh, local whole fish and

ceviche. mardel.com.mx; entrées $11–$40.

Torres Cerdán. fb.com/ acuyotaller.

Namik Erik Guerrero’s new restaurant is reviving the culinary heritage of Veracruz. namik. mx; entrées $14–$20.

Monday Market in Coscomatepec A great place to witness Veracruz’s living culinary traditions—and to taste some exceptional barbacoa and tamales.

Restaurante Tella A no-frills space with views of the Alvarado Lagoon. Try the shrimp-and-crab tortillas and cool off with an icy beer. Km 1, Carretera Federal Alvarado Veracruz; entrées $4–$7. Ruda A restaurant and cultural center in the coffee town of Coatepec, just outside Xalapa. comedorcultural. com; entrées $5–$24.

What to Do

Acuyo Taller de Cocina To really dig into Veracruz’s rich cultural and culinary history, book a class in the Xalapa home of Raquel

Museo de Antropología Xalapa One of Mexico’s finest anthropology museums tells the story of Veracruz’s Indigenous civilizations through artifacts and sculpture. uv.mx. Museo Salvador Ferrando A quaint village museum named for a 19th-century painter from Tlacotalpan. Filled with antiquities, it’s worth a quick visit if only for its dusty, old-world atmosphere. fb.com/ salvador ferrando museo. — M.S.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

A n

When setting off on a food tour of West Virginia, it’s best to leave your preconceptions at home. From a farm supper to an innovative white-tablecloth meal, S HERI CA STL E samples the state’s specialties—and discovers their surprising multicultural roots. P H OTO GRAPH S BY R O S S MANT L E

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

The New River Gorge Bridge, in West Virginia’s Fayette County. Opposite: A feast of green-tomato hand pies, corn bread, skillet-fried rabbit with chowchow, and candy roaster squash at Lost Creek Farm, in Harrison County.

aromas rushing through my car window at the drive-through of the Donut Shop in Buckhannon, West Virginia, were a heady mash-up of late-night pizza and earlymorning bakery. I had planned to drive to a nearby scenic overlook to eat my pepperoni rolls, but I never made it out of the parking lot. Instead, I tore straight into the bag, pleased to see drips of red grease on the wrappers—a sure sign that the rolls were generously filled and wouldn’t be dry. The first bite was burn-my-whistle hot. I didn’t care, although after things cooled a bit, I was better able to appreciate how the salty, tangy, minced pepperoni nestled into the pillowy bread. The second one—called a pizza roll because it contains peppers and a ribbon of red sauce—was maybe even better. Pepperoni rolls are a favorite in West Virginia, so beloved that they were recently nominated as an official state food. At their most basic, they’re nothing more than pepperoni baked inside bread. But different bakers add their own touches, such as cheese and pickled peppers, creating regional loyalties that are deep and unwavering. The rolls were created almost a hundred years ago by the Country Club Bakery in Fairmont, and designed especially for coal miners, many of whom were Italian immigrants, who needed a filling, satisfying meal that could be carried underground in lunch buckets.

TH E

From top: A coal tipple at a disused mine in New River Gorge National Park & Preserve; the Red Needle, a tequila-based cocktail served at the Billy Motel & Bar.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

About two blocks from the Donut Shop is Fish Hawk Acres, a food market where you can select imported Italian pasta or pick up a pound of Ground Hog pork breakfast sausage, a family recipe whose name winks (and eye-rolls) at the assumption that hillbillies eat groundhogs and other lesser mammals. I hadn’t intended to buy pepperoni rolls, but then I saw a man stride in for one—not his first that day, he confided, and perhaps not his last. He tossed his necktie over his shoulder to keep it safe from crumbs before tucking in. I added a roll to my lunch order. It was the size of a fist, but the dough was as tender and buttery as brioche. The pepperoni was finely chopped (although other bakers use long sticks or thin slices) and included cheese and peppers, both sweet and hot. It was served at room temperature, miner-style. I munched on leftover pepperoni rolls for the next two days as I continued to hike and explore, and they never faltered or faded from deliciousness, a testament to ingenious Appalachian cooks who can make a moveable feast out of next to nothing. went to West Virginia in search of Appalachian I food, old and new. I’m a food writer and cook who grew up in a different part of the Appalachian Mountains—in North Carolina, a few miles from the Tennessee and Virginia borders, a place that hasn’t been

Appalachian Mercantile, the retail outlet of J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works.

Raking up salt at J.Q. Dickinson.

my address in ages but will always be home. I’d never spent any real time in West Virginia, the only state that sits completely within the mountains, so I arrived with both a newcomer’s curiosity and an old hand’s familiarity. I aimed to find the vernacular cooking of West Virginia, and I was confident that I’d know it when I tasted it with my native Appalachian tongue. Over the course of eight days I drove 1,148 miles, hiked a few dozen more, and crossed a river in a boat that skipped along the water like a stone. Yet I covered only a sliver of a stunningly beautiful state that feels remote, but is within a day’s drive of roughly 40 percent of the U.S. population. (It’s also home to our newest national park, the New River Gorge National Park & Preserve.) Most of the time I just followed my nose, guided by what the locals said they like to eat. These stories are the souvenir postcards I wrote about what tasted true to me. restaurant 1010 Bridge sits on a hillside that THE feels like charming downtown Charleston’s upper balcony. This state capital seemed bustling compared with the tiny towns I’d driven through on the way, but has just under 50,000 residents. The comfortable dining room was full in the middle of a workweek, a mix of people who were there for special occasions and those who were just there because it was Wednesday and they were hungry. Aaron and Marie Clark

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

manage the front of the house, while chef Paul Smith, who’s a celebrity in these parts, holds sway in the kitchen. Throughout my trip, I noticed two types of restaurant menus: those that want you to get a pinpoint-specific taste of that place, and those that want you to understand that their chefs can cook as well as chefs anywhere in the country. At 1010 Bridge, those strategies aren’t mutually exclusive. The first thing I devoured was a bowl of guacamole studded with finely chopped boiled egg, as found in Colombia and El Salvador, and topped with a spoonful of vibrant pickledramp pico de gallo. Chunky and piquant, it was everything I wanted, but not at all what I expected, and it recalibrated my idea of what guacamole can be. That’s the thing about eating in West Virginia, and about touring this gorgeous state in general. Too many people come with preconceived (read: not great) notions that make them find only what they expect. It’s wiser to let what we find reset our expectations. I was smitten with the risotto carbonara. The creamy rice was topped with a silky sous vide egg and a smattering of crisp lardons and fried shallots under a topknot of bright-green garden-pea compound butter, a tangle of pea tendrils, and a generous dusting of salt-cured egg yolks that looked like marigold pollen. The evening’s vegan entrée (and let me be clear, vegans can eat well in West Virginia) was a savory tarte Tatin. A crisp puff pastry nest held a medley of roasted vegetables drizzled with an agrodolce-style apple-cider glaze and bold, peppery olive oil so good I had to ask where it came from. Turns out Villa DiTrapano olive oil is made by a family who immigrated to Charleston a couple of generations back but kept their estate near the Mediterranean, in Italy’s Lepini Mountains. They now ship crates of their namesake oil home to sell. The Clarks describe 1010 Bridge’s ever-changing seasonal menu as “Appalachian cuisine with Lowcountry influence,” so there are fresh seafood choices, but a steak dinner never goes out of rotation. West Virginia is beef country, with Black Angus cattle dotting the hillsides. The well-seasoned and judiciously sauced steak is teres major, an underappreciated cut that butchers once kept for themselves. Chef Paul calls it the 1010 cut because it’s unfamiliar to many diners and, let’s be honest, teres major sounds more like a constellation spotted by the state’s Green Bank Telescope. The service at 1010 Bridge was as hospitable as the food, but that’s what I experienced everywhere, from a roadside stand operated off the back of a lowered tailgate to this whitetablecloth restaurant in a tony neighborhood. I didn’t meet a soul who wasn’t proud of what they served. long wooden troughs looked as though they were TH E filled with melting snow, which would make sense in West Virginia, but the rustling of the rakes through the sparkling crystals suggested otherwise. The humid air inside the evaporation room smelled like the ocean. To harvest sea salt in a landlocked state sounds like something from an ancient riddle, but that’s the story of J.Q. Dickinson 82

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Brie-filled beignets with jelly at 1010 Bridge restaurant, in Charleston.

Hawk Knob Cider & Mead, in Lewisburg.

A Buff Cochin rooster at Lost Creek Farm.

Salt-Works, located a short drive downriver from Charleston in Malden. When this section of the Appalachian Mountains rose up some 400 to 600 million years ago, it trapped beneath it the Iapetus Ocean, an untouched sea older than the Atlantic. Starting with the Native Americans, people have come to this spot in the Kanawha Valley to pump out brine and make pristine salt. These days the business is in the able hands of Nancy Payne Bruns and her brother Lewis Payne, seventh-generation salt producers who are telling new stories about old Appalachian ways. There was no ingredient I heard mentioned more often across West Virginia than this salt. Fans call it JQD, as though it were a dear friend. Around the corner from the saltworks is the company’s retail outpost, Appalachian Mercantile,

where it sells its products alongside other artisanal foods and handcrafted household goods from the region. Visitors can taste the various salts with ripe cherry tomatoes. (If they put out good bread and mayonnaise, folks would never leave.) People who think salt has no character beyond salinity have never tasted ones like these, which are complex and laced with natural minerals. JQD also makes flavored salts. The applewood- and bourbon-barrel-smoked salts come from smokehouse

PENNSYLVANIA

OHIO

MARYLAND Lost Creek Buckhannon

Washington, D.C.

Charleston

Lewisburg

IL LU STRAT ION BY L ARA C O STAF R EDA

VIRGINIA

Retro styling at the Billy Motel & Bar. Opposite: The property occupies a revamped mid-century motor lodge. Owners Amy Dawson and Mike Costello enjoy the fruits of their harvest at Lost Creek Farm.

techniques that date back to the earliest forms of Appalachian food preservation. For its mushroom-herb blend, the firm works with George Patterson, of Hernshaw Farms, who grows at least 20 types of exotic mushrooms. Nancy makes jars of salted caramel sauce that hits that sweet spot just on the edge of savory. The company even makes nigari, the brine used in tofu and fresh ricotta that’s rumored to take the edge off a hangover. first thing I noticed when I stepped inside TH E the Hawk Knob Cider & Mead tasting room, in Lewisburg, was the aroma—the earthy musk of ripe fruit and that sweet, sharp, yeasty funk of fermentation. Given my fascination with heirloom apples, those scents felt promising, like being dealt a good hand at the start of poker night. A tasting flight confirmed my 84

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

lucky streak. I now contend that the hard beverage that best conveys Appalachian terroir isn’t moonshine or craft beer, it’s cider. The cider makers at Hawk Knob seek out apple varieties that once flourished in West Virginia’s terrain and climate, and that they hope will flourish again. Hard cider reigned as the New World alcoholic beverage of choice until the early 1900s, and cider apples grew in abundance until orchard decimation during Prohibition wiped out all but a handful. One of the goals at Hawk Knob is to help save and restore what’s left, as an act of environmental and cultural stewardship. Hawk Knob ciders are barrel-fermented, cool and slow in the West Virginia climate, which gives them complexity and depth on par with aged wine and high-end whiskey. These ciders aren’t sweet, which is revelatory for those

who suspect all hard cider will taste like a kid’s juice box left in a hot car for a few days. I would be hard-pressed (pun intended) to pick my favorite, but the one I’ve told the most people about is the wild-fermented Traditional Hard Cider, which goes through spontaneous fermentation with wild yeast in oak bourbon barrels and ages on its lees for eight months. It’s rich, smooth, and tastes like a whispered memory of the most interesting apple of your life. Hawk Knob also makes a dry style of mead, or honey wine, known as cyser, which combines heirloom apple juice with local wildflower honey. It’s aged in French and American oak, which leaves it tasting rich and buttery. This straw-colored beverage with a heavenly nose is more engaging than most Chardonnays. I arrived liking hard cider and wary of mead. I left with a case of each in the back of my car. this is our Red Needle,” Josh Gambetta said AN D as he handed me a cocktail in exchange for one of the two clay poker chips I received when I checked in. The drink was the Billy Motel & Bar’s take on a tequila concoction created by songwriter Leonard Cohen in Needles, California, in the summer of ’75. I spent my second poker chip on a Blue Meanie tinted with house-made blueberry shrub instead of the usual blue curaçao. I found a seat on the gold velour settee next to the (Continued on page 101)

Get a Taste of West Virginia Where to Stay

Billy Motel & Bar A refurbished motor lodge with a fun cocktail bar near the town of Davis. thebillymotel.com; doubles from $100. Brass Pineapple This traditional B&B is a short walk from the state capitol in Charleston. brass pineapple.com; doubles from $169. Cabin on Coney Island Outdoor enthusiasts will love this rustic cottage on an island at the southern end of New River Gorge National Park. guest housewv.com; doubles from $332. Forks Inn A recently renovated motel on a mountain near Elkins that has highland views and an acclaimed restaurant. attheforks. com; doubles from $125. Lafayette Flats Boutique Vacation Rentals Four plush rooms in a repurposed bank, steps away from the restaurants and shops of Fayetteville. lafayetteflats.com; doubles from $189.

Where to Eat

Cathedral Café A friendly place in Fayetteville to grab breakfast or a sandwich. thecathedral cafe.com; entrées $5–$13. Donut Shop Exemplary pepperoni rolls (and, of course, doughnuts) in Buckhannon. fb.com/thedonut shopbuckhannon.

Fish Hawk Acres Chef Dale Hawkins’s well-stocked specialty food market in Buckhannon. fish hawkacreswv.com. Hawk Knob Cider & Mead Take the brewery tour at this tasting room on the outskirts of Lewisburg. hawkknob.com. Lost Creek Farm Mike Costello and Amy Dawson host regular Farm & Forage Supper Club gatherings on their Harrison County homestead. lost creekfarmwv.com; tasting menu $100. The Station Fill a picnic basket before heading into New River Gorge National Park & Preserve—or enjoy dinner at the end of the day. thestation wv.com; entrées $14–$30. 1010 Bridge A comfortable upscale Charleston restaurant serving a twist on Appalachian cuisine. 1010bridge. com; entrées $15–$39.

What to Do

J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works This family-owned operation outside of Charleston is a rare inland source of sea salt. jqdsalt.com. New River Gorge National Park & Preserve Stunning scenery, world-class outdoor activities, and the New River Gorge Bridge, the longest single-span steel bridge in the Western Hemisphere. nps.gov. — S.C.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

Croatia’s Istrian peninsula is rich with the bounties of earth and sea—and with remnants of the many cultures that have claimed it through the ages. ADAM ERACE savors this melting pot on the Adriatic. Photographs by JAKA BULC

Rovinj, a city on the western coast of Croatia’s Istrian peninsula.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

of the

EFORE WE GO FURTHER, you should know there are no yachts in

this Croatia story. No below-deck rabble-rousing or port-side parties of the kind you’ll find in Dubrovnik or Hvar, where the rich and fabulous descend each summer. This story is about Istria, located at the opposite end of the country, where the “champagne” most commonly popped is sparkling Malvazija Istarska, the versatile native white, and the seaworthy ride is a bivalve harvester roped to the dock of Tony’s Oyster Shack at the beachhead of Limski Fjord. The cruise director of this no-frills vessel and owner of the oyster shack is Emil Sošić, a blue-eyed, buzz-cut connoisseur of Malvazija, massages, and Tina Turner. Emil spends most days on this fjord, and his boat may be a harder invitation to come by than any yacht in the Dubrovnik marina: Emil must judge you to be an Oyster Person, or a Wine Person, ideally both. “Because I offer only oysters, wine,” he says. On the rare occasions he indulges a non–Oyster/Wine Person, he faces off-brand demands: “Why is there no water? Why is there no Coca-Cola?” He sighs. “An Oyster Person does not ask for this.” Emil’s family has lived on a hill overlooking the fjord for seven generations, and he’s been farming flat European oysters for 16 years. They are among the many gastronomic specialties of Istria, an under-the-(American-)radar culinary capital home to hundreds of olive-oil estates and wineries, a coastline brimming with immaculate seafood, and ancient

Pizzeria Rumore, in the mountaintop village of Labin.

A plaza in Rovinj’s old town.

foodways that are nurturing a new generation of makers raised amid the turmoil of the Yugoslav Wars. When something is excellent, Croatians say, “Top!” For those who travel to eat, Istria is top. Our boat glides down the six-mile fjord. The angle of the sunlight, the nearness to the sea, the mineral runoff from the forested hills that rise up on either side like furry green wings—they all cause the color of the water to shift, from cloudy jade to aquamarine to deepest denim. It’s like sailing across the surface of a mood ring. Halfway between the beach and the Adriatic, the farm materializes: more than a thousand oval buoys lined up like the lanes in a lap pool, each tethered to an oyster cage below the surface. Emil’s captain flings the anchor overboard, engages the winch to raise the cages, then heads aft for a cigarette. 88

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Tony’s Oyster Shack, on the bank of Limski Fjord.

A plate of bivalves, fresh from Limski Fjord.

“Ask anyone here, where are the oysters in Istria?” Emil says. “Limski Bay. And ask, who has the oysters in Limski Bay?” He points to himself with a neatly manicured finger. A few years ago, there were other farmers raising oysters and mussels, but, according to Emil, they all gave up. Bivalves take their sweet time in these legally protected waters. “Other farms mature oysters in two years. Ours take three and a half,” he says. “Nice and easy.” As if on cue, Tina Turner’s raspy intro to “Proud Mary” blares over the boat’s speakers. “You see we never ever do nothing / Nice, easy,” she growls. “We always do it nice and rough.” Over the course of a week in Istria, this is what constitutes rough: the calf-searing ascent to dinner at the Michelin-starred Monte, in the shadow of Rovinj’s hilltop St. Euphemia church; finding a roadside strawberry stand closed; truffle hunter Nicola Tarandek’s dog biting a precious fungus in half during a hunt in the Motovun woods. Which is to say, not very rough at all. The people are openhearted, the infrastructure impeccable, the lifestyle salubrious. Some destinations conceal their treasures, make you work for them. Istria puts them all out on a picnic table underneath a vine-laced arbor, then covers them in world-class olive oil. After more than a year away from Europe, it’s about as low-stress a reacquaintance as an American can get. And we’re rollin’. “Rollin’ on the river!” Emil sings as we slide up to the dock. While the captain pours himself Malvazija from a plastic water bottle, Emil shucks oysters and wild “sea truffles” (cockles—salty and preternaturally sweet) and arranges them on a tin platter. I slurp an oyster down. Its brininess shocks my face like a cold wave, then retreats to reveal rich creaminess—panna cotta del mare. I toss back a few more and wash them down with the Malvazija, young and jicama-crisp. I could stay here all day, eating oysters and

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

The Pula Arena is one of the largest surviving Roman amphitheaters.

Luciano Bar at San Canzian Village & Hotel, near Buje in northwestern Istria.

drinking white wine on a ramshackle dock, overlooking a glittering body of water, but Istria has more to show me, so I jump back in the car, and we’re rollin’.

a slice of pizza, and Pula, the peninsula’s largest city, is just northwest of the point. It’s an octopus of pedestrian alleys and leafy boulevards climbing out from the seaport. Wandering the city, I encounter Roman ruins, in various stages of preservation and decay, as common as ATMs. The most impressive, the Pula Arena, watches the waterfront from a hill. Nearby, the market heaves with strawberries and wild asparagus in the spring, stone fruit and melons in the summer, and Stancija Kumparička dairy’s fantastic goat-milk cheeses—vacuumsealed for travelers—all year long. Pula makes a convenient base for exploring the region, and its Pješčana Uvala neighborhood is the kind of quiet, residential seaside cloister you’d see on House Hunters

STRIA IS SHAPED LIKE

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

IL LU ST RAT ION BY L ARA C O STAF R EDA

International. Tykes tearing across the beachfront playground, teens playing pickup basketball, friends unfurled on sofas on café patios. There are plenty of well-kept boats in the marina, none of them yachts, and plenty of attractive homes, only a few of them Modernist villas overlooking the sea. Hotel Valsabbion is one such: four bleached-white stories with a shimmering lap pool and 11 spacious rooms that balance thoughtful details (Frette bedding, essential-oil diffusers) with bohemian spirit. Premantura, with a population of less than a thousand, sits between Pula and Istria’s actual southernmost point, the wildflower-carpeted cliffs of Cape Kamenjak. Luka Žuljević and his wife and business partner, Anja Bendeković Žuljević, moved to the village two years ago, when their distilling hobby—the start of what would eventually become micro-distillery Monachus Gin—began outgrowing their Zagreb apartment just as they were outgrowing their city-based full-time jobs. The proximity to the sea, and to the botanicals that now give Monachus its Istrian terroir, became irresistible. I follow Luka and Anja’s dusty ’89 Suzuki Samurai to Cape Kamenjak’s upper trailhead. Anja leads me up the stony path, pointing out unruly wild figs and pungent immortelle, its silvery leaves bowing under mops of yellow blossoms. “On hot days, the smell of the plants is more intense. It’s incredible,” she says. The cloudy weather has the flora feeling stingy, so the dominant smell is salt air, borne on the Adriatic bora wind. Back at the Žuljevićs’ home in Premantura, the botanical aromas reveal themselves when the gin starts flowing on the garden patio. They float up one by one—lemony coriander, bright mandarin, piney blue juniper, zesty immortelle, smoky vanilla from the fig leaves—then harmonize into a subtle,

Music on the garden terrace at San Canzian, which sits about 15 minutes from the Slovenian border.

ITALY

Trieste SLOVENIA

Venice

Motovun I s t r i a GULF OF VENICE

Rovinj

Pula

elegant bouquet. “Our still is small for the industry, perfect for us,” Luka says. “The flavor is always best in small batches.” This is a time of many firsts in the peninsula’s food-and-drink realm, and they’re happening in garages, home kitchens, barns, and spare bedrooms. After visiting Anja and Luka, I drive to the interior town of Svetvinčenat, where a chalkboard sign outside the two-year-old brewery Kampanjola Eko Bira reads, in Croatian, if no one is here, call this number. I call, and owner Darko Pekica ambles over from his house. For a place that doesn’t even keep regular hours, the hospitality is over-the-top generous. Darko sets out a tasting of Kampanjola’s malty porter and easygoing blonde and brown ales, the first to be certified organic in Croatia; a bottle of oil from the olives he grows; and a board decked with his sharp, nutty aged cheeses. (The secret: he reads Walt Whitman to the cows.) Bora Nera, Istria’s first specialty coffee roaster, also appears to be closed when I pull up to the address—not the café I expected, but owners Matteo Cardin and Erika Forlani Cardin’s terra-cotta-colored home in Vodnjan. “Oh, yes, we’re open. Just ring the doorbell; my husband will let you in,” Erika answers when I call. Which is how I wind up sipping funky Sumatran espresso on yet another scenic patio, at yet another villa, with a view of yet another envyinducing garden—this one full of Whoville cacti, hardy kiwis, scarlet poppies, and a pawpaw tree smuggled from the hinterlands of New Jersey. Matteo sells me a bag of his Rwandan Gakenke beans that smell like chocolatecovered raspberries, but he won’t let me pay for the espresso. As far as he knows, I’m not a writer, just a guy who showed up on his doorstep interested in coffee.

WHO’S WHO of problematic empires

ruled Istria until Croatia’s declaration of independence in 1991: Roman, Venetian, Napoleonic, AustroHungarian. After World War I, Italy and its Fascist regime forcibly Italianized the region, subjugating (and murdering) Croats and Slovenes, who fled to Yugoslavia. After World War II, Yugoslavia and its Communist regime forcibly de-Italianized the region, subjugating (and murdering) ethnic Italians, who fled to Italy, North America, and beyond. Still, Italy’s influence is as culturally and culinarily embedded as the olive trees that

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

The entrance to Konoba Kotlić, a bastion of hearty Istrian classics.

The Monachus Gin team prepares waterfront cocktails at Cape Kamenjak.

have been grown here since the first century. Prosciutto is as revered as it is in Parma, but here it’s gamier, muskier, deeper in color, and cut in chips thick and sturdy enough to build a house of cards. It’s the same with the region’s pristine seafood. Everything from mackerel to langoustines is accorded intense respect, and nowhere more than at Marina, in Novigrad. Chef Marina Gaši enchants me with her poetic crudos: scallops with roe aioli, elderflower-freckled amberjack with coffee and kumquat. And don’t tell my Italian friends, but the crazy-popular Pizzeria Rumore, purveyor of pistachio-and-mortadella pies and out-ofbody experiences in the medieval aerie of Labin, beats all the pizza I’ve eaten on the other side of the Adriatic. Farther inland along the hilly switchbacks, the menus at the homey family-run restaurants known as konobe (the Istrian version of Italian trattorias) reveal watermarks of the region’s Austro-Hungarian past. At Konoba Malo Selo, a cozy tavern that specializes in dishes featuring meat from indigenous, longhorned Boskarin cattle, hearty fare offsets the evening chill in the carport turned courtyard. They’re sold out of steaks, so my server suggests braised Boskarin “goulash” with gnocchi. For dessert, it’s gibanica, an apple-and-poppy-seed strudel popular across the Balkans, and synthy Whitney Houston covers set against the rustling of an ancient mulberry tree. Deeper into the woods, at Konoba Kotlić, ravenous hikers and mountain bikers swallow the “Istrian plate” of crackling

Beet risotto with buffalomilk blue cheese and white asparagus with trout roe and at Meneghetti Wine Hotel.

Eat Your Way Through Istria Where to Stay

Hotel Valsabbion The modern design of this Pula property doesn’t sacrifice comfort. valsabbion. hr; doubles from $117. Meneghetti Wine Hotel Stay in a dreamy villa amid olive groves and vineyards. meneghetti.hr; doubles from $415. San Canzian Village & Hotel A laid-back-luxe retreat with a pool and a culinary focus. san-canzian.hr; doubles from $291. Villa La Vita Bella This spot near Poreč is built for languid terrace meals. olive andspicecroatia. com; villa from $415.

pork sausage, tenderloin, and sharp sauerkraut, while the forest swallows this fairy-tale stone cottage, like a Croatian Angkor Wat. Mojmir Ibrahimovič, Kotlić’s longtime supplier of foraged mushrooms and homemade cheese, rescued the restaurant in 2017 when the previous owner wanted to close. “What do you think?” he asks, leaning in. His brows are so bushy they meet his lashes, forming a trellis over eyes as iceblue as the Mirna River below. I think the Istrian plate—along with the featherweight gnocchi and (Continued on page 102)

Where to Eat & Drink

Ipša This family-owned operation makes stellar Malvazija. ipsamaslinovaulja.com. Kabola Winery An organic winery producing some of

Croatia’s best bottles. kabola.hr. Konoba Kotlić Comfort food so good you’ll weep. fb.com/konoba. kotlic; entrées $11–$35. Konoba Malo Selo The place to go for Boskarin beef and cozy vibes. konoba maloselo.hr; entrées $8–$40. Marina A celebration of the bounty of the Adriatic. marina restaurant.eu; tasting menus from $73. Pizzeria Rumore Labin’s premier pie shop rivals any in Naples. fb.com/ pizzeriarumore; entrées $8–$14. Tony’s Oyster Shack Slurp down bivalves straight from Limski Fjord. istrida.com. Vina Fakin Motovun’s most lauded winery highlights native grapes. fakinwines.com.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

S ECRE T

Ask any American about the best thing to eat in Kansas City, Missouri, and you’ll likely be met with one word: barbecue. But beneath that lacquered surface, there’s a diverse community of culinary pros who’ve found the ingredients to create an even richer (and more delicious) food culture. O SAYI END O LYN digs in.

P HOTO G RAPH S BY

ANNA P E T R OW

Buckwheat dumplings topped with caviar at Corvino Supper Club & Tasting Room, in Kansas City, Missouri.

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Clockwise from top left: A guest room at Hotel Kansas City, in Downtown; glasses of Stone’s Throw, a sour ale from Double Shift Brewing, in the Crossroads neighborhood; Fannie’s African & Tropical Cuisine, a South Hyde Park favorite for traditional pan-African food; vanilla mochi doughnuts with black-sesame glaze and strawberry-milk crumb from the lobby café at Hotel Kansas City.

Upon my return to New York, it seemed like when folks asked, “How was it?” what they really wanted to know was, “Could you still do it? Can you travel just because?” Even as a once-intrepid traveler, on this April trip—my first in the COVID era—everything felt new. Exciting even. The weather was sunny and perfect, and everyone was kind, including an older woman who tried to give up her place in line at Gates Bar-B-Q because she thought I was on a lunch break from work. I’VE BEEN REFITTING MY LIFE to celebrate joy

STARTED EATING the moment I touched

down in Kansas City, Missouri, and I didn’t really stop until the morning I left, just under a week later. But this isn’t a story about excessive consumption. And it isn’t a lesson in what Maya Angelou once described, in an interview I watch over and over again, as “too much moderation.” (She advised against it, blessed being that she was.) In the year that rooted us all in place while somehow thrusting us all forward, I’d determined that the only spot free from the coiling grasp of my own anxiety was the present moment, and nothing else. Driven by this energy, I ate what I wanted to eat when I wanted to eat it. And it’s through saying this outright that I recognize the privilege of being able to truly indulge. 96

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Chefs Helen Jo and Johnny Leach, the husband-and-wife team behind Hotel Kansas City’s restaurant, the Town Company, and its lobby café.

Egusi soup, a Nigerian staple made with ground melon seeds and greens, at Fannie’s African & Tropical Cuisine.

more intentionally, and yet, in the wake of the past year, writing that I ate well and hit the road for no specific reason feels immensely bold. When my trip was pending, the response to Kansas City was inevitably, “Barbecue?” A forgivable presumption, given the legendary status the regional style (spice-rubbed, slow-smoked, often with a tangy-sweet sauce) has achieved since Tennessee native and barbecue king Henry Perry pioneered it at his restaurant in Downtown in the early 1900s. But these days, Kansas City seems to be a place that is rediscovering itself and fostering a food scene where people express themselves personally. I found folks who’d gone away and recently returned, new arrivals who’d decided to take a chance on the Midwest, and a general approach of Why not here? I tried to pin down why this energy felt so new. It wasn’t just the reopening of businesses as pandemic restrictions softened. It wasn’t just that entrepreneurs are finding inspiration in one another’s pursuits. No one could explicitly tell me what was behind this shift, but many agreed that something was afoot.

Bar Stilwell at Loews Kansas City Hotel, a popular spot for evening cocktails.

Kansas City comprises many narratives: a little Southern, a little industrial, a beneficiary of many migrant cultures. A moment is happening. Revel in it while it’s here, was the advice I took. I want to believe that kind of serendipitous connection with a new-to-you place is still worth writing about, even as I remain glassy-eyed from lockdown. AT THE TOWN COMPANY, the restaurant at

Hotel Kansas City led by chef Johnny Leach and pastry chef Helen Jo Leach, you can be mindfully decadent, which I think is a thing. Transplants from New York by way

of Portland, Oregon, the couple is the creative engine behind the hotel’s culinary offerings. A wood-burning hearth in the open kitchen fosters the kind of cozy vibe that says you really ought to enjoy yourself here if you can. Dinner featured a smoked egg doused with trout roe; a rich halibut fillet paired with oyster mushrooms; baby spinach salad tossed with sunflower shoots in a delicate, creamy greengarlic dressing; and strip loin topped with a medallion of lobster-infused compound butter. This is a dish to give in to. The same can be said for Helen Jo’s desserts. The savory touches in her sweets rounded out my late, meandering meal, especially the signature chocolate steamed bun, which is warm and puffy and garnished with chocolate ganache, roasted acorns, pine nuts, and crunchy cocoa nibs. The next morning, in the lobby café, I was introduced to her lemon-mochi doughnut with salted pistachios. We can reserve debate about whether ending one day with sugar and starting with it the next is “wise” for another time, but in the moment, I adored its bouncy bite. Had I planned better, I would have paired the treat with the Hella Good Latte from Café Cà Phê, a coffee truck whose owner, Jackie Nguyen, has a way of giving you what you want, even if you didn’t ask for it. She serves coffee beverages prepared with beans from Vietnam. At the time, the truck was housed in an industrial space where vendors sometimes sell goods to raise funds for Asian American–led organizations. I ordered an eye-catching, bright-purple blend of ube, espresso, oat milk, and condensed milk that is, as it turns out, something of a conversation starter. Seeing a queue of people with no apparent connection to Vietnamese culture patiently wait for these drinks told me something else about Kansas City and places like it in the U.S., and echoed an oft-reposted sentiment Toni Morrison shared in a 1998 interview: the center, or the “mainstream,” is wherever the creator

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

From left: Jackie Nguyen sitting by her coffee truck, Café Cà Phê; Nguyen’s Hella Good Latte, which combines espresso, oat milk, ube, and condensed milk.

Sampling the Scene Where to Stay

Hotel Kansas City The historic Kansas City Club building has been transformed into an elegant 144-room hotel with a bustling lobby café and a destination restaurant, the Town Company. hotelkc. com; doubles from $188.

plates in an intimate space with live music (the supper club) or as a 10-course set menu against the backdrop of an open kitchen (the tasting room). corvino. com; tasting menu $125. Double Shift Brewing Co. A local firefighter founded this craft brewery and taproom in the buzzy Crossroads Arts District. doubleshiftbrewing.com.

Loews Kansas City Hotel This sleek 800-room newcomer is already popular with Downtown locals, thanks to its cocktail lounge, Bar Stilwell. loewshotels.com; doubles from $202.

Fannie’s African & Tropical Cuisine Deeply flavorful renditions of traditional West African dishes at this restaurant include egusi soup and jollof rice. fanniescuisine.com; entrées $12–$23.

Where to Eat & Drink

Yoli Tortilleria Handmade tortillas are made from non-GMO, stone-ground corn and Sonoran flour. eatyoli.com.

Café Cà Phê Jackie Nguyen’s coffee truck has earned a following for its vibrant drinks and responsibly sourced Vietnamese beans. cafe caphe.com. Corvino Supper Club & Tasting Room Modern American dishes are served as either shared

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

What to Do

American Jazz Museum Artifacts and interactive exhibits honor the genre’s legends and their cultural impact. americanjazz museum.org.

is. Increasingly, that varied representation is what more of us want to experience. We are beginning to understand how absurd it is that coffee grown and harvested in Rwanda or, yes, Vietnam would ever be repackaged as simply French or Italian roast. The truth is as much in the story we tell about it as the taste. I stopped at Fannie’s African & Tropical Cuisine for a lunch of egusi soup, a traditional dish made with bitter melon seeds and accompanied by pounded yam. Owner Fannie Gibson, a Liberia native, presents a menu reflecting a wide range of West African dishes. I’m getting used to being able to visit restaurants and enjoy the staples my Nigerian father prepared from his Edo culture when I was growing up in California, items that were considered “at-home” or “special-event” food to be shared with friends. At Fannie’s, the diversity of both clientele and staff suggested to me a welcome widening in the appeal of African-diaspora food.

From left: The green salad at the Town Company; strolling through Kansas City’s East Crossroads neighborhood.

Mark and Marissa Gencarelli inside their Yoli Tortilleria.

MAYBE THE MAN who took my entry ticket

at the American Jazz Museum asked me where I was visiting from, or some other innocuous query not intended to dissolve into aimless discussion. However it began, we had a moment. The man was fatherly; he may have shared that he was nearly 60. In our culture as Black Americans, he was an instant uncle to me, a 38-year-old woman of African American and West African heritage. We shared an unspoken but tangible energy of youth-to-elder respect and a presumption of intergenerational communal interest. He was the kind of uncle who toed a line between mature guidance and the mischievous, free-spirited candor of older Black men I’ve come to know. He told me he had moved to Kansas City in the late 1980s from small-town Arkansas. “This city has been good to me,” he said. “Anything I ever wanted, I got it right here.” He took his first job at Oscar’s Barbecue, but within a few years (Continued on page 103) became the owner of

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

(Veracruz, continued from page 77)

music that originated centuries ago in Veracruz’s cattle farms.

the highway bends past cattle farms and sugarcane fields before rising steeply into hills jutting straight out of the sea. Crystalline natural pools are surrounded by tropical greenery. Outside the town of San Andrés Tuxtla, we found a rural homestay, Yambigapan, perched on the edge of the Laguna Encantada, or Enchanted Lagoon, a limpid pool in an ancient volcanic crater. Nidia Hernández Medel started Yambigapan with her brother Bruno on two acres of land that their parents bought in the early 1990s as a place to retire. As with most people in this part of Veracruz, known as Los Tuxtlas, Hernández’s heritage is a blend of cultures and identities. It’s a reflection of the region’s Indigenous peoples and the population of African descent that, by the 18th century, constituted as much as a quarter of the people living in southern Veracruz. Today, Los Tuxtlas is a center of Mexico’s Afro-Mexican culture, present in its mix of religious practices (best seen at the Iglesia de la Virgen del Carmen, in Catemaco), in the traditional medicine (often misidentified as brujería, or witchcraft), and, of course, in its food. Like Guerrero, Hernández considers Torres a mentor and, like La Maestra, uses her kitchen to give lessons. But even more than the mountain food I’d tasted days earlier in Xalapa, the recipes at Yambigapan

100

FTER TLACOTALPAN,

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

shocked me. Curls of tripe, boiled then quickly smoked on the grill over fragrant guava leaves, were electric with raw garlic, cilantro, and lime, like something from the hill tracts of Southeast Asia. Mogomogo—mashed taro and plantains fortified with lashings of pork lard—tasted more like a Caribbean dish than one you’d find in Mexico. In one way or another, Hernández told me, all of these dishes speak to the history of her homeland. Spanish traders brought in cumin and cloves from Asia. Formerly enslaved people from West Africa, who established free colonies in southern Veracruz as early as 1618, and later, immigrants from the Caribbean, used locally grown viandas, or tubers, like taro and sweet potato, to approximate the yams of their ancestral homeland. The mixing of lard and sugar into masa emerged from those same Black foodways. Even the arroz a la tumbada that we’d eaten with Doña Tella, she told me, was an interpretation not of a Spanish paella, but of Creole jambalaya, a dish likely brought to Alvarado on the ships that once connected the town directly to New Orleans. For Hernández, sharing these recipes is an essential act of cultural preservation for a community whose history is too often erased from Mexico’s official narrative. “When you give someone a recipe, you’re giving away a part of yourself,” she told me over breakfast. Toucans winged between avocado trees as I sipped thick taro atole, soothing as oatmeal, made by mixing an ingredient that originated in the Asia-Pacific region with an Indigenous dish of Mexico’s corn-rich central valleys. “You can’t make sense of a recipe unless you know its story.”

O I drove back into the central hills to visit the Monday market in N MY FINAL DAY in Veracruz,

Coscomatepec, a town set in the folded skirts of Citlaltepetl. Guerrero ﬁrst visited this area around the time he met Torres, and “it really

changed the way I see things,” he said, explaining that the trip expanded his vocabulary of ingredients in much the same way that he hopes Namik can expand that of his clients in El Puerto, a distance of just 87 miles by road, but many worlds away. We spent the morning snaking our way between vendors from more than 50 nearby villages. Old women in gingham aprons sold wild blackberries, sour as citrus; bundles of wild greens in shades of sage, silver, and violet; and white palm flowers called tepojolotes, which they fried and served on tortillas with a pinch of salt. Guerrero joked around with vendors, as comfortable as if this were the market of the town he’d grown up in. He pointed out ingredients he planned to use at Namik: Purple leaves of yerba mora for a fish-head broth. Calabaza melocotón, an indigenous squash that tastes more like melon than most melons, for a delicate pudding sprinkled with cacao nibs. He told me he plans to experiment with mixing taro and yuca flours into his tortillas and hopes one day to master those tepojolotes, too. “They always come out bitter,” he said. “But I haven’t given up.” None of these dishes are exactly traditional, but tradition, especially in Veracruz, is never a constant. Once Namik opens, Guerrero told me, he’ll make it mandatory for anyone who wants to work in his kitchen to spend at least a full day out fishing and another working on Vélez’s coffee farm. Members of the team will tour the state constantly, covering all 212 of its municipalities every two years. He’ll keep growing his circle, not making anything new, he insists, not innovating, but revealing the intrinsic beauty of the home he loves. “There’s still so much for us to learn,” he told me that morning. “The truth is, I don’t really know Veracruz at all.” Michael Snyder (@mtpsnyder) is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City who specializes in food, architecture, travel, and culture.

(West Virginia, continued from page 85)

shiny red ski-chalet ﬁreplace and found myself wishing my muddy hiking shoes were white go-go boots. The Billy is a sunny yellow 10-room motor lodge located between two tiny Tucker County towns, outdoorsy Davis and artsy Thomas, and across from Blackwater Falls State Park. After sunset, the lights that run along the eaves make the place glow like the valley’s nightlight. Owner and bon vivant Joy Malinowski, who has a strong personal aesthetic and a background in art, restored the property about seven years ago. Inspired by the look of her childhood home, the place feels sincerely mid-century instead of staged. Malinowski is also the house raconteur. Her cousin is fashion photographer Stan Malinowski, who shot for magazines ranging from Vogue to Playboy. The lobby serves as a living room where overnight guests can mingle with locals and passersby who have come for drinks and a bite. The Billy’s restaurant, Ish Kitchen, serves its own take on tapas. My snack ﬂight began with a Turkish kofta meze, followed by Brazilian cheese puffs with creamy cilantro sauce and capped off with Spanish papas bravas. Dipping, smearing, and sopping are delightful

ways to eat, and the cooks know their sauces. Dining from vintage enameled snack trays made it all the more fun. Back in the early 1900s, during their boomtown years as timbering and mining hubs, Davis and Thomas drew immigrant workers, artisans, and craftspeople from all over the world. While tooling around Thomas earlier that day, I read historical markers that described the era when 15 languages could be heard in the streets. The Billy’s menu is a salute to those peoples and their contributions to this region. Appalachian foodways have always been as multicultural as the people who lived there. The Billy’s fare might not be conventional, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not authentic. baffled GPS had stopped MY talking to me 10 miles back, so I kept my eyes peeled for a big green mailbox and, when I found it, turned onto the rutted dirt road that leads to Lost Creek Farm, the mountaintop home of Mike Costello and Amy Dawson in the small town of Lost Creek. People jump at the chance to attend Lost Creek’s Farm & Forage Supper Club. (Anthony Bourdain filmed one for an episode of his TV series Parts Unknown.) The dinners, held monthly in warmer weather, are not so much farm-to-table as tables on the farm. Guests, usually a couple dozen or so, sit in the shaded clearing in front of Costello and Dawson’s 1880s farmhouse, on land that’s been in her family for at least six generations. Costello and Dawson take their culinary inspiration from ingredients they raise or find, with menus coming together at the last minute despite some of the dishes’ being

Content in this issue was produced with assistance from The Billy Motel & Bar; The Brass Pineapple; Charleston Area CVB; Croatia National Tourist Board; Emerald Maldives Resort & Spa; Explore Summers County CVB; The Forks Inn; The Guest House; Hotel Kansas City; Lafayette Flats Boutique Vacation Rentals; Loews Kansas City Hotel; Netflix; Ojai Valley Inn; Mandarin Oriental Ritz, Madrid; Tourism Australia; Tucker County CVB; West Virginia Tourism Office; and The Yeatman.

months in the making. The art of Appalachian food preservation is not only traditional, it’s practical, creating an everlasting harvest in a place with a short growing season and formidable winters. Dinner was served family-style. We feasted on juicy, sun-warmed red and yellow heirloom tomatoes sprinkled with JQD salt. We ate ruddy orange rings of candy roaster squash brushed with sorghum and sprinkled with fresh sage leaves. The slightly spicy skillet-fried rabbit was drizzled with shagbark hickory syrup Costello and Dawson had made from their own trees. The pair also make maple syrup, which they stir into the butter they serve with their skillet corn bread. Dawson bakes it using the Bloody Butcher corn, named for its brilliant red color, that the couple grows and grinds. As we ate, Costello and Dawson shared stories that helped us understand how the mountain landscape, friends and neighbors, heritage seeds, cultural history, and years of work conspired to make this multifaceted meal possible. On each table sat jars of homemade preserves, pickles, and jewel-toned chowchow, the sweet and tangy relish made from what some people call garden orphans, a ragtag assortment of cabbage, peppers, and unripe tomatoes gathered before the year’s first hard freeze. Those of us raised on this type of mountain fare intuitively used the spicy, vinegary, peppery, sweet, and acidic condiments to finesse each forkful, doctoring our plates to our liking in endless combinations of texture and flavor. Newbies and flatlanders caught on quickly. As bowls and plates emptied, we got up to stretch our legs and amble about the farmyard. The ridgeline and the setting sun began their late-afternoon matinee. The air was crisp and a breeze made the leaves on the trees shimmy. Conversations hummed. People continued their reveries. We were sitting on top of the world.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

101

(Istria, continued from page 93)

beef, fuži pasta under a canopy of shaved black trufﬂe, and almonddusted crêpes rolled up around hot fudge and plum preserves— constitutes the best meal I’ve eaten in Istria, and maybe one of the best I’ve eaten, period. TRAVEL CONCIERGE and Airbnb

host Marko Radović was four when things got bad in Slovonski Brod in 1992, a year after Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia. His parents owned a bar in that deep-inland city, far away from Istria, both physically and culturally. “I remember hearing the airplanes roaring above. There were days we weren’t allowed to go outside,” he says over lunch at the watermeloncolored Casa Rossa, a konoba and inn with an unbeatable view of the hilltop village of Motovun. “My parents did not want to leave Croatia. Istria was farthest away from the conﬂict, but no one in my family had ever been there, and we spoke a completely different dialect.” Eventually they saved up enough to open their own place, Bistro Niki’s, in Poreč, a summer town on the Istrian coast between Rovinj and Novigrad. Marko has worked there on and off all his life. It’s where he met his wife, Chelsea, while she was on vacation from Pittsburgh, and with whom he started the travel concierge company Olive & Spice. They have just put the ﬁnishing touches on Villa La Vita Bella, a three-bedroom rental near Poreč with a black-and-white Moroccan-tiled pool and central 102

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

air—“Croatian contractors think I’m crazy,” Chelsea says. Marko still pitches in at the restaurant, where his sister, Irena, is now the chef. He and Chelsea live upstairs. I meet Markos all over Istria— literally guys named Marko, but more broadly, millennials born in the limbo between the declaration and realization of independence, now stepping into the family business (or starting their own) instead of bouncing for Zagreb or London or New York. “All my life I have been in the vineyard,” another Marko, Marko Fakin, explains in the cozy tasting room of his winery, Vina Fakin, outside Motovun, where his family has lived off the land since the 17th century. “My family were farmers. My father made wine, but mostly grew grapes for other winemakers.” Marko wanted to grow grapes for himself. So in 2010, he produced 2,000 bottles from his father’s 10 acres. Today, he farms 91 acres and produces 130,000 bottles of Malvazija and Teran, the Istrian red whose feisty tannins and wild acidity require a winemaker with discipline and ﬁnesse, along with some Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet, Syrah, and Muscat. Fakin has a great catchphrase: “Fakin good wines.” And they are. WINE MAKING in Croatia is both

ancient and new. The Greeks introduced grapes in the sixth century B.C., and Malvazija thrived in Istria’s white-limestone-rich soil, up in the mountains. Malvazija is the Swiss Army knife of whites. It can sparkle. It can be as zippy as a Sauvignon Blanc or as voluptuous as Viognier. It can age, in oak or acacia barrels or conical clay vessels called amphorae, or go orange, as it does at Ipša, whose 2017 Malvazija is my favorite—an amber daydream of jasmine, apricot, and Honey Nut Cheerios. Had Yugoslavia not fallen, and with it the state-controlled wine cooperatives, there would be no Ipša (home to another father-son duo, Klaudio and Ivan Ipša) or Vina

Fakin as they exist today. Following independence, winemakers shifted focus from quantity to quality, and Croatia started to gain traction as an internationally significant wine region. Road-tripping through Istria’s lush interior and its grape-pampering microclimates of hot days and sea-breeze-cooled nights, I see that the ingredients for excellence have always been there, just waiting for the right moment. Every few miles, another winery beckons. Thirty minutes from Fakin and an olive’s toss from the Slovenian border, an unhurried construction project takes me on a detour to Kabola Winery, Croatia’s pioneer of amphora-aged, skin-contact wine in Momjan. After working for a large hotel chain, Ana Markežić moved back to Kabola to help her parents run the place while studying for her Italian sommelier certificate. She fills my glass with lovely iterations of Muškat Momjanski, from screamingfor-oysters-dry to honey-drenched. By Croatian law, only wineries in Momjan can use the Muškat Momjanski label, and now Ana is part of the effort to land a DOC-type protection from the European Union. Working to safeguard this fickle little grape, and by proxy her hometown and her heritage, was, for Markežić, a foregone conclusion. “I studied in Italy and traveled all over the world, but coming back to work in the family winery has become a natural part of the growing process,” she says. Marko Radović wasn’t so sure. He and Chelsea started his U.S. greencard process two years ago, imagining they’d eventually relocate. But after spending last winter in the wet gloom of Pittsburgh he had a change of heart. “I miss the sushi and the tacos, but you can’t beat this,” he says, gesturing to the truffles on his plate and the postcard view of Motovun. I think about Emil’s oysters, Luka and Anja’s gin, the dozens of other age-old and modern expressions of Istria I’ve consumed this week. No disrespect to Pittsburgh, but he has a point.

(Kansas City, continued from page 99)

a gas station where, one afternoon, in walked a woman who weeks later would become his wife. They had a beautiful life together—married for more than 30 years with several children—before she passed away a few years ago. He told me, “People think marriage is law-abiding and strict. To stay married you have to give and take a lot. A lot of it I took.” We laughed when I told him I knew something about that. I wanted to ﬁnd out what kind of things he got into as a young man in a city that at the time was pretty lit, as the kids say. He rattled off nightclubs that he used to frequent, many in the same area as the jazz museum. “We had 6902, Brook Street Lounge, Hanger Boy—you wouldn’t like that place. It was off the chain.” “How you know I wouldn’t like it?” “Oh, you could see anything you wanted down at Hanger Boy.” “What all were they doing down there?” “Girl, everything.” We cackled—him in recollection, me in amusement. I’m not sure I realized I could miss a place I had never been. I grew up in a household where Black American music in all its forms— gospel, R&B, rock, funk, hip-hop—was in constant rotation, and these genres

continue to shape my life. The diverse African American experiences that gave us jazz and blues were, in part, a result of the live music born in the thriving business and entertainment district—the heart of Black Kansas City in the early-to-mid 20th century. Legends like Count Basie and Mary Lou Williams were among the many talents who held court between 12th and 18th Streets in nightclubs where musicians from across the South came to cut their teeth. The American Jazz Museum tells these stories in part through artifacts and artwork, but its biggest achievement is in conveying how this style of music happens sonically. Listening stations allow visitors to toggle between versions of classic recordings and watch clips about elements of composition, such as rhythm and melody. IT FELT MEANINGFUL to reﬂect on

the history of the city’s music scene at a moment when so many in the food world are building on Kansas City’s culinary lore. Anyone who has cosigned the admonition “focus on the food” in response to stories that bridge politics, immigration, labor and wages, gender, or race in dining culture is woefully ignorant of one key factor: food is a result of where people go and what those people’s experiences have been, collectively and individually. As people travel and migrate, they bring their culinary heritage with them. Whether the impetus be war, work, or climate change, the small businesses that comprise the best of the American food tapestry can only exist when opportunity feels accessible. That such a range of offerings is readily available in Kansas City suggests a terrain that has never been monolithic. It’s more that the story we tell is changing.

You can still come for the barbecue—and you should. But unexpected delights emerge from all sides. Mexican migration has long been integral to Kansas City culture; over the years temporary workers have been recruited for the meatpacking and railroad industries. Still, I did not know how satisfying it would be to buy a pack of the porkfat Sonoran ﬂour tortillas from Yoli Tortilleria, along with a jar of its salsa macha morita (a blend of morita chiles and peanuts), and dip the disks into the rich, chunky paste while sitting in my bed at the new Loews Kansas City. I suspect my two-ingredient dinner—washed down with a Tessellation craft IPA I’d picked up at Double Shift Brewing—was not quite the scenario Yoli co-owners Marissa (a Sonora native) and Mark (born and raised in K.C.) Gencarelli intended. And yet, it felt appropriate. Indulging, but moderately. On the opposite end of the spectrum was a 10-course dinner at Corvino Supper Club & Tasting Room, where chef Michael Corvino reminded me how a precise, choreographed meal can still feel whimsical and easy. Uni with split peas, lemon, miso, and mint. Buckwheat dumplings with osetra caviar. I said countless thankyous. I drank a lot of sherry. Every American city struggles to retain, or even acknowledge, the truest narratives of the past. In Kansas City, I could see how people from every corner of the dining scene are building a future that speaks to the moment without forgetting their history. I’m grateful to have encountered a place where residents new and old are looking for what they can give back, so that communities and visitors can get what they need. And what they didn’t know they wanted.

Travel + Leisure (ISSN 0041-2007) September 2021, Vol. 51, No. 9, is published monthly by TI Inc. Affluent Media Group, a subsidiary of Meredith Corporation, Principal Office: 225 Liberty St., New York, NY 10281-1008. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 507.1.5.2.) Non-Postal and Military Facilities: Send address corrections to Travel + Leisure, PO Box 37508, Boone, IA 50037-0508. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement #40069223. BN #129480364RT. Copyright ©2021 TI Inc. Affluent Media Group, a subsidiary of Meredith Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Customer Service and Subscriptions For 24/7 service, please use our website: www.travelandleisure.com/myaccount. You can also call 800-888-8728 or write to Travel + Leisure, PO Box 37508, Boone, IA 50037-0508. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. Your bank may provide updates to the card information we have on file. You may opt out of this service at any time. Member of the Alliance for Audited Media. Mailing List We may make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you prefer we not include your name, please call or write us at the customer service information above. The magazine assumes no responsibility for the safekeeping or return of unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, artwork, or other material. To order back issues, call 800-270-3053. To order article reprints of 500 or more, call 212-221-9595.

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M

103

YOUR BE ST SH OT I ran away from Miami to spend a long weekend at a beloved tree house in Puerto Rico, where my family and I have been going for the past 20 years. It’s in Toro Negro State Forest, which we always call ‘the real rain forest’ because it’s in the center of the island, out in the middle of nowhere. That’s the reason I went—there’s no better place to escape everything. This photo shows how isolated and beautiful it was. Being surrounded by the sights and sounds of the jungle just felt incredibly peaceful.”

“AS S O ON AS I WAS ABL E TO GE T T HE C OVID-19 VAC CINE ,

— R E AD ER B R E T T F E I N STE I N O N HI S P HOTO G RAP H, SH OT W I TH A SAMS UNG G AL AXY S9, F EB RUARY 202 1

104

T R AV E L + L E I S U R E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

Brett Feinstein was an entrant in our ongoing Photo of the Day contest. Submit your best pictures at travelandleisure. com/photos/photoof-the-day for the chance to be featured on this page in a future issue.

All Wheels Up flights are operated by our DOT/FAA-authorized air carrier subsidiaries (Wheels Up Private Jets LLC, Gama Aviation LLC, Mountain Aviation LLC, Sterling Aviation LLC, and TWC Aviation LLC) or by an approved vendor air carrier that has undergone our safety assessment.