When I was little my great aunt Edna used to send us a tin of cookies every Christmas. They weren’t really kid cookies – no icing, no chocolate chips, no sprinkles, no real fun. I always thought of them as adult cookies. Not too sweet, made from a grainy semolina, covered with a fluff of…

I have mixed feelings about eating Indian food in a hotel whose 560 rooms go for upward of $1000/night in a city where people are putting their children to bed on the streets. The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel is a lovely place, to be sure, and it has an amazing history, including being rebuilt to…

Seabourn made a deal with Thomas Keller that has resulted, among other things, in The Grill by Thomas Keller — essentially a Kelleresque version of a floating steak house. There are other Keller touches around the ship but this is the biggest deal and we had Christmas dinner there last night.  Because Keller really does…

Omani cuisine is new to me. I don’t understand it very well and I had one shot at discovery, but it seems much more like an Indian/Persian/Afghan hybrid than the more familiar food of the Levant we have been eating.  Spent the morning sightseeing — the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque is spectacular.  Explored a souk…

  I grew up eating, then cooking, Lebanese food made from my grandmother’s recipes. I have never been to Lebanon, probably will never go to Lebanon now, and still, if you ask me what my heritage is, I will tell you I am Lebanese. If you are what you eat, that’s what I am. That…

  If you want to learn who other people are, eat what they eat. The intimate act of feeding oneself is so integral to one’s being that once you have shared it you can never completely see people as “the other” again. I can’t, anyway. Eating is my window on the world. That’s why one…

  Indian Accent. New Delhi. If you are planning to be in the neighborhood book it. Weeks in advance. And go.  If you can’t manage the trip to India, try the one in New York, or hope for another pop up in Tel Aviv. But go.  It’s a miniature jewel box of a place, in…

I love Indian food, but as a person who never set foot in India until two days ago, I always wondered if I knew what I was talking about. The answer is “sort of.”  The food here is recognizable as the Indian food I’ve eaten in the US or the UK but it isn’t a…

Since I began this post we left Paris, stopped in Dubai overnight en route to India, and now my nose is burning with the acrid smoke-filled air of New Delhi. In between I had the obscenely luxurious treat of getting here via a first class suite in an Emirates 777, but that is a post…

Yes, this is a fallafel selfie. No selfie sticks were involved. I’m that good (and that vain.) Had lunch with Jerry, Tom and Gale at L’As du Fallafel (34 rue des Rosiers in the Marais.) Seriously, it’s the best. We’ve been going for years and it just gets better. Fortunately, it has also gotten bigger….

Maybe not, “home” home, but you can go back to that place where you are supremely comfortable, that reaches out to you with a welcoming hug,  that feeds you like you are starving and always fills your heart with warmth and joy.  For me that place is Paris.  And within Paris, the Hotel Relais St….

Transferring over to WordPress and hoping for a seamless transition.  Eventually I’ll figure out how to migrate my old archives over (I hope) but in the meantime, a fresh start. So in keeping with that theme, here’s what I had for breakfast — greek yogurt and fresh pineapple.  No better way to say hello to…