Paper Palate

Anthony Bourdain and the crew for his Travel Channel series No Reservations were evacuated from Beirut on a ship bound for Cyprus two days ago. Word that the top-selling chef-author was caught up in the devastating bombing crisis in Lebanon (where he was filming an episode about the country’s culinary and cultural resurgence) spread […]

Auckland is home to great wine (try Villa Maria), great restaurants (go to Dine by Peter Gordon), and great foodies. The city of only 400,000 even has a bookstore dedicated entirely to cookbooks. I walked into Cook the Books about a week ago, eager to peruse the shelves. New Zealand was the […]

The Frenchman living in Vietnam is a difficult concept for tourists to grapple with. The confused conclusions of western tourists are likewise hard to make sense of. Those who think the Frenchman is an outrageous example of imperialism whose very presence pollutes Vietnamese culture might as well pack their bags, go home, and […]

I’m an itinerant traveler, a lover of literature, and a native New Yorker who’s currently based in Australia. I’ve also been a movie reviewer, a reproductive health researcher, and an independent bookstore owner.
I grew into an everyday cook a couple of years ago when I lived in the historic Central American town of Antigua, […]

Tim Ecott’s culinary history Vanilla (subtitled Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid in the U.S. and Travels in Search of the Luscious Substance in he U.K.) first lured me in as an edible version of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (the work of horticultural journalism that spawned the cult film Adaptation). However, […]