Seattle by Sea: AQUA by El Gaucho
Most residents of Seattle are in no hurry to see another volcanic eruption, that is, unless it’s the Emerald City Volcano, a flamboyant flaming dessert that is served tableside after sunset at AQUA by El Gaucho. Back in the Fifties, Seattle’s…
A Culinary Journey Across the Fairmont Pacific Rim
If you wander into the Lobby Lounge of Vancouver’s Fairmont Pacific Rim on any evening, it’s quite likely that you’ll feel as if you’ve entered into a high-spirited atmosphere of Gatsbyesque proportions, with sylphlike women and…
Vancouver’s ‘Castle in the City’
It’s known as the “Castle in the City” for good reason. With gargoyles perched on parapets below its green patina copper mansard roof, the Hotel Vancouver was built in the style of Scottish and French chateaux in keeping with the grand…
Perfumer Gérald Ghislain Says ‘Make Perfume Not War’
The luckiest of children are those who are freshly-bathed nightly and tucked into bed by a grandparent, preferably one who smells like lilacs and tells bedtime stories of good children and bad children and children who are rewarded with sweet oranges and…
Beer and Brats at Seattle’s Von Trapp’s
The coat of arms above the door to Von Trapp’s Restaurant features two rearing horned stags along with the motto Brats Biergarten Bocce. Bocce? The Italian version of “boules” in a German beer garden? Why not, this in Seattle. Located…
Hermès Haiku: Iris Ukiyoé
You think you know it. Like a haiku you read in school, one as beautiful as it was clean and straightforward – and yet when you read it again, study it further, you realize the paradoxes imbedded within its 5-7-5 structure. So it is with Hermès Iris…
A Cornucopia of Tapas at Manhattan’s Casa Pomona
Given the unforeseen obstacles overcome on their way to opening Casa Pomona on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, restaurateurs Sid Gupta and Marion Maur might have felt they’d opened a Pandora’s box rather than a restaurant named for the…
Modern Classic: Aqua Universalis forte
’I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,’ wrote Isak Dinesen. Years ago we had a country house on the Cape where the winter could linger through April – and where a lily of the valley might peep through a spring snow. Perfumer Francis…