December 2010

SOUTHEAST ASIA

Anniversary SPECIAL

ISSUE

T+L’S 2010 ASIA PICKS

OUR BEST OF THE BEST: HOTELS, SPAS, WINING, DINING, SHOPS, MORE!

DECEMBER 2010

ON TOP OF THE WORLD SENSATIONAL STYLE FROM SINGAPORE’S NEWEST ICON BANGKOK’S BEST MICHELIN CHEFS

EAT LIKE A LOCAL SCORE AUTHENTIC DINING EVERY TIME

27

NEW MUST-TRY HONG KONG STOPS

PLUS EUROPE, PENANG MANILA, BRAZIL

CHECK OUT OUR FRESH, STYLISH NEW LOOK!

NEW ZEALAND MUST-DRIVE ROAD TRIP ITINERARY

SINGAPORE SG$7.90 ● HONG KONG HK$43 THAILAND THB175 ● INDONESIA IDR50,000 MALAYSIA MYR17● VIETNAM VND85,000 MACAU MOP44 ● PHILIPPINES PHP240 BURMA MMK35 ● CAMBODIA KHR22,000 BRUNEI BND7.90 ● LAOS LAK52,000

TravelandLeisureAsia.com TravelandLeisureAsia.com

contents

december 2010

volume 4 : issue 12

features 140 Global Chinatown If it weren’t in a constant state of flux, Hong Kong just wouldn’t be the same.

But don’t try to find your favorite spot from your last visit—there’s a good chance it’s morphed into something else. by christopher kucway. photographed by daniel groshong. guide 148 150 Un-holy Jerusalem It is an ancient, sacred, embattled, beloved city—more densely layered with religious and cultural significance than any on earth. But for daphne merkin Jerusalem is also a secular place, home to artists and writers, markets and galleries, the pleasures of everyday life. photographed by anders overgaard. guide and map 156

166 D reamland: New Orleans Sometime resident thomas beller takes to the streets in search of the eclectic characters and strange beauty that only the Big Easy can deliver. photographed by cedric angeles. guide and map 175

8 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

140

At The Mira hotel in Hong Kong.

daniel groshong

158 Savoring São Paulo Amazon Locavores. Cachaça missionaries. Food pioneers. anya von bremzen takes a bite out of the frenetic food scene in Brazil’s capital of style. photographed by david nicolas. guide and map 165

contents

december 2010

volume 4 : issue 12

T+L SOUTHEAST ASIA THIRD ANNIVERSARY ISSUE / 2010 PICKS / HONG KONG / SINGAPORE / NEW ZEALAND / THAILAND / MANILA

SOUTHEAST ASIA

Anniversary SPECIAL

ISSUE

T+L’S 2010 ASIA PICKS

OUR BEST OF THE BEST: HOTELS, SPAS, WINING, DINING, SHOPS, MORE!

DECEMBER 2010

ON TOP OF THE WORLD

SENSATIONAL STYLE FROM SINGAPORE’S NEWEST ICON BANGKOK’S BEST MICHELIN CHEFS

EAT LIKE A LOCAL SCORE AUTHENTIC DINING EVERY TIME

27

NEW MUST-TRY HONG KONG STOPS

D EC E MBE R 2010

PLUS EUROPE, PENANG MANILA, BRAZIL

CHECK OUT OUR FRESH, STYLISH NEW LOOK!

DEC ISSUE CHOSEN MLV7.indd 1

NEW ZEALAND MUST-DRIVE ROAD TRIP ITINERARY

SINGAPORE SG$7.90 ● HONG KONG HK$43 THAILAND THB175 ● INDONESIA IDR50,000 MALAYSIA MYR17● VIETNAM VND85,000 MACAU MOP44 ● PHILIPPINES PHP240 BURMA MMK35 ● CAMBODIA KHR22,000 BRUNEI BND7.90 ● LAOS LAK52,000

TravelandLeisureAsia.com TravelandLeisureAsia.com

12/11/2010 09:56

On the cover Photographed by Mitchell

Nguyen McCormack. Model: Anna D. Styled by Linda Charoenlab.

Hair and makeup by Kitty Kittiya.

Place: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

insider 63 Check-in These new European inns show that bigger isn’t necessarily better. by shane mitchell 68 First Look Penang’s most pedigreed lodging is reborn as the island’s most stylish seaside stay. by robyn eckhardt

74 Outdoors If you thought a European ski vacation was out of reach, think again. These three under-the-radar resorts are accessible, charming and loaded with après-ski attractions. by james jung

90 special

37 T+L’s top picks for the year, with the best spots for eating, drinking, shopping, staying and playing around Southeast Asia.

78 Art Fresh, edgy and eminently affordable, Philippine art is making waves on home shores— and around the globe. Here, our pick of the hottest galleries in the capital. by lara day

newsflash

55 Indonesia’s new wallet-friendly stays, stunning openings in Japan, Andy Warhol meets Dom Pérignon and more.

10 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

37

85 restaurants In Bangkok, three restaurants with big ambitions are shaking up the city’s fine-dining scene. by lara day

f r o m to p da ry l V i ss c h e r ; co u rt e sy o f m a da m e h i e n

70 Drinks Phnom Penh has become a haven for grape lovers, with wine bars, boutiques and savvy sommeliers cropping up across the city. by naomi lindt

AUTHENTIC

/adjective/

bona fide, convincing, credible, genuine, original, pure, real, sure, true

Authentic dishes and original creations for sophisticated palates.

155 Rajadamri Road, Bangkok 10330, Thailand Tel: 66 (0) 2 250-1000 Fax: 66 (0) 2 253-9195 Email: restaurants.bangkok@fourseasons.com w w w . f o u r s e a s o n s . c o m

contents

december 2010 volume 4 : issue 12

130 89 T+L guide From the heart of Mumbai to the city’s emerging neighborhoods, we’ve rounded up the best boutiques, galleries, restaurants and hotels on offer. by david kaufman

94 sourcebook Golden or

green, smooth or spicy. We tasted

dozens of extra-virgin olive oils

from around the globe to track

down the world’s best artisanal

bottles. by shane mitchell

journal 119 Drive New Zealand’s South Island—with its Lord of the Rings landscapes, superb local wines and unforgettable glass-and- timber lodges—is like a visit to another, more perfect world. by anthony dennis 122 Food Is Portland, Oregon America’s newest food capital?

96 NAVIGATOR We map out an easy guide to Macau, from splashy casinos to chic designer shops and charming colonial squares. by helen dalley

departments

Shopping Keep warm this season with these three Scandinavian-inspired pieces. styled by mimi lombardo

14 index 16 Editor’s Note

102 Gift Guide Shopping for

your favorite globe-trotters?

Here, our 40 picks for presents

that will get them in the spirit.

110 Fashion With sky-high views

and sumptuous suites, the Marina

Bay Sands is raising Singapore’s

style stakes.

12 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

128 Obsessions Your flight’s been canceled, you missed the connection, you got held up in traffic—for whatever reason, you’re stuck at the airport, and it’s going to be a while. But is that really so bad? Not at all, argues michael gross.

130 Portfolio In and around Indonesia’s Mount Bromo is an unforgettable landscape, one not of this planet. And worth an early morning hike. photographed by lauryn ishak

stylish traveler 101

adam sachs gets to know the indie chefs, coffee geeks, meat obsessives and salt fanatics who are turning up the heat in the Pacific Northwest.

20 Contributors­ 24 Letters 26 Best Deals 30 Smart Traveler

102

32 ask t+l 176 My Favorite Place

f r o m to p l e f t: l au ry n i s h a k , st e v e k e p p l e . b ot to m l a r s k lov e

122

in this issue

Jerusalem 150

Hong Kong 26, 37, 58, 59, 140

New Orleans 166

Penang 68 São Paolo 158 Queenstown 119

trip ideas

DESTINATIONS

travel tip

Asia Beijing 26 China 37, 176 Japan 55 Mumbai 89

Seoul 26 Shanghai 26 Taipei 26 Taiwan 37

Active and Adventure

26, 74, 130

Affordable

26

Arts + Culture

26, 57, 78

Australia and New Zealand Queenstown 119

Beaches + Islands

26, 119

City

26, 56, 58, 59, 89, 96, 140, 166

Culture + History

150

Fashion

110

Food + Drink

37, 56, 85, 94, 122, 158

Hotels + Resorts

37, 55, 63, 68

Shopping

101, 102

Travel Tips

30

Wine + Spirits

70

Europe Austria 74 Belgium 63 England 63 France 63 Italy 63, 74 The Netherlands 63 Spain 63 Sweden 63 Switzerland 63, 74 The Americas New Orleans 166 Portland 122 São Paulo 158 Middle East Jerusalem 150

Featured Destination

Hong Kong

In a place that loves everything new and modern, why not check out the Chinese side of the city, whether at a local dim sum restaurant or at a market? This month, Hong Kong’s skyscrapers are lit up like Christmas ornaments, lights that will be reconfigured in a few weeks’ time to celebrate Chinese New Year, which is at the start of February. (See page 140 for more on Hong Kong.)

14 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

daniel groshong (3)

Southeast Asia Bali 57 Bangkok 56, 59, 85 Cambodia 37 Cebu 26 Hong Kong 26, 37, 58, 59, 140 Indonesia 37, 58 Kuala Lumpur 26 Laos 37 Macau 96 Malaysia 37 Manila 78 Mount Bromo 130 Penang 68 Philippines 26, 37 Phnom Penh 70 Siem Reap 26 Singapore 37, 59, 110 Thailand 26, 37 Vietnam 37

editor’s note where to find me )) matt@mediatransasia.com )) matt leppard tlsea on Facebook

PICKS OF THE MONTH Some of my recent travel favorites.

SINGAPORE The Fullerton Bay Hotel Classic colonial architecture with views—and a pool— to die for. 80 Collyer Quay; fullertonbay hotel.com.

L’Angelus Evocative French eatery with a wow-factor wine list.

85 Club Street; 65/6225-6897.

counting, of course. It’s been a thrilling ride, both personally and professionally, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our staff, old and new, as well as loyal readers and supporters, all of whom make this magazine what it is. It’s a labor of love, and I hope that shows. Something that I also hope shows is that for this, our third anniversary issue and beyond, we’ve given the magazine a fresh lick of paint; a stylish, vibrant new look and feel.

Creating and implementing a new design can be a challenge, especially if you’ve seen as much of the magazine as I have (see above), but I feel passionately that the modern look really captures the snappy, smart zeitgeist of the Asian travel boom. At the same time, it retains all the classic T+L SEA elements you will have come to know and rely on. Love it, hate it, but don’t be indifferent! E-mail me and tell me what you really think. Of course, this being our third anniversary issue and the launch of our new design, we’ve packed the

mag with tons of goodies. Back in is our Ask T+L section (page 32), which I trust you’ll make use of, as well as a seasonal Best Deals (pages 26–28). We round up our editors’ picks of the year (“The Best of 2010,” page 37), as well as present to you a guide stuffed with gorgeous gifts that you can pick up on your travels in Asia and beyond (“40 Great Travel Gifts,” page 102). But most striking for me is our photo essay on Mt. Bromo in East Java (“Peak Dreams,” page 130), since this primeval landscape transports me back to a childhood filled with dinosaur dreams. And I couldn’t end this note without a comment on the cover: Shot atop Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands, the image, rich colors and dramatic composition are simply stunning, especially with our brand-new logo. On that note, I’ll leave you to savor this special issue, but do drop me a line about the design, or find me on Facebook. I’m sure we can be friends.

— m at t l e p pa r d

Centara Karon Resort Phuket Stunning new resort on the popular Karon Beach... literally! One of the few properties here actually located on the beach. 502/3 Patak Road, Karon Beach; centarahotels resorts.com.

One to watch...

Hilton Pattaya The centerpiece of the huge Central Festival shopping mall, this property is the latest skyline transformation in this ever-evolving town. 333/101 Moo 9, Nong Prue, Banglamung; www1.hilton.com.

travel + leisure editors , writers and photographers are the industry ’s most reliable sources . while on assignment, they travel incognito whenever possible and do not take press trips or accept free travel of any kind.

16 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

tom ho ops

Welcome to Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia’s 37th issue. That’s three years, more than 5,000 pages and something like 700,000 words—not that I’m

THAILAND W Retreat Koh Samui Ultimate chic on an island within an island; one of the country’s most anticipated openings.

4/1 Moo 1, Tambol Maenam, Surat Thani, Koh Samui; starwood hotels.com.

editor-in-chief art director deputy editor features editor senior DEsigner DEsigner ASSISTANT editor/Illustrator Assistant Editor

Matt Leppard James Nvathorn Unkong Christopher Kucway Lara Day Wannapha Nawayon Sirirat Prajakthip Wasinee Chantakorn Liang Xinyi

Regular contributors / photographers Cedric Arnold, Jennifer Chen, Robyn Eckhardt, Philipp Engelhorn, David Hagerman, Lauryn Ishak, Naomi Lindt, Jen Lin-Liu, Nat Prakobsantisuk, Adam Skolnick, Darren Soh, Daven Wu

chairman president publishing director

publishER director singapore / associate publisher DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGER business development managers CONSULTANT, HONG KONG/MACAU chief financial officer production manager production group circulation MANAGER circulation assistant

J.S. Uberoi Egasith Chotpakditrakul Rasina Uberoi-Bajaj

Robert Fernhout Lucas W. Krump Pichayanee Kitsanayothin Michael K. Hirsch Joey Kukielka Shea Stanley Gaurav Kumar Kanda Thanakornwongskul Supalak Krewsasaen Porames Chinwongs Yupadee Saebea

american express publishing corporation President/Chief Executive Officer Senior Vice President/Chief Marketing Officer Senior Vice President/Chief Financial Officer Senior Vice President/Editorial Director Vice President/Publisher, Travel + Leisure U.S. Executive Editor, International Publishing Director, International

Ed Kelly Mark V. Stanich Paul B. Francis Nancy Novogrod Jean-Paul Kyrillos Mark Orwoll Thomas D. Storms

travel+leisure southeast asia Vol. 4, Issue 12 Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia is published monthly by Media Transasia Limited, Room 1205-06, 12/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. Tel: +852 2851-6963; Fax: +852 2851-1933; under license from American Express Publishing Corporation, 1120 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036, United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Produced and distributed by Media Transasia Thailand Ltd., 14th Floor, Ocean Tower II, 75/8 Soi Sukhumvit 19, Sukhumvit Road, Klongtoeynue, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand. Tel: +66 2 204-2370.

Printed by Comform Co., Ltd. (+66 2 368-2942–7). Color separation by Classic Scan Co., Ltd. (+66 2 291-7575). While the editors do their utmost to verify information published, they do not accept responsibility for its absolute accuracy.

This edition is published by permission of AMERICAN EXPRESS PUBLISHING CORPORATION 1120 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036 United States of America Tel. +1 212 382 5600 Online: www.amexpub.com Reproduction in whole or in part without the consent of the copyright owner is prohibited.

subscriptions Subscription enquiries: www.travelandleisuresea.com/subscribe ADVERTISING Advertising enquiries: e-mail advertising@mediatransasia.com

A KALEIDOSCOPE OF CULTURE AND HERITAGE BECKONS

Discover the many facets and rich cultures of our ethnic communities when you stay at Village Hotels & Residences.

Located in the heart of Singapore始s diverse enclaves, our exclusive hotels and residences offer modern comforts with friendly and attentive service wherever you stay.

thomas beller writer

anders overgaard photographer

assignment Wrote “Dreamland: New Orleans” (page 166). new orleans in three words Down and dirty. Hot and spicy. Or: shake, rattle, roll. favorite local bar Le Bon Temps Roule. best hotel The Columns. the song that most exemplifies new orleans “Here Come the Girls,” by Ernie K. Doe, who once described himself as “the greatest boy-child ever conceived at Charity Hospital.” favorite getaway JetBlue. recent work How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood (W.W. Norton). don’t leave new orleans without eating Food.

assignment Shot “Un-holy Jerusalem.” jerusalem in three words Intense, surprising, beautiful. travel photography tip Take as many pictures as possible.

This was my first time shooting digital for work, and I loved it. favorite photography museum Berlin’s Helmut Newton Foundation. can’t travel without Bose noisecanceling headphones are necessary for the plane.

Without them, you arrive tired; with them, it’s your own world. dream assignment To the moon!

daphne merkin writer assignment Wrote “Un-holy Jerusalem” (page 150). first thing you do in jerusalem Walk through Rehavia, a leafy neighborhood where my uncle used to live and where I always feel peaceful. month to visit October or May. only in jerusalem Hasidim (members of a Jewish sect) standing on a bus line next to soldiers— both male and female. must-have travel items I always take four or five books and at least two watches. dream trip I’d love to return to Cornwall, England, to stay at the Hotel Tresanton, in St. Mawes, for a week or more.

T o p R o w , F r o m L e f t : DAN DEITCH ; COURTESY OF DAPHNE MERKIN ; PETE THOMPSON .

BOTTOM RO W , FROM LEFT : CEDRIC ANGELES ; ANDERS O V ERGAARD ( 2 )

contributors

HOW I GOT THAT SHOT

new orleans

cedric angeles

photographer The assignment Shot the Big Easy over several weeks (“Dreamland: New Orleans,” page 168). a new Orleans state of mind

I first came to the city about four years ago to shoot a story related to Katrina. And then I came back a year and a half ago.

That’s when New Orleans got under my skin, and now I spend most of my time here. THE CITY’S MOST DEFINING FEATURE Its residents. The charismatic, talented and proud people who hold this place together. I tried to capture the characters I knew would add color to the story. QUINTESSENTIAL New orleans EXPERIENCE

NOLA IN Two WORDS

The French Quarter

Mysterious and passionate.

Your Southern diet

I get spoiled regularly with boiled crawfish, roast-beef po’boys, gumbo, jambalaya, red beans.... It’s a miracle that I haven’t gained weight. best Souvenir from the big easy Louisiana’s

Crystal Hot Sauce.

The Scene Just past dusk on Royal Street. On New Orleans Architecture The buildings are so picturesque with their colorful façades and wrought-iron railings. It’s almost like shooting in Europe. How I Got That Shot I don’t usually carry a tripod, but for nighttime photos you need a long exposure—which requires a steady camera. In this case, I placed my Pentax 67 on a post and wrapped the strap tightly around it. The camera was stable enough for a five-second exposure at f4 (a wide aperture). The Key Here Was… Illumination. I had to match the brightness of the sky with that of the street. The ambient lighting was beautiful—from the lampposts (which you can’t see) to the bright gallery windows. But the sky balances it out with some color of its own, so it works.

22 december 2010 | www.travelandleisureasia.com

i n s e t: co u rt e sy o f c e d r i c a n g e l e s

Listening to the Natchez Steamboat’s whistle as it plies the Mississippi River.

©2010 Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. All rights reserved.

WO R L DW I D E WOW. N OW B A L I - S E M I N YA K .

SOON : BANG KOK

KOH SAM U I

+62 361 738 106

LONDON

N E W YORK

PARIS

W H AT E V E R / W H E N E V E R

®

SINGAPORE

S T. P E T E R S B U RG

TA I P E I T E L AV I V

W H OT E L S . C O M / B A L I S E M I N YA K

mail Letter of the month

PARIS

Insider Traveling

Kudos on two stories in your November 2010 issue—both are why I read travel magazines for their insider tips. I found myself rooting for Min Jin Lee in her tale about Cheju [“A Trip in Time”] and, in the end, she didn’t disappoint: she had dessert with a boy! What a great ending. Turning the page, I was able to commit to memory Alexandra Marshall’s knowledgeable take on Paris [“Paris Secrets”] and hope to use these tips on my next visit to the French capital. Keep these stories coming.

SECRETS Want to find the hidden joys of one of Europe’s most iconic destinations? ALEXANDRA MARSHALL shares her favorite haunts in the city she now calls home.

Photographed by RICHARD TRUSCOTT Styled by MIMI LOMBARDO

Getting the lay of the land at the Parc Monceau, in the Ternes district. Jacket by YSL Edition 24; pants, Max Mara; earrings, Van Cleef & Arpels; scarf, Façonnable. Opposite: Montmartre’s Rue Chappe, in the 18th Arrondissement.

—Margaret Cho, Hong Kong 11PARISCKv2.indd 1

11/10/2010 19:12

Cover Check

Engaging Reads

When I saw the cover of your November 2010 issue, I was expecting a magazine filled with island stories.

Maybe I shouldn’t judge the magazine by its cover, because clearly there’s more. The section on packing [“T+L’s Packing Primer”] is a real gem. This will come in handy when I face the upcoming year-end travel season. I chuckled when reading how to avoid fees as some of the things mentioned are really what I’ve always done in my travels. But “How to Make Coach Feel Classy” on tips to pack your own meals might not be so helpful. Even AirAsia won’t allow you to consume outside food onboard. The articles on off-thebeaten path destinations such as Cheju Island, Ghent and the tea plantation in Mae Salong are always pleasant to read. For smaller destinations, the articles you publish are eye-opening ideas for a trip.

Thanks for your guide on the top 60 travel websites [“Best of the Web,” October 2010]. Like a mini itinerary planner, this information will come in useful when I plan my next vacation.

The story “Hooray for Hollywood” [October 2010] was a delightful tale and it was fascinating reading about the kitschy movie memorabilia in the many shops there. Now, I just need a free plane ticket to Hollywood to lay my hands on the treasure trove of collectibles at Bettie Page and Hollywood Movie Posters. Just a suggestion here: To engage your readers, you might want to consider holding a travel contest, where readers can write in with their most adventurous or memorable holiday experience and the winner gets a free plane ticket to a destination of their choice featured in that particular month’s issue.

—Pujitama Tanamas, Jakarta

—Rachel Chan, Singapore

e-mail t+l Send your letters to editor@travelandleisuresea.com and let us know your thoughts on recent stories or new places to visit.

Letters chosen may be edited for clarity and space. The letter of the month receives a free one-year subscription to Travel + Leisure (Southeast Asia only). Reader opinions expressed in letters do not necessarily reflect those of Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, Media Transasia Ltd., or American Express Publishing.

bestdeals AFFORDABLE ASIAN TRIPS

budget-friendly tips for your travel planning

deal of the month s n a p

The Shilla Seoul.

Discovery Country Suites, Tagaytay.

ROMANTIC RETREATS

Hotel G Beijing.

URBAN ESCAPES

THAILAND 2+1 Special Offer at The Pavilions Phuket (66-76/317-600; thepavilionsresorts.com). What’s Included

BEIJING Drive Me to My Room package at Hotel G Beijing (86-10/6552-3599; hotel-g. com). What’s Included A stay in a Great

A stay in a private villa for two; daily champagne breakfast; daily afternoon tea at the Plantation Club; nightly turn-down; free shuttle to Layan Beach; and one free night for every two-night stay. Cost From Bt14,300 per night, through December 26.

Savings 33 percent.

room; round-trip airport transfers by limousine; welcome cocktails; daily buffet breakfast; free Wi-Fi, local calls and minibar soft drinks; use of a Nintendo Wii and DVD player (upon request and subject to availability); and late check-out until 4 p.m. Cost From RMB1,588 per room per night, four-night minimum, through December 31. Savings 25 percent.

Why Not Enjoy a Night on Us? package at the w retreat koh samui (66-77/915-999; whotels.com/kohsamui). What’s Included A two-night stay in a private villa with a free third night; daily breakfast for two; a treatment at Thaimazcal spa for two followed by a drink at Tonic bar; and a W gift. Cost From Bt16,000 per night, through March 31. Savings 40 percent.

PHILIPPINES Sweet Rendezvous package at Discovery Country Suites (63-46/4134567; discoverycountrysuites.com) in Tagaytay, in the highlands south of Manila. What’s Included A stay in a Deluxe suite; daily breakfast for two; cocktails with wine and cheese at sundown; and a choice of a four-course lunch or dinner for two at Restaurant Verbena.

Cost From P7,500 per night, through June 1. Savings Up to 50 percent.

26 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

HONG KONG Winter Escapes package at The Peninsula Hong Kong (852/2910-1628; peninsula.com/hongkong). What’s Included Daily breakfast for two at the Lobby; local calls; in-room wired and wireless broadband Internet; and a choice of either a one-way airport transfer, an upgrade to the next available room category or a Holistic body massage for two at The Peninsula Spa by ESPA. Cost From HK$4,260 per night, through March 31. Savings Up to 20 percent.

KUALA LUMPUR Pamper & Rejuvenate package at The club at the Saujana

(theclubatthesaujana.com; 60-3/7843-1234).

What’s Included A stay in a Club room with in-room daily breakfast for two; a 60-minute ancient Balinese massage at

Christmas at The RitzCarlton package at The Ritz-Carlton, Kuala Lumpur (603/2142-8000; ritzcarlton. com). What’s Included A stay in a two-bedroom suite with in-suite breakfast for four; in-suite Christmas dinner for four on Christmas Day; access to the Club Lounge and 24-hour gymnasium; and 24-hour butler service.

Cost From RM1,200 per night, December 24–31.

Savings 77 percent.

The Ritz-Carlton, Kuala Lumpur.

c l o c k w i s e f r o m t o p l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f THE SHILLA SEOUL ; c o u r t e s y o f D i s c o v e r y C o u n t r y S u i t e s ; c o u r t e s y o f e p o q u e H o t e l s ; c o u r t e s y o f T h e r i t z - c a r lt o n , k u a l a l u m p u r

i t

best deals Cost From US$102 per

night, through March 31.

Savings 50 percent.

Hot Deal package at the 661; taraangkorhotel.com).

What’s Included A threeThe Club at The Borei Angkor Resort & night stay in a Superior Le Méridien Taipei.

Saujana, Kuala Lumpur.

Spa, Siem Reap. room; one-way airport pickup; daily buffet breakfast for two; one set dinner for two; a 30-minute back STRICTLY BUSINESS The Spa and Med Beauty for two; and shoulder massage for two; two complimentary private bar; all-day TAIPEI Opening package at le méridien bottles of water daily; daily local tea and coffee; cocktails in the Lounge taipei (886-2/6622-8000; lemeridien.com/ English-language newspaper; and (5.30­–6.30 p.m.); free Wi-Fi at the Club; taipei). What’s Included A stay in a 10 percent off drinks, laundry and complimentary dry cleaning, laundry Junior or Executive suite; daily babysitting. Cost From US$684, threeand pressing; and one-way shuttle breakfast; Executive Lounge service to nearby shopping malls. refreshments; mini-bar soft drinks; night minimum, through March 31. dry cleaning for one suit; taxi transfers Savings 20 percent.

Cost From RM893 per night, through from hotel to office (for Taipei city December 31. Savings 47 percent. only); and one-hour meeting room FAMILY BREAKS usage daily (if available). Cost From CEBU Suite promotion at the ShangriPHNOM PENH Opening offer at the NT$5,800 per night, through La’s Mactan Resort & Spa (63-32/231-0288; SOFITEL PHNOM PENH PHOKEETHRA (855December 30. Savings Up to 47 percent. shangri-la.com). What’s Included A stay 23/999-200; sofitel.com). What’s Included in an Executive or Panorama suite; A stay in a Superior room, with a free daily buffet breakfast; 20 percent off upgrade to a Prestige suite for each ART DETOUR select food and beverages; round-trip 50th guest (five-night maximum).

SEOUL Gallery at the Shilla package at airport transfers; a 30-minute foot The Shilla Seoul (82-2/2233-3131; shilla.

Cost From US$135 per night, massage; access to the Ocean Club; net). What’s Included A stay in a Deluxe December 11–February 28; blackout free broadband; and laundry (except dates apply. Savings 25 percent. room; breakfast for two; gym, sauna dry cleaning). Cost From P16,000 per and swimming-pool access; L’Occitane amenities; free mobile-phone rental; night, up to three adults or two adults HERITAGE STAYS a guidebook to the hotel art gallery; and two children, through December SHANGHAI Discover Winter Peace 24. Savings 27 percent. package at the Fairmont Peace Hotel (86- tickets for two to the Leeum Museum of Art; a VIP Gold Card offering up 21/6321-6888; fairmont.com/peacehotel). to 15 percent off Duty Free shop HONG KONG Festive Family package What’s Included A stay in a Fairmont at the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong room; daily breakfast for two; welcome purchases; and a KRW10,000 Duty Free voucher. Cost From KRW320,000 cocktails for two at the Jazz Bar; high (852/2820-4202; mandarinoriental.com/ tea for two at the Jasmine Lounge; per night, through December 31. hongkong). What’s Included A stay in an access to the fitness center; and a Oriental suite or Deluxe Oriental suite Savings 40 percent. free guided tour of the Peace Gallery. with a second connecting room; daily buffet breakfast at the Clipper Lounge angkor ADVENTURES Cost RMB1,929 per night, through for two; welcome chocolates; children’s March 31. Savings 68 percent.

SIEM REAP Flaming Deal for Winter movie DVD rental; and late check-out package at the Borei Angkor Resort & Spa until 4 p.m. Cost From HK$8,199 per (855-63/964-406; boreiangkor.com).

SINGAPORE Opening promotion at room per night, four-person the Hotel Fort Canning (65/6338-1212; What’s Included Round-trip airport maximum, through February 10. transfers; daily breakfast; dinner for hfcsingapore.com), built in 1926. What’s two at the Borei Café; Internet access; Savings 68 percent.

Included A stay in a Deluxe room; daily use of swimming pool, Jacuzzi, sauna breakfast; and free Wi-Fi. Cost From S$275 per night, through December 31. and steam room; 20 percent off spa treatments; and 15 percent off dining.

Savings Up to 15 percent.

28 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

f r o m to p l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f L e M É r i d i e n Ta i p e i ; c o u r t e s y o f T h e C l u b at t h e S a u j a n a ; c o u r t e s y o f B o r e i A n g k o r R e s o r t & S pa

TARA Angkor (855-63/966-

smarttraveler

the ins and outs of modern travel

Eating as the Romans Do Many of us live to eat, especially when we’re traveling. But what’s the best way to suss out the difference between what’s merely a tourist trap and what is a genuine find? By Jennifer Chen

T

he menu was the giveaway. After a long day of wandering the streets of Barcelona, we were hallucinating about paella and pa amb tomàquet, washed down with a bottle of Ribera del Duero. But there was something about the plastic rusticity of the tavern that we stumbled into that didn’t seem quite right. Our waiter came by, wielding thick plastic folders that contained the menu—printed in Spanish, English, German and Japanese. My husband and I glanced at each other, and without a word, slipped out, preferring hunger to the risk of a mediocre meal.

Food is one of the main reasons I travel, and, judging by the number of gastronomically inclined blogs, websites and tweets out there, it’s a fixation many others share. Hotels are chosen by the quality of their breakfasts; weekend getaways are planned around a random craving. The lure of exotic countries is sometimes dampened by the knowledge that the local cuisine is based on, say, overcooked mutton (sorry, Mongolia). Winging it doesn’t always work, especially

30 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

in a popular destination where tourist traps abound. Yet, meticulously planning every meal robs you of the chance of happening upon those truly great finds. So I asked some of Asia’s top food writers to share their tips on how they hunt down the best local eats during their travels.

1. Talk to taxi drivers That’s something T+L contributor Robyn Eckhardt, author of the acclaimed Eating Asia blog (eatingasia.typepad.com), always does when she lands somewhere new. This approach can sometimes backfire—some drivers are prone to regurgitating what they think tourists want. Just try to make it clear that you’re looking for places that they patronize. You’ll get better results if you name specific dishes. Best cities for tips from taxi drivers? Food-obsessed Taipei and Singapore, where cabbies are often friendly and loquacious. Eckhardt has also scored in Penang and Chiang Mai, where one driver helped her scour the city for gai yang (grilled chicken) during the bird flu outbreak.

Illustrated by Wasinee Chantakorn

2. Make some local friends Nothing quite beats having your own local guide. Plug into your network and ask around for contacts.

3. Get online Trawling the Internet and Twitter is a great way to glean information about where to eat now.

Jarrett Wrisley, a food writer and owner of Bangkok’s fabulous Soul Food Mahanakorn (soulfoodmahanakorn. com), is a fan of foodie chat room e-gullet.com. U.S.based chowhound.com, a gathering place for obsessive types, is always a good place to start when researching a destination. In Asia, I’m a regular reader of Bangkok Glutton (bangkokglutton.com), a lively blog focused on the city’s street eats by Thai writer Chawadee Nualkhair; A Hungry Girl in Taipei (hungryintaipei.blogspot.com), an invaluable guide to the city’s eateries—and one of the few in English; photographer Austin Bush’s blog (austinbushphotography.com); Hong Kong’s E*ting the World (e-tingfood.com) and Life as a Bon Vivant (jasonbonvivant.com); veteran food writer Karen Coates’ Rambling Spoon (ramblingspoon.com/blog); and Singapore-centric I Eat I Shoot I Post (ieatishootipost.sg).

You can follow most of these writers on Twitter as well.

These blogs are mostly devoted to humbler establishments. When it comes to fine dining, I scan reviews on websites such as Singapore’s hungrygowhere. com, openrice.com in Hong Kong, and Beijing’s localnoodles.com. As with tripadvisor.com, you’ll find a fair share of irascible cranks on these sites, but they’re still better than local publications that exchange good reviews for ads.

4. Don’t ask professionals It might seem counterintuitive, but chefs and restaurateurs are often too busy with their own establishments to discover new places, notes Wrisley.

5. Eat when the locals eat A packed dining room is obviously a quick gauge of how good a restaurant is. But if you’re eating dinner at 7 p.m. in Spain or lunch at 2 p.m. in Thailand, you’re more likely to be faced with empty eateries and puzzled staff. Unless you’re in a 24hour city like New York or Tokyo, tweak your habits.

6. Hit the morning markets Unlike night bazaars, mornings markets are geared towards shoppers who are looking for good food rather than a scene, says Eckhardt. They’re great hunting grounds not only for tips but also for hearty, authentic breakfasts. ✚ C

C

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Hotel Éclat Hotel Éclat, a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, is strategically located in the most fashionable and prestigious district of Taipei, offering our guests great convenience for business and entertainment. For business travelers, Hotel Éclat boasts Wi-Fi connectivity and in-room business facilities. A variety of meeting rooms provide the ideal venue for professional meetings, corporate functions and social gathering.

Restaurants: Ming Yuen An elegant excitingly ecletic decorated Chinese restaurant serves authentic Cantonese and other Chinese regional cuisine as well as a European Menu. Éclat Lounge Open for Breakfast, Lunch and Traditional English Afternoon Tea. Relax in an artistic distinguished “Art Gallery”.

George Bar A casual elegant Bar to unwind. Savor a Single Malt Whisky from our excellent selection. The intimate atmosphere is created by a classic English Pub-style décor.

No.370, Sec. 1, Dunhua S. Rd., Da-an District, Taipei City 106, Taiwan Reservation:886-2-2784 8118 Éclat Lounge:886-2-2754 8011 Ming Yuen:886-2-2784 8338 www.eclathotels.com

Could you recommend a good snorkeling destination in Thailand for my June honeymoon?

—Stephen Shave, Cambridge

While June isn’t the ideal month for snorkeling in Thailand, Khao Lak and the nearby Surin Islands should fit the bill, particularly toward the end of the month.

The islands are an easy day trip from Khao Lak and have pristine waters, though they will be somewhat clouded by the rains that usually develop later in the afternoon at this time of year. Wicked Diving (6685/795-2221; wickeddiving.com) offers day trips for Bt3,500 that include marine park fees, lunch and equipment, though if you’ve got your own favorite gear, it’s recommended that you bring it along.

Q: Is it really dangerous to turn on my mobile phone when I’m flying?

—Boon Arroyo, Manila

Snorkeling in the Andaman Sea, Thailand.

A: The short answer, according to most airlines, is yes. Simply put, there’s the possibility that mobile-phone use adversely affects the navigational equipment on board aircraft and, until testing confirms this not to be the case or that the risks have been addressed, there’s little chance the restrictions will be lifted. So, airlines have been coming up with creative solutions for passengers who insist on being in touch with the ground while they fly. Singapore Airlines is the latest to announce such a move.

It expects to expand its in-flight connectivity options during the first half of the new year, introducing Wi-Fi Internet, mobile-phone services and even SMS messaging and e-mail on personal GSM-compatible mobile phones.

32 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

A pool suite at Sri Panwa, at the far end of Phuket.

Though take note: the airline is quick to point out that the specifics of this program are still being reviewed.

Q: Can you suggest where to go skiing in South Korea this winter?

—joshua wang, Singapore A: Only 200 kilometers outside of Seoul, Yongpyong Resort (82-63/335-5757;

yongpyong.co.kr; 5-day, 4-night packages from KRW700,000) offers 31 ski runs of varying degrees of difficulty and is popular with snowboarders. An alternative is the highest ski resort in South Korea, Muju Resort (8263/322-9000; mujuresort.com; 3-day, 2-night packages from KRW300,000 per person), where accommodation is a mix of Korean and Austrian designs. It’s also ideal for beginners: there’s a decent ski school on hand to help you out with the basics.

Q: Is there a quieter side of Phuket worth exploring, away from the bright lights of Patong?

—Naomi Randall, Hong Kong A: Head due south on the popular island to the Westin Siray Bay (66-76/252-701; westin.

com/siraybayresort; doubles from Bt4,100), which opened in August. The Westin has 261 guest rooms, all with sweeping views of the ocean. Also in the vicinity on Cape Panwa is Cloud 19 (66-76/200-920; doubles from Bt2,800), a family-run resort where it’s best to book any of the five rooms found in the family’s original house. Nearby—and very secluded—is the money-is-no-object Sri Panwa (66-76/371-000; sripanwa.com; pool suites from Bt15,750), a romantic getaway with brilliant views and a sense of calm not always found on Phuket these days. what’s your travel question?

» E-mail us at editor@travelandleisuresea.com » Post queries at Facebook.com/TravelandLeisureAsia » Follow us on Twitter at @TravLeisureAsia

(Questions may be edited for clarity and space.)

c l o c k w i s e F R O M t o p LE F T : c o u r t e s y o f y o n g p y o n g R e s o r t ; c o u r t e s y o f s r i p a n w a ; © P u w a n a i P o n c h a i / D r e a m s t i m e . c o m

askt+l

Skiing at South Korea’s Yongpyong Resort.

travel + leisure special

2010 ď ľ

t h e b e s t of

t

f r o m l e f t: c o u r t e s y o f M a g n a n & T s e ; c o u r t e s y o f Fa i r m o n t P e a c e H ot e l ; c o u r t e sy o f Da n n y a n d C o m pa n y

Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam

ASIA RISING From left: Magnan & Tse, in Hong Kong; Shanghai's Fairmont Peace Hotel, China; at Danny & Company, in Taipei.

Southeast Asia’s newest and hottest restaurants, bars, hotels, shops and more Reported and written by Lara Day, Robyn Eckhardt, Naomi Lindt, Daven Wu and Liang Xinyi

Get the guide

for more ideas and recommendations on what to do in southeast asia, go to travelandleisureasia.com

travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 37

At 208 Duecento Otto, in Hong Kong.

Cambodia

Eric Raisina's Siem Reap boutique.

The Villa Romonea, in Kep, Cambodia.

Amanfayun, in Hangzhou, China.

Hong Kong's Ben Brown Fine Arts.

 EAT Phnom Penh newcomer Yumi (29a St. 288; 855-92/163-903; theyumi.com; dinner for two US$20) and its addictive izakaya-themed small plates have fast become a must for the capital’s foodies—don’t miss the slow-cooked ribs and the tempura squid. Book one of 18 spots at charming, wood-paneled Armand’s (33 St. 108; 855-15/548-966; dinner for two US$30) for French bistro fare, such as the renowned steak in cognac, flambéed tableside. In Siem Reap, multi-talented French chef Patrick Guerry has transformed Samot Restaurant into the Italian Trattoria (Alley West; 855-92/410-400; samot-restaurant.com; dinner for two US$25), a black-and-white-tiled space with wrought iron chairs serving handmade ravioli, marketfresh seafood and signature pizzas like the TP: mozzarella cheese, olive oil, mushroom and bacon. For excellent value, order the US$6 two-course lunch.  DRINK One of the capital city’s chicest after-hours hangouts, Saint Tropez (31 St. 174; 855/23-676-7009; drinks for two US$8) has electric purple and red décor, leopard-print chaises and thumping DJ’s. For a cerebral têteà-tête, try wine bar Le Sauvignon (6B St. 302; 855-92/730-250; bar-sauvignon.com; drinks for two US$7), where you can sip Muscadet in a cozy armchair while nibbling on a platter of Roquefort, Camembert and chèvre. Beer lovers will rejoice at Cambodia’s new boutique lager:

38 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Kingdom, a pilsener made with the finest German and Czech hops. Call ahead to arrange a tour of the brewery, housed on the Tonle Sap River, or sample the recipe at the leather-andwood brewpub next door (1748 National Rd. 5; 855-23/430-180; kingdombreweries.com; drinks for two US$5).  STAY This month Phnom Penh sees the launch of the 1920’s-inspired Sofitel Phnom Penh Phokeethra (26 Old August Site, Sothearos Blvd.; 855-23/999-200; sofitel.com; doubles from US$135), set to welcome business travelers in style. Located along the Tonle Bassac River in an up-and-coming financial district, the hotel offers 210 rooms defined by dark-wood furniture and muted sage, tangerine and burgundy accents. In the seaside town of Kep, the Villa Romonea (Kep; 855-12/879-486; villaromonea.com; doubles from US$120) gives guests a chance to stay in a stunningly restored six-room Modernist villa, with a sybaritic infinity pool overlooking the Gulf of Thailand.  SHOP Siem Reap’s favorite haute couturier, Eric Raisina (Pokambore Ave.; 855-63/963-208; ericraisina.com), has opened his own boutique at the FCC Angkor Hotel, where you’ll find a collection of delicate dresses and scarves edged in the Malagasy’s famous silk fur, and finely crocheted tops.

China

A Beijing cevicheria may sound counterintuitive, but Terra (1 Sanlitun Nanlu, Chaoyang district; 86-10/6591-9148; terrabeijing. com; dinner for two RMB600) pulls it off, with Peruvian chef Gaby Alves offering eight types of ceviche, including salmon and tuna. Be sure to try the sublime empanadas and the first-rate drinks; the five-course brunch has free-flowing caipirinhas, mojitos and even Veuve Clicquot for RMB598. In Shanghai’s newly restored Sinan Mansions, culinary dynamo David Laris caters to well-heeled flâneurs at 12 Chairs (Sinan Mansions, Mansion 26F, Corner of Sinan Lu and Fuxing Lu; 86-21/3368-9527; davidlariscreates. com; dinner menus from RMB800), a private kitchen with just 12 covers. Expect to eat like a monarch: the huge multi-course “King’s Feast,” featuring a procession of mousses, jellies and terrines, and dishes like whole-roasted pigeon dressed in gold leaf, was inspired by feasts at the court of Henry VIII.  EAT

f r o m to p : co u rt e sy o f 2 0 8 D u e c e n to Ot to ; co u rt e sy o f E r i c R a i s i n a ; co u rt e sy o f V i l l a R o m o n e a ; courtesy of Amanresorts; courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts

special t+l picks

Beijing tipplers are flocking to Modo (3rd floor, Sanlitun Village South, Sanlitun Lu, Chaoyang district; 86-10/6415-7207; modomodo. cn; drinks for two RMB150) for the city’s first oenomatic wine dispensers. Choose from a well-chosen list of 16 global vintages—Austrian Grüner Veltliner; Italian Albarino—with tasting portions starting at just RMB10 a pop.

Mixology maestro George Zhou is the man behind George’s (Gate 12, Workers’ Stadium, Gongrentiyuchang, Chaoyang district; 86-10/6553 6299; drinks for two RMB100), an instant hit among locals for its low-lit ambience, funky soundtrack and superlative drinks—order a midori sour, or, better yet, ask Zhou to mix you his latest creation.  STAY This year’s World Expo saw a boom in luxury openings on Shanghai’s Bund, from the storied Art Deco Fairmont Peace Hotel (10 Nanjing Rd. East; 86-21/6321-6888; fairmont. com/peacehotel; doubles from RMB2,600), with 270 rooms and suites, to the edgy Waterhouse at South Bund (Maojiayuan Rd. No. 1–3, Zhongshan Rd. South, Huangpu District; 86-21/6080-2988; waterhouseshanghai.com; doubles from RMB1,200), whose 19 rooms were individually designed by local architecture duo Neri & Hu. Over in the capital, stylish, moldbreaking hotels are cropping up away from the city center: the 19th-century crystal factory turned 30-room boutique stay Yi House Art Hotel 798 (Jiuxianqiao Lu, 2 Hao Yuan, 798 Yishu Qu; 86-10/6436-1818; yi-house.com; doubles from RMB970) is tucked away in Dashanzi Art District, while the funky, ultra-high-tech Langham Place, Beijing Capital Airport (1 Er Jing Rd., Terminal 3, Capital International Airport; 86-10/6457-5555; doubles from RMB1,200) has 372 rooms and suites just a minute away from the Foster & Partners–designed Terminal 3.

Had enough of city life? Head to Hangzhou, where the serene Amanfayun (22 Fayun Nong, Xihujiedao, Xihufengjingmingsheng District; 86571/8732-9999; amanresorts.com; doubles from US$580) offers 42 expansive, Sino-styled suites, rooms and villas, a gorgeous spa, and original structures dating to the 19th century, all amid lush tea fields and natural forest.

f r o m to p : c o u r t e s y o f L a n g h a m P l a c e , B e i j i n g C a p i ta l A r i p o r t ; c o u r t e s y o f M o d o , C h i n a ; co u rt e sy o f E ast; co u rt e sy o f L e Sau v i g n o n ; co u rt e sy o f e p o q u e h ot e l s

 DRINK

Hong Kong

In a year of high-profile openings— among them Yenn Wong’s Autoban–designed

 EAT

Italian resto-bar 208 Duecento Otto (208 Hollywood Rd.; 852/2549-0208; 208.com.hk; dinner for two HK$1,400), and the muchanticipated Gold by Harlan Goldstein (2nd floor, LKF Tower, 33 Wyndham St., Central; 852/2869-9986; dinner for two HK$2,000)—we’re most intrigued by ABC Kitchen (Shop CF7, Food Market, 1 Queen St., Sheung Wan; 852/9278-8227; lunch for two HK$350), an unlikely gourmet stall in a humble cooked-food center, run by two chefs from the erstwhile M at the Fringe. Tune out the high-decibel environs and instead focus on the outstanding Western fare—don’t leave without trying the sumptuous soft-shell crab with aioli, the melt-in-your-mouth suckling pig and the sticky toffee pudding.  DRINK Perched above the frenzy of Lan Kwai Fong, slick bar-and-restaurant combo Lily and Bloom (6th floor, LKF Tower, 33 Wyndham St., Central; 852/2810-6166; lily-bloom.com; dinner and drinks for two HK$900) lures night owls with its sultry, speakeasy vibe, modAmerican fare—think bone marrow with fennel and grapes—and consistently excellent, Prohibition-inspired cocktails; sit down at a wooden booth and order an Old Fashioned.

Fancy a Cohiba with your bourbon? Duck inside the hidden whiskey-and-cigar room, where orders are placed by rotary phone and delivered via a secret serving hatch.  STAY East (29 Taikoo Shing Rd., Island East; 852/3968-3968; east-hongkong.com; doubles from HK$1,400) brings a welcome dose of style to the Canary Wharf–esque Island East, with 345 chic, neutral-toned rooms decked out in natural materials like bamboo and marble. Step onto the outdoor deck of Sugar, the 32nd-floor bar, for killer cocktails and stunning views.  SEE While big-name overseas galleries are tackling the Asian market with slick Hong Kong outposts—among them London’s Ben Brown Fine Arts (301 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder St., Central; 852/2522-9600; benbrownfinearts. com), whose artists include Candida Höfer and Caio Fonseca—the home-grown, photographerrun Upper Station (22 Upper Station St., Sheung Wan; 852/3486-2474; theupperstation.com) is quietly carving a niche for itself as a nexus for the city’s thriving contemporary photography scene. Come for the well-curated exhibitions with an Asian focus, and the small but excellent photo-book library. »

At Langham Place, Beijing Capital Airport.

Wine dispensers at Modo, in Beijing.

East hotel, on Hong Kong Island's east side.

Le Sauvignon wine bar, in Phnom Penh.

The art-inspired Yi Hotel, in Beijing.

travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 39

special t+l picks Parisian design duo Magnan & Tse (Ground floor, 15 Aberdeen St., Central; 852/25448188; magnan-tse.com) trade in “precious apparel,” blurring the line between clothes and jewelry with a blend of understated cuts and glittering, hand-sewn embroidery, all displayed in their bright, minimalist boutique.  SHOP

Indonesia  EAT The

first of its kind in Jakarta, ninetynine (East Mall, Lower ground floor, Grand

Bali's Cocoon Beach Club.

At Five Elements Purl Ahimsa, in Bali.

Luang Prabang's relaxing Apsara Rive Droite.

The Upper Station, in Hong Kong.

Indonesia Shopping Town, Jln. M.H. Thamrin No. 1; 62-21/2358-1199; lunch for two Rp200,000) serves up tasty, no-nonsense fare in an upscale setting, using top-notch ingredients from its food-emporium neighbor: Think salads spilling with perky greens, croque monsieurs made with rustic-style bread, and authentic sup buntut and nasi goreng.  DRINK Locals and expats are flocking to the Domain Bar (Panin Tower B2, Senayan City, Jln. Asia Afrika Kav 19; 62-21/7278-1641; drinks for two RP220,000), a slick industrial space in one of the capital’s hippest enclaves. Quirky touches—wall plaques sprouting deer antlers; modish purple mood lighting over the long bar—keep the vibe fun, while a resident DJ and creative cocktails mean the dance floor stays packed long after midnight—try the Raspberry Bramble (fresh berries muddled with sweet lemon juice and gin) or the coffee-infused vodka “moccatini.”  EAT,  DRINK,  SHOP Pick up a colorful caftan, refresh with a swim, watch the sun drop behind the Indian Ocean—“lemongrasstini” in hand, then dine on a supper of barramundi confit—all within the grounds of Bali’s Cocoon Beach Club (Jln. Double Six, Blue Ocean Boulevard, Seminyak; 62-361/731-266; cocoonbeach.com; drinks for two Rp190,000; dinner for two Rp600,00). The 3,000-square-meter restobar along iconic 66 Beach has a pool fringed with daybeds and VIP cabanas, a kitchen helmed by former Sydney Rockpool and Icebergs chef Stephen Moore, and lounge and drinking areas where you can groove to sounds from DJ’s spun by around the globe.  STAY Immerse yourself in the healing practices and sacred arts of Bali at Five Elements Puri Ahimsa (Banjar Adat Baturning,

40 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Mambal, Abiansemal, Badung; 62-361/469-822; fivelements.org; doubles from US$490), a tranquil resort just 30 minutes from Ubud, with five serene and airy suites constructed from bamboo and nipa thatch with balconies jutting over the Ayung River. Indulge body and soul with treatments ranging from reflexology and chakra balancing to yoga and meditation; or you can even arrange a blessing with a Balinese high priest.

Laos

After cooking in Geneva, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Piedmonte-born Gerardo Dereviziis renounced urban life for sleepy Vientiane to open Aria Mixai (8 Rue Francois Nginn, Ban Mixai; 856-21/222-589; dinner for two US$36). Cotto tiles, alfresco tables and an open kitchen make for a relaxed space, while the menu draws on Dereviziis’s mixed southern and northern heritage, with dishes spanning the length and breadth of the boot: try the spaghetti with calamari, Puglia wild onions, chili and sliced bottarga, or the braised-deerand-forest-mushroom ravioli with red wine and mountain herbs. Choose from a list of more than 130 Italian wines, and don’t forget to finish up with the Turin-style chocolate mousse.  STAY A short stroll from the Mekong, on Vientiane’s most charming street, the Ansara Hotel (Quai Fa Ngum, Ban Vat Chan Tha, Hom 5, Muang Chanthabury; 856-21/213-514; ansarahotel.com; doubles from US$115) has just 14 rooms and suites, and offers the kind of personalized service only a small hotel can.

Rooms are decked out in handwoven textiles, dark wood and rattan furnishings, and each has a balcony overlooking a lush garden. Plan to stay in for dinner: the hotel’s restaurant, La Signature, tempts with scrumptious GallicLao creations such as pan-fried foie gras with curry. The Alila Luang Prabang (Unit 4, Ban Mano, Old Prison Rd.; 856-71/260-777; alilahotels. com; doubles from US$170), sister to the brand’s elegant 3 Nagas, marries colonial charm with contemporary lines in its 23 sumptuous suites, spread across a cluster of new and early 20thcentury structures—book into a corner pool suite for your own private viewing tower. After sightseeing, recharge with a treatment at Spa Alila or master the art of laab at the on-site Ka-toke Cooking School. Luang Prabang’s »  EAT

f r o m to p : co u rt e sy o f A l i l a Lua n g P r a b a n g ; co u rt e sy o f Co co o n B e ac h ; c o u r t e s y o f F i v e E l e m e n t s P u r i A h i m s a ; c o u r t e s y o f A p s a r a R i v e D r o i t e ; c o u r t e s y o f T h e U p p e r S tat i o n

The Alila Luang Prabang, in Laos.

Society Lounge's dining room, in Manila.

only lodging set on the right bank of the Nahm Khan River, the Apsara Rive Droite (Ban Phanluang; 856-71/254-252; theapsara.com; doubles from US$140) has dark timber floors, huge beds and generous soaking tubs in the nine airy rooms, each with private outdoor space overlooking mountains and temples.

A boat will ferry you to town in three minutes, but the swimming pool and delicious breakfasts served until 3 p.m. (house-made jam, omelettes, Bolaven plateau–grown coffee brewed in espresso pots) make it hard to leave.

Malaysia  EAT

At long last, Kuala Lumpur favorite

Cilantro (MiCasa All Suite Hotel, 368-B Jln. Tun The Straits Collection, in Penang.

Cupcakes in Kuala Lumpur,

by A Slice of Heaven.

Razak; 60-3/2179-8082; cilantrokl.com; dinner for two RM500) has returned after a two-year renovation. Muted earth tones and low lights set the stage for French-meets-Japanese cuisine: think old favorites like unagi with foie gras, supplemented with lighter, purer Japanese fare. Deliveries from Tokyo’s Tsukiji market guarantee stunning seafood—look for Hokkaido scallops in briny sea-urchin sauce and Japanese shellfish stew. Friday set lunches, at RM150 for four courses, are an exceptional deal. Sited in the capital’s toniest mall, A Slice of Heaven by Just Heavenly (Level 1, Lot P1-12-01, Gourmet Emporium, KL Pavillion; 60-3/2287-9866; dessert for two from RM5) bakes prêt-à-manger confections that are as lovely to look at as they are delicious: the Red Velvet, a rich yet light

crumbed cake frosted with whipped cream cheese is a best seller, while the Chocolate Durian—dark ganache-frosted génoise encasing fresh durian bound with cream—elevates the king of fruits to new heights. Even sweeter: a portion of sales go to help Malaysia’s Women’s Aid Organization.  DRINK Conveniently tucked between Georgetown, Penang’s unesco heritage district, and seaside Gurney Drive, That Little Wine Bar (54 Jln. Chow Thye; 60-4/226-8182; thatlittlewinebar.com; drinks for two RM60) is a welcome addition to a drinking scene dominated by backpacker dives. Run by a globe-trotting European couple, the bistro-bar retains its 1930’s row-house façade but goes urban-contemporary inside, with a small bar, velvet banquettes and a blackboard advertising daily specials. Come for the selection of reasonably priced tipples, but stay for nibbles like the delectable house-made duck pasties.  STAY Georgetown’s new buzz is embodied in The Straits Collection (47–55 Stewart Lane, 89–95 Armenian St.; 60-4/263-7299, 262-7299; straitscollection.com.my; doubles from RM400), two rows of once-crumbling double-story shop houses, reimagined as the Penang capital’s most stylish boutique lodgings. Nine houses in total each host two roomy suites, all graced with period details—timber doors; interior air wells—eclectic furnishings and semi-open baths with rain showers.

Philippines  EAT

The Philippine capital is going green at

Le Bistro Vert (Fraser Place, Valero St., Salcedo

Manila's Le Bistro Vert.

1-Altitude, a 63rd-floor bar in Singapore.

42 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Village, Makati; 63-2/403.1841; lebistro.ph; lunch for two P1,500), a bastion of sustainable eating disguised as a chic, airy café. On the menu are healthy, locally sourced dishes like Tagaytay vegetable lasagne and Palawan cashew-andherb-crusted sole. Sound too wholesome? Skip straight to dessert with a Valrhona chocolate sansrival. Over in Taguig, foodies can’t get enough of Chef’s Table (Ground floor, Unit 106, The Infinity Tower, 26th St., The Fort Global City, Taguig; 63-2/399-1888; chefstablemanila.com; dinner for two P3,000), the modern Filipino restaurant of TV chef Bruce Lim—don’t miss the steamed lapu lapu with savory ube.  DRINK Society Lounge, better known as S Lounge (Ground floor, Atrium Bldg., Makati »

f r o m to p : co u rt e sy o f S o c i e t y Lo u n g e ; co u rt e sy o f T h e St r a i ts Co l l e c t i o n ; c o u r t e s y o f j u s t H e a v e n ly ; c o u r t e s y o f L e B i s t r o V e r t ; c o u r t e s y o f 1 - r o c h e s t e r g r o u p

special t+l picks

Artwork at the Kaikai Kiki Gallery Taipei.

Wanderlust hotel, in Singapore.

The Mandarin Gallery, on Orchard Road.

Ave. corner of Paseo de Roxas, Makati; 63-2/4081852; dinner and drinks for two P2,000), delivers French chef Patrice Freuslon’s Asian-inflected creations—green-asparagus tempura with poached egg and Hollandaise; ginger crème brûlée—in a swish dining room, but the real draw here is the bar-lounge, where Manila’s beautiful set let their hair down from 11 p.m.

On Fridays, don’t miss DJ Elian Habayeb’s legendary Groove Sanctuary nights.  STAY Esconced in leafy Salcedo Village, the Picasso Boutique Serviced Residences (119 L.P. Leviste St., Salcedo Village, Makati; 63-2/8284774; picassomakati.com; doubles from P8,560) stands out for its chic, spacious rooms—the smallest, the Malaga Studio, starts at 45 square meters—as well as its in-house contemporary art gallery showing exhibitions curated by Art Cabinet Philippines.  SHOP The capital’s most creative denizens congregate at The Collective (7274 Malugay St., San Antonio Village, Makati), a former garage turned independent arts-and-design hub: check out Vinyl on Vinyl for old-school records, Sundae for flirty dresses and galoshes with bold graphic prints, Crazy Eddie’s Shirts, Slacks & Wonder Emporium for hip menswear (think skinny ties and vintage specs), Ritual for affordable gourmet goodies with an earth-friendly twist, and, after-hours, B-Side, for funky beats and an au courant crowd.

Singapore

Looking more like a punk rocker than the accomplished chef she is, Apasara Navarojanasakul transforms Thai standards with great finesse at Soht & Baay (#04-11 Ion Orchard, 2 Orchard Turn; 65/6509-6058; dinner for two S$120). Highlights include a pomelo salad lashed with palm sugar syrup, creamy otak, and coffee-scented sticky rice and mango.

The Disgruntled Chef (26B Dempsey Rd.; 65/6476-5305; dinner for two S$130) is Daniel Sia’s debut turn as chef-owner. Here the conceit is tapas-style dining, though this alone doesn’t explain the taste rush you get from garlic bread with baked bone marrow, or a slow-cooked veal cheek served with Yorkshire pudding.  DRINK In Singapore, the word du jour is “view,” which explains the flurry of new rooftop bars. Framed by greenery and a vertiginous infinity pool, Ku Dé Ta (Skypark at Marina Bay  EAT

At the Disgruntled Chef, in Singapore.

That Little Wine Bar, in Georgetown, Penang.

44 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Sands North Tower, 1 Bayfront Ave.; 65/6688-7688; kudeta.com.sg) offers a stunning panorama of Singapore’s skyscrapers from its 57th-floor perch. Across the bay, 1-Altitude (One Raffles Place; 65/6438-0410; 1-altitude.com) claims the title of the world’s tallest alfresco bar—it’s on the 63rd floor—as it reels in tipplers with Indian and Japanese malt whiskies.  STAY While the towering Marina Bay Sands (1 Bayfront Ave.; 65/6688-8888; marinabaysands. com; doubles from S$359) rolls out a brashly overloaded menu of designer shops, glitzy casino and celebrity chefs like Guy Savoy and Tetsuya, those preferring a quieter and more intimate setting should hightail it to the elegant Fullerton Bay Hotel (80 Collyer Quay; 65/63338388; fullertonbayhotel.com; doubles from S$480), where every room boasts perfect views of the bay and city. Over in Little India, Wanderlust (2 Dickson Rd.; 65/6396-3322; wanderlusthotel. com; doubles from S$180) tempts with a mix of glam backpacker grunge and quirky design.  SHOP It’s easy to lose an entire afternoon wandering concept store ALT (#01-01 The Heeren, 260 Orchard Rd.; 65/6732-6677; altstyle.com.sg). On offer is a dizzying variety of grooming products, pet accessories and regional and international labels like Thai cosmetic range BSC Panadda and Shanghainese fashionista favorite Broadcast. Across the road, the four-story Mandarin Gallery (333a Orchard Rd.; 65/6831-6363; mandaringallery.com.sg) boasts a savvy mix of fashion, Japanese homeware and eateries headlined by the likes of Just Cavalli, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Bathing Ape, Jones the Grocer, Vertu and Henry Cotton’s.

Taiwan

 EAT Taipei teppanyaki guru Danny Teng— billed by locals as the “godfather of steak”—has enlisted an A-list team of interior designers, dessert masters and sommeliers for his latest venture, Danny & Company (No. 33, Lane 52, Siwei Rd.; 886-2/2705-9911; dannyandcompany. com; lunch for two NT$2,000). Try the prime dry-aged rib-eye cap steak and sous vide lamb rack, paired with wine from a 170-label collection. Taipei’s gourmands are aflutter with the arrival of L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon (5th floor, Bellavita, 28 Songren Rd.; 886-2/8729-2628; joel-robuchon.net; tasting menus from NT$2,680), the newest outpost of culinary titan Joël »

f r o m to p : c o u r t e s y o f K a i k a i K i k i G a l l e r y ; c o u r t e s y o f Wa n d e r l u s t ; c o u r t e s y o f m a n d a r i n G a l l e r y ; c o u r t e s y o f T h e D i s g r u n t l e d C h e f ; c o u r t e s y o f T h at L i t t l e W i n e B a r

special t+l picks

special t+l picks 0328; taipei.gallery-kaikaikiki.com), his second outpost in the world (the first is in Tokyo).

On show in the light-filled, 390-square-meter space are exhibitions of whimsical Japanese contemporary art, from sculptures and installations to paintings. In Yilan County, Lanyang Museum (26144 No. 750, Qingyun Rd., Sec. 3, Toucheng; 886-3/977-9700; lym.gov. tw; admission NT$100) dispels the notion that Asia’s provincial museums are fusty affairs.

Exhibitions delve into local ecology, geography and tribal cultures, but most striking is the architecture: the structure’s slanting glass-androck façade cuts a dramatic contrast against the lush surrounding marshlands.

Phulay Bay, in Krabi, Thailand.

A design by Taiwan brand Jia Inc.

The Palais de Chine, in Taipei.

A room at Le Meridien Taipei.

At the Fullerton Bay Hotel, in Singapore.

Lanyang Museum, in Yilan County, Taiwan.

Robuchon’s fine-dining empire, with executive chef Yosuke Suga delivering his refined French classics such as raw oysters dressed with caviar, and crispy langoustine papillote.  STAY The 286-room Palais de Chine (No. 3, Sect. 1, Chengde Rd.; 886-2/2181-9999; palaisdechinehotel.com; doubles from NT$11,000) makes a splashy debut on Taipei’s hotel scene with plush neoclassical styling—ornate linen, mirrored ceilings, gleaming chandeliers—and four swanky dining outlets, including superb Cantonese restaurant Le Palais. The newly minted Le Méridien Taipei (38 Songren Rd.; 886-2/6622-8000; lemeridien.com/taipei; doubles from NT$10,300) stands out from Xinyi district’s crowd of business hotels with its artsoriented approach—more than 500 artworks are scattered throughout, while key cards designed by Taiwanese artist Michael Lin open the doors of the 160 guestrooms.  SHOP For chic designer dinnerware, head to the first dedicated boutique of renowned home-grown brand Jia Inc. (5th floor, Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Xinyi New Life Square A9, 9 Songshou Rd.; 886-2/2725-2579; jia-inc.com), whose collections meld contemporary aesthetics with Chinese sensibilities: think three-legged bronze casseroles, gourd-shaped saucers and calligraphy-inspired cutlery.  SEE Is Taiwan’s art scene 10 years ahead of Japan’s? Takashi Murakami thinks so, as evidenced by the Kaikai Kiki Gallery Taipei (1st floor, Taiwan Development Financial Bldg., 2 Chongqing South Rd., Sec. 1; 886-2/2382-

46 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

 EAT It’s been a strong year for Thai cuisine in the capital. In addition to Bangkok’s two most dazzling fine-dining openings, both in five-star hotels—David Thompson’s Nahm (27 South Sathorn Rd.; 66-2/625-3388; metropolitan. bangkok.como.bz; dinner for two Bt3,000) at the Metropolitan Bangkok; Henrik Yde-Andersen’s Sra Bua by Kiin Kiin (991/9 Rama 1 Rd.; 662/162-9000; kempinskibangkok.com; dinner for two Bt6,000) at the new Siam Kempinski—two low-key Thong Lo debuts have citizens’ taste buds zinging. Soul Food Mahanakorn (56/10 Sukhumvit Soi 55 (Thong Lo); 66-2/714-7708; soulfoodmahanakorn.com; dinner and drinks for two Bt1,200), by American food journalist Jarett Wrisley, rolls out beautifully interpreted takes on regional dishes—perfectly crisp southernstyle samosas; smoky-sour roast-duck laab— while Phuket Town (160/8 Soi 6, Sukhumvit Soi 55 (Thong Lo); 66-2/714-9402; dinner for two Bt800) specializes in family-style southern fare, like khanom jeen (fermented rice noodles) with coconut crabmeat curry, and addictively hot nahm prik (chili-paste dip with condiments).  DRINK Just off Sukhumvit, gastro-bar Hyde & Seek (65/1 Athenee Residence, Soi Ruamrudee, Wireless Rd.; 66-2/1685-1523; hydeandseek. com; drinks for two Bt600) delivers a winning combination of gourmet comfort food—gingerale-fried calamari; truffle mac’n’cheese—and top-notch drinks. The cocktail list changes monthly, but recent favorites include the Modern Mad Men, with pear-and-rosemaryinfused bourbon, and the Siam Sunrays, a vodka-based mix with kaffir lime. »

f r o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f r i t z - c a r lt o n ; c o u r t e s y o f J i a I n c . ; c o u r t e s y o f Pa l a i s d e C h i n e ; c o u r t e s y o f L e M e r i d i e n Ta i p e i ; c o u r t e s y o f F u l l e r t o n B ay H o t e l ; c o u r t e s y o f L a n ya n g M u s e u m

Thailand

Madame Hien, in Hanoi.

The Wishing Tree Resort, in Thailand.

The Ana Mandara, in Hue, Vietnam.

 STAY In Bangkok, the 24-story S31 Hotel (545 Sukhumvit 31; 66-2/260-1111; s31hotel. com; doubles from Bt2,750) stands out for its whimsical exterior, by Thai architect Dr. Sumet Jumsai: the colorful, nest-like rooftop is impossible to miss, while inside, the 90 rooms have spacious 2.5-meter beds and floor-toceiling windows. Over in Krabi, Phulay Bay (111 Moo 3 Nongthalay, Muang: 66-7/562-8111; phulaybay.com; villas from Bt19,550) is the first ever Ritz-Carlton Reserve. The 49-villa, Lek Bunnag–designed sanctuary offers views of teakwood pavilions, landscaped greenery and the karst-studded Andaman Sea at every turn.

On the banks of Khon Kaen’s Chi River, the charming Wishing Tree Resort (114/1 Moo 5, Thapra; 66-43/209-333; wishingtreeresort.com; doubles from Bt2,500) is the latest addition to Isaan’s burgeoning boutique-hotel scene; all 48 rooms have private verandas and walls draped with checkered pha khao ma textiles.  SHOP Sartorially inclined gentlemen will love the new Thai menswear label 4x4 Man

by S’Fare (4th floor, Central Chidlom, Ploenchit Rd.; 63-2/7937900), which specializes in contemporary tailored shirts, vests, trousers and jackets, all delivered in breathable cotton that is perfect for Southeast Asia.

Look out for its first boutique, set to open in CentralWorld early in the new year.

Vietnam

Men's fashion by Thai label 4x4 by S'Fare.

Nahm prik at Soul Food Mahanakorn, in Bangkok.

 EAT Didier Corlou, Vietnam’s most celebrated chef, delves into the country’s legendary street-food traditions at his latest venture in the capital, Madame Hien (15 Chan Cam; 84-4/3938-1588; verticale-hanoi.com; dinner for two 600,000 dong), where dishes like banana-flower salad, pho and lemongrass-duck foie gras are served in a stunning, century-old Hanoian villa. In Saigon’s District 1, diners tuck into cumin-grilled lamb chops and green-beanand-goat’s-cheese pasta at Flow (88 Ho Tung Mau; 84-8/3915-3691; flowsaigon.com; dinner for two VND900,000), a shophouse that’s been transformed into a contemporary brasserie and hung with modern art. The latest addition to An Phu’s culinary awakening is the riverfront

48 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Blu Bar & Grill (53 Vo Truong Toan; 84-8/37444111; dinner for two VND800,000); the stylish, resort-like spot serves up treats like Sriracha garlic chicken wings, lamb-and-spinach curry and killer Bloody Marys.  DRINK For a completely fresh perspective, head to The Rooftop Hanoi (83B Ly Thuong Kiet St.; 84-4/3946-1901; drinks for two VND200,000), on the 19th floor of Pacific Place Tower. Sure, the views from the alfresco veranda are intoxicating, but the burgundyand-gold interior, with its brocade couches and glass-beaded tables, is one of the city’s most sophisticated spots to clink glasses. In Saigon, the Franco-Japanese Ala Mezon (10 Chu Manh Trinh; 84-8/6291-0447; drinks for two VND170,000) serves inventive cocktails based on Japanese ingredients—awamori martinis; So Flavor Tea with green-tea liqueur—in a mix of kitschy spaces: a “girls’ room” is all pink, while a “boys’ room” is equipped with bean bags and a Wii. All too much? Escape to the fourth-floor rooftop terrace and unwind on a daybed.  STAY Travelers to the former Imperial capital of Hue can rest like royalty at the new five-star beach villa Ana Mandara (Thuan An Town; 848/6291-3030; hotelcollectionindochine.com; doubles from US$150), whose 78 rooms, with hardwood floors and exposed beam roofs, overlook rice paddies and the South China Sea; Hue’s old citadel is a 20-minute drive. Further along the coast, guests at the 30-story Sheraton Nha Trang Hotel (26-28 Tran Phu St.; 84-58/3880000; starwoodhotels.com; doubles from US$125) spend days lounging on the 7-kilometer stretch of sand before retiring to rooms blessed with thick white duvets, beige settees and colorful Vietnamese art.  SHOP Hanoi’s chicest fashion designer, Ha Troung (278 Duong Nghi Tam Rd.; 84-4/37100675; hatruong.com), has opened an eponymous shop in West Lake, where you’ll find her sexyyet-classic range of tailored, long-sleeved mini-dresses, embroidered tunics and widelegged pants. In Saigon, source eco-chic, highdesign accessories—beaded leather handbags; bamboo-and-jute stationery—by a collection of designers at Villa Anupa (17/27 Le Thanh Ton; 84-8/3825-7307; anupa.net). ✚

f r o m to p : co u rt e sy o f M a da m e H i e n ; co u rt e sy o f t h e u n i q u e co l l e c t i o n ; c o u r t e s y o f A n a M a n da r a H u e ; c o u r t e s y o f 4 x 4 b y s ' fa r e ; c o u r t e s y o f S o u l F o o d M a h a n a ko r n

special t+l picks

Š Singapore Tourism Board

In this exclusive feature, T+L drinks in the new, often innovative sights currently being offered up in the ever-evolving and increasingly creative Singapore

architectural genius,” wrote Tristan Rayner for Australian newspaper The Northern Rivers Echo in October. “Everything about the Sands is worth ogling, and no matter how many times you rub your eyes, it’s real.” Chiefly responsible for redefining the local skyline, this eye-boggling structural masterpiece stands proud and peerless in the city’s heart.

Travel + Leisure’s Mark Orwoll saw the 57th-story open-air oasis, Sands SkyPark® – at 12,400sqm (the size of three football fields), the world’s largest public cantilevered platform – as its “piece de resistance.” Suspended 200m in the air – higher than the Eiffel Tower – this crowning glory greets visitors with its verdant vision of sculptured gardens.

Located at the highest point of Sands SkyPark, The Sky on 57, helmed by local celebrity chef, Justin Quek, offers a world-class dining experience with magnificent skyline views of Singapore. And recently voted one of the top ten global hotspots

by The New York Times, the expansive KU DE TA offers three seperate yet integrated outlets: a 230-seat restaurant, a circular, alfresco Sky Bar, and a Club Lounge.

Up here, the dizzying 360-degree city views – from the public observation deck that can host hundreds – are unforgettable. As

Clockwise from left: Marshall Ward; © Marina Bay Sands® (2).

ompact Singapore is far more manageable than most large cities yet the island packs in plenty of views. Consider that Singapore’s state-of-the-art skyline is currently the fourth most scenic in the world – according to international real-estate authority Emporis GmbH, which annually ranks cities for visual impact.

Singapore’s spectacular new horizons are courtesy of numerous prominent architectural wonders recently built into its landscape. While Singapore’s skyscraping scenery symbolizes economic smarts, the ever-evolving horizon also represents monumental change.

The transformation runs deeper than aesthetics. Even those acquainted with the island may be surprised at the difference found on street level. Singapore’s creative scenes – as well as its actual scenery – are flourishing. Offering more sights, sounds, tastes, cultures, attractions and all-round diversity than ever, today’s Singapore is precisely what you make of it.

“Looming from the Singapore skyline as a shimmering mirage, the Marina Bay Sands is an astonishing monument to

Clockwise from left: © Marina Bay Sands® (3); © Wong Hock Weng John | Dreamstime.com

this page, clockwise from top: the sky bar at ku de ta; museum at mbs; the crystal pavilion t MBS; the heLix bridge. opposite page, clockwise from top: spiral sculptures set sail; the pool at the mbs; the painted circles at the lobby of the MBS.

is the experience of draping over the vertiginous edge of Sands SkyPark’s 150m infinity-edge swimming pool to witness the city hustling below. There’s nothing like swimming at the top of the world.

Sitting at the waterfront beside MBS is its Museum.

As visually awe-inspiring as the triple-towers albeit on a smaller scale, this intricately designed building traces the contours of a lotus plant. Its innovative, retractable roof channels rainwater through the building’s central atrium as a waterfall. After dark, the aqua springs into colorful life via variously hued lasers shooting through the water. This exceptional edifice is set to host major international exhibitions from the world’s most renowned collections in its 5,574sqm of gallery space.

Another exciting addition at MBS would be their two glassand-steel Crystal Pavilions, which appear to float on Marina Bay. One of the pavilions will soon offer luxury fashion fans Louis Vuitton’s flagship boutique – augmenting myriad highend stores at The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands®.

The other will host two international A-list nightspots.

Celebrated in New York, Miami and London, Pangaea is set

to make its Asian debut on the first level. Meanwhile, on the pavilion’s top two levels Avalon “ultra-lounge” will offer revelers superb Marina Bay views to go with their expertly mixed cocktails.

V

isitors to MBS are treated to a visual feast of art, courtesy of the dedicated ‘art path’ of large-scale installations by internationally renowned artists. According to MBS’ architect, Moshe Safdie, who handpicked each piece for suitability, “each of the works resonates in a particular way with the architecture” via thoughtful usage of environmental elements, such as water, wind or light.

Elsewhere, a leisurely stroll usually reveals that infrastructure strives for the same technical innovation and aesthetic appeal as Singapore’s architecture. A great example is the Helix Bridge. This state-of-the-art connection caters to the pedestrian – although its appearance is anything but!

At 280m, Singapore’s longest overpass is a showcase for the pioneering engineering that also made it the first curved bridge in the world. This innovative structure also doubles as a public gallery for children’s art. Bay views and city

to span a quay (Keppel Harbor). Named after engineer Captain Charles Edward Faber, Mount Faber is one of the country’s oldest parks. Its summit boasts uninterrupted views over the city and southern islands beyond. Outdoor activities, like bird-watching and nature trails, can be pursued here. The Jewel Box is a culinary gem designed so diners can survey the horizon while savoring their food.

However, panoramas don’t always require scaling a mountain. In the case of The Fullerton Bay Hotel, head for Marina Bay instead. The quay’s first waterfront hotel commissioned the sought-after styling of design guru Andre Fu, who contrasts heritage with modernity via nautical maps

“Looming from the Singapore skyline as a shimmering mirage, the Marina Bay Sands is an astonishing monument to architectural genius…Everything about the Sands is worth ogling, and no matter how many times you rub your eyes, it’s real.”

Tristan Rayner, The Northern Rivers Echo (Australia), October 11, 2010

Clockwise from left: © The Fullerton Bay Hotel; © Singapore Tourism Board; © 1-Altitude.

panoramas are for the taking from its five strategically plotted observation platforms.

So far so long, but to the west is Singapore’s highest pedestrian bridge – the Henderson Waves. Unfurling among the treetops, this 274m-long steel-and-timber treetop snake links Mount Faber Park to Telok Blangah Hill Park as part of a two-year-old nature conservation trail called the Southern Ridges. The bridge’s highest point at 77.88m above sea level also offers great photographic moments. In addition to grounded bridges, the Jewel Cable Car Ride provides a vertiginous aerial link, connecting Mount Faber to Sentosa Island – and in 1974 became the world’s first aerial ropeway system

Clockwise from left: Singapore Tourism Board; Choo Yut Shing; © 2010 Resorts World ™ at Sentosa (3).

and contemporary art throughout the hotel’s public areas. Up top, the stylish rooftop bar Lantern is a great trendy spot to enjoy a glass of fine wine and gourmet snacks complemented by dreamy bay views.

For an alternative, try heading to the aptly named 1-Altitude Gallery & Bar, which looms over the city from 282m above sea level. Here, you can unwind with a cocktail while ships pass in the night in the harbor below. Last – but definitely not least – in terms of recommended viewpoints is the verified world-recordbreaker that is the 165m Singapore Flyer – the world’s tallest observation wheel. The height of a 42-story building and some 30m higher than the London Eye, its half-hour rides flaunt 360degree panoramas of numerous landmarks (from Marina Bay to the Singapore River, taking in Raffles Place, Merlion Park, Empress Place and the Padang).

Resorts World™ Sentosa (RWS) is another visually stunning complex – and home of Southeast Asia’s only Universal Studios®, as well as different uniquely themed hotels including the Hard Rock Hotel Singapore, Festive Hotel and Hotel Michael. A virtual gallery for installation art, pieces decorating the vicinity include Adam and Eve by

this page, clockwise from below: the singapore flyer; the RWS chihuly gallery; hotel michael at rws; the mosaic shower at hotel michael, a room at festive hotel rws. opposite page, clockwise from top: the lobby at the fullerton bay hotel; henderson waves; the view from 1-altitude bar.

Columbian artist Fernando Botero and, notably, Space Elephant – sculpted from one of legendary absurdist Salvador Dali’s most famous paintings, The Temptation of St Anthony (1946).

Within the FestiveWalk retail esplanade at RWS is the world’s first (and only) Michael Graves Gallery.

Named after this complex’s renowned American architect, the gallery presents products designed exclusively by the man himself, including original drawings, fine art posters, books, stationery, kitchen and home-ware – even fashion lines.

Hotel Michael also offers rooms featuring his trademark furniture and circular, blue mosaic showers.

Back on the mainland, Singapore’s diversity expresses itself via a new breed of niche hotels. Having established two such offerings, lawyer-turned-hotelier Loh Lik Peng characterizes the boutique spirit. After installing his ultramodern New Majestic Hotel in the heart of Chinatown, the entrepreneur transformed a former school in Little India into the glitzy 29-room Wanderlust Hotel.

The latter is so design-driven it features input from no less than four creative agencies. So, exactly what’s fuelling Peng’s

clockwise from top left: the club; a room at wanderlust; the whimsical tree room at wanderlust; THE club hotel LOBBY; quincy hotel; the ‘rising forest art installation’ AT MBS by chongbin zheng.

Essentials

The Fullerton Bay Hotel: 80 Collyer Quay, Singapore 049178; www.fullertonbayhotel.com.

1-Altitude: OUB Centre, 1 Raffles Place, Singapore, www.1-altitude.com.

The Singapore Flyer: 30 Raffles Avenue, Singapore 039803, www.singaporeflyer.com.

Marina Bay Sands®: 10 Bayfront Avenue, Singapore 018956, www.marinabaysands.com.

Resorts World™ Sentosa: 39 Artillery Avenue, Sentosa, Singapore 099958, www.rwsentosa.com.

New Majestic Hotel: 31–37 Bukit Pasoh Road, www.newmajestichotel.com.

Wanderlust Hotel: 2 Dickson Road, www.wanderlusthotel.com.

The Club Hotel: 28 Ann Siang Road, www.theclub.com.sg.

Quincy Hotel: 22 Mount Elizabeth, Singapore 228517, www.quincy.com.sg.

land via innovation and inspiration – the transformative boutique concept almost seems to symbolize the spirit of Singapore itself.

In fact, to experience the bold, brave new Singapore is to really be part of it.

© Quincy Hotel; © Marina Bay Sands®.

The Jewel Box: 109 Mount Faber Road, Singapore 099203. www.mountfaber.com.sg

Clockwise from top left: © The Club; © The Wanderlust (2); © The Club;

creative drive? “I’ve always liked beautiful and well designed things,” he says, simply. “I like furniture especially and you know that fits perfectly with hotels.”

While Peng’s accommodations spruce up their surroundings, The Club Hotel is located in the historically rich conservation area of Club Street and Ann Siang Hill. Ministry of Design Director Colin Seah thus made cheeky references to Singapore’s colonial past in the hotel’s interior, “such as a larger-than-life statue of Raffles with his head in the clouds, as well as through furniture and artifacts.”

When it comes to outstanding exteriors, however, all visitors should check out the 108-room Quincy Hotel on Orchard Road, framed in dark aluminum and tempered glass. The distinctive amalgam of materials makes the building almost leap out and meet you head-on. Behind the façade, a collection of individual spaces awaits, with each offering a different experience, encompassing elements drawn from architecture, interior design, landscape, project management and even graphic design.

In these ways – and the way it has historically and continuously updated and modernized the lay of the local

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c l o c kw i s e f r o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f H o t e l K a n r a K y o t o ; c o u r t e s y o f CA P ITOL H OTEL TO K Y U ; c o u r t e s y o f S t . R e g i s O s a k a

sleek, modern and chic in JAPAN

Three stunning new hotels on Honshu are giving guests plenty of reason to stay in In the former imperial capital, the Hotel Kanra Kyoto (Karasuma-takatsuji, Higashi-iru Shimogyo-ku; 81-75/344-3815; hotelkanra. jp; doubles from ¥19,500) takes its cues from history, with just 29 beautifully designed rooms inspired by the city’s traditional wooden machiya, or townhouses. Rising above Osaka’s chichi Midosuji district, the St. Regis Osaka (3-6-12 Honmachi, Chuo-ku Osaka; 81-6/6258-3333; starwoodhotels.com; doubles from ¥69,000) delivers the brand’s trademark epicurean touches—24-hour butler service; a dedicated pillow menu—in its flagship Japan property, with 160 sybaritic rooms and suites. Over in the capital, the Capitol Hotel Tokyu (2-10-3, Nagata-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; 81-3/3503-0109; capitolhoteltokyu.com; doubles from ¥65,000) played host to the Beatles and Michael Jackson as a Hilton; now, it’s been rebuilt and reimagined by star architect Kengo Kuma, with 251 modern Japanese guest rooms featuring sliding Shoji screens and original artworks by the likes of Toko Shinoda.—l a r a day

The St. Regis Osaka, in fashionable Midosuji. Top: A suite at the Hotel Kanra Kyoto. Right: The lounge at Kengo Kuma’s Capitol Hotel Tokyu.

travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 55

newsflash eat

A TASTE OF MANHATTAN IN BANGKOK

sweet treats Clockwise from top: Dean & Deluca, in Bangkok; inside the shop; Aristocake cupcakes.

style

global glamour

beauty

SKINCARE, STREET-STYLE We love Aussie skincare brand Aesop’s new East to West collection: seven chic, compact travel kits, each inspired by a city street that houses one of the brand’s stores around the world. Contents cater to different needs: London’s Westbourne Grove tackles challenging climates—a rich hand balm moisturizes with mandarin rind, rosemary leaf and cedarwood atlas—while Hong Kong’s Lyndhurst Terrace targets men “from Kowloon to Canberra” and includes a balancing toner made from green-tea extracts.

The sleek black microfiber containers are made to last, but don’t throw out the packaging: every label is a mini city guide, with up-to-the-minute travel tips. aesop.net.au; travel kits from S$83.

A esop’s new travel kits are inspired by streets such as Flinders Lane, in Melbourne.

A Balenciaga ensemble designed in 1967.

56 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Here, three fashion exhibits with far-flung inspirations.

• At New York’s Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, “Balenciaga: Spanish Master” (spanishinstitute.org; through Feb. 19) shows the late Basque couturier’s avant-garde pieces, including gowns worn by Spanish nobility.

• This season, Louis Vuitton celebrates Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Indian artist Rajeev Sethi designed the company’s window displays worldwide using illuminated trunks and clothes inspired by Indian motifs.

•“Yves Saint Laurent and Morocco” spotlights the French designer’s African–style creations— such as bougainvillea-embossed caftans—at the Jardin Majorelle (jardinmajorelle.com; through March 18) in Marrakesh.—jim shi

c l o c kw i s e f r o m t o p r i gh t : c o u r t e s y o f D e a n & D e L u c a ( 3 ) ; C o u r t e s y o f B a l e n c i a g a A r c h i v e s ; C o u r t e s y o f a e s o p

Gourmet New York food shop Dean & DeLuca has finally hit the region, with its first Southeast Asian outpost in Bangkok.

Sited in MahaNakhon Pavilion—set to be the city’s tallest building on completion in 2014— the airy shop–café has high ceilings, marbletop counters, a black-and-white color palette and chalkboard menus touting signature offerings: try the goat’s-cheese-and-avocado sandwiches and New York–style bagels.

Also look out for only-in-Thailand specials such as mango-and-sticky-rice shakes and Aristocakes—cupcakes with genteel-sounding names like Countess Chocolate, destined to appeal to the capital’s hi-so set. MahaNakhon Pavilion, 92 Naratiwat-Rachanakarin Rd., Silom; 66-2/234-1434; deandeluca.com; lunch for two Bt700.—l i a ng x i ny i

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Hidden Hong Kong Hong Kong’s freshest oysters. Or if you’re seeking a glimpse of authentic culture, Margarita Lee Chang in room service suggests the Luk Keng Villages, New ­Territories. “The old ladies living there still often wear the traditional Hakka costume,” she says. “It is a singularly beautiful place.” ­peninsula.com; doubles from HK$4,185.— j e n n i f e r c h e n

A Chinese theater depicted by illustrator Lorette Roberts in Our Hong Kong.

Hotel

Dom Pérignon's 2002 Andy Warhol bottles.

drink

THE FINE ART OF CHAMPAGNE Andy Warhol—a fixture at New York’s fabled Studio 54—was as famous for his bon vivant lifestyle as his iconic takes on pop culture, from Heinz ketchup bottles to Marilyn Monroe. Now, in a witty tribute to the American artist’s life and work, French vintage champagne brand Dom Pérignon has released a trio of limited-edition 2002 Andy Warhol bottles, with vivid shields in red, yellow and blue, containing Dom Pérignon’s prized 2002 cuvée, rich with vibrant notes of almond and preserved lemon. Now that’s reason to celebrate. domperignon.com; HK$1,038.—l . d

pop archipelago A new chain of Indonesian hotels is out to prove that style doesn’t mean blowing the budget. Pop! Harris Hotels has made its debut in Bali with the Pop! Harris Hotel Teuku Umar Denpasar: 147 cheerfully appointed rooms have bold color accents—tangerine, lime, fuschia—king-size beds and compact shower pods designed with the environment in mind (water heaters run using solar power). What’s more, unlike budget airline carriers, rates here are inclusive of all amenities, from towels and air-conditioning to Wi-Fi and cable TV. Hungry for more?

There’s even free nasi jinggo (spicy chicken with rice).

Look out for a total of eight properties opening in the next 18 months, in Bali, Jakarta, Surabaya, Manado and Yogyakarta. Jln. Teuku Umar No. 74 Denpasar; 62-361/258025; popharris.com; doubles from Rp188,000.

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The eye-popping Pop! Harris hotel, in Bali.

c l o c kw i s e f r o m t o p r i gh t : c o u r t e s y o f D o m P É r i g n o n ; c o u r t e s y o f P o p ! H a r r i s H o t e l T e u k u U m a r D e n p a s a r ; ILLUSTRATION B Y L o r e t t e R o b e r t s

This month, the ­Peninsula Hong Kong marks its 82nd anniversary with Our Hong Kong (free for guests), an insider’s guide to the city with tips from staffers on the best places to eat, shop and explore. Turn the pages to discover under-the-radar spots including Deep Bay’s Lau Fau Shan Village, where restaurant hostess Kiki Wing Ki Tsang claims you’ll find

on the radar

countdown 2011

c l o c kw i s e f r o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f M a r i n a B ay S a n d s ; l e i s u r e g r o u p ; © Ta o l m o r / D r e a m s t i m e . c o m

courtesy of sentosa

Below, our pick of spots to see in the New Year. By Helen Dalley

happy new year Clockwise from top: High above the city at Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands; revelers at the Siloso Beach Party; at CentralWorld, in Bangkok.

• BANGKOK Join a high-energy crowd of revelers outside the reopened CentralWorld (999/9 Rama 1 Rd.; 662/2645555; centralworld.co.th; admission free) and watch the clock tick against a backdrop of live music and dazzling light shows. At Sanam Luang (Na Phra Lan Rd.; admission free), a square outside the Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaew, soak in the sounds of traditional Thai folk music and watch the fireworks over the Chao Phraya River.

• HONG KONG Tsim Sha Tsui’s waterfront promenade (Avenue of Stars; free) is the best spot to admire the midnight pyrotechnics released from Hong Kong Island’s tallest building, the 415-meter IFC Two, as well as nine other skyscrapers. Prefer to beat the crowds? Hop aboard one of Saffron Cruises’ old teak junks (852/2857-1311; saffron-cruises.com; tickets from HK$550) for a trip around Victoria Harbour.

• SINGAPORE The city-state’s most extravagant new stay, the Marina Bay Sands (10 Bayfront Ave; 65/6688-8868; marinabaysands.com; New Year’s Eve packages for two from S$1,050) boasts a 200-meter-high viewing deck—the perfect spot to take in the festivities below. Ready for an outdoor dance party? Head straight to Sentosa’s Siloso Beach Party (Siloso Beach; 65/6736-8672; sentosa.com.sg; tickets from S$39) for live DJ’s, a foam pool, stilt walkers and fire eaters.

insider

destinations trends restaurants + more

EUROPE’S STYLISH SMALL HOTELS.

these top newcomers show bigger isn’t necessarily better. by shane mitchell

T

he English call them boltholes: intimate, personalized spaces to escape the madding crowd, filled with thought-­ provoking art and stylish accessories. A place to put your feet up and feel at home, plan the next foray to galleries and greenswards, or merely contemplate the approach of cocktail hour. Europeans, of course, have always had a way with chic, smallscale hotels. Here are 10 of the top newcomers, all with fewer than 15 rooms­—and many under €180 a night.

A l i o n a A d r i a n o va

belgium

At London’s 40 Winks, a converted 18th-century town house in fashionable Shoreditch.

The two attached town houses that make up Tenbosch House (131 Rue ­Washington, Brussels; 32-2/888-9090; tenboschhouse.com; doubles from €220) contain seven uncluttered suites in the heart of Brussels’s of-the-moment Ixelles neighborhood. The hotel showcases contemporary furnishings—such as Tom » travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 63

insider check-in

INN CROWD Clockwise

from below: A room at the Hôtel Ville d’Hiver, on France’s southwest coast; the hotel’s exterior; an antique dresser at London’s 40 Winks, stacked with flea-market finds.

watercolors and journals for a stay at the Boathouse at Knotts End (Watermillock, Ullswater; 44-20/7307-2797; chicretreats.com; doubles from £287), a 19th-century stone cottage on the water’s edge in scenic Cumbria. It has slate-and-oak interiors, with one cozy bedroom, a lounge with a leather sofa, and a kitchen for preparing tea and biscuits. In the slip below, a boat awaits for rowing on the private lake.

Dixon’s copper bubble lamps—and a rotating collection of art curated by top local galleries.

England

Near hip Shoreditch, 40 Winks (109 Mile End Rd., Stepney Green, London; 4420/7790-0259; 40winks.org; doubles from £125) is a darling of the theater and fashion crowd, including actress Kristin Scott Thomas; Dolce & Gabbana often uses the 18th-century town house turned design studio as a set for photo shoots. Above the public salons and a postagestamp garden, the two bedrooms are filled with vintage discoveries from ­Portobello Road and Paris’s Clignancourt market.

The Lake District has always been inspiration for painters and poets, so pack

GREAT VALUE The Hôtel Ville d’Hiver (20 Ave. Victor Hugo, Arcachon; 33-5/56-66-10-36; hotelville dhiver.com; doubles from €173), in a quiet seaside town southwest of Bordeaux, takes liquid refreshment seriously. This former bottling plant has a classic bistro with an extensive wine list from the region’s best vineyards—including 30 organic vintages. The 12 guest rooms are furnished with Napoleon-era antiques and modern steel-and-bamboo campaign beds.

GREAT VALUE

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italy

Sepia-toned photographic murals of iconic Roman monuments set the tone in the 14 rooms at B ­ abuino 181 (181 Via Babuino, Rome; 3906/3229-5295; romeluxurysuites.com; doubles from €295). This palazzo near the Spanish Steps retains original details—a cast-iron railing and Italian marble staircase—and, come this spring, will have a marvelous rooftop bar for aperitivi.

Babuino is also a stone’s throw from Via Margutta, a cul-de-sac lined with some of the Eternal City’s best galleries and design shops. »

C l o c k w i s e fr o m t o p : a l i o n a a dr i a n o v a ; c o u r t e s y o f h Ô t e l v i l l e d ‘ h i v e r ( 2 )

france

insider check-in

the netherlands GREAT VALUE Just outside Amsterdam, a 17thcentury church rectory has been transformed into the Inn on the Lake (11 Kerkplein, Broek in Waterland; 44-20/7307-2797; chicretreats.com; doubles from €117). The four bedrooms— decorated with soft pastels and prints—overlook the cobblestoned village square or a waterway that freezes in winter for ice-skating. At the restaurant, don’t miss the venison with red cabbage or cod fillet with hollandaise.

spain GREAT VALUE On a cliff near a pilgrimage route in Aragon, Consolación (Km 96, Crta. Nacional 232, Monroyo; 34/97-885-6755; consolacion.com.es; doubles from €134) has 10 cube-shaped guest quarters with sunken baths and wood-burning fireboxes hanging from the ceiling. One wall is made of glass, for unobstructed views of the pine-covered hills. In the adjacent 18th-century hermitage are two additional suites, a restaurant serving seasonal fare and a library for those who want to curl up with a real page-turner.

sweden The Treehotel (2A Edeforsväg, Harads; 46-928/

10403; treehotel.se; doubles from €340), inspired by a documentary film about tree huggers, takes green to new heights. Suspended in the trees of a forest in northern Sweden, 60 kilometers from the Arctic Circle, the five conceptual retreats resemble, respectively, a cubic cabin, a flying saucer, a bird’s nest, a ­Modernist pinecone and a mirrored box. Footbridges and viewing platforms above the Lule River valley allow guests to commune with nature. Even the birch sauna seems to float in midair.

SWITZERLAND

Part of the RoughLuxe collection, Vorstadt 14 (14 Vorstadt, Zug; 41-41/710-7101; vorstadt14.ch; doubles from €347) is an art experiment from top to bottom. The ground floor of this updated 15thcentury house near Zurich is occupied by Face, a postmodern gallery, while the remaining three floors—called Brain and Soul—contain a suite and a private apartment with an open fireplace and platform bed. For cocooning creatives, chef Hubert Erni will deliver sushi and strudel from his equally progressive restaurant the Blinker. ✚

The Cabin, a room suspended 8 meters in the air at Sweden’s Treehotel, left. Above: A butterfly chair at the Hotel Consolación, in Aragon, Spain.

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fr o m L e f t : c o u r t e s y o f t r e e h o t e l ; c o u r t e s y o f h o t e l c o n s o l a c i ó n

GREAT VALUE In Sicily, Aranjaya (Contrada San Giorgio, Lentini; 44-20/7307-2797; chicretreats.com; doubles from €161) is a rustic farmhouse with eight ­antiques-filled rooms, set in an orange grove on the fertile Catania Plain, facing Mount Etna. Everything from the olive-oil soaps to the pasta (prepared by a Tunisian chef and served poolside) is produced on or around this 300year-old estate.

insider trip navigator malay style The Lone Pine Hotel's L-shaped pool.

Below: A Deluxe suite at the property.

beachside revival. in penang,

Batu Ferringhi’s most pedigreed lodging is reborn as its most stylish on-thesand stay. By Robyn Eckhardt

68 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

c o u r t e s y o f B at u f e r r i n g h i ( 2 )

O

pened in 1948, the historic Lone Pine Hotel was Penang’s first beachfront getaway. Now, after an 18-month-plus renovation by the owners of Georgetown’s venerable E&O Hotel, it has emerged as the island state’s most stunning coastline property. Discreetly hidden behind a row of conifers, the Lone Pine has 90 bright, airy rooms and suites that capitalize on their superb location on the quiet end of Batu Ferringhi’s white-sand stretch: many are graced with sea-facing balconies, not to mention private plunge pools. Clean lines pervade the design, splashes of color punctuate plenty of white—seafoam blue, light grass and burnt orange are the property’s signature hues—original Lone Pine furniture pieces pay tribute to the past, and, in the common areas, polished black-cement flooring gives a sense of place (“batu” means stone). There’s plenty to keep guests occupied: they can relax by the L-shaped pool, revive at the Pure Energy spa, sip cocktails at the Danish Modern–styled Batubar, or, from January, watch the sunset from Japanese restaurant Matsu’s boomerang-shaped veranda.

With mod-cons like free broadband Internet and in-room DVD players, as well as old-fashioned luxuries like hammocks swaying in the ocean breeze, this is one place where you’d be forgiven for staying put. 97 Batu Ferringhi, Penang; 60-4/ 8868686; lonepinehotel.com; doubles from RM880. ✚

insider drinks

tasting notes

Clockwise from left: French wine flows at Topaz; relaxing at Le Sauvignon; at the Parisianstyled bar.

I

n Phnom Penh, where you’ll find ovenfresh baguettes on street corners and some of the prettiest French colonial villas around, it was only matter of time before wine culture made a resurgence. Trendy wine bars and sommelier-staffed restaurants are thriving in the capital, while premiere wine shops like the Warehouse, Red Apron and the Food Pantry are tackling the Cambodian market full force. Here, the lowdown on where to sample Phnom Penh’s burgeoning vinoculture.

Le Sauvignon

PHNOM PENH's WINE REVIVAL.

The Cambodian capital has become a haven for grape lovers, with wine bars, wine boutiques and savvy sommeliers cropping up across the city. By Naomi Lindt

After more than a decade working in international development, Parisian Isabelle Duzer channeled a life-long passion for wine into the adorable Le Sauvignon. Daily wines by the glass—recent selections include Montepulciano, Muscadet and Vouvray—are handwritten on a chalkboard, while the wine list has nearly 50 vintages, most of which are French (Duzer favors the Sauternes, a dessert wine harvested in the area of Bordeaux where her grandparents had a vineyard). The chic, feminine space, with violet walls, a gray terrazzo bar, and plush purple, gray and turquoise seating, also serves simple salads and sandwiches, and regularly hosts tastings, live music and literary readings.

6B St. 302; 855/92-730-250; bar-sauvignon.com; snacks and wine for two US$15.

Luna D’Autunno

Fans of Italian food and wine need look no further than Luna D’Autunno, the city’s premier spot for pastas, pizzas, Barolos and Proseccos. The 55-strong wine collection brings Italy’s best bottles to Phnom Penh, with several pleasant house wines that start at just US$18—the Carpineto Dogajolo and Verdicchio Serra del Conte are good picks.

70 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Photographed by James Grant

Though the interior here is more ristorante than trattoria—think white linens, upholstered chairs and abstract paintings on the walls—the ambience is refreshingly casual, making it just as easy to stop in for a quick wood-fired pizza or house-made pasta as settle in for a selection of primi and secondi piatti. If you’re opting for the latter, we recommend the beef carpaccio with a Sangiovese, the Gorgonzola–rucola gnocchi with a Valpolicella, and the roasted lamb rack with a Brunello di Montalcino. Top off the meal with a tiramisu or panna cotta, plus a glass of the outstanding house-made limoncello on the side. 6C St. 29; 855-23/220-895; dinner for two US$25.

Topaz

Diplomats, officials and dignitaries gather at Topaz for what may be the city’s finest French food and wine. In the subdued, sophisticated space, decked out with silk chandeliers, wood floors, and tangerine and burgundy armchairs, diners peruse a global, 100-plus wine selection that’s renowned in Phnom Penh—luckily, sommelier Meas Sarveurn is on hand to help you make your choice. On a recent visit, he steered us toward a Petit Moulon with Topaz’s famed Black Angus côte de boeuf, served with buttery fondant potatoes and spinach ravioli; we also tried a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc Sileni, which found its match in the grouper in puff pastry. Don’t miss the restaurant’s legendary chocolate-and–Grand Marnier soufflé, best savored with a bottle of Loupiac Chateau Martillac. If you’re looking for live jazz with your vintage, head to the loungey Studio 182 upstairs. 182 Norodom Blvd.; 855-23/221-622; topaz-restaurant.com; dinner for two US$80.

vine culture From top: At Red Apron, one of Phnom Penh's best wine shops; antiques at La Résidence; Topaz's dining room; La Résidence was once the home of a Cambodian prince.

La Résidence

Located in the former home of Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Ranariddh, La Résidence is an appropriately regal affair; an entire menu is dedicated to Grand Crus alone. While a second spans the world from California to Australia, the focus—and the food—is French. The duck breast with raspberries is sublime with a Château de l’Aumerade rosé, while the tournedos Rossini—just one of the restaurant’s eight famed foie gras dishes—reaches new heights with a bottle of sweet Sauternes Chateau Rayne Vigneau. The Kobe beef mains are equally worthy of royalty, ideally accompanied by a bottle of Rothschild Pauillac.

With minimalist furnishings offset by bold » travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 71

insider drinks

T+L Tip

Look out for Canadian-Japanese wine expert Rémie Fujiwara’s tastings and culinary events around town at vinotage.biz and on Facebook (search Vinotage).

contemporary Cambodian art and golden statues of Buddha, the atmosphere here can’t be beat.

22/24 St. 214; 855-23/224-582; la-residence-restaurant. com; dinner for two US$60.

Aristocrat Wine & Cigar Bar

Overlooking a sea of green tables and blinking slot machines, the Aristocrat Wine & Cigar Bar provides a tasteful respite from NagaWorld’s gambling mania. Not a baccarat expert? Don’t fret: the point here is the serious wine list, which tops 100 and is among Phnom Penh’s most sophisticated. Choice reds include the Chateau Noaillac Médoc and Chateau Haut Rocher, while the South African Fleur de Cap Sauvignon Blanc and Mouton Cadet are standout whites. With a Cuban cigar in hand and nestled into one of the gold velvet armchairs, it’s hard not to feel like a winner. NagaWorld, Hun Sen Park; 855-23/228-822; nagaworld.com; wine for two US$16.

Red Apron

phnom penh pours

From top: Behind the counter at Luna D'Autunno; the wine selection at Topaz; at Red Apron, in Phnom Penh; the shop's chic tasting lounge.

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Phnom Penh’s growing scene of grape lovers is perhaps nowhere more apparent than at Red Apron, the wine shop found across Vietnam. Since opening in 2004 on Street 240, the city’s boutique lane, Red Apron—which imports 300 labels into Cambodia—has expanded to include an industrialchic tasting lounge with cocktail tables and shiny white loungers, where half a dozen wines can be sampled by the glass—a recent list featured French, South African and Chilean varietals. Last month, an exclusive “lifestyle lounge” opened upstairs, offering a small food menu designed with wine in mind; call for details. 15–17 St. 240; 855-23/990-951; wine and snacks for two US$25. ✚

insider outdoors

Chills and thrills Left:

The Alps, Made Easy.

if you thought a european ski vacation was out of reach, think again. these three under-the-radar resorts—in as many different countries—are accessible, charming and loaded with après-ski attractions. by james jung SWITZERLAND ■ The Resort GRINDELWALD

This storybook village in the picturesque Bernese Oberland is home to the towering Wetterhorn and Eiger mountains and near the Jungfrau (now a unesco-protected natural World Heritage site), which have long attracted outdoor enthusiasts and form a breathtaking backdrop to the chalet-dotted hills around town.

Getting There Grindelwald is three

hours from Zurich by train (sbb.ch).

Stay Nothing captures the town’s charm like the Romantik Hotel Schweizerhof (Spillstat; 41-33/854-

5858; hotel-schweizerhof.com; doubles from €224), with its pitched roofs and 19th-century wood-paneled façade.

The suites blend old-world details 74 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

(fireplaces; carved pine headboards) with modern amenities (flat-screen TV’s; heated tile floors in the bathrooms). For impressive views at a more affordable price, try Hotel Steinbock (Dorfstrasse; 41-33/853-8989; steinbock-grindelwald.ch; doubles from €209), where the wood-beamed rooms are simple but cheery.

Eat Directly across from the train station, Grand Regina hotel’s La Pendule d’Or (Hauptstrasse; 41-33/8548600; dinner for two €65) serves a mix of regional and French cuisine—all prepared with ingredients from the hotel’s own farm and organic garden.

For fondue, look no further than Barry’s (Dorfstrasse; 41-33/854-3131; dinner for two €53), an authentic Swiss hut inside the Hotel Eiger that offers the perfect blend of Gruyère and

Vacherin cheeses, plus a shot or two of kirsch. Rancher Bar (Chalet Selma am Wuhr; 41-33/853-4502; dinner for two €81), an atmospheric log cabin known for its steaks and mulled wine.

Do Need a day out of ski boots? Shop for gear (not to mention clothing from designers like Escada) at Graf Sport (Hauptstrasse; 41-33/854-8844), or hike the wooded trail to mountain hideaway Rasthysi (41-78/789-3421), where local character Rolf Schneller makes a tasty Schümli Pflümlis (Switzerland’s answer to Irish coffee). For a day trip, hop the Jungfrau Railway (41-33/828-7111; jungfraubahn.ch; tickets €19), whose tracks top out at a spectacular 3,350-meter vantage point. »

c o u r t e s y o f A l p e n r o ya l G r a n d H o t e l G o u r m e t & S p a ( 2 ) . i n s e t : © M a r z a n n a S y n c e r z / D r e a m s t i m e . c o m

High in the Dolomites, there's nowhere to go but down.

Far left: Après ski at Italy's Alpenroyal Grand Hotel Gourmet & Spa.

CoMing soon. the ConrAD Koh sAMui.

Imagine a place where you have option to enjoy your holiday on the best terms possible—your terms. Imagine a resort that lets you relax and rejuvenate in the most luxurious way—your way.

Imagine a team that senses every luxury you desire while still leaving the most important luxury up to you—the luxury of being yourself.

Introducing the Conrad Koh Samui, the newest resort on the popular Thai island of Koh Samui, only an hour from Bangkok with direct flights available from other major Asian hubs. Scheduled to open in April 2011, the Conrad Koh Samui sets the standard for a new and sophisticated sense of hospitality that empowers you with a forgotten service: embracing individuality.

Just as no two vacations are the same, no two resorts are the same. The Conrad Koh Samui is the only luxury resort in Koh Samui that faces due west to enjoy the astonishing golden sunsets of the Gulf of Thailand, creating the perfect moment in the most stylish of settings. Picture a haven of eighty private villas sprawling across 25-acres of dramatic hillside overlooking the azure waters of the Aow Thai beach. Enjoy unobstructed ocean views and 10-metre infinity pools wrapped in accommodations that are tailored to suit the needs of even the most discerning guest.

Stay at the resort that features the most innovative cuisine and eclectic dining options on Koh Samui, which are guaranteed to excite the most serious gourmand.

The Conrad Koh Samui offers choices ranging from casual and contemporary to formal and traditional. Tantalize the palate with Mediterranean-rim influenced cuisine cooked from exciting live action stations in our all-day casual restaurant. Or perhaps indulge in the mysterious setting of our cliff-side specialty restaurant, which features the finest ingredients, infused with Thai and pan-Asian flavours, and preparations that delight the senses. At Conrad Koh Samui, each dining experience is more memorable than the last; no matter how guests choose to take their meal.

Situated in the corner of the resort high above a 300-degree panoramic view of the ocean, the Spa is a hideaway from the daily distractions of modern life and a den of tranquility equipped with a range of world-class holistic and contemporary treatments.

Every detail and surface has been crafted with guest’s well-being and harmony in mind. Disengage and relax by spending the day receiving pampering treatments in dramatic rock settings; journeying through multiple spa experiences to rebalance and revitalize.

Coming soon, the Conrad Koh Samui will set a new standard of luxury in Thailand.

Experience the greatest luxury of all...

the luxury of being yourself For furter information please visit ConradHotels.com

insider outdoors AUSTRIA ■ The Resort ST. ANTON AM ARLBERG This classic Tyrolean

cated Italian families who flock here each winter.

village, considered the birthplace of modern skiing, has become a lively Alpine center, as renowned for its slopes (275 downhill kilometers with easy access to a network of 84 lifts) as it is for its nightlife.

Getting There Airports in Verona,

Italy, and Innsbruck, Austria, are about two to three hours away. Buses run to the valley regularly (39-0471/777-777; flytovalgardena.com).

hours from Zurich and 31/2 hours from Munich by train (oebb.at).

Stay With its gabled architecture, traditional rooms, and popular cocktail lounge, the Hotel Alte Post (11 Dorfstrasse; 43-5446/25530; hotel-altepost.at; doubles from €126)—set in the heart of the pedestrian base village— harks back to skiing’s sophisticated heyday. Ideally located next to the main gondola, the hotel Bergschloessl (13 Kandaharweg; 43-5446/2220; bergschloessl.at; doubles from €157) is housed in a 100-year-old building and delivers a taste of the Austrian countryside with claw-footed tubs and ceiling frescoes in its 10 guest rooms.

Eat In the high-altitude hamlet of St. Christoph, the ski-in, ski-out Hospiz Alm (St. Christoph; 43-5446/36250; lunch for two €42) is a rustic chalet with a cozy atmosphere and a Bordeauxheavy wine list. Just outside of town, there’s Hotel Sonnbichl (11 St. Jakober Dorfstrasse; 43-5446/2243; dinner for two €69) for Tyrolean fare, and Pomodoro (5 Dorfstrasse; 43-5446/3333; dinner for two €43), which serves pitch-perfect thin-crust pizza. For adventurous diners, few experiences rival the biweekly sledding night, or Rodel Abend (Nassereinbahn; 43-5446/23520; gondola ticket and sled rental €32). Start at the mountaintop Rodel Huette (106 Nassereinerstrasse; 43-676/886-486-100; dinner for two €45) with a meal of local specialties (pig’s knuckle with honey-infused sauerkraut, followed by Kaiserschmarren, a crêpelike dessert) 76 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Winter dreams Above: At the Alpenroyal Grand Hotel Gourmet & Spa in Italy. Below, left and right: Fondue at Barry's, near the Eiger in Swizerland; have chairlift, will ski in the Swiss Alps.

and end the night with a 4.3-kilometer, floodlighted sled run.

Do No ski day here is complete without a salutary cocktail, so take your pick of the village’s two legendary bars: the Krazy Kanguruh (19 Mooserweg; 43-5446/2633; drinks for two €9), a nearly 40-year-old staple that lures skiers with copious helpings of Jägermeister and rock ’n’ roll, and the Mooserwirt (2 Unterer Mooserweg; 43-5446/3588; drinks for two €8), a lively disco where Swedish ski instructors and European vacationers down frothy steins and ski-booted table dancing is de rigueur.

ITALY ■ The Resort VAL GARDENA

At the heart of the Val Gardena valley in the Dolomites is a massive, 360-degree expanse of interconnected slopes and ski resorts known as the Sella Ronda, or carousel, referring to the merry-go-round skiing of sophisti-

Gardena’s three villages, the minimal Hotel Alpino Plan (71 Str. Plan; 39-0471/795-134; hotel-alpino.com; doubles from €186) is beloved by members of the U.S. ski team for its four-course dinners and attentive staff.

Or splurge on the Alpenroyal Grand Hotel Gourmet & Spa (43 Via Meisules; 39-0471/795-555; alpenroyal.com; doubles from €368). The property has a heated outdoor pool, a two-story spa, and its own ski school.

Eat Just below the jagged, 3,048meter-high Sassolungo peak sits the popular lunchtime spot Rifugio Emilio Comici (24 Plan de Gralba; 39-0471/ 794-121; lunch for two €75), which offers grilled fish and generously portioned tiramisu. At night, head to Ristorante Nives (4 Nives St.; 39-0471/773-329; dinner for two $131) for northern Italian cuisine made with regional ingredients such as tortelloni stuffed with chamois and wild-berry butter. Or hunker down at Ristorante Concordia (41I Via Roma; 39-0471/796-276; dinner for two €95), in the neighboring village of Ortisei, where south Tyrolean specialties are served in a woodpaneled stube.

Do Ortisei is also the best place to explore Val Gardena’s famous woodcarving tradition, which dates back to the 17th century. You’ll find contemporary artisans’ work at Galaria Unika (9 Via Arnaria; 39-0339/179-2227). Back in Selva, Hotel Nives’s modern wine bar welcomes stylish patrons, who cap the day with Prosecco and their tales from the slopes. ✚

c l o c k w i s e f r o m t o p : c o u r t e s y o f A l p e n r o ya l G r a n d H o t e l G o u r m e t & S p a ; © S e r b a n E n a c h e / D r e a m s t i m e . c o m ; w h i t n e y l a w s o n

Stay In Selva, the highest of Val Getting There St. Anton is 21/2

insider art

T

he Philippines’ thriving art scene has never lacked in creativity, but until recently, you had to visit crowded, poorly lit shopping malls to find the best contemporary art galleries in the capital.

Now, the scene is shifting, with a crop of cutting-edge Manila art spaces setting up as large, one-stop destinations that mirror the scene’s rising ambitions. Here, five not to miss.

■ FINALE ART FILE

When Finale Art File migrated from the fourth floor of SM Megamall to a 450-square-meter mezzanine space two years ago, it was a sign that something major was afoot. Like many top Manila galleries, it had sited itself in a mall to connect with a wide viewing public, but two years ago, it was finally able to set up an independent space—now a destination in its

own right—thanks to the Philippine art scene’s growing dynamism. “Artists nowadays are more creative, free and daring with their subjects, and with their use of materials and techniques,” says Evita Sarenas, who founded the gallery in 1983. “Collectors and art enthusiasts, on the other hand, are more open to learning about and appreciating young contemporary art, whether drawing, painting, sculpture, photography or installation.” Today, Finale’s exhibitions are renowned for their diversity, and include new media shows in a dedicated second-floor video room. Up this month: A solo show by Spanish-Filipina Valeria Cavestany, featuring sculptural steel animals in automative paint (December 9–31). ARTISTS TO WATCH Pipo Alido, Wire Tuazon, Redd Nacpil, Liv Vinluan, Bembol dela Cruz. Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound (Gate 1), 2241 Pasong Tamo, Makati; 63-2/813-2310; finaleartfile.com. »

MANILA ART NOW. Fresh, edgy and eminently

affordable, Philippine art is making waves on home shores—and around the globe. Here, our pick of the hottest galleries in the capital. By Lara Day

Word-art installations by Cesare Syjuco at Galleria Duemila, in Pasay. Inset: Artwork by Norberto Roldan at Silverlens.

78 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Photographed by Philipp Engelhorn

insider art Finale Art File, left. Below: Painter Ambie Abano with her work, at Manila Contemporary. Far left: Artist Cesare Syjuco.

■ GALLERIA DUEMILA

A well-trimmed hedge and fanciful metalwork gate—actually a sculpture by Australian artist Tony Twigg—are the only signs that Galleria Duemila, the longest-running commercial art gallery in the Philippines, lies on a nondescript side street in Pasay. It moved here in 2008, after consolidating its reputation as a champion for modern Filipino art at SM Megamall, and now occupies two airy, modern art spaces in a converted residential house. If the artists shown here read like a roll call of modern Filipino masters—Fernando Zobel, H. R. Ocampo, Jose Joya, Cesar Legaspi—that’s because the gallery’s charismatic founder, Italian Silvana Ancellotti, has been instrumental in bringing their work to prominence since setting up shop in 1975.

“We look at developing artists in the long term,” says Ancellotti. “We promote them not just through exhibitions, but through books and documentation of their work.” But while the gallery’s rich history and relationships mean its roots extend deep into the past, it also has its eye on the future. Case in point: this month’s exhibition, “Material-Parallel,” is a joint mixedmedia show by two young conceptual artists, London-based Maria Tanaguchi and Harvardeducated Bea Camacho (December 5–January 30). ARTISTS TO WATCH R. M. Deleon, Trek Valdizno, Jon Cuyson, Isabel and Ramon Diaz, Maria Cruz. 210 Loring St., Pasay: 63-2/831-9990; galleriaduemila.com.

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■ SILVERLENS

Fine-art photographers Rachel Rillo and Isa Lorenzo took a risk in 2004 when they converted a lonely warehouse space on Pasong Tamo Extension into Silverlens, the Philippines’ first dedicated photography gallery. These days, not only has Silverlens been joined by other slick warehouse spaces (see Finale Art File and Manila Contemporary), but it has more recently bridged its roots—literally—with two walkwaylinked sister spaces, SLab and 20Square. Both show emerging, cross-platform artists with a strong conceptual vein, and Silverlens has its sights set beyond national borders.

“Internationally, we are being asked to participate in more and more international art fairs and to collaborate on shows outside [the country], whether with other galleries or through biennials and triennals,” says Rillo. Up this month: solo shows by Hanna Pettyjohn and Nikki Luna at SLab and 20Square, respectively, and at Silverlens, an anniversary exhibition called “Six,” inspired by Susan Sontag’s On Photography, with works by six artists including Frankie Callaghan and Wawi Navarozza (through December 18). ARTISTS TO WATCH Patricia Eustaquio, Gary Ross Pastrana, Mariano Ching, Frankie Callaghan. 2320 Pasong Tamo Extension, Warehouse 2, Yupangco Bldg., Makati; 63-2/816-0044; silverlensphoto.com. »

insider art ■ THE DRAWING ROOM

■ MANILA CONTEMPORARY

Founded in 1998 by Cesar Villalon Jr., the Drawing Room originally specialized in artworks on paper by such luminaries as Ben Cabrera (“BenCab”), Kiko Escora and Marcel Antonio. These days, you can still find these in the stockroom—a cozy space with a couch where it’s easy to spend hours browsing—but the Drawing Room’s two street-facing galleries, which sit side by side on a street off Ayala Avenue, have evolved to show works across genres. “From the very start we decided to not to go into a mall,” says Villalon. “We thought a small, intimate space would be suited for works on paper, and it worked very well, but after five or six years we decided to evolve.” Since then, Villalon has transformed the gallery into one of the country’s most high-profile spaces by taking edgy works such as Lirio Salvador’s metal assemblages—playable sculpture instruments that blur the lines between object and sound art—to art fairs such as Bridge New York, Scope Basel and Miami, the Hong Kong International Art Fair and India Art Summit.

It also fosters close ties with overseas galleries across the region, while next June sees it mount a show at Rossi & Rossi, in London.

On display this month: “Converging Nature,” a show of sculptures and paintings by auctionheadlining artist Ronald Ventura (December 4–24). ARTISTS TO WATCH Kawayan de Guia, Lirio Salvador, Marina Cruz, Rodel Tapaya.

1007 Metropolitan Ave., Metrostar Bldg., Makati; 63-2/897-7877; drawingroomgallery.com.

Malaysia-based Valentine Willie operates galleries across Southeast Asia, and with Manila Contemporary—his high-ceilinged, 300-squaremeter Chelsea-style warehouse conversion, opened in 2008—he caters to a new generation hungry to view and buy works that both question and break with convention. “The kind of art that is shown and collected is no longer confined to what I call ‘pretty art’ à la Fernando Amorsolo or Romulo Galicano,” says Willie.

“Artists doing challenging works can now exhibit and often sell well, [largely thanks to] Manuel Ocampo, whose works are as far from ‘pretty’ as you can get and are collected worldwide.” His Manila space shows a healthy roster of emerging artists working in new media—expect photography, video, performance and large-scale installation works—along with established artists, with a rotating calendar of avant-garde exhibitions.

Catch a group exhibition (through December 5), followed by “The Light Show,” a groundbreaking display of light sculptures, curated by Katya Guerrero (December 11– January 9). ARTISTS TO WATCH Constantino Zicarelli, Maya Muñoz, Maria Jeona, Poklong Anading, M. M. Yu. Whitespace 2314, Chino Roces Ave., Pasong Tamo Extension, Makati; 63-2/8447328; manilacontemporary.com. ✚

BEYOND PAINTING

Left: Alfredo Aquilizan at the Drawing Room.

Right: Work at Galleria Duemila.

Below: Silverlens' bright, airy space.

82 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

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Located in Macau’s most-talked-about integrated entertainment resort, Grand Hyatt Macau has its sights set on being one of the leading properties in the region.

The hotel comprises two wave-inspired towers within City of Dreams, a fiveminute drive from Macau’s airport and 15 minutes’ drive from the Macau Ferry terminal. Meanwhile, the House of Dancing Water is a show like no other on Earth only at City of Dreams. The House of Dancing Water is the world’s newest most spectacular extravaganza.

At the hotel, guests are greeted and guided into the lobby, with its 22-meter-high ceiling, and a backdrop of travertine inlaid with red marble, overlapping geometric wall panels and black marble flooring. Water cascades over a stainless steel hemisphere, with curved ribbons showering down from an illuminated cloud motif.

For its two main restaurants, Beijing Kitchen replicates the successful format of Grand Hyatt Beijing’s Made in China restaurant, and is one of the signature restaurants at City of Dreams, serving authentic northern Chinese cuisine.

Meanwhile, mezza9 Macau on Level 3 focuses on authentic international fare, and

is inspired by the hotel’s sister property, the Grand Hyatt Singapore’s award-winning restaurant mezza9.

Business guests can opt to work out at the hotel’s Fitness Centre. The gym overlooks the Pool Deck and features cardio and resistance machines. Those who prefer to unwind at a more leisurely pace will surely love Isala Spa, with its 15 spa suites, most featuring natural daylight.

By this stage, guests should be ready to retire and can choose from one of the many rooms and suites in the Grand Tower and in the Grand Club Tower. The “Grand Suites” in the Grand Tower are spacious, with a separate living area. Floor-to-ceiling picture windows provide views of Cotai or the Pearl River, and all rooms feature a king-size bed or twin beds and a contemporary marble bathroom with a deep-soaking tub, twin vanity areas and a glass-walled rain-shower.

In the Grand Club Tower, the “Grand Deluxe” rooms measure 52 square meters and offer an a freestanding elliptical bath looking out over Cotai or the Pearl River, a walk-in dressing room, and nature-inspired art. On Level 35 is the Chairman Suite; a private residence with panoramic views, a security-monitored entrance, a spa area, and so much more.

insider restaurants

FLAVOR CULTURE. In Bangkok,

three restaurants with lofty ambitions are shaking up the city’s Thai fine-dining scene. By Lara Day

P

tasting thailand

Clockwise from top right: The dining room at Nahm, in Bangkok; a chef prepares a dish at the restaurant; Nahm's delicate scallop salad with lemongrass, coconut and Asian citron; Australian chef David Thompson in the kitchen of Nahm, at the Metropolitan Bangkok, in Sathorn.

Photographed by Cedric Arnold

aradoxical as it may sound, Bangkok isn’t known as a destination for Thai fine dining. Street-stall smorgasbords?

Sure. Mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall blowouts? Definitely. But, until recently, the rule here for local eateries was inversely proportional: The splashier the environment, the more lackluster the fare. Now, three pioneering restaurants are challenging that perception, with style-driven surrounds, exquisitely paired drinks— and, yes, exceptional cuisine. What’s more, all boast Michelin-star pedigrees. Read on to find out what’s cooking in the Thai capital.

NAHM THE CHEF For many, chef David Thompson needs little introduction: not only did the Sydney native earn Nahm, in London, the first ever Michelin star for a Thai restaurant back in 2001, but he’s also the author of several defining compendiums of Thai cuisine, including the excellent Thai Street Food.

THE PLACE Nestled in the Metropolitan Bangkok, Nahm’s Koichiro Ikebuchi–designed dining room seats 112, but seems far more intimate. Polished wood tables, understated tableware, comfortable cream-hued chairs and stepped Ayutthaya-inspired pillars make for a relaxed, contemporary space.

THE FOOD Don’t be fooled by the laid-back vibe; the food is serious business, with painstak­ingly researched recipes gleaned from Thai memorial books as well Thompson’s own travels. Equal attention is paid to ingredients, sourced from » travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 85

insider restaurants

SIAMESE DREAM Clockwise from

top right: Frozen red lobster curry at Sra Bua by Kiin Kiin; chefs Henrik Yde-Andersen and Lertchai Treetawatchaiwong; Wagyu beef salad with orchids at the restaurant; Sra Bua's high-ceilinged dining room.

around the country for maximum flavor (thus young coconuts are flown in from Chumphon). The central conceit here is balance, the holy grail of Thai cuisine, from the self-contained mouthfuls of each canapé—the ma hor, or minced pork, shrimp and chicken atop thin slices of pineapple, is sweet, nutty, sharp and savory by turns—to the main dishes, where diners have a choice of salad, spicy nahm prik (relishes), soups, curries and steamed, grilled or stir-fried items, served family-style and portioned according to the number of diners. The menu is set to evolve with the seasons, but for now, look out for the delicate scallop salad with coconut, lemongrass and Asian citron, and the mouth­ wateringly hot gaeng som kung, or sour orange curry with prawns. T+L Tip Cocktail fans should order the “tomyumtini,” a playful take on the flavor profile of the beloved Thai soup. 27 South Sathorn Rd., Sathorn; 66-2/625-3388; metropolitan.bangkok. como.bz; set menu Bt1,500 per person. sRA BUA BY KIIN KIIN THE CHEFS Danish chef Henrik Yde-Andersen and Thai partner Lertchai Treetawatchaiwong earned Kiin Kiin, in Copenhagen, the world’s second Michelin star for a Thai restaurant, in 2008. Here, former Kiin Kiin chef and London Nahm graduate Morten Bøjstrup helms the kitchen.

THE PLACE Located in the Siam Kempinski, the 70-cover dining room impresses with opulence, with a high-ceilinged space defined by articulated wood, lustrous table settings and a standalone sala, created by the hotel along with design firm HBA. THE FOOD Don’t come expecting comfort food: the flavors here may be Thai, but their preparation and presentation are brazenly modern. Tom yam kung arrives deconstructed, a plain broth served separately from three jellies encasing bursts of coriander-and-shrimp, galangal and mushroom

86 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

respectively; with each alternating mouthful, their flavors escalate to a crescendo. The signature red lobster curry is rich and deeply satisfying, but it comes frozen, almost like ice cream, and topped with a subtle lychee foam; succulent baby lobster, sliced lychee and thread-like slivers of kaffir lime appear alongside as garnishes, while underneath, liquid nitrogen ensures a constant temperature and an exuberant theatricality. Prepare for a sequence of standout desserts, including the Cha Kiin Kiin, flavored with aromatic jasmine and Earl Grey tea.

T+L Tip Oenophiles will appreciate the superbly matched wine menu: enjoy how a grassy German Riesling from Fritz Haag, Mosel, perfectly offsets the searing heat of the orchid-strewn Wagyu beef salad. Siam Kempinski Hotel Bangkok, 991/9 Rama 1 Rd.; 66-2/162-9000; kempinskibangkok.com; sevencourse tasting menu Bt2,400 per person.

BO.LAN

THE CHEFS Since late last year, young chef couple

Duangporn “Bo” Songvisava and Dylan “Lan” Jones have helped to redefine expectations about Thai fine dining in Bangkok, with both drawing on their training under Thompson at Nahm, in London.

THE PLACE Housed in a standalone residence in a side soi along Sukhumvit, the 60-seat restaurant is stylish but pleasantly relaxed, with two cozy dining rooms and a spacious patio overlooking a small garden and a lotus-dotted water feature.

THE FOOD When a meal kicks off with a shot of yadong, the illicit herbal Thai whiskey, you know you’re in for something different. The amuses bouche maintain the ante, with five outstanding mouthfuls to be sampled from left to right: think zesty starfruit with tamarind-and-chili nahm prik, and spirited khao yam, or southern rice salad. Main dishes come with your choice of rice harvest, from the tender jasmine Kor Khor 105 from Yasothorn to the wonderful organic GABA rice sourced from Sisaket—either will do justice to dishes like the delectably smoky stir-fried pork neck with shrimp paste, and the earthy, aromatic coconut-based soup with smoked fish and lotus shoot. Be sure to take advantage of the wine list: the Heart of Stone Pinot Noir 2008, from New Zealand, pairs beautifully with just about anything on the menu. T+L Tip The generously portioned Bo.lan Balance menu is ideal for groups of four or more; smaller parties are better off ordering à la carte. 42 Soi Pichai Ronnarong, Sukhumvit Rd. Soi 26; 66-2/260-2962; bolan.co.th; set menu Bt3,000 per person. ✚

bold flavors

From top: Bo.lan's outdoor terrace; prawns with krachai and peppercorns at the restaurant; chefs Duangporn “Bo” Songvisava and Dylan Jones; bite-size portions of spicy beef salad, at Bo.lan.

travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 87

ntimate in-Villa

Spa Treatment

& Dinner

insider sourcebook 1. FRANCE Floral and feminine, Alziari is a classic niçoise oil from the Côte d’Azur. zingermans.com.

2. SPAIN The Vea family plants organic Arbequiña olives amid almond trees to produce their nutty L’Estornell. oliveoilemporium.com.

4. CHILE Pressed in the Colchagua Valley near Santiago, O-Live & Co. is mild and clean, ideal for grilling. olisur.com.

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2 4

3. MOROCCO Picholine olives are handpicked in a century-old grove to make the peppery Les Terroirs de Marrakech. deandeluca.com.

5. TURKEY The Gulf of Edremit’s golden Ilk El is an unfiltered oil you’ll want to drizzle over sliced tomatoes or use for dipping. ta-ze.com.

6. CALIFORNIA Sicilian and Tuscan varieties are blended to make the spicy Grove 45, harvested at a Napa Valley estate. theolivepress.com.

7. ITALY Coratina olives imbue Antico Frantoio Muraglia Intenso with a cayenne-apricot flavor. deandeluca.com.

1

5

7

6

Our Favorite Olive Oils. Golden

or green, smooth or spicy. We tasted dozens of extra-virgin oils from around the globe to track down these superior artisanal bottles. By Shane Mitchell

Photographed by Lucy Schaeffer

travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 89

insider t+l guide

A triptych by Zakkir Hussain at BMB.

reinvented mumbai.

From the heart of downtown to emerging Neighborhoods, we’ve rounded up the city’s best boutiques, galleries, restaurants and hotels. BY DAVID KAUFMAN

M

umbai has long been India’s commercial and film capital, but the city is fast becoming a formidable art, style, culinary and design destination—a welcome development in the wake of 2008’s tragic attacks. Once-badly-damaged hotels have reopened with elegant interiors and stepped-up security; restaurants such as the Thai-inspired Koh by Ian Kittichai (and soon a branch of London’s famed Hakkasan) are giving an international edge to the city’s food scene; new shops are luring European fashion talents to create sophisticated lines from locally sourced fabrics; and artists are reinventing

90 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

south Mumbai’s art scene in and around the Fort and Colaba districts.

SHOP Navigating Mumbai’s traditional sari stands and stylish boutiques can be daunting; luckily celebrity personal shopper Monica Vaziralli (91-98/2007-8611) can guide you to the best spots. Two of her top picks: Neemrana (6 Purshotam Bldg., New Queen’s Rd., Opera House; 91-22/2361-4436) for cotton and georgette saris, robes and blouses, and the newly opened Bandit Queen (130 Dinshaw Petit Lane, Kalachowki; 91-22/22948752), a home-goods emporium launched by Belgian designer ­Valerie ­Barkowski and textile exporter Sunita Namjoshi. The duo’s collections are all handmade linens and cottons from Indian mills and include elaborately pleated and embellished bedding that can take 40 days to create. For a finely edited selection of works by Indian designers, head to Mélange (33 Altamount Rd., ­Cumballa Hill; 91-22/23534492), where owner Sangita Sinh Kathiwada carries more than 20 mostly eco-­friendly brands, including classic kurtas, tunics and caftans with a modern spin.

At the 232-square-meter D7 (Turning Point Bldg., » Photographed by Daryl Visscher

insider t+l guide

filled Colaba neighborhood, the cavernous G ­ allery Maskara (Warehouse on Third Pasta, 6/7 Third Pasta Lane, ­Colaba; 91-22/2202-3056; gallerymaskara.com) packs a former cotton warehouse with exceptional, groundbreaking installations by local and international artists. Nearby, on the seafront, Volte (2/19 Kamal Mansion, Arthur Bunder Rd., Colaba; 91-22/2204-1220; volte.in) specializes in showing new media video and art installations.

FoOD When it made its debut last year, the 2,323square-meter restaurant complex Tote on the Turf

artful lines

Women’s wear in limited-edition fabrics on display at Bungalow 8, in Colaba. Top right: Tailor Mama by Srinivasa Prasad at the year-old Gallery BMB, in the Fort district.

Khar Danda Rd., Khar W.; 91-22/2648-5626), near Bandra, seven of Delhi’s best talents showcase their designs.

Look for colorful bags from ­Manish Arora, a favorite of singer M.I.A.; appliquéd tunics from Namrata Joshipura; and the clean-lined wool suits and sweaters of Rajesh Pratap Singh, India’s answer to Jil Sander or Martin ­Margiela. Bungalow 8 (Grants Bldg., 17 Arthur Bunder Rd., Colaba; 91-22/2281-9880) made its name almost a decade ago selling contemporary furnishings; two years ago, Yves Saint Laurent and Lanvin vet Mathieu Gugumus-Leguillon arrived to launch the Bungalow—a line of women’s wear. Now­Gugumus-Leguillon has unveiled a men’s collection with a cutting-edge twist on traditional Indian designs.

CULTURE New modern art galleries are attracting

­ umbai’s sophisticated set to the commercial Fort M district. At the year-old Gallery BMB (Queens Mansion, G. T. Marg, Fort; 91-22/6171-5757; gallerybmb.com), which includes a cozy café and bookshop, the focus is on young, burgeoning Indian painters and sculptors, with pieces by P. S. Jalaja and Sonia Jose. In the street-stall92 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

(­Mahalaxmi Race Course, Keshav Rao Khadye Marg, ­Mahalaxmi; 91-22/6157-7777; dinner for two Rs4,450) was an immediate hit because of its location—beside the ­Mahalaxmi Race Course—and its avant-garde design

by London-based Serie Architects, which lined the ceiling with a forest of white metal branches. Drinks such as tequila-infused sangria and celery martinis are still crowd-­pleasers at its 12-meter-long teak bar, and foodies come for the East-meets-West menu (think beef tikka, Parma ham spring rolls and a savory mushroom-and-walnut “tiramisu”). In ­August, Thailand-born chef ­Pongtawat Ian ­Chalermkittichai (of New York’s ­Kittichai) opened Koh by Ian Kittichai (135 Marine Dr.; 91-22/3987-9999; dinner for two Rs3,560) in Mumbai’s ­InterContinental ­Marine Drive, where he serves signature dishes such as chocolate babyback ribs, Japanese hamachi sashimi and green curry with slow-roasted chicken. Indigo’s contemporary ­European, Indian-­inflected dishes lure the likes of Bill Clinton and Brad Pitt, and its newer Indigo Café (Clifton Trishul C.H.S., ­Oshiwara ­Village, Andheri W.­; 9122/2633-6262; lunch for two Rs1,780) is a far more lowkey brunch spot in the ­Andheri district with thin-crust pizzas, pastas and all-day breakfast classics such as eggs Florentine.

STAY It took 21 months, 2,000 craftsmen and US$38 million to renovate the Palace Wing of the Taj Mahal Palace (Apollo Bunder, Colaba; 866/969-1825; tajhotels. com; doubles from Rs13,600)—and the result is just »

GET AWAY TO A BEACH OF YOUR OWN

In Krabi you can enjoy more than a beach on your own, but a whole bay.

Nestled beneath spectacular limestone cliffs Centara Grand Beach Resort & Villas Krabi exclusively sits on Pai Plong Bay framed by a stretch of white sand and crystal clear waters.

The idyllic atmosphere of the resort is the perfect match to honeymooners, couples on a romantic retreat and to those who simply want to experience absolute sense of serenity. With spacious accommodations and recreational activities to be found in the resort and by the beach adult guests can relax whilst kids are having fun.

All new bookings will receive Come “Dine with Us� package with benefits that include daily buffet breakfast, complimentary buffet dinner option at Lotus Court or exchange for a daily credit of 1,000 baht per adult and 500 baht per child to be redeemed against a la carte menu options.

Krabi. The perfect getaway.

For more information and reservations please call T +66 (0) 7563 7789 F +66 (0) 7563 7800 E ckbr@chr.co.th www.centararesorts.com/ckbr

insider t+L guide

AIRPORT NEWS

as impressive as the numbers. The 285 redesigned rooms—some outfitted with rosewood floors—have mahogany beds and glass-walled bathrooms. A 20-minute walk west, you’ll find the overhauled Oberoi (Nariman Point; 91-22/6632-5757; oberoihotels. com; doubles from Rs20,250), where cream-colored marble imported from the Greek island of Thassos lines the hotel’s 14-floor atrium lobby. Upstairs, the 287 rooms incorporate elaborate hand-carved wooden furniture and ­restored Indian artwork. Just north of Bandra, the 14 rooms at the stylish Le Sutra (14 Union Park, Khar W.; 91-22/2649-2995; lesutra.in; doubles from Rs12,000) are inspired by classical Indian art, from the Shringar suite’s peacock motifs to the Buddha frescoes in the Nirvan room. In the Worli business district, there’s the 202-room Four Seasons Hotel Mumbai (114 Dr. E. Moses Rd., Worli; 91-22/2481-8000; fourseasons.com; doubles from Rs17,650) with a duplex spa, the sophisticated rooftop Aer lounge and an on-demand fleet of BMW 7-series cars for guests. ✚ 94 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

t o p l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f l e s u t r a . t o p r i g h t : C o u r t e s y o f SO M / C r y s t a l CG

mumbai modern

From above: The Dyuutya (gambling) themed room at Indian-art-inspired Le Sutra hotel; a waitress at the new Koh restaurant.

Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport is ­midway through a multibillion-dollar makeover that’s slated to be completed in 2012. The centerpiece will be a new ­Terminal 2, designed by New York–based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and expected to serve some 40 million passengers annually.

Shaped like an X—and linked to Mumbai’s proposed lightrail network—T2 will serve as a mega-terminal and ultimately replace the four ­domestic and international terminals now in operation.

come for the

...stay

views...

for the experience

woRld’S #1 SpA HoTEl - 2010 Conde Nast Traveller Readers’ Awards woRld’S lEAdING lUXURY VIllA (AYANA VIllA) - 2010 World Travel Awards ASIA’S lEAdING lUXURY RESoRT - 2010 & 2009 World Travel Awards

AYANA Resort and Spa Bali Jl. Karang Mas Sejahtera Jimbaran 80364 | Tel: (62) 361-702 222 www.ayanaresort.com

insider navigator The Ruins of Saint Paul's, below.

Right: The Venetian, in Macau, is the world's largest casino.

at breakneck speed, but it still has plenty of charm outside of its dazzling casinos. Here, T+L maps out an easy guide. By Helen Dalley

Ritzenhoff piggy banks, at Dora Tam Design.

F

or hundreds of years, Macau has been home to pastel-hued colonial architecture, sleepy fishing villages, and Buddhist and Taoist temples cloaked with incense.

But since the government ended its monopoly license on gambling in 2002, the cityscape has changed dramatically, most conspicuously on the Las Vegas Sands’ Cotai Strip on Taipa, which hosts money-spinning exports such as The Venetian Macao and City of Dreams. Today, its quiet back streets and picturesque squares coexist with dazzling casino developments worthy of its Nevada cousin. Read on to learn more about the new Macau.

■ SCENE

Dusk settles at the Westin Resort Macau.

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For a glimpse of the former colony’s Portuguese heritage, head straight to its unesco-listed historic center:

the stone-paved Senado Square (Avenida de Almedia Ribeiro) features a bubbling central fountain and colonial structures including St. Dominic’s Church, while the Ruins of St. Paul’s (Rua de Sao Paulo) has 66 steps leading up to a carved cathedral façade, preserved since the 1620’s. Fast-forward to the present at the world’s largest, most opulent casino, The Venetian (Estrada da Baía de N. Senhora da Esperança, Taipa; 853/2882-8888; venetianmacao.com), with 750 gambling tables, 3,400 slot machines and countless singing gondoliers who ply three indoor canals; there’s also a 15,000-seat arena that has hosted shows with the likes of Beyoncé and Usher. More aquatic entertainment is in store at the House of Dancing Water (Estrado Co Istmo, City of Dreams, Cotai; 853/8868-6688; thehouseofdancingwater.com; admission from HK$380), a splashy Vegas-style

c lo c kw i s e f r o m to p l e f t: © M ac ao l a n d m a r ks / i sto c k p h oto.co m ; co u rt e sy o f t h e V e n e t i a n ; c o u r t e s y o f t h e W e s t i n R e s o r t M a c a u ; c o u r t e s y o f d o r a ta m d e s i g n

Macau’s Moment. The former Portuguese enclave may be changing

showcase of daredevil acrobatics directed by ex–Cirque du Soleil man Franco Dragone. Dedicated to the goddess of seafarers, A-Ma (Rua de S. Tiago da Barra; 853/2831-5566) is Macau’s most popular temple, drawing crowds of worshipers to its prayer halls, pavilions and gardens; its current structure dates to the 1600’s.

f r o m to p : co u rt e sy o f t h e V e n e t i a n ; Co u rt e sy o f Lo r d Stow ' s g a r d e n c a f É ; co u rt e sy o f m a n da r i n o r i e n ta l m a c a u ; c o u r t e s y o f s h o p p e s at f o u r s e a s o n s ; c o u r t e s y o f t h e w e s t i n r e s o r t m a c a u

■ EAT

Macau’s only three-Michelin-star restaurant, Robuchon a Galera (3rd floor, Lisboa Tower, 2–4 Avenida Lisboa; 853/8803-7878; hotellisboa.com; tasting menus from HK$1,588 per person) serves fine French fare from the grand master of refined dining, Joël Robuchon, and has a wine collection of more than 7,100 labels. Lucky at cards? Blow the budget with a 1995 Dom Pérignon, paired with caviar in fine royal jelly and anise cream.

For rustic Macanese and Cantonese classics—the succulent roast pigeon is a must-try—sit down at the original Fat Siu Lau (64 Rua de Felicidade; 853/2857-3580; fatsiulau.com.mo; dinner for two MOP500), established in 1903.

Lord Stow’s Garden Café (105 Rua da Cordoaria, Coloane; 853/2888-1851; lordstow.com; lunch for two MOP160) offers heavenly egg tarts and alfresco seating on laid-back Coloane, while Fernando’s (9 Hac Sa Beach; 853/28882264; dinner for two MOP350) rolls out superb Portuguese dishes in a beachside setting; don’t miss the fresh grilled sardines or roast suckling pig, accompanied by a Portuguese vintage.

■ STAY

The only casino-endowed Hard Rock Hotel (City of Dreams, Estrada do Istmo, Cotai; 853/8868-3338; hardrockhotelmacau.com; doubles from HKD$988) outside North America has 326 slick, contemporary rooms, including a rock-star suite dedicated to Cantopop idol Jacky Cheung. While it may not have baccarat tables, the Mandarin Oriental Macau (956–1110

Avenida Amizade; 853/2870-1016; mandarinoriental.com/macau; doubles from HK$1,788) boasts luxe lodgings and a deeply indulgent spa, with Traditional Chinese Medicine and Portuguese–inspired treatments on the menu. Retreat from modernity at the Pousada de Sao Tiago (Avenida da República, Fortaleza de São Tiago da Barra; 853/2837-8111; saotiago.com. mo; doubles from HKD$2,500), a 17thcentury fortress turned charming 12-suite boutique hotel with a fine Spanish restaurant and even its own chapel. For a complete getaway, the 208-room Westin Resort Macau (1918 Estrada De Hac Sa, Coloane; 853/28871111; starwoodhotels.com; doubles from HK$1,188) is set on a peaceful hillside overlooking the South China Sea.

Flamboyance at The Venetian Macao.

Rejuvenating at the Mandarin Oriental Macau's spa.

■ SHOP At the Shoppes at Four Seasons

(Estrada da Baía de N. Senhora da Esperança, Four Seasons Hotel Macao, Cotai Strip, Taipa; 853/8117-7992; shoppesatfourseasons.com), you’ll find 160 luxury brands including Gucci, Shanghai Tang and Shiatzy Chen, plus the world’s first Moët & Chandon Bar— perfect for celebrating that big win.

No love at the roulette table? Then stock up on comforting local treats like crumbly almond biscuits and spicy ginger candy from Pasteleria Koi Kei (70–72 Rua de Felicidade; 8532893-8102; koikei.com), the territory’s most famous confectionary. All-white boutique Dora Tam Design (20 Rua da Se; 853/28256319; doratamdesign.com) displays the Hong Kong designer’s artful jewelry, as well as funky glassware and porcelain from German brand Ritzenhoff—think adorably colorful piggy banks—and hand-crafted Italian leather goods by Giorgio Fedon. Mastermind Japan (Avenida Sir Anders Ljungstedt, Lei Keng Kuok De Hoi Keng Jardim; 853/28723414; mmjmacau.com) showcases the label’s edgy newest collections at its first dedicated store located outside of Japan. ✚

The entrance to Lord Stow's Garden Café.

Outside the Shoppes at the Four Seasons.

A room at The Westin Resort Macau.

travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 97

Privilege knows no boundaries.

Carried by the Elite, the world over.

By invitation only.

For expression of interest, please call Singapore: + (65) 6295 6293 Hong Kong: + (852) 2277 2233 Thailand: + (66) 2273 5445

EXCLUSIVE TOKYO OFFERS FOR AMERICAN EXPRESS PLATINUM CARDMEMBERS

Four Seasons Tokyo

Park Hyatt Tokyo

The Peninsula Tokyo

Mandarin Oriental Tokyo

Tokyo is one of the most vibrant cities in Asia, and a destination ever growing in popularity among Asian travellers in the know. It offers some of the most varied and succulent cuisine in the region (a whopping 197 chefs in Tokyo boast Michelin stars), while at the same time appeasing artistic palates with cutting-edge, often tucked-away art galleries.

Take Kiyosumi, Koto-ku’s harbourfront warehouse district, for instance. Here visitors can find an unassuming seven-story former warehouse, opposite a sprawling concrete plant, with three floors of some of the best art in Asia.

Since there’s never been a better time to visit this storied city, we are delighted to present to you our Exclusive Lodging Programmes showcasing some of the finest properties in Tokyo, all of which extend a special welcome to American Express Platinum Cardmembers.

With our ongoing Fine Hotels & Resorts Programme, we offer you a variety of memorable experiences and a suite of exclusive benefits giving you access to more than US$550 in

valuable benefits based on a 2-night stay*. Exclusive benefits include a room upgrade upon check-in (subject to availability); daily continental breakfast for two; a 4pm late check-out; and additional privileges unique to each property, such as a dinner or afternoon tea for two, or USD100 food and beverage credit during your stay.

Our partners in Tokyo: Four Seasons at Marunouchi, Four Seasons At Chinzan-so, Grand Hyatt, Hotel Seiyo Ginza, Park Hyatt, Mandarin Oriental, The Peninsula and The Ritz-Carlton.

For more details of the Fine Hotels & Resorts Program, please visit: americanexpress.com.sg/platinumfhr.

GETTING THERE: Enjoy additional benefits with fare savings when you book a flight to Japan with one of our partner airlines.

Call The Platinum Card® Service for more details on the airlines and routes available.

*Based on double occupancy. Actual value varies by property, length and date of stay. Certain terms and conditions apply. In order to receive Fine Hotels & Resorts programme amenities and rates, reservations must be made through The Platinum Card Travel Service and payment must be made using the American Express® Card in the Platinum Cardmember's name. Room upgrade at check-in is based on availability. One special programme amenity per room, per stay. Not combinable with corporate or group contracted rates. Participating partners and programme benefits are subject to change without notice. Programme valid for travel until December 31, 2011.

Information is correct at the time of publishing.

For details & reservations, please call The Platinum CARD® Service AT Singapore: +(65) 6392 1177 (option 1) HONG KONG: +(852) 2277 2233 Thailand: +(66) 2273 5599

stylish traveler

[st ]

ASSISTANT F ASHION ED i TOR : J ESSIE BANDY ; P r o p s t y l i s t : h e a t h e r c h o n t o s

cold comforts

Clockwise from top left: Wool sweater, by D&G; baby alpaca cap, Eugenia Kim; wool-cotton blend mittens, Lauren Ralph Lauren; woolcotton blend scarf, Lauren Ralph Lauren; lamb’s-wool ski hat, Kangol; cotton knit boot with faux-fur pom-poms, Rocket Dog.

shopping

nordic chic

keep warm this season with these scandinavianinspired pieces. Styled by Mimi Lombardo

Photographed by Charles Masters

travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 101

[st] gift guide

great travel gifts shopping for your favorite globe-trotters? here, our picks for presents that will get them in the spirit.

Photographed by Lars Klove Styled by Mimi Lombardo

1

Dress up your tree with a glittering ornament, Eliot Raffit.

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4

2

The perfect carry on: a canvas holdall with Italian glazed calfskin trim, Nyla Noor.

10

Conquer the mountain in self-heating, waterproof boots, Columbia.

These cashmereand-deerskin slippers will keep your feet feeling first-class, Hermès.

3

Listen to (or tune out) the holiday music with SE535 noise-canceling earbuds, Shure.

5

Who doesn’t miss Polaroids? The Instax Mini 7S camera gives you that same instant-film gratification, Fujifilm.

9

11

The frequent flier is sure to appreciate a non-iron cotton dress shirt (shown with a silk tie), Brooks Brothers.

This nylon-and– down reversible jacket packs into a nifty cube-shaped travel pouch, Max Mara.

8

’Tis the season for giving back.

All proceeds from this BPAfree plastic travel bottle help provide clean drinking water in developing countries, water.org.

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7

A green onyx and 24-karat gold bracelet adds a touch of holiday color, Bounkit.

6

For aspiring aviators, this stainless-steel Atlantic Voyage watch with a leather strap was codesigned by Charles Lindbergh—the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, Longines.

e a r b u d s : C o u r t e s y o f S h u r e . B o o t i e s : C o u r t e s y o f H e r m è s . CA m e r a : C o u r t e s y o f F u j i f i l m . S h i r t : C o u r t e s y o f B r o o k s B r o t h e r s . W a t c h : C o u r t e s y o f l o n g i n e s . W a t e r b o t t l e : C o u r t e s y o f WATER . ORG

[st] gift guide

[st] gift guide

14

12

13

Take your essentials on the plane or on the town in an aged lambskin tote, Dior.

15

20 19

You can play music anywhere with these portable folding speakers, Muji.

Pack a personal picnic in a BPA-free plastic boxlunch container, Daniel Black & Martin Blum.

With cashmere inside and out, these ballet flats beat any hotel slippers, Banana Republic.

16

Press a location on this talking city globe (available for 20 destinations worldwide, including Manhattan, pictured) and get the download on local landmarks, Globee for Pylones USA.

18

Not only does it take 12.1mp shots and record HD movies— the V-Lux 20 camera also geotags them via GPS, Leica.

17

Carry your iPad in style.

From top: neoprene holder, Tumi; Vacchetta sleeve, Tod’s; leather snap cover and calfskin zip style, Smythson; leather case, Red Camo by Trussardi 1911.

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MAP : C o u r t e s y o f à l a c a r t e MAPS . BAG : COURTESY O F DIOR . GLOBE : COURTESY O F GLOBEE F OR PYLONES u SA . CAMERA : COURTESY O F LEICA CAMERA

We love these goldplated pewter sea-themed pendants with Czech crystals, Alicia Shulman.

This hand-drawn, laminated, foldout map and guide (available for 14 locations) is practical and chic, À La Carte Maps.

21

Travel back in time to the 1980’s—the silicone-coated spring band on this water-resistant digital watch hugs your wrist without a clasp, Philip Keller.

30

With its urban motif from a vintage Ferragamo ad, this canvas beach bag works on the sand or in the city, Salvatore Ferragamo.

23

A two-in-one coat is good for the woman on the go: the patent-leather rain shell snaps off to reveal a wool layer that can be worn alone, Jane Post.

22

Amateur filmmakers will rejoice over this limitededition plastic Flip camera, Paul Smith.

29

Driving-themed sterling-silver-and-lacquer cuff links look sharp on the road, Louis Vuitton.

24

With lenses that block UV rays, these sunglasses are ideal for a sunny getaway, Cartier.

25

CU F F LINKS : COURTESY O F LOUIS VUITTON

Set the mood in your hotel room with a travel-size, hand-poured soy candle, Linnea’s Lights.

26

Shetland wool-lined leather mittens will brighten up a cold winter day, L.L.Bean.

28

Pick up stations almost anywhere with a lightweight, water-resistant, satellite travel radio and alarm clock, Tivoli Audio.

27

This ripstop ballistic rolling suitcase weighs less than three kilograms and fits easily in the overhead bin, Lands’ End.

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[st] gift guide

33

Accessorize your travel wardrobe with a pair of rose-gold hoop earrings, Van Cleef & Arpels.

32

31

Make a bold statement with a hand-stamped cotton batik shirt, Three Islands.

38

This leather travel wallet is durable enough for the most intrepid nomads, Rimowa.

40

Adventurous types can capture HD action footage using the small, shock-resistant, waterproof ATC9K camcorder, Oregon Scientific.

39

Hit the road in rubber-soled deerskin shoes, Minnetonka Moccasin.

34

You can’t go wrong with a cotton travel cardigan for the man on the move, Guess.

35

37

A satiny down-filled nylon jacket works both on the slopes and après-ski, Pink Pony Collection by Ralph Lauren.

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With Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree, you don’t have to leave your armchair to island-hop around the Caribbean, New York Review Books.

36

Clip the BackTrack Point 5 personal GPS device on to your hiking gear and you’ll easily find your way on the trail, Bushnell.

EARRINGS : COURTESY O F VAN CLEE F & ARPELS . CAM c o r d e r : COURTESY O F OREGON SCIENTI F IC . J ACKET : COURTESY O F POLO RALPH LAUREN

Hit the sand—or the hotel pool— in nylon swim trunks, Nautica.

[st] fashion

Dress, Emillio Pucci; shoes, model’s own.

Opposite: Jumpsuit and belt, Raoul; shoes, model’s own.

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lion city soaring

with its sky-high views and sumptuous suites, the marina bay sands raises singapore's style stakes. Photographed by mitchell nguyen mccormack.

Styled by linda charoenlab

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[st] fashion

Sequin dress, Hook’s by Prapakas; bracelet, Raoul; shoes, model’s own.

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[st] fashion

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Dress, Hermès; belt, bracelet and clutch bag, Raoul.

Opposite: Velvet dress, Hook’s by Prapakas; bracelet, Hermès; stockings, Topshop.

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[st] fashion

Dress, Prada; handbag, Fendi; bracelet, Raoul; shoes, model’s own.

Opposite: Dress, Theatre; shoes, model’s own.

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Model: Anna D Hair and Make-up: Kitty Kittiya Place: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore stockists Emilio Pucci emiliopucci.com Fendi fendi.com Hermès hermes.com Hooks by Prapakas hooksbyprapakas.com Prada prada.com Raoul raoul.com Theatre theatrebangkok.com Topshop topshop.com

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journal

travel topics in depth, vivid visuals and more

Rounded rocks in Oamaru, north of Dunedin.

c h r i s t o p h e r k u c way

southern crossing ia drive on new zealand’s south island—with itsi ilord of the rings landscapes, superb local winesi iand glass-and-timber lodges—is like a visit toi ianother, more perfect world. By ANTHONY DENNISi

travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 119

journal drive DAYS Queenstown 1–2 The end of the year is ideal for a springtime tour

DAY 3

Queenstown to Te Anau (177 Kilometers)

DAY 4

Te Anau–Ma napouri Loop (42 kilometers)

After a final alfresco breakfast on Matakauri’s terrace—basking in the views of the aptly named Remarkables Mountains—drive back into Queenstown and hug Lake Wakatipu as it veers south. The road will lead you past farming communities such as Mossburn, New Zealand’s “deer capital” and a source of much of the venison you’ll find on your plate, before reaching Te Anau. This is the start of the Southern Scenic Route (southernscenicroute.co.nz), one of New Zealand’s greatest, though least-known, drives, traversing a sparsely populated wonderland of forests, lakes, waterfalls and wild coastlines. Fjords figure here, too; New Zealand is one of a handful of places blessed with the narrow inlets. Check in to the rustic-modern Fiordland Lodge (472 Te Anau–Milford Hwy.; 64-3/249-7832; fiordlandlodge.co.nz; doubles from NZ$692), owned by a veteran park ranger and designed to take advantage of the views. A three-course dinner is included in the rate.

Milford Sound, New Zealand’s most famous fjord, is magnificent, but savvy Kiwis favor Doubtful Sound, which is both larger and less touristy. Real Journeys (see above; cruises 120 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

f r o m T o p : c h r i s t o p h e r k u c way ; C o u r t e s Y o f E i c h a r d t ’ s P r i vat e H o t e l ; c o u r t e s y o f m ata k a u r i l o d g e

Delicious views

From above: Nature sparkles on the South Island; a crayfish sandwich at Eichardt’s Private Hotel; Matakauri Lodge, which overlooks Lake Wakatipu.

of South Island’s secluded fjords, wild seascapes and remote luxury lodges. Begin in Queenstown, New Zealand’s premier year-round alpine resort, a kind of antipodean Aspen. From the airport, head into town by following the shore of Lake Wakatipu and snare the lakeside window table at the glamorous Eichardt’s Private Hotel (Marine Parade; 643/441-0450; eichardtshotel.co.nz; lunch for two NZ$77); the seafood chowder makes for a superb lunch. After shopping for merino wool sweaters in Queenstown’s compact, lively center, drive 10 minutes along Lake Esplanade to Matakauri Lodge (569 Glenorchy Rd.; 64-3/441-1008; matakauri.co.nz; doubles from NZ$1,344, including dinner), your lakeside retreat for the next two nights. Matakauri—the newest sibling to North Island’s Kauri Cliffs and the Farm at Cape Kidnappers lodges—has 11 spacious, light-filled suites with panoramic views of the lake and Cecil Peak, whose 1,533-meter summit is often obscured by wispy clouds.

Dinner at the lodge is cooked by head chef Dale Gartland, who uses exquisitely fresh local produce: green-lipped mussels; Southland beef; organic vegetables. Stretch your legs here for another day, allowing time for a lake cruise on the Earnslaw, a 98-year-old steamer, or a half day of whitewater rafting on the Shotover River, with Real Journeys (64-3/249-7416; realjourneys.co.nz; lake cruises from NZ$45; rafting trips from NZ$173).

from NZ$245) operates a daylong excursion to Doubtful Sound that starts in Manapouri, 25 minutes from the lodge.

You’ll take a one-hour boat ride across Lake Manapouri, then get on a bus to cross 670-meter Wilmot Pass before glimpsing Doubtful Sound glittering below. Once aboard the Breaksea Girl—a 20-passenger ketch small enough to get close to the waterfalls—look out for fur seals, bottlenose dolphins and penguins. The day ends with an astronomy session back at Fiordland Lodge: with no major cities for at least 160 kilometers, the stargazing here is unparalleled.

Lake Wakatipu

Queenstown The Remarkables

6

Mossburn Te Anau

6

Otago Peninsula

1

8

Manapouri

Te Anau to Otago Peninsula (298 kilometers)

Have the lodge pack you a lunch: on today’s drive, the gourmet opportunities are limited to gas station cafés and the odd fish-and-chips shop. It is worth pausing at seaside Orepuki, about a 11/2-hour drive south of Te Anau, where southern right whales can sometimes be spotted. Push on another 30 minutes to Riverton, established by whalers in the 1830’s and now a busy fishing village, to find a spot on the beach for your picnic. From there, bypass the unremarkable city of Invercargill and head east directly to the Catlins, a rugged region of waterfalls, blowholes and petrified forests from the Jurassic era—beyond this remotest of Pacific shores, the next landfall is in Antarctica. The Southern Scenic Route ends in Dunedin, a Scottish-influenced college town, but you’re heading about 30 minutes further to the Otago Peninsula, where the scenery is untamed and the wildlife abundant. You’ll reach Kaimata Retreat (297 Cape Saunders Rd., Portobello; 64-3/456-3443; kaimatanz.com; doubles from NZ$426), a remote, timber-clad lodge, via a series of gravel roads. Toast the long drive with a bottle of outstanding Central Otago Pinot Noir and chill out on the deck overlooking the inlet and the sheep ranch that clings to the precipitous, pea-green hillside across the way.

DAY 6

Doubtful Sound

South Island

99

Orepuki

92

Catlin Forest Park

Stewart Island Southern Scenic Route 0

Dunedin

Riverton Invercargill

92 km

Australia

DAY 5

N

Pacific Ocean Canberra

New Zealand

Wellington Tasman Sea

It's easy to get off the beaten track on New Zealand's South Island.

Otago Peninsula to Queenstown (298 kilometers)

c h r i s t o p h e r k u c way

The tip of the Otago Peninsula is home to the Westpac Royal Albatross Centre (Taiaroa Head; 64-3/478-0499; albatross.org.nz; tours from NZ$43), the world’s only mainland breeding colony for the formidable birds, which can live longer than 60 years and have a wingspan of 3 meters or more. Afterward, follow Portobello Road back into Dunedin and to the Octagon, its appealing central plaza—that’s a statue of Robert Burns in front of the cathedral. Grab a quick lunch at the hip Mash Café (16 The Octagon; 64-3/471-7372; lunch for two NZ$31), located under the eaves of the historic Regent Theatre. From here, Queenstown is a leisurely fourhour drive via routes 8 and 6 through the interior of South Island, passing farms and former gold fields. The Dairy Private Luxury Hotel (corner of Brecon and Isle Sts.; 64-

3/442-5164; thedairy.co.nz; doubles from NZ$446) is an unpretentious boutique property and the perfect spot to end your trip (“dairy” is Kiwi for “convenience store,” by the way). From there, the plush and amiable Botswana Butchery (17 Marine Parade; 64-3/442-6994; dinner for two NZ$133), one of Queenstown’s hottest tables, is an easy walk for dinner. Dishes include a range of superior steaks, venison and lamb, as well as seafood dishes—such as Antarctic sea bass with bouillabaisse sauce—direct from the pristine waters you’ve just been admiring. ✚ travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 121

journal food

Northern Exposure Is Portland, Oregon, America’s newest food capital? ADAM SACHS gets to know the indie chefs, coffee geeks, meat obsessives and salt fanatics who are turning up the heat in the pacific Northwest.

Photographed by Steve Kepple

I

’m just gonna come right out and say it,” Naomi Pomeroy says, stealing a glance over her shoulder before just coming right out and saying it: “Men brutalize their vegetables!”

Boy chefs suffer from a meat-first machismo, she says, giggling. Hers is a commanding giggle, if there is such a thing. She’s no dainty herbivore.

At her restaurant Beast last night, I’d eaten boudin noir set in apple and duck-fat pastry and sliced hanger steak with brown-butter béarnaise. Then came the salad. It was a salad that was actually worth saving for the end of the meal. Why? Maybe it was the peppery freshness of the wild miner’s lettuce and greens from Gathering Together Farms. Maybe it was the unbrutalized way in which they’d been handled (emphasis on hands; tongs are to Pomeroy’s greens as wire hangers were to Joan Crawford’s closets) or the light, tart touch of the Sauvignon Blanc vinaigrette. Or maybe it really did come down to the “gentle chick-flick approach” Pomeroy

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says she and sous-chef Mika Paredes bring to their cooking: a two-woman, two-seating, six-course, set-menu nightly show in which 20 or so satisfied-looking participants eat communally and leave no trace of salad on their plates.

Veggie-handling trash talk aside, Pomeroy has nothing but love for Portland’s community of chefs, guys she’s worked with and grown up around over the years in the city’s flowering, cross-pollinating restaurant industry. There is Gabriel Rucker of Le Pigeon, the small and celebrated Lower Burnside space that is half civilized bistro and half culinary crack den, where your darkest desires (foie gras torchon with buttermilk pancakes? Sweetbreads with blue cheese?) are indulged. And there’s Jason Barwikowski— with whom Rucker and Pomeroy once worked—who has now turned to the curing and butchering arts at Olympic Provisions, in Southeast Portland.

Beast is run like a nightly dinner party, with Pomeroy and Paredes as the busy hosts. During a brief break in the

Taste of Oregon Left: A

charcuterie plate at Beast in Portland. Below: Beast chef Naomi Pomeroy (right) and sous chef Mika Paredes. Opposite from left: A vintage sign in Portland’s Old Town; Nong Poonsukwattana at her chicken-and-rice cart, Nong’s Khao Man Gai.

action, Pomeroy takes me to a nearby café, where she immediately spots and is spotted by a local food blogger.

She lowers her voice and we take our coffees to go. Surely there are other food nerds lurking nearby. Artisanal picklers, back-to-the-land lettuce farmers, sandwich-shop schemers, coffee micro-roasters, sous chefs sketching their plans for the next great wood-fired pizza cart. Is Portland the most food-obsessed city in the U.S.? It sure feels like it.

Pomeroy traces the city’s culinary obsessions to the 1960’s hippie influx, to people who came to Portland to grow their own food and do their own canning; it’s an awareness of the politics of consumption that never went away. “My generation is coming around to our own interpretation of what our parents did,” she says, over a pile of torn bread that will become tonight’s wild-onion-and-Swiss-chard panada.

“But we’re doing an edgier version. We like meat. We’ve got no interest in suffering. We like to have a good time.”

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his should be a cologne,” Jason French says, sniffing like a hound at the meat-fragrant air.

“You need to bottle this. Call it ‘USDA-Approved.’”

We’re in the laboratory-like curing and hanging locker at Olympic Provisions, a restaurant and salumeria occupying an old cereal mill on the eastern side of town. Olympic may well be the first curing facility in the state to have its wares approved by the USDA, which means not only doing things by the book but also having an agency official looking over its shoulder on a daily basis. The room looks clean enough to make microchips in, but the air is invisibly alive: garlic, allspice, a nose-tickling chorizo-ness.

French runs Ned Ludd, a small-scale, pure-hearted restaurant that has no stove. What it’s got is a wood-burning oven he and his partner inherited from the space’s last incarnation, a short-lived pizza joint. Named for the storied leader of the Luddites, the restaurant manages the trick of turning this accidental technological limitation into a great, sort of illuminating and inspiring DIY strength. Everything from slow-roasted chops and vegetables to meat pies and flat breads goes into the oven. Earlier in the week I’d tried charred, sweet, crunchy baby leeks with romesco; a plate of house-made charcuterie with thin slices of porchetta di testa (a cold cut made of rolled, well-seasoned, epically porky »

Somehow, one restaurant turns an ACCIDENTAL technological limitation into an inspiring DIY strength

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head meat); and a dewy, chewy, just-the-right-side-of-dry bresaola. There’s an honesty and straightforwardness about French’s cooking that I really admire—but more to the point, it all just tasted great.

French offers to chauffeur me around on his night away from the wood oven. He picks me up at the Ace Hotel and we wend our way around in his beat-up old truck. From downtown we cross over the Willamette River to an emptyish-feeling industrial area of Southeast where a lot of good stuff has been popping up. First stop: House Spirits Distillery, to sample their Oregon gin and local malted whiskeys.

Then to Kir, a dark little wine bar where we eat baked chèvre and chicken liver–and-currant mousse and our server praises a Muscadet by declaring that it “tastes like something an otter swam through.”

“Those two nerds out front are two of the best baristas in the country,” French says, tapping the window. That’s Portland, he says. Where the food nerds are the cool kids.

Where everyone came for the products and the energy and stayed because it’s cheap enough to try anything.

Next we’re at Olympic with Barwikowski, and the two Jasons are praising each other’s curing techniques.

Barwikowski wants to get into the business of canning preserved fish. “I’ve done a bunch of research on where to get the canners and the flywheel crank cans for tuna and octopus,” he says, with the twinkly eyed look of the committed tinkerer gearing up for a new project.

There was a time—like a year ago—when the words hipster and charcuterie (let alone octopus canning) were not naturally linked in one’s mind. But now the old ways are 124 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

Portland has an enduring, ENDEARING appreciation of the low-rent, the goofy, the not-ready-for-prime-time new again. What saves Portland from being crushed under its heavy load of hipsterdom is the levity and sincerity of its enthusiasms. And there is an enduring, endearing appreciation of the low-rent, the goofy, the not-ready-for-primetime. For all its farm-to-table zeal, it’s also a city that takes civic pride in Voodoo Doughnut’s bacon-maple-glazed variety, its friendly strip clubs and packed sandwich shops (I’ll let you navigate the former on your own; for pork-belly cubano and meatball subs, look for the lines at Bunk Sandwiches; stop in at Meat Cheese Bread, in Southeast, for a flank-steak sandwich with blue cheese or a BLB—bacon, lettuce and golden beets).

There are other American cities with a good food-cart culture, but few are as organized and encouraging as Portland’s. Many of the city’s several hundred registered food carts are clustered together in dedicated “pods,” or food-court trailer parks. Everyone I talked to urged me to find a cart called Nong’s Khao Man Gai. Go, they said, and you’ll understand. Step one to khao man gai enlightenment: check Nong’s Twitter feed to see if she’s sold out of her signature (and only) dish, poached chicken and rice with soup. Wait too long and the news on Twitter (twitter.com/ nongskhaomangai) is usually bad, so I get up early and go one

flavor city Left: Counter dining at chef Gabriel Rucker’s tiny Le Pigeon. Below: The Sugar Cube’s vanilla-bean panna cotta with local strawberries and a chocolate ganache-coated cupcake topped with potato chips.

Opposite from left: Ned Ludd co-owner Jason French in his restaurant; grilled dorade stuffed with lemon and oregano at Clyde Common, at the Ace Hotel.

drizzly morning. On the cart is a smiley-faced, rain-smudged sign: add fried chicken skin $1. I do and take my butcherpaper-wrapped bundle and soup container in search of cover from the drizzle. The contents of the package are as advertised: sliced poached chicken, the sticky unctuousness of rice cooked in the chicken’s broth, a bit of light spiced soybean sauce, crisp curls of chicken skin. How to describe it? Deeply, comfortingly, almost movingly plain.

At another pod, in the North Mississippi area, I find sweet, redheaded and tattooed Kir Jensen smiling from within her cart of sweets, the Sugar Cube. Her “Amy Winehouse” cupcake is soaked in brandy and comes topped with a straw and “bump” of powdered sugar. I eat one and bounce down North Mississippi Avenue on my way to the Meadow, which looks like an innocuous gift shop but hides within it an outlandish library of exotic salts curated by salt nut—sorry, “selmelier”—Mark Bitterman.

There are black salts from Cyprus in pyramid-shaped crystals, Balinese reef salt and El Salvadoran fleur de sel. Pink salts and gray salts, ones that smell like volcanoes and others like chocolate and hickory smoke and the briny sea. I nibble all the samples I can; and the salt-sugar counterpoint makes me think of Alice and her many mushrooms, and it seems we are down the rabbit hole of culinary obsessions.

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ell me, where else in the country do you find sturgeon?” Robert Reynolds asks. Not waiting for an answer, he continues his partial catalogue of the qualities that contribute to a great food city. “We have uncultivated berries, you can get them off the bush and onto your plate by the end of the day. There are coasts and rivers and orchards and vineyards and dairies—this is one of the great dairy regions of the country.”

Reynolds was a chef in San Francisco in the 1970’s and 80’s and took motorcycle trips to Oregon on his time off.

Long before the Portland restaurant scene exploded, he fell in love with the agricultural wealth of the state. He used to take his cooks to France to eat and learn. “Then I realized you had everything in one place here, and you could speak English,” he says. He left California and the restaurant business and moved here to open a private cooking school.

There are other natural resources harder to measure, for instance openness and creativity. One of my favorite places in the city is Evoe, a low-key lunch counter attached to a gourmet grocery called Pastaworks, on Southeast Hawthorne. There are jars of pickled vegetables, specials on the chalkboard, and soup-stained copies of The Art of Eating to read while you eat. Kevin Gibson, who used to be the chef at the well-regarded Castagna, quietly presides over the space, stripped to its bare essentials: a hot plate; a small stove; a couple of stools gathered around the woodblock bar that also serves as his workspace. The food, too, is pared down: a perfect salad of sweet Sauvie Island beets and an egg with a yolk of deep sunset orange; scrambled eggs and chanterelles over a good buttered toast. One afternoon I fall into talking with Jon Hart, a cook and writer who helps out Gibson at Evoe sometimes. “There’s very little smoke and » travelandleisureasia.com | december 2010 125

journal food Castagna’s char-grilled fava beans and squid au jus. Right: Western Culinary Institute students take a break on Portland’s Alder Street.

mirrors,” Hart says about why he thinks Portland restaurants work the way they do.

Reynolds urges me to see what’s happening at Castagna these days. The restaurant’s been around for a while, but it has a young new chef who trained at Mugaritz, a Michelinstarred restaurant in Spain. The first time Reynolds tried Matthew Lightner’s food, he marched into the kitchen and told him, “This dish has everything—including disappointment.” They got along well after that. Lightner’s not your typical Portland dude chef. No visible tattoos, no swaggering sausage-curing side projects. He’s a bit brainy and formal, which is how the elegant, serene Castagna feels. The room— all muted grays and greens—is refined by Portland standards. White tablecloths? Have I seen any white tablecloths since I got to town? The menu mentions “hay” and “twigs” and I worry that foams and spheres might not be far behind. And then the food comes and it has everything and very little disappointment. To my great relief, Lightner’s dishes are neither smeared-plate think pieces nor high-tech dazzlery. There is an organic simplicity to the way they look, artful assemblages of good-tasting things. Raw oysters are dressed in apple and fennel fronds and puffy clouds of frozen horseradish cream. A yuba-like skin of milk is draped like a noodle over a melting piece of halibut that’s been poached in whey. This isn’t mission-statement food or polemic food or international show-off food. It’s personal, surprising, and, true to the spirit of the city, not just local but a bit odd and very likable.

It strikes me that part of what makes Portland work is not just the many things the city has going for it but 126 december 2010 | travelandleisureasia.com

precisely what it lacks. There is the self-consciously indie vibrancy of Brooklyn without the long shadow of Manhattan. It has the natural bounty of San Francisco minus Bay Area rents or the inherited seriousness of its food revolutions. It has the ethnic food carts and the whatever-works energy of Los Angeles without the sprawl.

“We try to put you in the field, forest or ocean,” Lightner says when I ask him to describe the effect he’s going for.

A noble conceit, but I don’t want to be anywhere other than here: in a city of ambitious food nerds working hard to amuse themselves and please the rest of us. ✚

portland address book Beast 5425 N.E. 30th Ave.; 1-503/841-6968; dinner for two US$150.

Bunk Sandwiches 621 S.E. Morrison St.; 1-503/4779515; lunch for two US$16.

Castagna 1752 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.; 1-503/2317373; dinner for two US$110.

Clyde Common The meatcentric restaurant at the Ace Hotel. 1014 S.W. Stark St.; 1-503/228-3333; dinner for two US$70.

Evoe 3731 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.; 1-503/232-1010; lunch for two US$20.

House Spirits Distillery 2025 S.E. Seventh Ave.; 1-503/235-3174; tasting for two US$20.

Kir 22 N.E. Seventh Ave.; 1-503/232-3063; drinks and snacks for two US$46.

Le Pigeon 738 E. Burnside

St.; 1-503/546-8796; dinner for two US$80.

Meat Cheese Bread 1406 S.E. Stark St.; 1-503/2341700; lunch for two US$20.

The Meadow 3731 N. Mississippi Ave.; 1-503/2884633; free salt tastings.

Ned Ludd 3925 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.; 1-503/288-6900; dinner for two US$65.

Nong’s Khao Man Gai S.W. 10th Ave. at Alder St.; 1-971/255-3480; lunch for two US$12.

Olympic Provisions 107 S.E. Washington St.; 1-503/9543663; lunch for two US$21.

Sugar Cube 4237 N. Mississippi Ave.; 1-503/8902825; dessert for two US$6.

Voodoo Doughnut 22 S.W. Third Ave.; 1-503/241-4704; doughnuts for two US$5.

journal obsessions

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liked getting to airports early even before the last decade, when my neurosis became a necessity. My wife, on the other hand, considers time spent in an airport wasted, lost, anathema. And neither rain nor sleet nor increased security is going to change her mind.

Generally speaking, when we fly together, we compromise and do it her way. So two years ago, we had a leisurely breakfast at a B&B

Ode to Airports Your flight’s been canceled, you missed the connection, you got held up in traffic—for whatever reason, you’re stuck at the airport, and it’s going to be a while. But is that really so bad? Not at all, argues Michael Gross. Illustrated by Serge Bloch

before racing the 93 kilometers from Lucca to Florence and then down the A1 to Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport to catch an earlyafternoon flight to New York.

Rush hour outside Florence didn’t help matters. Neither did the roadwork or the jam-up between Rome and Fiumicino, a town I knew only by name because da Vinci was there.

We pulled into the rental-car return 20 minutes before our scheduled departure. We raced to the check-in desk and learned our plane was still at the gate. Success! But then the Italian immigration officers strolled past en route to lunch, and no amount of pleading was going to stop them.

Back at the counter, my wife got us rebooked while I dug a Michelin guide out of our suitcase. An hour later, we had boarding passes for the next morning, a room at the Hilton Rome Airport hotel, and a reservation for dinner at Bastianelli dal 1929, which both the Michelin and the airline clerk assured us was the best restaurant in Fiumicino.

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Claudius, through which the Tiber drains into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Then we had the best scampi alla griglia of our trip and went to bed early. As we fell asleep we agreed that, handed travel lemons, we’d managed to make lemonade: we’d been held up a day and night at the airport, but we’d found a pleasant hotel, discovered a new town and eaten like kings.

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aying over doesn’t have to mean laying about on hard plastic chairs, shopping at duty-free stores full of the same old scarves, bottles and belts, or reading yet another Ludlum thriller. These days, airports come with amenities—they and the towns near them have a lot going for them.

Consider the town of Narita, for example, home of Tokyo’s main international airport, two hours outside the city. Travelers waylaid there can discover a lovely temple surrounded by a park with a waterfall that flows into three ponds; and, in season, plum and cherry trees in full bloom; and streets lined with traditional shops and an open-air food market. At Schiphol, Amsterdam’s airport, you can while away a couple of hours, depending on your tastes, at a meditation center, a casino or a tiny branch of the Rijksmuseum, where exhibits are changed frequently—the first of its kind in an airport in the world. LAX now has a Pink’s Hot Dogs stand and will soon have Skewers, by the celebrity chef Masaharu Morimoto. The airport in Austin, Texas, mounts live concerts.

Taoyuan, in Taipei, has a Hello Kitty–themed gate. Ted Stevens Airport, in Anchorage, has a collection of taxidermied animals that includes a 209-kilogram halibut. And at Reykjavik’s Keflavik International, you can take a 20-minute bus ride to the Blue Lagoon geothermal wonderland.

The distance between travel tedium and makeshift masterpiece, in other words, can be closed with nothing more than an open mind, a willingness to explore. An Internet connection helps, too. Certainly, the lesson of Fiumicino helped us this summer when we found ourselves with an unexpected five-hour layover at Charles de Gaulle, in Paris. Years ago, in a similar situation at Heathrow, I’d checked my luggage and taken the train into London for lunch and a stop at my favorite bookstore, Hatchards, on Piccadilly. But this

We’d been held up a day, but found a pleasant hotel, discovered a new town and EATEN like kings

time, it was August, half of Paris was shut for les grandes vacances, and it was raining. We would stay put, but I did want to eat. So despite my wife’s mockery—“There’s no decent food at de Gaulle!”—I got on the Web and discovered that, actually, there is. Not that you’d know it from the signage at the airport, which makes scarce mention of the Brasserie Flo in Terminal 2F—owned by the same group that runs Paris’s Bofinger, Terminus Nord and La Coupole. We walked through three terminals in Aerogare 2, stopping to check our bags en route, and finally, there it was, tucked in a corner just steps from the airport Sheraton. Two hours later, after a lunch of frisée aux lardons, steak tartare and a good rosé, we rolled back through those terminals feeling not at all as if we’d wasted a day.

B

ack at Rome airport after our “lost-and-found” half-day in Fiumicino, my wife and I were happy and relaxed as we checked in for our flight and headed for the departure lounge, where passengers destined for several northeastern American cities were all mashed together. It was only after the announcement that our new flight home was slightly delayed that we discovered just how lucky we’d been.

Our fellow passengers were more than usually disgruntled. It turned out that the flight we’d “missed” had never taken off; rather, it had sat on the runway for hours only to be canceled. By the time passengers disembarked, there were only a few seats left on the morning flight to New York, and there were no rooms at the Hilton. So families that had spent the night in less convenient accommodations—and eaten hotel rations—were headed to Boston and Philadelphia instead of New York.

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peak dreams in and around indonesia's Mount Bromo is an unforgettable landscape not of this planet.

Photographed by lauryn ishak

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t a modest 2,329 meters, Mount Bromo isn’t the most dominating of Indonesia’s suddenly active chain of volcanoes, but it remains one of the country’s most scenic.

This is particularly true at sunrise, when Java’s soft light mixes with low-slung clouds across a landscape that looks like it belongs on another planet. The scenes even startled Lauryn Ishak, a Singapore-based photographer who has captured her share of stunning landscapes, from Bali to Iceland and many places in between. “This is on a different level altogether. It’s kind of Marslike,” she says. “The scale is really huge so the feel is very surreal.” Ishak’s days at Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park in East Java began as early as 2 a.m., more often than not along secluded trails with Tris, a knowledgeable guide, which, she says, lent her journey a sense of solitude rarely found in other parts of Asia. ✚

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Mount Bromo basks in the early morning light.

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A view of the Sand Sea inside the caldera, above.

Right: Clouds sweep across the national park and the village of Ngadisari.

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‘It’s kind of Mars-like,’ Ishak says. ‘The scale is really huge, so the feel is very surreal.’

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The view from atop Mount Bromo. Below left and right: Horseback is one way up; the lush landscape behind the volcano. Opposite: A sweep of the park.

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Capturing the timeless landscape. Opposite from top: A bumpy ride on the Sand Sea; taking a break inside the Tengger caldera.

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Global Chinatown

If it weren’t in a constant state of flux, Hong Kong just wouldn’t be the same. but don’t try to find your favorite spot from your last visit—there’s a good chance it’s morphed into something else.

By Christopher Kucway Photographed by Daniel Groshong

At Wooloomooloo Prime, Hong Kong really is at your feet.

The Star Street neighborhood before the rush.

G

laring at me in his rear-view mirror, the elderly Chinese taxi driver clearly thinks I’m nuts.

We’re mired in traffic, he’s run out of steam complaining about his short retirement in Canada— “Too boring-ah!”—and I feel a creeping tinge of national pride.

That’s when I make the mistake of pointing out that my home and native land never has traffic snarls like the one enveloping us. Cue the glare. “You know the problem with Hong Kong?” he asks in a voice that intones everyone but me already knows the answer.

“Yeah, too many cars.”

“Aiya!” he says, shaking his head at me. “Not enough roads!”

And so it goes in the world’s most famous Chinatown.

Crowded, ever-changing, always digging, forever reclaiming Hong Kong. Even in this condensed city of more than seven million, there’s only one direction and that’s forward. There’s a mantra of constant change in the air, along with the pollution from Chinese factories across the border, of never being content with the way things are.

I lived here for 18 years after arriving, like so many before me, “for a year or two.” So, while it’s not exactly home, I still can’t go back again—not in the sense that you can’t relive the past, but more because the place you’re looking for has been torn down to make way for something new, a venture that will make more money more quickly. My head spins. Everywhere I turn today is something I’ve never seen before alongside the completely familiar.

Time matters, particularly in Hong Kong, a city that came with its own expiry date of July 1, 1997, when Britain handed it—gridlock, stocks and barrel—back to China. At the time, many predicted that this was a best-before warning. The city had reached its zenith. Shanghai would take over. But, even as part of fast-expanding China, Hong Kong has managed to hold its own since then turning what, at the time, was an ominous date into a historical footnote.

Yet some things haven’t changed. As a pedestrian in Hong Kong, remember that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line—if the French hadn’t invented parcours, some Cantonese grandmother would have—and that there are no such things as rules for those on foot. Digital counters are everywhere, in an odd effort to reduce the transit dash: No need to sprint for the Star Ferry, there will be another one in seven minutes. Enter a shop anywhere in Hong Kong and, in mere seconds staff will inform you that everything is 20 percent off just in case you hadn’t seen any of the signs announcing this. In Tsim Sha Tsui, a street tout offers me a suit without interrupting his mobile phone conversation and, if I don’t want that, how about a copy watch?

Surely knock-off watches are passé in a place where a young Chinese woman fills the idle moments zipping along the MTR by playing mahjong on her mobile phone. One day, I lunch with a friend who has her wrist bandaged as if she’s just gone 12 rounds with one of those Cantonese grandmothers. The bandage? “Oh it’s nothing, just a case of ‘Blackberry-itis.’” As if it’s the latest thing in cosmetic surgery, she tells me she’s had a small muscle removed from her wrist, the result of too much texting. Turns out Hong Kong is wired, not just in its frenetic pace, but also in a more literal sense. This is a city with virtual tour guides. That’s where Sarah Lian enters the frame. She appears on a service called ask Ting Ting, a mobile guide that a handful of hotels rent for the day. It features more than two hours of video, 600 dining, shopping and sightseeing suggestions, and even discounts at stores vetted by a dozen local experts. Twenty percent off at Shanghai Tang? Take it. Lian spent a few years as a young child in Hong Kong before emigrating to Canada and has been back for a year. “What I like about Hong Kong is the hustle and bustle,” she tells me, and I’ve got to wonder if she thought Vancouver boring. “A lot of people who live here don’t even know the places we mention on ask Ting Ting.” Lian says the city really caters to an international community these days, as does the mobile device that even pops up with addresses in Chinese for taxi drivers.

It’s not that I can’t find The Upper House; it’s more that it doesn’t exist in the conventional sense of a hotel. I arrive early for a meeting with public relations manager Michelle Lau only to find that there’s no lobby, reception desk or concierge, at least not in the usual sense. I chalk this up to the fact that the 117-room hotel is trying to stand out. Once inside, though, comes the single most obvious sign of change in Hong Kong: the elevator that whisks us up to the dozen floors has no “close door” button. No big thing in most places, but in Hong Kong, where not a second should be wasted and that button is most often worn out by overuse, this is nothing short of jarring.

Think New York City without the profanity. It also says a lot about the beyond-tranquil hotel. Soft woods, subtle lighting, plush carpets and that lack of a lobby all combine with large, uncluttered guestrooms—at 68 square meters, the smallest studio is huge for Hong Kong, where the price tag on land even affects the size of hotel rooms—to offer this level of comfort. Wandering around the subdued public areas, I feel like I’ve put on noise-canceling headphones. Up on the 49th floor Café Gray Deluxe, the city all comes back to me, though soundlessly, through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The café and its adjoining bar—go local and order the Hong Kong Highball, a mix of vodka, ginger, honey, lemon, cassis, pomegranate and champagne—has fast become a see-and-beseen address, one in a wave of locales that understands there are some great views of this city on the sea. With Hong » 143

These days the passion for views

172 december 2010 | www.travelandleisureasia.com

requires at least a drink in hand

Victoria Harbour from that famous ferry. Clockwise from left: At Forest Bird Boutique; looking up in Star Street; desserts at Sheung Wan's ABC Restaurant.

A night out in SoHo.

Kong, London and Tokyo on her résumé, Lau remains a big fan of her hometown and insists that, as diverse as it is, visitors shouldn’t forego its distinctly Chinese side in favor of all that is modern. “We still have a very traditional Chinese core,” she says, before adding, “There aren’t many cities in the world that can make you feel so at home.”

Later that evening, I head across the harbor to a neighborhood I spotted from the café—not to formerly decrepit streets that have been gentrified, but to an area that didn’t exist only a few years ago. Hong Kong can turn water into valuable real estate, so I’m walking through a forest of construction cranes on reclaimed land—I stop counting after a dozen—heading to the W hotel on foot (on foot! That taxi driver would say this confirms his suspicions about me) and pass through a huge under-construction block, the bright lights of Central in the distance. ICC shoots up 118 stories out of this ground, one of the new steel-and-glass chess pieces on Hong Kong’s board of skyscrapers. On the ground, I feel a reverse vertigo—or maybe it’s just the bus fumes—and duck into Elements, which, given that I easily get lost in shopping malls and there’s a reported million square meters of retail here, isn’t necessarily a good move. Steps inside, I come across a bunch of 10-year-olds

tennis player’s sleeve—goes through its dance of lights. Now more than ever, Tsim Sha Tsui is lined with brand-name boutiques and queues of mainland Chinese angling to get into each of them. Closets in China must be as large as some bank accounts, if the massive bags of loot being lugged back to, oh, let’s say the Peninsula, are any indication. How much shopping can one nation do? The answer is still coming.

The next morning, in that horrible lull before the stores open, the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui look forlorn, quiet aside from some muted traffic. I’m not bothered. A coffee in hand, I’m perched on the veranda of Hullett House overlooking an empty, interlocking brick courtyard, Hong Kong Island visible in the distance. Formerly a marine-police headquarters and seemingly abandoned for years, this colonial gem and the city block it occupies dates to the early 1880’s, with a top floor added four decades later. Today it’s been restored to house 10 individually designed suites and five restaurants. Its creaking wooden floorboards and granite walls are a pleasant break from the cookie-cutter mentality of most modern hotels. The Pui O suite, for one, makes me think I’ve forgotten my fedora, evoking as it does 1930’s Shanghai with dark-wood floors, Art Deco furnishings and, making the room spring to life, a vibrant

if i can’t find tim ho wan, i don't deserve to eat there playing hockey on an indoor sheet of ice, the South China Sea and not Canadian locale only given away when I spot a roastgoose takeaway at rink side. Up in the overly alliterative (Whatever/Whenever, colonial cool) confines of the W, it strikes me that the 393-room hotel is an amalgam of everything I could buy downstairs in the well-stocked shopping mall. Entering the lobby, it’s apparent that this is iPad territory.

I do feel a bit naked without one, though a look out the window at the ongoing reclamation makes me wonder about the hotel’s boast that it’s in Hong Kong’s hottest neighborhood. Not just yet, but maybe in a few months.

Hong Kong has always had scene stealers up at the Peak and from the bobbing decks of the Star Ferry, but these days the passion for views requires dinner or at least a drink in hand at Taikoo Shing’s Sugar or Wooloomooloo Prime in Tsim Sha Tsui. Nearby, at Nanhai No. 1, on the 30th floor of iSquare, a mod tower sprouting from the lower end of Nathan Road, I’m again on ground never seen before. Cocktails at Eyebar and the Cantonese menu—braised grouper with bamboo shoots; baked oysters in a Sichuan sauce—at the nautical-themed restaurant generate a lot of talk, but I’m most impressed by that nighttime view. From this perch in the middle of Tsim Sha Tsui, there’s an autumn snap in the air, one that drowns out the retail buzz of the streets below, while Hong Kong’s advertising skyline—neon signs on buildings that look like patches on a

stained-glass sectional room divider. On the other hand, I’d avoid the light green, deep orange D’Aguilar suite unless staring at yourself in a wall of mirrors is your thing.

arlan Goldstein is looking for a waitress.

Instead, every time he turns around, he’s half out of his chair greeting a businessman, a lawyer, a fellow restaurateur, all with the same mantra that his new place is opening in a few weeks and they should book a table. As much as Goldstein wants to place his lunch order, he also wants his identity back, and opening a new restaurant is a sure way of accomplishing that. Around town, he’s known as Harlan, or H, or G or—by the town’s young, monied financial stars—as Gold, but a previous partner continues to use his name on a restaurant Goldstein has nothing to do with. “How can I get my name back?” he asks only six floors away from his latest address. In this all-business city, he’s literally rebranding himself through his new restaurant, Gold by Harlan Goldstein. His signature dishes will include The Big G Fiorentina, a 35-ounce charcoal-grilled steak for two, with rosemary–garlic potatoes, white-truffle dressing and aged balsamic; and a slow-braised Wagyu beef– cheek ravioli, with foie gras and black-truffle sauce. In a place that loves food as much as making money, Goldstein fits in well. “This is a city where people appreciate good food and »

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don’t mind paying for it,” he tells me. “It’s also a land of opportunity. If you are a little bit smart and a little lucky, you can do anything.” Well, almost.

“No booking,” the woman on the other end of the phone shouts when I dial up a dim sum place that I’m told can’t miss.

It makes me want to eat there all the more, so I tell her mo man tai—no problem. Her English might be limited, but she makes her point. I can find Tim Ho Wan simply by looking for the queue outside. Then I must wait. In fact, if I can’t find it, I don’t deserve to eat there. The 20-seat, off-the-map restaurant is as popular as it is basic. Cantonese friends tell me the dim sum is excellent and wave off the fact that it also happens to be the cheapest Michelin-star restaurant in the world. Pui Mak-kwai, previously a chef at Lung King Heen, the three-Michelin-star Chinese restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel, ventured out on his own in March 2009. He garnered his own star for his deft touch when it comes to preparing staples such as cheung fan (rich flour rolls), har gao (shrimp dumplings) and siu mai (pork dumplings). The only downside is that wait, which can last more than an hour.

Where Tim Ho Wan is off on its own, revitalized neighborhoods such as Wanchai’s Star Street bring a blend of bistros and shops to what had been little more than run-down side

streets. Here is a mix of small design shops such as Kapok and one-off addresses like Margaret River Wines.

And SoHo continues to creep eastward, with pricey restaurants and galleries rubbing elbows with Chinese shop fronts.

Further down the hill, Hollywood Road is also looking east.

Housed in a former meat-packing shop, the laid-back and loud 208 Duecento Otto is more bar than restaurant downstairs, a chance to blow cigar smoke out onto what is a quiet city street.

Stools surround long wooden tables in front of the bar, where antipasti and salumi, and the occasional shared pizza—mozzarella direct from Italy, ditto for the oven from Naples—accompany cocktails or any of the 20 wines by the glass. Upstairs, where even midweek every seat is taken, there’s more of a restaurant feel to it and the chance to sample mains such as a penne with truffles, roasted eggplant parmigiana or braised rabbit with chanterelles. Nearby, in an outdoor market, is the modest ABC Kitchen, where two chefs who once toiled at M at the Fringe have set up shop dishing out Italian dishes—but my meal schedule, like so much else is in the city, is chock-a-block.

I only hope it’s around the next time I visit. Instead, I hop in a taxi, and it’s clear sailing down to the Star Ferry. That’s when I see it, from the deck of the dated ferry: the best view of Hong Kong, a city that is always in flux. ✚

guide to hong kong Stay GREAT VALUE East A

smartly designed hotel in the east of Hong Kong Island but convenient for the MTR. 29 Taikoo Shing Rd., Taikoo Shing; 852/3968-3968; easthongkong.com; doubles from HK$1,400.

Hullett House No. 2A Canton Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui; 852/3988-0000; hulletthouse.com; doubles from HK$6,000.

The Langham Hong Kong European elegance in Hong Kong, with a new executive club. 8 Peking Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui; 852/2375-1133; hongkong. langhamhotels.com; doubles from HK$1,755.

GREAT VALUE The Mira

Part of the Design Hotels group, the property plays up the style side of the equation. 118 Nathan Rd.; Tsim Sha Tsui; 852/23861111; themirahotel.com; doubles from HK$1,600.

Ritz-Carlton, Hong Kong Opening in March across

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16 floors of the ICC tower, the hotel will offer 312 guest rooms. ICC, 1 Austin Rd.; 852/3760-9000; ritzcarlton.com; doubles from HK$4,500.

The Upper House 88 Queensway, Pacific Place, Admiralty; 852/3968-1111; upperhouse.com; doubles from HK$4,000.

W Hong Kong 1 Austin Rd. W., Kowloon; 852/37172222; starwoodhotels.com; doubles from HK$1,955.

Eat and Drink ABC Kitchen Don’t be put off by the location; the Italian dishes are worth it.

Booking essential. CF7, Queen Street Cooked Food Centre, Sheung Wan; 852/9278-8227; dinner for two HK$350.

Alfie’s by Kee Central hideaway for a power meal or just drinks. Shop G5, Prince’s Building, Central; 852/2530-4422; lunch for two HK$1,000.

Café Gray Deluxe The Upper House, Admiralty;

852/3968-1106; dinner for two HK$1,300.

Domani Modern take on all things Italian in an open atmosphere. Level 4, Pacific Place, Admiralty; 852/2111-1197; lunch or dinner for two HK$800.

Gold by Harlan Goldstein Definitely a place for financial movers and shakers. Level 2, LKF Tower, 33 Wyndham St., Central; 852/2869-9986; dinner for two HK$2,000.

Liberty Private Works A kitchen that serves 7 to 8 course omakase, it seats 14 each night at 8 p.m. so booking is essential. 3rd floor, 12 Wellington St., Central; 852/5186-3282; dinner for two HK$1,200, no corkage fee (the payoff for walking up several flights of stairs).

Lung King Heen The place for dim sum in a classy setting at the Four Seasons Hotel. 8 Finance St., Central; 852/31968880; lunch for two HK$800.

Nanhai No. 1 and Eyebar Level 30, iSquare, 63 Nathan Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui; 852/2487-3688; dinner for two HK$800.

Shore The menu dwells on organic produce, dry-aged beef and sustainable seafood. 3rd and 4th floors, The L Place, 139 Queen’s Rd., Central; 852/2915-1638; dinner for two HK$1,200.

Sugar Book in advance for seating space on the popular indoor–outdoor roof deck in East Hotel. 29 Taikoo Shing Rd., Taikoo Shing; 852/3968-3968; east-hongkong.com; drinks for two HK$200.

TBLS A private kitchen serving innovative takes on comfort food. 7th floor, 31 Hollywood Rd., Central; 852/2544-3433; dinner for two HK$1,200.

Tim Ho Wan A 15-minute walk from Yau Ma Tei MTR—go early to avoid a long wait. 8 Kwong Wa St., Mongkok; 852/9332-2896; lunch for two HK$150.

208 Duecento Otto 208 Hollywood Rd.; 852/25490208; dinner for two HK$600.

Wooloomooloo Prime Level 21, The One, 100 Nathan Rd.; 852/28700087; dinner for two HK$1,500.

Do ask Ting Ting Available at hotels such as the Grand Hyatt and Holiday Inn Golden Mile, this mobile guide costs HK$250 a day. asktingting.com.

Forest Bird Boutique Coffee shop and trendy women’s fashions rolled into one. 39 Staunton St., Central; 852/2810-1166.

Kapok A design-centric shop with wares from across the globe. Ground floor, St. Francis Yard, Wanchai; ka-pok.com; 852/ 2549-9254.

Margaret River Wines A healthy selection of wines from Australia and New Zealand. 3 St. Francis St., Wanchai; 852/2575-6770.

Crowds hungry for quality dim sum queue up outside Tim Ho Wan in Mongkok knowing full well the wait might take hours, above. Lost in thought at a more tranquil setting—at least before the night-time crowds arrive—at Café Gray Deluxe, below.

Locals shopping at the Mahane Yehuda market, in Jerusalem.

Opposite: The Dormition Abbey at Mount Zion, near the southern wall of the Old City.

Un~holy

Jerusalem

It is an ancient, sacred, embattled, beloved city—more densely layered with religious and cultural significance than any on earth.

But for Daphne Merkin, who’s been coming here her whole life, Jerusalem is also a secular place, home to artists and writers, markets and galleries, the pleasures of everyday life.

Photographed by Anders Overgaard

There is something about Jerusalem that seizes the imagination when you first come upon it. I have been traveling there for more than four decades, ever since I was a child, and I never fail to be surprised by my first glimpse of the place, the way it appears without fanfare as you drive southeast from Ben Gurion International Airport, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, into the Judean Hills. From the road you see the arid landscape begin to curve and stretch and grow more lush as the car, still in the valley, begins to climb.

Eventually, the view is all-embracing, with miles of green hills, red-tiled roofs and open skies off in the distance.

It is a city of singularly spartan beauty, built entirely out of different shades of native stone—yellow, pink and gray—and pocked with scrubby growth as well as sudden, random bursts of bougainvillea, forsythia and honeysuckle. For an ancient city, Jerusalem is enamored of the new: luxury apartment buildings under construction loom at odd intersections, with an eye to American and European Jews who look to buy second homes here. (Sadly, many of these apartment buildings are fated to remain unoccupied for most of the year, giving certain sections of Jerusalem an increasingly ghostly aspect.) Olive trees, pines, firs and small maples dot the land, speaking to the city’s hardy survivalist ethos, and everywhere you look is sky, which appears to hang lower here than it does in the West. I have never arrived in Jerusalem without feeling an intensification of ordinary emotions, as though the light, shimmering over the hills, carried with it a weight all its own. Call it the weight of history: that would be the obvious connection for a city that is close to 4,000 years old and whose existence has been documented— and contested—ever since biblical times.

Jerusalem is best known, of course, for its international standing as a religious destination for flocks of the pious.

Jewish, Christian and Muslim worshippers each have their claim on parts of the city: the Western Wall is here, as is the grave from which Jesus is said to have risen, as is the Dome of the Rock, as is the Al-Aqsa Mosque. I myself made my first trip here as a 10-year-old with my family on a kosher cruise ship 152

called the Shalom as a way of connecting with the Zionist dream that was important to both my parents but particularly to my mother, whose family had emigrated to Jerusalem in 1936 to escape Hitler’s scourge.

Although my mother left Palestine a year before the new state of Israel was declared in 1948, and eventually settled in New York City, her heart remained tied to the land where her family first found refuge. Indeed, during my childhood she sang Hebrew lullabies, one of which dated from her own youth and was composed to celebrate the ideal of a Jewish homeland.

As a little girl I loved this particular song and would lie in bed listening raptly to its mournful tune and hopeful lyrics. It began by imitating the whistling sound of an approaching boat, packed with Jewish pioneers coming from far and wide to build a new nation. I was a somewhat timid child, but all the same I found myself identifying with this intrepid group, carrying pails and shovels across vast distances as easily as if they were going off to the neighborhood playground. As I began to drift off toward sleep, I would envision myself signing up, shedding my schoolgirl clothes and urban pallor for the safari-flavored outfit and bronzed complexion of a genuine chalutz (pioneer), taking off for foreign and possibly hazardous shores. When I became a mother myself, I sang this lullaby to my daughter in turn; her own first trip to Israel took place when she flew in a baby carrier next to me on one of El Al’s overcrowded planes.

Although the emotional logistics of travel are usually fairly straightforward and rational—we go to the Caribbean because we love the sun and languor, the image of ourselves sipping picturesque drinks at day’s end as the sky turns pink—the logistics of traveling to Israel, and to Jerusalem in particular, have a degree of the irrational about them, if only because they involve the potential for danger. On the same road that brings you into Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, for instance, you pass a series of discarded armored cars used in the 1948 War of Independence, arranged in a long row and cemented to the ground, bringing home the reality of Israel as a country that has been besieged from its inception.

I can remember arriving in Israel five or six years ago a day after a popular restaurant several blocks from my sister’s apartment in Jerusalem had been blown up; in the afternoon of the same day a suicide bombing had taken place in Tel Aviv. I felt a kind of stoicism-under-fire that I continue to feel whenever I visit Israel and that my American friends find hard to understand: Why would one voluntarily travel to a country that has the potential to ignite? The answer lies somewhere in my bones, in those childhood lullabies, in a fierce sense of Zionist pride that has not diminished despite the fact that Israel has proved itself an imperfect entity, part legitimate state and part occupying force.

I recently decided to try on the role of a tourist visiting Jerusalem not for its inherent spiritual meaning or emblematic power, nor because I have close family there, but to explore it as a secular city like any other—home to restaurants, museums, movie theaters and art galleries. The un-holy side of the city, »

city views Clockwise from above left:

A night out in Kikar HaHatulot; the entrance to Damascus Gate; along Mea Shearim Street, in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods; a doorway to a Templar community house in the German Colony; sunrise at the Dome of the Rock, in the Old City; looking south to the Judean Hills; Sofia, a clothing boutique specializing in Israeli designers.

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local pleasures

Clockwise from left: Butcher’s cut steak at the Mamilla Hotel’s rooftop restaurant; the box office at the Smadar Theater; kipot for sale in the Old City; skateboarder Marc Aslanian in the Armenian Quarter; the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem.

you might call it. I wondered whether this ancient city, with its large ultra-Orthodox (haredi) population and little of the popping nightlife of Tel Aviv, would stand up to agnostic scrutiny. Could it hold its own as a cultural destination if you took God out of the equation?

I

met up with Stephen Horenstein, an American composer and musician who moved to Israel 30 years ago, who generously agreed to be my guide. Horenstein is a man of many enthusiasms, one of which is his adoptive city. “The key to Jerusalem,” he told me as we shared a Moroccan-inspired lunch (including the de rigueur trinity of hummus, falafel and baba ghanoush) at a family-style steak house in the so-called Industrial Zone—a commercial

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area that includes car dealerships, two shopping malls, a film school and the city’s only bowling alley—“is that things are hidden. Tel Aviv is in your face. Here, there’s a sense of mystery.

There are so many parts of the city I’m still discovering after all these years.” It was a sentiment I would hear over and over again, the sense that there is always more to be uncovered.

Later that first day, we went to visit Steve’s friend, the internationally renowned sculptor Israel Hadany, who was at work at his studio in the artists’ colony in Chutzot Hayotzer, located in the valley at the foot of the Old City and the Tower of David. (The studio has since moved.) Hadany, who served us glasses of mint tea and has about him a kind of concentrated energy that borders on serenity, said that Jerusalem is a city of conflicts, divided both between observant and nonobservant

Jews, and between Jews and Arabs. Although not a religious man in the conventional sense, Hadany is drawn to Jerusalem’s layered quality and the way it brings one inward: “In most places, what you see on the first day—that’s what’s there. In Jerusalem, you need a lifetime to discover what’s underneath.”

On a sunny Wednesday morning, Steve and I made our way to Emek Refaim, the main thoroughfare in the German Colony.

This chic and bustling part of the city was settled in the 1870’s by the German Templars, who belonged to the Christian Zionist movement that arose with the European rediscovery of the Holy Land from 1840 on. It is one of the most charming areas in Jerusalem and is known for its blend of Ottoman and British Art Deco architecture as well as for its café culture.

Students hang out here, and both creative types and professionals choose to live here. (Or at least those who can afford to: the area has grown expensive over the past decade, as has most of the center of the city.) The Germany Colony is also home to the Smadar Theater, an art-house cinema on leafy Lloyd George Street that has drawn the artist-erati for more than 80 years. As the first movie theater in Jerusalem to remain open on the Sabbath—which begins at sundown Friday and ends at nightfall on Saturday—it is also a symbol of pluralism in a city that is seen by some as yielding far too often to its ultraOrthodox residents, who make up only a fourth of its population. (The celebrated Jerusalem poet Yehuda Amichai refers to the Smadar in this liberating context in two of his poems.) Plans, since abandoned, were recently afoot to sell the Smadar and turn it into another luxury development.

More prominent than the Smadar, however, are the numerous coffee bars. The walls of the Coffee Mill, which sells coffee and tea from all over the world, are blanketed with covers from The New Yorker. Across the street is a children’s music conservatory, and young mothers with strollers are everywhere you look. The sounds of someone expertly playing violin come out from one apartment and a breeze stirs the leaves on the trees that were planted by the German Templars.

The old community house is still here with its apse, small bell cote and green-painted front door, as is a cemetery behind a cluster of small homes set in gardens.

The next morning Steve and I went to see the residence of the late Nobel Prize–winning writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon in Talpiot, not far from the Industrial Zone. Agnon has special meaning to me not only because of his writerly gifts but also because he was a close friend of my maternal grandfather, Isaac Breuer, who started a religious political party in Palestine after he moved there and eventually had a street named in his honor.

Agnon himself remained an observant Jew throughout his life; the synagogue he helped establish in Jerusalem was named for him after his death. When he and his wife stopped in New York on their way to Sweden, I went with my mother to pick them up for dinner at our apartment. I can still remember the excitement I felt at being in the presence of literary greatness.

Although it would be years before my Hebrew was good enough to delve into Agnon’s stories and novels for myself, I

understood him to be a rare spirit, steeped in the religious training of his background while also immersing himself in contemporary culture.

As luck would have it, Agnon’s home has just been extensively renovated and reopened to the public. It is a modest house, built in 1931 in a pared-down version of the Bauhaus style by a German-born architect who lived across the street. Unlike most of the houses in the city, it was not built of stone—the law that required this was not yet in effect in this neighborhood when it was planned—but is instead covered with a lightcolored plaster. Its narrow windows are hidden behind metal latticework, giving the building a fortified appearance. Agnon’s study takes up the entire second story and includes an impressive library filled with thousands of volumes, ranging from books of Jewish learning from the 16th and 17th centuries to works by Freud and Harry Stack Sullivan and copies of Peer Gynt and Tom Jones. There is a green tiled floor and a lectern at which Agnon often wrote standing up, in the manner of Virginia Woolf. On his desk are a shoe horn, a bottle opener and a Remington typewriter. The whole atmosphere is very casual, with few guards or roped-off areas or explanatory notices in sight; if you felt like walking off with Agnon’s beer opener, no one would stop you. I found myself thinking how different the Israeli approach to officialness of any sort is from the American or European approach, such that stepping into the house of one the greatest Hebrew writers of novels and short stories feels less like an auspicious occasion and more like stopping by to visit an old, bookish uncle.

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he ideal of Jerusalem as a Renaissance city inspired Teddy Kollek, the mayor from 1965 to 1993—a man who is often referred to as “the greatest builder of Jerusalem since Herod.” One of Kollek’s first projects after he took office was the creation of the Israel Museum, whose buildings cover 50,000 square meters and which is the country’s largest cultural institution. As James Snyder, the museum’s director since 1997, told me “Teddy, in 1965, decided there would be a national museum that would in short order be on a par with the world’s leading museums.” It has undergone an ambitious US$100 million renovation, and reopened in its entirety last July.

Snyder, who was at New York’s Museum of Modern Art for 22 years before he came to the Israel Museum, says he took the appointment mostly on the basis of its location. “I’m not sure I would’ve come,” he said, “if it were in Tel Aviv.” Snyder refers to Jerusalem’s “secret subtext”—its “fluctuating intercommunal fabric”—which gives it an international flavor that he finds lacking in Tel Aviv and that is reflected in the museum’s farranging collection of nearly 500,000 objects, dating from the 12th century B.C. to Damien Hirst. Together we walked through the exquisitely designed Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest biblical manuscripts in the world.

At this point Snyder left me to take a stroll in the museum’s Billy Rose Art Garden, designed by the Japanese-American » 155

sculptor Isamu Noguchi, where I wandered among sculptures

by Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, Menashe Kadishman and Auguste Rodin, all set against the dramatic Jerusalem backdrop.

But perhaps the most sensuous experience to be had in Jerusalem is a most basic one, available every day except the Sabbath, requiring nothing more than energy for haggling and eyes for seeing. I’m referring, of course, to Jerusalem’s labyrinthine open-air market, Mahane Yehuda—also referred to as the “shuk”—which is located between Jaffa Road and Agrippas Street. It is the largest and busiest outdoor market in all of Israel and is always full, even the day after a terrorist attack. (During the period of the Second Intifada, between 2000 and 2005, the market was the scene of several bombings; today guards check everyone entering.) It gets more and more crowded toward the end of the week and by Friday afternoon,

guide to jerusalem Tel Aviv Ag rip

pa s S t.

Ja

ffa

israel

Rd .

jordan

Dome of the Rock

Independence Park

Chutzot Hayotzer

1.5 km

Stay King David Hotel A stone’s throw from the Old City, this 1930’s property has hosted numerous international heads of state. 23 King David St.; 972-2/620-8888; danhotels.com; doubles from US$490.

Mamilla Hotel New 194-room property consisting of historic and modern spaces, a kilometer from the Old City. 11 King Solomon St.; 9722/548-2222; mamillahotel.com; doubles from US$305.

Eat Austrian Hospice 37 Via Dolorosa; 9722/626-5800; dinner for two NIS136.

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Al-Aqsa Mosque

old city

German Colony

N 0

Jerusalem

Mahane Yehuda Market

Coffee Mill 23 Emek Refaim St.; 9722/566-1665; lunch for two NIS90.

Shop Babar Etz Haim St., Mahane Yehuda; 972-2/625-7969.

Israel Hadany 19 Yad Charutzim, Talpiot; 972-50/839-0899; visitors by appointment.

Mahane Yehuda Located between Jaffa Rd. and Agrippas St.; Sunday– Thursday 8 a.m. to sunset, Friday and holidays 8 a.m.–2 p.m.

Sofia 2 Bezalel St.; 972-2/625-2765.

See and Do Agnon House 16 Klausner St.; 9722/671-6498;

Western Wall

agnonhouse.org.il; admission NIS20.

Al-Aqsa Mosque Temple Mount, Old City; open only to Muslims. Saturday– Thursday 8–10:30 a.m. and 12:30–2 p.m.

Chutzot Hayotzer Chativat Jerusalem St.; jerusalem-art.org.

Dome of the Rock Temple Mount, Old City; open only to Muslims. Saturday– Thursday 8–10:30 a.m. and 12:30–2 p.m.

Israel Museum Ruppin Blvd; 9722/670-8811; imjnet. org.il; admission NIS48.

Smadar Theater 4 Lloyd George St.; 972-2/561-8168.

Western Wall Jewish Quarter, Old City.

when the prices have been reduced, students and foreign workers come to stock up on bargains.

The market dates back to the 1920’s and is fast-paced, colorful, noisy, invigorating and enervating all at once. It contains hundreds of stands and shops selling vegetables, fruits, fish, meat, baked goods, candy, eggs, household appliances, toiletries and Judaica. Within the past decade Mahane Yehuda has been modernized and cleaned up: tiled floors have replaced the cobblestones, and there is an indoor area with small places to eat. Two Georgian brothers have opened a sparkling boutique, Babar, that carries cheese from all over the world as well as wines and olive oils from Israel—seven different types of olive oil from one kibbutz alone. There are competing spice dealers who will ladle out couscous to measure, the grapes look too plump to be true and the fish are jumping.

(All the meat and fish are kosher.) The smells are enticing, the characters are picturesque and you come away with a sense that between the eagerness of the multi-ethnic vendors to cut a deal and the eagerness of the multi-ethnic shoppers to go home with the freshest wedge of halvah at the best price possible, peace in the Middle East might be forthcoming in the not-toodistant future.

If you hang around Jerusalem long enough and talk to the right people, layers will begin to unpeel and you’ll find out all sorts of intriguing tidbits. That the best view (as well as the best Sacher torte) in Jerusalem is to be found on top of the Austrian Hospice, tucked away in the Old City. That Israel’s best film school (it has more than 15, itself a surprising fact) is in Jerusalem—the Sam Spiegal Film & Television School. And that the city Jerusalem is compared with most often by its most sophisticated residents, such as Emmanuel Halperin, a wellknown TV journalist who drives into Tel Aviv twice a week to teach literature courses at Tel Aviv University, is Paris. “I think someone who comes from Paris can’t live anywhere else in Israel,” Halperin said. “Tel Aviv tries to be a melting pot but it’s a syncretic culture. Cosmopolitan is not a mixture of different sources to create something new. It’s different people living side by side—that’s cosmopolitan. Jerusalem is truly cosmopolitan. You can be yourself among strangers.”

At the end of the day, Jerusalem is not a city like any other.

You can forget its history, what Halperin refers to as “the feeling of the weight of the ages” for a time, even for weeks at a go, but then all of a sudden, at certain places, at certain hours, it comes back to you. In between you can hear first-class string quartets at the YMCA; take in new plays at the Khan Theater; walk around in dusty quarters of the Old City watching neighborhood regulars drink tea, black coffee or arak, a liquor made from anise, at little cafés as they play backgammon and cards all the live-long day; and shop for one-of-a-kind pieces by Israeli designers at the wonderful Sofia boutique. But at some point, perhaps when you look up at the sun setting over the hills, you will think you have come to a place that has managed to cast a mysterious spell over you, composed of equal parts history and immediacy, tension and lassitude, ferocity and calm. ✚

modern old city Clockwise from top left: Inside the library at Agnon House, the former residence of Nobel Prize–­winning writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon; a selection of pastas at the outdoor Mahane Yehuda market; the Muslim Quarter of the Old City; a woman at Station 3, a church in the Muslim Quarter; The Boy from South Tel Aviv (2001) by Ohad Meromi, and L-Leucine-15N (2001) by Damien Hirst, on display at the Israel Museum.

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Savoring

Sã Paul Amazon Locavores.

Cachaça missionaries.

Food pioneers.

Anya von Bremzen takes a bite out of the frenetic food scene in Brazil’s capital of style.

Photographed by David Nicolas

bright lights, big city From left: Porto Alegre–born chef

Helena Rizzo of Maní; an overview of São Paulo, a city of 11 million people. Opposite: Oyster tartare–stuffed cherry tomatoes, wakame and borraja silvestre flowers at Eñe.

Long past midnight at restaurant D.O.M., in São Paulo, my partner, Barry, and I are sniffing out exotic notes (anise? banana?) in the Anísio Santiago Cachaça. Produced in minuscule batches in the colonial state of Minas Gerais, this is the sassicaia of sugarcane spirits. “The refinement of the best grappa,” I suggest, in a daze. “With the brawn of moonshine supreme…” offers Barry. Quickly, travel fatigue (We’ve just flown in from New York) gives way to a pleasant delirium as we take in our surroundings. » 159

Armored SUV’s await tanned CEO’s at the entrance to this soaring beige space. At the next table a clutch of French celebrity chefs (in town for a food event) ogle fantastical blondes in Diesel jeans and Louboutin heels. The blondes in turn glance adoringly at D.O.M.’s chef-owner Alex Atala.

A dish with five striking iterations of okra—sautéed, roasted, fried, reinvented as translucent paper and turned into a crunchy caviar of its seeds—arrives. I examine my notebook, trying to make sense of flavors and names: fettuccine of pupunha (palm heart). Purple Amazonian basil scattered over a green tomato gelée. Vinaigrette of citronella (“An herb,” I’ve scribbled, “used by jungle natives as insect repellent”). At this late hour an exquisite dish of briochebreaded oysters, under a glistening heap of lime-marinated tapioca pearls accented with Brazilian soy sauce, here seems less like chef-y artifice than some postmodern, postcolonial inevitability. Here being a multicultural, 11 million–strong megalopolis teetering on the brink of the future in a present of helipads, favelas, behemoth traffic jams and celebrated street art that’s both wildly colorful and edgily feral.

Actually, scratch that: the future is already here at D.O.M. and a handful of other São Paulo restaurants whose chefs meld avant-garde European techniques with ingredients native to this continent in a distinctly original style. South America’s largest city has become the talk of the food world, a required stop for international mega-chefs from Alain 160

Ducasse to Ferran Adrià (not to mention ravenous gastronauts like myself ). Subtropical warmth, high-energy urbanism and Brazilian sexiness blend to deliver a cuisine that dazzles like no other.

Here at D.O.M., possibly the world’s Next Great Flavor lands on our table. It’s a weird root, hairy and scratchy.

“Priprioca,” Atala says, flashing his charismatic grin.

“Amazonian natives use it for cosmetics.” After discovering that priprioca was edible, Atala has been extracting its essence to use in desserts. Its aroma (“grassy; a suggestion of dope”) infused the caramel served with the transparent banana-andlime ravioli we’d just had. Priprioca is Atala’s latest obsession— along with every possible by-product of manioc; turu (anyone for mangrove worms with a flavor of oysters?); and jambu (a tongue-numbing Amazonian green).

Trim-bearded and tattooed, the fortyish Atala looks like a rock-star chef, which he is, and a former punk-rock DJ, which he was before he went backpacking in Europe at the age of 19 and enrolled in catering school in Belgium so he could acquire a work visa. Returning to Brazil in 1994, he opened D.O.M. five years later and today spearheads Brazil’s food revolution. Forager, fisherman, environmentalist—and for my money one of this planet’s most exciting chefs—Atala is an evangelist, spreading the word about Amazonian foodstuffs around Brazil and beyond. Extreme terroir-ism is easy in Europe, it occurs to me after another gulp of cachaça.

taste of brazil From far left: Regional cachaças at Mocotó, in the Vila Medeiros district; mango foam with coconut ice cream and ginger syrup at Dalva e Dito restaurant; Mercado Municipal, the city’s boisterous main market; the kitchen at Eñe, in São Paulo’s Jardins district.

immigrant cultures are what made SÃo Paulo an exciting food city from the get-go, even before the current interest in locavore flavors Another matter altogether is the Amazonian rain forest, home to the world’s largest collection of flora and fauna.

“A new pride in Brazilian flavors!” exclaims my friend Luiz Camargo, a local food-magazine editor, over lunch the next day in the chichi Jardins district (here, São Paulo resembles Beverly Hills). “It’s huge news in this globalized city of immigrants, which used to import foreign chefs and treat them like idols and role models.”

Veneration of haute imported chefs notwithstanding, immigrant cultures are what made São Paulo such an exciting food city from the get-go, even before the current explosion of interest in locavore flavors turned it into the world’s newest culinary mecca. Founded in 1554 by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, Sampa (as the locals call it) received a vast influx of immigrants throughout the 19th century—but particularly after the abolition of slavery in 1888, when

foreign labor was needed to work the coffee plantations surrounding the city.

Italians brought pizzas, Germans brewed their beer, the Japanese transformed farming.

“So we mix pasta, sushi, feijoada and Portuguese salt-cod fritters,” Camargo explains. “It’s always been perfectly natural here.”

Of course there was Brazilian cuisine, too—itself a hybrid of Portuguese, West African and indigenous influences. But as Camargo is telling us, until recently, “eating Brazilian” was something relegated to home or to cheap rice-and-beans lunch joints. Barry and I take this all in while still daydreaming about our ur-mid-morning snack: a puffy pão de queijo (a cheese-and-manioc-starch bread) accompanied by a bracing cafezinho at Pão de Queijo Haddock Lobo, a tiny takeout counter just down the street.

For a tutorial in contemporary flavors, Camargo has brought us to Dalva e Dito, Atala’s new casual restaurant. In contrast to D.O.M.’s flashy experimentation, the adobe-hued Dalva is all about sharp updating of grandmotherly regional dishes. Moqueca, a seafood stew from the Afro-Brazilian state of Bahia, normally heavy with its thick film of dende (palm oil), tastes clean, vibrant and coconutty here. To follow: pirarucu, a white-fleshed Amazonian fish that can reach » 161

Dalva e Dito’s moqueca baiana, a traditional Brazilian stew with fish, shrimp and coconut broth.

200 kilograms. Atala uses the loin of a smaller, more delicate specimen, saucing it with a Brazil-nut vinaigrette. “A typical caipira [country folk] meal,” Camargo pronounces as the main course arrives. It’s porco na lata, pork cooked in a tin can into a tender confit. For dessert: silky pastel-hued sorbets in tropical flavors such as caju (cashew fruit), guava and graviola (soursop). “Brazil is vast,” Camargo says. “Until now, such flavors were as exotic to us Paulistas as they are to you!” He adds slyly: “Alex showed young local chefs that you can be cool and Brazilian.”

That afternoon we squeeze into the fun house–style museum opening for local heroes Osgemeos, internationally toasted twin-brother graffitists. A band plays a raucous northeastern forró beat among the twins’ spray-painted fantasies. More forró music awaits at lunch at Mocotó the next day. Restaurants don’t get any cooler—or more Brazilian—than this current cult spot owned by 30-year-old Rodrigo Oliveira, Atala’s favorite young chef and disciple. A few years ago Oliveira took over the humble three-decadeold place from his father—in secret, while Dad was away— tweaking the details but preserving the populist espírito and the vernacular flavors of Pernambuco, the northeastern state his family’s from. Getting here is an adventure: You ride in a cab for an hour, leaving the city’s high-rises and their helipads behind, finally emerging in the ramshackle workingclass district of Vila Medeiros. You squeeze onto a bench under the shingled awning outside. Then you wait—and wait—for a table, savoring the block-party vibe with a glass of cachaça. Scouring Brazil’s alambiques (distilleries) for hyperartisanal stuff, Oliveira has assembled a list of nearly 350 bottles. Brave them straight or in a rainbow of exotic fruit caipirinhas: milky graviola, violet jaboticaba that tastes a bit like tropical blueberry.

When at last we claim a long wooden table inside the colorsplashed restaurant decorated with cachaça bottles, the food proves worth waiting for. There’s a goat stew in the rustic style of the sertão (northeastern backcountry) and the restaurant’s eponymous dish, mocotó, is a high-octane cow’shoof soup. Mix it with yellow favas laced with linguica sausage, shredded beef and cilantro and you get mocofava, Oliveira’s signature dish. Another standout, carne de sol (salted air-dried beef ), isn’t dry in the least.

That’s because Oliveira cooks it sous vide for 24 hours before serving it smothered with roasted garlic on a hot metal slab. “Sous vide cooking of carne de sol,” Atala says to me later. “This isn’t ‘molecular gastronomy’—it’s a way of advancing Brazilian identity.”

Brazil’s classic cuisine is, of course, a colonial melting pot of identities. Consider Brazil’s answer to cassoulet, feijoada—a

copious casserole of black beans and various pork parts.

“Feijoada is a cauldron bubbling with three cultures,” someone is saying at our long table at a figueira rubaiyat, a Jardins steak house legendary for its Saturday feijoada buffet. “The farofa (toasted manioc meal) is an indigenous staple; the linguica sausage and collard greens are a Portuguese contribution; many say the whole dish is a creation of African slaves.” To this mix Figueira’s owners, the Iglesias family, bring a sustainable twist: most of the ingredients come from their fazenda (estate) in the fertile southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Our waiter offers more caipirinhas and a hoary feijoada cliché: Eat it as slowly and languidly as it was cooked.

Four hours later we’re still ferrying our plates from the milelong buffet back to our table under the vast 100-year-old fig tree in the glass-roofed patio. Another helping of creamy feijao floresta beans slowly simmered over two days; spoonfuls of crunchy farofa, emerald ribbons of greens, a few orange segments. Then pig craziness: tender ribs, two kinds of sausages, slow-cooked baby boar, smoked tongue…feet, ears, tail, snout. Feijoada is a dish for which the siesta was invented.

after dinner at manÍ, helena rizzo talks about food memories being like 'fragments of a puzzle, which over time cohere into a dish that connects us to our roots' To taste the essence of Brazil without the bean-induced slumber, we head to Maní, where the country’s national dish has been given a post-molecular treatment by the talented thirty-something husband-wife chefs Helena Rizzo and Daniel Redondo. A onetime model, Rizzo met Redondo at Celler de Can Roca, the cutting-edge Catalan restaurant where she was an apprentice and he, chef de cuisine. You taste the influence of their mentors, the Michelin-darling Roca brothers, in the Waldorf salad deconstructed into celery ice, apple gelée and Gorgonzola emulsion, a dish as pretty as a bouquet of spring flowers. Still, the true excitement is in the couple’s reinterpretations of Brazilian flavors. For their trompe l’oeil feijoada, the intense black-bean liquid is “spherified” into delicate beads (adapting a technique by Ferran Adrià). The black pearls arrive on the plate dotted with bits of linguica and oranges under a crunchy sheath of julienned fried kale. After dinner Rizzo talks about food memories being like “fragments of a puzzle, which over time cohere into a dish that connects us to our roots, amid the endless stimuli and confusion of big cities.” I find this thought very poetic, especially in overstimulating São Paulo. » 163

next great flavors From left: Star chef Alex Atala, owner of D.O.M.

and Dalva e Dito; cured bottarga with daikon and mitsuba at Kinoshita.

brazilian chefs travel to spain to spread the word about their native ingredients. meanwhile, catalan chefs head to sÃo paulo, smelling gold

If feijoada is a Saturday lunch ritual, the perfect Paulista Sunday follows a futebol match with a late pizza supper (more than a million pies are sold in the city on Sundays). And if the wait is eternal at Bráz, the city’s best upscale pizzeria? Leave your name at the door and chill with a frosty chopp at Bar Original nearby, in the bar-rich Moema district. A diminutive pull of draft beer, chopp (pronounced SHO-pee) far outranks the caipirinha as the country’s national tipple. “Chopp is perhaps more a beachy Rio thing,” comments our friend Nirlando Beirão, an elegantly goateed publisher who’s just taken us to a Corinthians club soccer match. “But all Brazil is addicted to extremely cold drinks.” The cozy, tiled Original elevates draft beer to high science. The brew (small-bubbled Brahma) rests in iceberg-cold tanks for at least two days to settle the head.

Wisecracking chopeiros chill your glass between ice cubes to precisely 30 degrees before filling it: first beer, then exactly a three-finger thickness of crema (foam). Even if rivers of very quaffable Portuguese wine await at Bráz to accompany the ultra-cheesy pies from the infernal woodburning oven and the pleasantly oily Calabrian sausage bread. Looking up from the puffy round of our chard-and-pine-nut pizza, I notice genial Beirão is brooding. His beloved Corinthians lost.

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No brooding—and please, no Havaianas flip-flops, such as I’m wearing—at Gero. Yes, this is the low-key Italian outpost of the chic Fasano hotel and restaurant empire. But according to our table companion—an editor at Brazilian Vogue—60 Birkin bags arrived in São Paulo with the recent opening of the Hermès store, “and they’re all here today.” Gero owner Rogério Fasano joins our table, dapper with a cashmere sweater draped just-so over his jacketed shoulders. “Meat smothered in red sauce and cheese, with fries and white rice” is how Fasano describes typical Italo-Brazilian cantina fare.

He takes pride in the role his family played in tuning Paulistas to the refinements of modern cucina. Fittingly, the porcini in our pasta were flown in from Italy, and the milanesa, a platesize veal cutlet breaded in tiny cubes of white sandwich bread, presents a truly bella figura. “São Paulo restaurants are so great because we thrive on regular customers, not a tourist

economy,” Signor Fasano declares. He then waves arrivederci to a regular, the owner of the soccer club São Paulo, the crosstown enemies of the Corinthians.

In the 21st-century edition of the post-Columbian culinary exchange, Brazilian chefs travel to Spain to absorb new techniques and spread the word about their native ingredients. Meanwhile, Spanish—or rather, Catalan—chefs head to São Paulo, smelling gold. Madrid-based super-toque Sergi Arola has just opened Arola Vintetres in a high-rise hotel in Jardins. A few years ago the adorable Catalan twins Javier and Sergio Torres (they look like Vince Vaughn’s handsomer younger brothers and are chef-owners of the celebrated Dos Cielos, in Barcelona) launched their swank Eñe, in the up-and-coming southern Jardins district. “One of us can always be here, the other in Barcelona,” says Sergio, smiling. “Of course nobody can tell us apart.” Playing innovation (oyster tartare inside a hollowed-out cherry tomato dolloped with caviar) against tradition (the best pa amb tomàquet and patatas bravas outside Barcelona), Eñe’s menu hits all the right notes. The succulent seafood fideuà, a pasta paella, almost transports us to the Spanish Mediterranean chiringuitos (beach shacks). Almost, because the room is no shack, with its lipstick-red wall hanging accenting the modern warehouse-style mix of warm wood and concrete.

São Paulo’s 1.5 million-strong Nikkei (Japanese Brazilian) population is the biggest Japanese community outside Japan.

This makes the city home to pristine sushi restaurants, such as Jun Sakamoto or Kinu, inside the muito-luxe Grand Hyatt hotel. One foggy morning we meet the ebullient Adriano Kanashiro at a street fair in Liberdade, the city’s Little Tokyo, near downtown. Until recently Kinu’s chef de cuisine (about to launch a place of his own), Kanashiro is third-generation Nikkei of Okinawan descent. Japanese first came to Brazil in 1908 to work as farmers, he tells us while sprinkling a springy shrimp ball snagged from a street vendor with katsuo flakes and spicy gree sauce. “Our ancestral cuisine had to adapt,” he continues, now sipping caju juice from a tropical-fruit stall, “into its own kind of fusion.” To prove his point he swings us

by Itiriki Bakery. Here, Japanese karepan (curry buns) are sold alongside Brazilian palmito cakes and eggy breads laced with Portuguese sausage. Our next stop, Mercado Municipal, the city’s main market, is a short drive away. Under its soaring roof we take in the strands of Brazil’s multicultural past: Italian purveyors of spicy Calabrian sausage; Portuguese salt cod experts; shrine-like Amazonian stalls hung with herbs used in macumba rituals; riotous produce stands you can smell from miles away. We eyeball an electric-pink wedge of guava while Kanashiro test-chews a new pineapple variety called gomo-de-mel. Then he haggles with the fishmonger for crocodile-tail meat. (“Tastes like fish, only fishier.”)

Kanashiro is back with us for dinner at the white-hot Kinoshita, where the sushi chefs have Japanese features and sexy Brazilian body language. Kinoshita has a Zenon- steroids

design and a magnetic host in chef and co-owner Tsuyoshi Murakami, Kanashiro’s rival and pal. “Mura” was born in Japan and worked in Spain and New York, which explains his beguiling Japo-Mediterranean hybrid cuisine with the occasional tropical flourish. I note that the umeboshi plum sauce makes a surprisingly perfect foil for the tangy grilled disks of pupunha, and that buffalo mozzarella benefits from accents of ginger, lime and house-made soy sauce. This same sweetish organic shoyu mingles with olive oil to highlight a simple, hauntingly delicious dish of daikon and shaved Japanese cured mullet roe. Aha! Across the room I spot an old acquaintance, a Basque chef who has a television show in Spain to go along with a restaurant in Mexico City. He’s dining with a famous young Mexican cook whom I last saw in Madrid. Briefly, I join their table. Over mango ravioli with yuzu ice, we compare notes from our São Paulo eating adventures. Is priprioca the Next Great Flavor? Will Amazonian foodstuffs conquer the world? We share in the feeling: The future is now. ✚

guide to EATING IN SÃO PAULO Brazil South America

Brasília

São Paulo

0

A Figueira Rubaiyat 1738 Rua Haddock Lobo; 55-11/30871399; feijoada buffet for two BRL184.

Bar Original 137 Rua Graúna; 55-11/5093- 9486; drinks for two BRL18.

Bráz 125 Rua Grauna; 55-11/55611736; dinner for two BRL84.

Dalva e Dito 1115 Rua Padre Joao Manuel; 55-11/3064-4444; lunch for two BRL176.

D.O.M. 549 Rua Barao de Capanema; 55-11/3088-0761; dinner for two BRL512.

Eñe 213 Rua Dr. Mario Ferraz; 55-11/3816-4333; dinner for two BRL158.

Gero 1629 Rua Haddock Lobo; 55-11/3064-0005; lunch for two BRL223.

N

At l a n t i c O ce a n

1035 km

Itiriki Bakery 24 Rua dos Estudantes; 55-11/3277-4939.

Kinoshita 405 Rua Jacques Félix; 55-11/3849-6940; dinner for two BRL352.

Kinu 13301 Avda. Nacoes Unidas; 55-11/2838-3207; lunch for two BRL178.

Maní 210 Rua Joaquim Antunes; 55-11/3085-4148; dinner for two BRL352.

Mercado Municipal 306 Rua da Cantareira; 55-11/3326-3401; mercadomunicipal.com.br.

Mocotó 1100 Avda. Nossa Senhora do Loreto; 55-11/2951-3056; lunch for two BRL67.

Pão de Queijo Haddock Lobo 1408 Rua Haddock Lobo; 55-11/3088-3087; snacks for two BRL13.

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Ben Jaffe (left) and Charlie Gabriel of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, outside the French Quarter club. Opposite: Pouring a Sazerac at Clancy’s, in Uptown.

dreamLAnd: New Orleans

In the aftermath of Katrina and the Gulf oil spill, sometime NOLA resident Thomas Beller takes to the streets—from Faubourg Treme to Uptown— in search of the eclectic characters, strange beauty and authentic local experiences that only the Big Easy can deliver—if you know where to look.

Photographed by Cedric Angeles

It’s an early spring evening. The sky is a lovely shade of pale blue and the street is filled with people, children, dogs. Everyone is in a good mood. This sort of improvised communal happiness is something New Orleans does effortlessly

H

ollywood South

A crawfish is a strange-looking creature. The easiest way to describe it might be to say it’s a tiny lobster, and learning how to eat one is, it turns out, one of the subtle markers on the path to understanding, or at least enjoying, New ­Orleans. It took me a while, but I finally got the hang of it. Standing in the middle of a block party outside of Restaurant Patois, a fantastic place in ­Uptown, I transition from the realm of merely understanding into the realm of delight. In this town the boundary between competence and pleasure is one you’re encouraged to cross. It’s a kind of New Orleans bar mitzvah in which, instead of becoming a man, you become a sensualist. No one writes you a check. But you will suddenly possess a whole list of predilections and wants, and right now I want more crawfish.

At this block party everything is free. The crowd feasts on crawfish, pulled pork, hot dogs, burgers and beer. It’s a thank-you party thrown by the producers of Treme, the HBO series that has been shooting all over New Orleans for the past couple of months, including at Patois. Supposedly we’re being thanked for tolerating the shooting in our neighborhood. But to live here is to be aware of the other meaning of “shooting in the neighborhood,” though movie sets are a common enough sight in New ­Orleans, which has recently been dubbed Hollywood South. Green Lantern, a big-budget action picture, is also being filmed here. They come because it’s cheap and it’s a location scout’s dream for interiors and ­exteriors alike. Gorgeous and cheap are excellent recommendations, whether you are making a movie or just want to feel like you’re walking through one. Then there are the high-profile figures who have moved in—most recently, Sandra Bullock; most famously, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Bullock is in a mansion in the Garden District; Brad and Angelina are on the second floor of a French Quarter walk-up.

Shortly after moving in, Jolie reportedly spent two hours chatting up the patrons at the Abbey, on ­Decatur Street, a few steps from their place. The friend who relayed this legend describes the Abbey as “our most violent bar” in a tone of rueful fondness. Pitt has devoted a great deal of energy to the city; his Make It Right Foundation has commissioned a slew of new houses in the Lower Ninth Ward.

It’s an early spring evening. The sky is a lovely shade of pale blue and the street is filled with people,

children, dogs. Everyone is in a good mood. This sort of improvised communal happiness is something New Orleans does effortlessly. Walker Percy, one of the city’s poet laureates, wrote that New ­Orleans, for all its problems, including crime, is blessed with a “certain persisting non-­malevolence.” It comes from the architecture, the embrace of the huge oaks overhanging the street, and the town’s central metaphor, Mardi Gras, the multi­day celebration during which the city throngs the streets to watch itself in costume and on parade.

I tell the person next to me that I’m from New York.

He turns to the person across from him, a woman deeply concentrating on removing the crawfish’s tail from its body, and says, “Are you from New York?”

“Hell, no!” she says, looking up in alarm. “Do I look like I’m from New York?”

I ask my neighbors what they think about Treme.

Everyone agrees they like it, but some people worry it is too New Orleans for the rest of the country. This is the ambivalence of New ­Orleans culture, at once proud of its unique status and lamenting that no one really understands it, or cares.

Treme is dark—in mood but also literally. Many of its scenes are lit in such a way that faces appear as apparitions, most memorably when a Mardi Gras Indian chief dresses in full regalia and does a dance outside his bar to solicit help for cleanup. What is remarkable about Treme is how faithful it is to the reality of New Orleans and its citizens in the aftermath of Katrina. The anger, despair, ­sadness—and the accompanying use of music as salvation, the wild bursts of joy. How unreal it all feels—and yet, how real.

Neighborhood Watch Lolis Eric Elie is a well-dressed dude. The first time I met him, at a charity reading at the Bridge Lounge, he was wearing matching saffron shorts and shirt and looked like a chilled-out New ­Orleans monk. He has that innate sense of ­manners and charm a lot of New Orleanians seem to have, and comports himself in a low-key way, although he would have every right to be pissed off.

“If you’re not from New Orleans, you probably never heard of it,” begins the documentary ­Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. It’s Elie talking.

The statement now seems ironic; after the French Quarter and the Garden District, Treme is one of the city’s most instantly recognizable neighborhoods, but much of its heritage hasn’t been preserved. “The local government has done so much to destroy the neighborhood,” says Elie, who, along with director Dawn »

NOLA ENSEMBLE

Opposite, clockwise from top left: Inside Preservation Hall; Lolis Eric Elie, a writer for HBO’s Treme, which is set in the neighborhood; Oak Street Café’s Charles Farmer; the staff of Plum Street Snoballs, in Uptown.

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Logsdon, made Faubourg Treme and is now one of the writers of HBO’s Treme. His list of “ravages” inflicted on the neighborhood by the city government include “the abandonment of our architectural heritage, Armstrong Park, the overpass.”

Huge cement pillars support the I-10 overpass that cuts through Treme at precisely the point where an alley of live oaks once stood. This is where the neighborhood would gather for picnics and outdoor barbecues. To honor and acknowledge that history, elaborate paintings of trees and vines snake up the base of the cement pillars. It makes what was torn up, if not visible, then palpable. The first second-line parade after Katrina took place there, and was re-created for an episode of Treme. Neighborhood residents still commune among these painted trees, to the accompanying roar of the interstate above.

“New Orleans politicians treat New Orleans like it’s an average American city,” Elie says. “We’ve had average politicians running an extraordinary place they don’t understand.”

“H-E-L-P”

city mix Opposite, clockwise from top left: Chef Susan Spicer at her restaurant, Bayona; one of the new houses in the Lower Ninth Ward built by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation; locals on Toulouse Street in the French Quarter; houses on Chartres Street; Grover Mouton, head of Tulane University’s Regional Urban Design Center, at his home in the French Quarter; the dining room at Bayona; at Le Bon Temps Roule bar, in Uptown; the back of St. Louis Cathedral; a server at Antoine’s Restaurant, a French Quarter institution.

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I moved to New Orleans from New York in the fall of 2008 to teach at Tulane University. The most important thing I packed was a strong sense of denial. It’s useful for all occasions when traveling to flood zones, war zones, anything off the continental shelf of the known world. I didn’t think New Orleans was off this shelf, exactly, but at that time it felt like America’s terra incognita. My wife, less invested in this strategy (and more nervous about hurricanes), stayed in New York for a few weeks with our baby, which proved to be prescient. Two weeks into the school year there was a mandatory evacuation. The mayor at the time, Ray Nagin, called the approaching hurricane “The Mother of All Storms.” Gustav came and went without much damage, but what lingered, in my imagination, was the picture of an evacuated city.

We moved into a place on State Street in the Uptown neighborhood near Audubon Park. Gorgeous medallions on the 4-meter ceilings; oak floors; chandeliers.

The eccentricity of New ­Orleans is in its marrow, in its landscape and its homes. Just outside my place, on the sidewalk, are three letters painted in the same robin’segg blue as the house: e-l-p. I got the story from a neighbor: the rebellious son of a previous tenant had stayed through ­Katrina and was stranded. So he painted help on the sidewalk. I didn’t know what was more indicative of my new city—that the word help had once been scrawled on the sidewalk in front of my house, or that the landlord, recognizing that it might

be a bit morbid to step over the word help every day, had gone to the trouble of scrubbing out the letter H and deemed that sufficient.

I set about exploring my immediate vicinity and came upon a truth that applies to the whole city: New Orleans is still the land of mom-and-pop stores.

Magazine Street, around the corner from my house, is one long parade of the curious, the convenient and the strange. Near where I live, on State Street, not far from the Whole Foods and the Pinkberry, you can find a specialized vinegar store, a chocolatier, a ballet school, a dry cleaner, several restaurants, three independently owned cafés, ­Hazelnut (an interiors shop owned by Mad Men’s Bryan Batt) and a place called Laredo Printing.

Fred Laredo is a disheveled man with silver whiskers on a soft face set in a permanent deadpan. I entered his shop one day wanting to print a digital photograph and saw that the walls were covered with old concert posters that he had printed. There were posters for Chuck Berry, Dr. John, Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny, Irma Thomas, Jimmy Buffett, and the Neville Brothers, as well as Steve Martin and Eldridge Cleaver.

Each poster’s design evoked a different era. They were held up with tacks and tape and billowed slightly in the breeze from a fan. It was a museum of graphic design and music history, but when I commented on his posters, Laredo wasn’t particularly moved. A place to print things and make copies is not your usual destination when exploring a city, but ­Laredo Printing illustrates a point: in New Orleans a lot of the oysters have pearls.

La Vie BohÈme “There’s a fine line between stability and stagnation, and by the time I was born, New Orleans had already crossed it,” Michael Lewis famously wrote in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. When I asked him about this recently, he said, “I have been most impressed over my lifetime with the resistance of New Orleans to change. It has a ­remarkable ability to stay what it is in spite of overwhelming incentives not to.”

By March of 2010, the city felt like it was on a roll.

Winning the Super Bowl had certainly been a part of it. Tourism was up. A reform-minded mayor, Mitch Landrieu, had replaced the widely mocked Ray Nagin, and the city’s population had reached nearly 80 percent of its pre-Katrina level. Tulane University, long a famous party school, was attracting civic-minded students drawn to the project of rebuilding a city. Every week, it seemed, a friend of a friend sent an e-mail of introduction saying he or she was moving to New »

We moved into a place on State Street in the Uptown neighborhood near Audubon Park.

Gorgeous medallions on the 4-meter ceilings; oak floors; chandeliers. The eccentricity of New Orleans is in its marrow, in its landscape and its homes

Royal Street after dark.

You can’t claim the Oak Street Café has the best music, and its cuisine is rudimentary. But it has a certain something, a sense of improvised grace and style, old green-and-white tiles on the floor and the feeling of time pooling. It’s a great spot to recover from a hangover even if you don’t have one

Orleans. That same month, the New York Observer ran a long article quoting various New Yorkers, media types, flocking to the city not to visit but to live. They were praising New Orleans as a refuge from New York real estate, cattily carping that JetBlue’s direct flights don’t take much longer than the Hampton Jitney.

Dan Cameron, whose Prospect New Orleans 1, a giant biennial, attracted the international art scene and its audience in 2008, is now launching Prospect 1.5, a smaller exhibition focusing on local artists that runs until February. The Bywater and Marigny neighborhoods, long the city’s bohemian frontiers, are teeming with new establishments and renovations.

More art galleries appear on St. Claude Avenue.

Restaurants such as Satsuma Café and Bacchanal Wine are proliferating, along with twentysomethings on bicycles ­toting laptops. Just as a generation of writers and artists once flocked to Paris for its beauty, inspiration and cheap living, it was starting to look as if New ­Orleans might become such a place for a generation of American writers and artists. There is no other American city with more of the ­requisite ingredients of affordability, beauty and personality. And yet....

So it was that one day last spring, not long after the Treme block party, I glanced at the local paper and saw a strange photo on the front page. A fire on the water. A black plume of smoke rising into the blue sky.

Small boats sending cheerful arcs of water toward the flames. Something had gone very wrong on an oil rig way out in the Gulf.

“Boom” “It’s sort of a pattern,” says Bayona chef and co-owner Susan Spicer. “Just before 9/11 things were going great, but after that the tourist industry got smacked down.

It took us four years to build back up. We were going great guns, and then Katrina. And we come clawing and scratching our way back. And then, again, boom.”

Boom was one of the many new words that everyone in New Orleans, and America, learned last summer, along with the comically morbid topkill. Grasping what the oil spill means for the Gulf, for the seafood industry and for New Orleans, was unclear as the oil flowed, and remains so. I visit Spicer in her new restaurant in Lakeview, Mondo, which, true to its name, features an eclectic, globalized menu: a ceviche with fresh tortilla chips and guacamole; Thai shrimp and pork meatballs; pizza from a wood-burning oven; deviled eggs. She has a warm, sardonic presence beneath which, you can tell, lurks a fierce perfectionist. Already well-known, Spicer has seen her notoriety rise because of a class action lawsuit against BP that seeks ­damages ­resulting from

the oil spill’s impact on the Gulf Coast seafood industry.

“The next step is what they call ‘discovery,’ ” she says.

“We’ll see what gets discovered. There’s already a huge whitewash campaign, but people need to be informed.

I don’t think something of this magnitude can help but have long-term effects.” Meanwhile, the dishes at Mondo and Bayona keep coming.

Sno-Balls and Funk A word about sno-balls: On their own, sno-balls are not remarkable—crushed ice and flavoring, sometimes with a dollop of condensed milk. But they are one of the great delicacies of New Orleans. They exist in concert with the environment. Whether you get yours at the Queen of the Ball, which at first glance seems like a wild beauty parlor crossed with a tea shop, or at Plum Street Snoballs, which is so tucked away it feels illicit, the atmosphere is part of the experience.

A couple of blocks away, the atmosphere is also part of the experience at the Oak Street Café, the place I go to recalibrate my New Orleans compass. It looks innocuous enough—picture windows; green walls cluttered with framed artifacts and photographs; paintings—all askance, and each checked tablecloth adorned with salt and pepper and the ubiquitous and addictive Crystal hot sauce. Behind the piano in a corner sits Charles Farmer singing “The Sunny Side of the Street” or some other song you might not recognize. You can’t claim the Oak Street Café has the best music, and its cuisine is rudimentary: breakfast and lunch, a good omelette, decent gumbo. But it has a certain something, a sense of improvised grace and style, old green-and-white tiles on the floor and the feeling of time pooling. It’s a great spot to recover from a ­hangover, even if you don’t have one.

Farmer is a very skinny man with hair flying out from the periphery of his head. He almost always wears a suit, which gives him a weathered kind of elegance that goes well with the café. Originally from Oklahoma, Farmer lived in New ­Orleans from 1974 to 1986, then moved to Europe for 20 years before returning to New Orleans in 2006. “It doesn’t make much sense to move to a disaster area,” he said, “but there is something about New Orleans. It’s the only place I haven’t felt out of place. It’s my spiritual home. Funk is out on the street.”

off the grid There are buildings in New Orleans, mere cottages even, that take your breath away simply by the » 173

Houses bordering St. Louis Cathedral, behind Jackson Square.

juxtaposition of green shutters against an ocher background. It’s an artist’s dream, and this sense of innate style permeates up and down Oak Street, from the myriad colors of the Queen of the Ball up to the blackness of Z’otz, a labyrinthine goth coffee shop open until all hours that also serves an excellent cappuccino first thing in the morning.

Grover Mouton, who runs the ­Regional Urban Design Center in the School of Architecture at Tulane, sometimes gives me guided tours of New ­Orleans. On our walks and drives, he explains that the city’s grids are based on the boundaries of the old plantations and, as he puts it gleefully, “The grids collide. If you study the grid you know where you are. But if you don’t, you never know where you are, which is wonderful.”

I study the grid but most of the time I don’t know where I am. I like to spend afternoons cruising the streets in my car or, even better, on my Vespa, taking in the amazing sequence of houses. A single pink cottage done up with ornate brackets is pretty, but after you have seen houses of a variety of shapes and colors run into one another they become hypnotic. A vintage blue pickup truck stands in front of a pink house; a looming willow drapes itself over an austere structure built in the 1930’s. Next to it is a large blue house, 174

abandoned and covered with the frightening postKatrina iconography of marks and slashes indicating that the house had been inspected; the gas turned off; whether any bodies were found. The austere Deco structure with the willow is the Alvar Branch Library, once frequented by Lee Harvey ­Oswald.

Ideally, I’m happy to be lost. All intuition as to where you are is constantly foiled, and that is fine, because most of the time wherever you are is striking. Even the Central Business District, a horror of isolated skyscrapers and empty parking lots, has a kind of Modernist dazzle; if you turn up Poydras Street in the early evening you will see the edge of the ­Superdome off in the distance, its curve against the setting sun almost sexy, like a woman’s hip.

New Orleans surprises you with exquisite detail, as piercing as a single trumpet note, and it overwhelms you with beauty unspooling for blocks and blocks and blocks. The architectural flow is its own kind of music, an ensemble piece. The landscape is one long confusion of gorgeous imperfection, exquisite dilapidation.

In the French Quarter, the Garden ­District and Uptown the houses are grand, but even there or in my ­favorite neighborhoods—the Marigny, ­Bywater, Mid-City—the handsome, the sublime and the ruined intermingle.

“New Orleans does not develop, it accretes,” Michael Lewis had told me. “Layers and layers of patina.”

One night at Coquette, a restaurant on Magazine Street, I see John Berendt, who has been in town for months, possibly looking for his next story. It makes perfect sense—his last two books were about ­Savannah and Venice, a southern town with secrets and an architectural treasure half underwater; New Orleans combines the two.

The Wasteland On one of our drives, Mouton and I come to a stop in the Lower Ninth Ward. Off in the distance is a gray cement wall that looks a bit like the Berlin Wall before graffiti—the new levee. This is the epicenter of Brad Pitt’s Make It Right ­Foundation, which commissioned sustainable housing from cutting-edge architects. The houses are futuristic, faintly Californian and raised on concrete pillars. They sit in mostly empty fields.

“There was a lot of what you could call intellectual carpetbagging after ­Katrina,” Mouton says. “A whole phenomenon of foundations coming down, and whatever they did was sure to receive acknowledgment.” The Ninth Ward is now, five years after the fact, largely a destroyed wasteland, and every instance of a rebuilt house, by Pitt or someone else, looks like an enormous ­victory. And there are more and more of

But whatever one imagines for the future of New Orleans, the past is always nearby, and it is felt most viscerally in music. My favorite place to experience it is at the legendary Preservation Hall, a tiny hole-inthe-wall in the French Quarter dedicated to traditional New Orleans jazz. It’s run by Ben Jaffe, who plays tuba in the band. Like so many New ­Orleanians, he is in the same business as his dad, who took over the Hall in its early years and ran it for decades.

The tuba, the trumpet, the trombone. Brass instruments and marching bands. These motifs permeate the city; you can see it in the obsessive band-formation drawings by Bruce Davenport, on display in Prospect 1.5; Treme’s logo incorporates a trumpet. I never thought I cared for marching bands until I saw them at Mardi Gras. My first encounter with those parades

guide to new orleans GETTING THERE From Asia, Los Angeles is the most obvious gateway to New Orleans, though other major hubs such as Chicago, DallasFort Worth and New York offer frequent connections as well.

STAY GREAT VALUE Columns Hotel A 19-room hotel in the Garden District, unchanged since Louis Malle filmed Pretty Baby there; the front porch is perfect for drinks. 3811 St. Charles Ave.; 1-504/899-9308; thecolumns.com; doubles from US$120, including breakfast.

GREAT VALUE

International House Hotel A boho-chic boutique property on the edge of the French Quarter with a candlelit bar. 221 Camp St.; 1-504/553-9550; ihhotel.com; doubles from US$139.

GREAT VALUE 714 Gov. Nicholls Street Francis Ford ­Coppola turned this French ­Quarter house into

a seven-room hotel with exposed-brick interiors, antiques, and modern art. 1-415/788-7500 ext.

200; 714nicholls.com; doubles from US$250.

EAT and drink The Abbey 1123 Decatur St.; 1-504/523-7177; drinks for two US$7.

Antoine’s Restaurant A French-Creole favorite since 1840. 713 Rue St.Louis; 1-504/581-4422; dinner for two US$120.

Bacchanal Fine Wine & Spirits Gorgeous torchlit courtyard, great wine list and local outfit Jazz Lab with Jessie Morrow on Wednesdays. 600 Poland Ave.; 1-504/948-9111; drinks for two US$20.

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Coquette Bistro & Wine Bar 2800 Magazine St.; 1-504/265-0421; dinner for two US$90.

Le Bon Temps Roule Don’t miss Thursday nights with the Soul Rebels at this raucous bar. 4801 Magazine St.; 1-504/895-8117; drinks for two US$10.

Mondo 900 Harrison Ave.; 1-504/224-2633; dinner for two US$60.

Oak Street Café 8140 Oak St.; 1-504/866-8710; breakfast for two US$12.

Bayona 430 Dauphine St.; 1-504/525-4455; dinner for two US$100.

Plum Street Snoballs 1300 Burdette St.; 1504/866-7996.

Clancy’s The peoplewatching is almost as good as the upscale Creole food. 6100 Annunciation St.; 1-504/895-1111; dinner for two US$100.

Queen of the Ball 8116 Oak St.; 1-504/430-5718.

Restaurant Patois 6078 Laurel St.; 504/895-9441; dinner for two US$80.

Satsuma Café A cozy spot

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treme

Mid-city

Gautreau’s Hidden away in Uptown, this FrenchCreole restaurant feels like a secret eating society. 1728 Soniat St.; 1-504/899-7397; dinner for two US$120.

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reminded me of a fashion show, when it all seems silly and then suddenly you can’t believe what you’re seeing.

Except in the case of ­Mardi Gras, there is a real cultural resonance and populist joy.

One sunny afternoon as I was driving through the city, I turned a corner somewhere in Uptown and was confronted with a marching band consisting of what appeared to be eighth graders. They wore gold jackets and Prussian hats with white feathers and were on the march, cheeks puffed out, mallets swinging. The low, bright sun exploded off tubas, trumpets, trombones; their jackets seemed to glow. It was an astonishing sight. The sound, cacophony. Like a dream, unreal, and like in a dream, they were a mysterious impediment. I had to back out of the street. As I was backing up, the noisy, brazen sound of the marching band and their instruments filled the car. I was stunned at the sight of this little army. I drove away through the nestlike, sun-drenched streets, past the pastel houses and their ornate details. The music was still in the air.

I was glad for the fading thump and crack of the drums and the bleat and honk of the trumpets. They assured me I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. ✚

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them, making inroads against the empty lots. You have to admire Pitt’s project for its energy, vision, philanthropy. If it’s the future, the future feels strange.

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Louisiana

Baton Rouge New Orleans Gulf of Mexico

in ­Bywater. 3218 Dauphine St.; 1-504/304-5962; lunch for two US$20. shop Ann Koerner Antiques An eclectic mix of 18th- and 19th-century antiques from around the globe.

4021 Magazine St.; 1-504/899-2664.

Hazelnut 5515 Magazine St.; 1-504/891-2424.

Laredo Printing 5231 Magazine St.; 1-504/897-1224.

SEE and DO St. Claude Avenue galleries include Antenna (3161 Burgundy St.) and ­B arrister’s (2331 St. Claude Ave.; 1-504/710-4506).

Preservation Hall 726 St. Peter St.; 1-504/522-2841; preservationhall.com; tickets US$12.

Prospect 1.5 Nov. 6– Feb. 19, 2011; citywide; prospectneworleans.org

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sa dingding’s

favorite place

by LARA DAY

Sa Dingding. Right: Two views of the Earth Nest, the home of Chinese sculptor Luo Xu.

the earth nest The Earth Nest is the home of my friend Luo Xu, a famous sculptor from China’s Yunnan province. He built his “nest” himself, on a small hill 20 minutes away from Kunming. It doesn’t have a big entrance, so it’s easy to miss. But once you go through the gate, walk up along a small path, and turn at a corner flourishing with trees and flowers, all of a sudden you’re enlightened.

The place springs directly from Luo Xu’s imagination; he’s been working on it for the past 20 years. It has multiple round-shaped rooms, made of brick—they’re actually inspired by the shape of a woman. Luo Xu can be found around his wonderland, gardening, lounging on the porch, rearing chickens and ducks, and playing with clay.

Whenever his friends, or friends of friends, come over, he turns into a chef: he makes them a delicious dinner and lets them wander around, introducing them to his For more information on the Earth Nest, visit luoxustudio.com.

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animals. His sculptures and paintings are everywhere, indoors and out. To guests, they’re exhibits, but to him, they’re a part of his life, down to the last detail. Take the courtyard, where there’s a big iron bathtub under a Japanese pagoda tree. When it’s flowering season, he fills the tub with hot water, the steam reaches the tree’s flowers, and the flowers drop like rain. He sits in the tub, dreaming in his own world. Isn’t this the life of an artist?

Luo Xu is constantly making new artworks, so the Earth Nest changes all the time. It’s a giant work in progress, and a perfect example of my dream home.

I believe we should all create our own living spaces, according to our imaginations and desires. My friend may be materially rich, but instead of living in a luxurious mansion, he has made a fantastical kingdom, not bound by anyone or anything. That’s what truly attracts me. ✚

f r o m l e f t: co u rt e sy o f sa d i n g d i n g ; l i u g a n g ( 2 )

Yunnan, china