Sublime

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

In France, food norms are powerful and cohesive forces, while in the US food is simply a whirlwind of chaos.

I have no doubt there are good chefs working in spas throughout France, but the godfather of them all is Michel Guérard, one of the first modern celebrity cooks. He became a household name in France more than twenty years ago when he inventedcuisine minceur. This was based on the thought—revolutionary in those days, and not all that common even now

All those ingredients figured heavily into the cuisines of France and the San Francisco Bay Area, two places where people are obsessed with what’s on their plate. The transition was natural for me. Another obsession shared by both San Francisco and Paris is real estate: it’s rare that you attend a party or gathering in either city and the subject d