Sublime

Happy Place HE HATED GROCERY shopping, hated the time it took. But he came up with a method. People bought the same things, more or less. So he would look for someone of his type, sneak up behind them and roll their fully-laden trolley off to the checkout. It made life interesting. Often there were things he would never have bought; once there was

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I am always impressed by a well-written menu, one that is informative and appetizing without slipping into pretentious nonsense. Here, for example, is a London restaurant’s attempt to justify the exorbitant price of its whitebait: “The tiny fresh fish are tossed by our chef for a few fleeting seconds into a bath of boiling oil, and then removed bef

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In a prime spot just across the yellow-tape road from the lemon trees, he tended his own dark grove of bookshelves, and beside them a field of legal boxes, which held thousands of menus from restaurants famous and obscure. Whenever I passed Horace’s collection, there was someone flipping through the menus with the furious intensity of a DJ digging

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The Cigale Récamier, a five-minute stroll from the hotel, was one of Sam’s favorite stops in Paris. Hidden away at the end of a cul-de-sac off the Rue de Sèvres, it had all the qualities he liked in a restaurant. It was simple, unpretentious, and highly professional. The waiters had been there forever; they knew their métier to a fault and the wine

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