Category: Intro Letter

“I’m advocating the lifelong investigation of pleasure, and this task requires all five of your senses… Sounds selfish, no? No, it’s not. For true generosity does not occur unless you give from your own surplus.” – Regina Thomashauer Fall rushes on to Thanksgiving and I am happy to stay home for awhile, savoring the tastes and smells of fall that… Read more →

“How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?” – Julia Child Freshly back from Scotland, I am in the midst of glorious October weather. San Francisco’s pristine blue skies and waters and its glowing white skyline are illuminated in 70 degree sunny days… the best time of year. Imbiber considers wine from a few angles: contemplating… Read more →

“No matter how developed you are in any other area of your life, no matter what you say you believe, no matter how sophisticated or enlightened you think you are, how you eat tells all.” – Geneen Roth Believe it or not, I am heading overseas again to Scotland, though just freshly returned from Bordeaux two weeks ago! I will… Read more →

“Paris, San Francisco, Tehran, all claim a part of me… I thought about how the kitchens where I was shaped belong to all these places, and yet none claim to be the center. I’ll always negotiate that in-between culture… I’ll always rely on the longing for these places, and I’ll always be learning to move between them without falling through… Read more →

“San Francisco is really divine… The streets are steep like Edinburgh and Chinatown right in the middle of everything. There’s a Rock just outside the town by the Golden Gate covered with seals! They’re so sweet.” – Noel Coward, 1926 letter to his mother I hope your fall is off to a sweet start… Adventures in Colorado with family (a… Read more →

“The morning smelled like a freshly opened bottle of wine – leaves, earth, the damp woods, berries, grass. There is still more than enough beauty in one morning alone on earth to break a heart wide open… For every person who has ever lived there will come, at last, a spring he will never see…  Glory then in the seasons… Read more →

“If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory.” – Marguerite Yourcenar August has been a non-stop flurry of major SF events: SF Chefs, our city’s biggest food & drink week (which I give the photo recap treatment in On the Town), and Outside Lands, a massive music festival… Read more →

“…life is short, But desire, desire is long.” – Jane Hirshfield, “Heat” Summer rages on with family visits and more Napa weekends giving way to major events over the next two weeks like SF Chefs (SF’s big food & drink ‘classic’, if you will), and to the huge Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park, both of which I’ll… Read more →

“i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.” – e.e. cummings Summer is speeding by… upon returning from the UK, I’ve been writing up a storm. My article on corn whiskey is in… Read more →

“Those two short months in another country and another language had recalibrated my inner compass in ways that lingered with me… I was aware, above all, and at long last, that the world was a broad and grand place and that I was equal to and worthy of my surroundings wherever I went. I was also aware that no one,… Read more →