Category: Intro Letter

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement .” – poet, Mary Oliver Back from Los Angeles and enjoying the alternating balmy, sunny days and rainy storms of February. Top Tastes in food include some spectacular cheeses, cheap eats in Middle Eastern food and a new chef at Urban Tavern, while… Read more →

“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.” – Rainer Maria Rilke I’m in the Silver Lake neighborhood of LA as I write, adventuring and tasting with family and friends… to  share with you at a later date. Meanwhile, February feasting continues with Top Tastes in food (from… Read more →

“I just want to drink the day’s loveliness in… I feel as if she were holding it out to my lips like a cup of airy wine and I’ll take a sip at every step.” – L.M. Montgomery, “Anne of Avonlea” February… how did you arrive so swiftly? It has already been a rich start to the year and decade.… Read more →

“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.” – Albert Camus Well into January, I’m looking ahead to travels and adventures for the new year – what will yours be? I love to dream and plan – it’s almost as sweet as… Read more →

“… sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.” – Muriel Barbery, “Gourmet Rhapsody” I wish you a beautiful new year (and decade!) full of growth, promise and a blossoming. I feel the words of one of… Read more →

“Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world… Be the inferior of no man, nor of any man be the superior… In the time of your life, live – so that in that wondrous time… Read more →

“[San Francisco] sparkles with that crystalline northern California light that makes everything pop out from the background. All the buildings and people have hard, crisp edges. It’s bucolic and hard to believe – a picture postcard, unreal.” – David Byrne, “Bicycle Diaries” A beautiful Thanksgiving it was, with family, food, excursions, a peaceful stay at Lake Tahoe. As usual, plenty… Read more →

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain I’m giving away a pair of VIP tickets to this Thursday’s (11/19) Indy Spirits Expo at Mighty (6-9pm; 5pm entrance for… Read more →

“I write because I want to remember. ” – Isabel Allende In the throes of Fall, SF continues to experience balmy 70 degree days with the invigorating evening crisp of the season. I’m craving pumpkin-spiced tastes, awaiting family visits, and settling into a new home. Top Tastes reflects the best new places  and dishes from my recent culinary explorations, while… Read more →

“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day… I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing… Read more →