Tango in Saigon
Octo bills itself as a ‘restobar’ -having weaved down a small alley, climbed a rickety staircase, up past multiple, mixed businesses on each floor until lost, deep in the bowels of a decaying […]
Bars
Ham & Sherry
Ham & Sherry “Just to eat is a gift.” Ferran Adria A small, hole-in-the-wall ‘Bodega’ down a little lane in Wan Chai -noticeable by the Catalan style blue and white wall tiles on […]
The Exciseman
The Exciseman Whisky Bar, Singapore exciseman (British) noun plural -men A government official who collects excises and enforces the laws concerning them For over two hundred and fifty years, from the early 18th […]
Penh and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – (Updated)
Tim Belcourt looks the part of an outlaw biker, a long white handlebar moustache gives him the appearance of a grizzled walrus, tattoos cover his forearms, there are lasting scars, on the […]
Foraged Goods
Forage: verb: (of a person or animal) to search for food. To hunt, search, rummage around, root about, scavenge for provisions. A few decades back, when agriculture began to become industrialized, mechanized, chemically treated […]
Occitanian Masterpiece
An Englishman, A Belgian and an Aussie walk into a French Bistro… Anyone who has read the works of Peter Mayle or admired the aching beauty and incandescent palette of Van Gogh’s paintings around Arles […]
The Midnight Special
The ‘Misnomer of the Year’ a friend called it, indeed brunch is supposed to be about sleeping in very late on the weekend and then having a relaxed, decadent and somewhat boozy meal between breakfast […]
Straight Up, No Chaser
Phnom Penh, late morning and I have an audience with the ruling monarch of Phnom Penh’s cocktail society, Jen Queen. The café is Feel Good, I get a sense we both come here regularly, […]
The Brexistentialist
July is the month when the French celebrate ‘La fête nationale’, commemorating the storming of the Bastille, (14th of July 1789) the original celebration -held one year later- was meant to symbolize the unity displayed […]
This Negroni Life
The bitter and twisted Negroni has somehow become the trendiest cocktail of the decade, with Conde Nast Traveler magazine suggesting it is to New Millennials what the Cosmopolitan was to Yuppies way back in the […]