Travel

Best of LA: Gjusta & Sqirl

16 March 2018

I’m crushing especially hard on two casually brilliant Los Angeles eateries – Gjusta in Venice and Sqirl in Silver Lake. Both have attracted a lot of media and social media love in recent years, so I thought it would be fun to take you on a virtual visit. We ate at Gjusta four times in […]

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Girls getaway: Los Angeles

13 March 2018

I’m coming clean with the fact that I, a native northern Californian, have become a total LA fangirl. Sibling rivalry is strong in California. I’m from the north, land of geeks, tree huggers, fog and earnestness. Southern California is home to sun, surfers, avocados and cosmetic enhancements. We’re all family, but like many close geographic […]

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Un-granola

21 April 2017

Life dimmed for me and my kids when my friend Katie moved two years ago, she and her husband Rick trading their Silicon Valley home for a ranch in Oregon and taking with them three of our favorite little people – two of my kids’ soulmates and my angelic 18-month-old boyfriend. Between school and kids’ […]

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Grand Canyon’s quieter east entrance

10 October 2016

My parents avoided the crowds and tension of cities, so we rarely traveled to urban areas on family vacations, unless we did the Asian thing and stopped for a college tour. To their immigrant eyes, the wonders of America were not in cities but in the immense protected landscape of the country, unusual in a […]

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A local’s guide to San Francisco

23 July 2016

I would never trade summers in the midwest with family, but I’m always a little heartbroken when far-flung friends email, “We’re coming to San Francisco this summer!” and I have to write back, “Sorry, but we won’t be there…” Good friends came to San Francisco for the first time this month, and when they emailed […]

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The best xiao long bao in NYC (is not Joe’s)

20 June 2016

One of the best meals to be had in New York City – and very often my first destination off the plane – is a $5 tray of steaming hot dumplings in Chinatown. Xiao long bao – pronunciation shao (rhymes with now) lohng (long O like tone) bow (as in take a bow) – aren’t […]

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The greatest city

12 May 2016

I’ve spent more years living in California than New York, but because I was in Manhattan for my first independent decade – the years between leaving my childhood home to having children myself – New York City is where I feel most free and alive. I went to college there, built a career there, met […]

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Paris

8 October 2015

I’m four weeks into a six week no-wheat, no-sugar, no-rice experiment, and I hope to heck it’s good for my health because it’s definitely not so great for my joie de vivre. Or maybe I hope it’s terrible for my health so I when I’m done I can get on with my regularly scheduled life. […]

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Getaway beef (hello Vegas)

2 June 2014

It’s never easy to get away when you have mouths to feed and people to care for, but it seems to me if you leave them with heaps of food, they notice you being gone a little less. I didn’t win the Saveur award or the free trip to the award dinner in Las Vegas […]

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Breakfast of Hawaiians (rice, egg, Portuguese sausage) – and a wander through Hawaii eats

18 April 2014

Is it too mean to write about spring break in Hawaii when it snowed again in Ohio this week? I’m not here to wax lyrical about the sand (soft and powdery), or the sea (warm and iridescent turquoise), or the air (marvelously dewy). The beach is the beach – but Hawaiian food is its own […]

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