On food

I believe you learn more about a place from a market stall than a monument — and more from a grandmother's kitchen than any guidebook.

Markets over Michelin

Fine dining is craft, and I admire it — but it's a culture's Sunday best, performed for guests. The everyday food is where a place actually lives: the market before dawn, the stall with one dish it has perfected over decades, the lunch counter where the whole neighborhood eats. That's where I point my attention, because that's where the truth is.

Ingredients as language

Every cuisine is a set of decisions about the same handful of things — heat, salt, fat, acid, time. How a culture handles garlic, or rice, or the bones nobody else wanted, is a kind of grammar. Learn to read it and a meal becomes a sentence about history, geography and what a people learned to love out of what they had.

The kitchen is the real destination

Given the choice between a famous restaurant and an invitation into someone's home kitchen, I take the kitchen every time. That's where recipes are taught without measurements, where the reason behind a dish gets told alongside it, and where you understand that food is mostly love with a side of practicality. The best meals of my writing life have all had plastic stools.