Every Essay

The colour is what one hundred and thirty plants leave behind after they have been steeped, distilled and left in oak. N…

The elevator at the War Memorial Opera House is larger than it has any reason to be. It is staffed by an operator on a s…

Someone asks what the greatest Champagne ever made is. The room divides immediately. Krug, says one. Salon, says another…

The flutes are set before anyone arrives. A bottle of Champagne is already cold. The host opens it quietly, without cere…

Three hotels. One opened in 1875 and burned to its frame in 1906, and what rose from it was the Garden Court. One was ab…

The papers on the desk have been there since morning. The ash in the tray has grown into a column of specific height. In…

The paper is spread across the cutting table and already marked with a confidence that suggests the work began before th…

On a grey Tuesday morning, a cutter on Savile Row draws a chalk line across dark charcoal flannel. The line is straight …

The body knows it has been transported even when the mind refuses to acknowledge it. The air on a transatlantic flight t…

The concierge hesitated. Then he said we probably would not want to go there. I said that was exactly where we wanted to…

The first pour is the most important one. It establishes pace. Everything that follows inherits its tone.…

The easiest way to be remembered poorly is through friction. A well constructed evening carries invisible labor behind i…

Every serious restaurant and hotel is looking for signals. The empty notes field is a missed opportunity. A thoughtful r…

Its reputation does not require announcement. It arrives with the object itself: the weight of a lighter in the hand, th…

Taste, in the older and more exacting sense of the word, is a form of knowledge: what you have learned to see. The philo…

For a man who builds a serious collection, the most important professional in the conversation is rarely the one whose n…

Most men begin at the sleeve. They look for working buttonholes, hand stitched lapels, kissing buttons. The industry has…

There are objects that serve a single purpose and do so adequately. And there are objects that appear to serve a single …

A friend who is a seventh generation winemaker once said that decanting an old bottle is like asking an old man in a whe…

Most dining rooms contain a table that was purchased rather than considered. The resolution, for most people, is somethi…

Being a good guest is an art that has fallen out of fashion, not because people have stopped caring about hospitality bu…

I have been buying Prüm family Rieslings from the 1970s and 1980s with some regularity and find them, without exception,…