dine•o•crat

My first impression of the restaurant  Les Tablettes de Jean-Louis Nomicos‎  was mixed. One the one hand, the place oozed with cool, its basketweave interior an absolutely stunning marvel of modern precision interlaced with hand-craftsmanship. On the other hand, there was a dog at the table next to us. Granted, it was a small dog, quiet and adorable, a companion to the old madam  whose two younger female dining partners looked like they could be the second and third branches of the family tree. Parisian ladies who lunch? The Chanel jackets told as much. My imagination ran wild: in my mind, the two younger women were trying to save their inheritance because somehow, the old lady got involved with a much younger lothario, an opportunistic gigolo who was about to get half of her millions or billions of euros in assets. But les femmes did it all with such warmth and conviviality, all smiles and bonheur . It was even putting the dog to sleep. Welcome to Paris....

Civitella in Val di Chiana is a small, picturesque comune in the hills of Arezzo in Tuscany with a grim war history. It has as its main attraction the ruins of a castle built in 1048. Civitella itself is a fortress town, built even before that castle, in the 7th century, as part of a series of fortresses around the territory. During World War II, 244 people, most from Civitella, along with dozens more from nearby towns of Cornia and San Pancrazio, were massacred by German forces for the death of two of their own soldiers. The castle itself was used by Germans as headquarters during the war and it was eventually bombed by Allied forces. If you walk around the town, you'll find stark reminders of that awful act from long ago. But nowadays, it's mostly a quaint and quiet community where nothing much happens. If you stay in the town's B&B, Antico Borgo , below is what you wake up to when you first open your windows. (Helpful traveler tip: if you plan on staying at the B...

We were lost, hopelessly, almost irretrievably lost. My friend from California had been driving us around for several hours, all three of us having gotten very little rest after our arrival in Rome. At that point, we had been up almost 48 hours with hardly a wink on the planes we took. We were searching for Civitella in Val di Chiana, a tiny little town in the hills above the Tuscan city of Arrezzo and it was a task more difficult than we thought. The directions we received were not very clear and it didn't help our cause that the signs around this area of Italy weren't very clear, either. Once you leave the city, the Tuscan towns pretty much all look the same. Pretty, but identical. And even when we stopped to ask for directions, the language barrier was worse than we had anticipated. Hours later, our Italian friend finally decided to meet us at a nearby hotel, easier to find than the bed and breakfast in which we were to stay. By the time we checked in to Antico Borgo—the B...

It's been said that the long, full-course French lunch is disappearing . For various reasons—among others, health and economic—the French need to eat shorter, hence smaller, lunches. Septime, in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, is still a place for long lunches in a decidedly more casual environment. (The picture of three young women across the street having their lunch on a bench, however, is an apt juxtaposition that represents France's changing lunch economics.) Entering Septime is like walking into a San Francisco or New York hipster restaurant. The waiters all wear white shirts, jeans, sneakers and aprons. The atmosphere is very relaxed and the focus is on the food. The pedigreed chef, Bertrand Grébaut of L'Arpège and L'Agapé, offers in his less formal restaurant a tantalizing and welcoming spareness both in the decor and the food. I sensed that the preparations had this philosophy behind them: the techniques and presentations are mere backdrops for, not the fo...