Melora Koepke

By the time I’m at the foot of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, I haven’t slept in five days and I’m running on bocadillos and adrenalin. The circadian rhythms of touring like a musician are new to me; when you’re travelling on this kind of schedule, your experience of time and space becomes intensified, amplified, […]

Running my hands over the smooth and
 nubbly turrets of green nopales, the cactus pads that Chuck Hughes is trying to de-needle on camera like an habitué, I follow along as he picks up the items on his grocery list: yerba santa, an aromatic that tastes like nutmeg and mint, and huitlacoche, bulbous black mushrooms that cling […]

I’m in the mood for goose and I’m in luck. Pride of place at themarché nocturne in Casseneuil, a stone-house settlement in Lot-et-Garonne, in Southern France, belongs to the goose guy, whose combo plates are scrawled on yellow poster board. I pick the deluxe option – foie-gras-stuffed goose neck with magret and salad with slices of air-dried magret […]

The first time I went downstairs to find the facilities at Le Comptoir charcuteries et vins, chef Ségué Lepage’s wine bar in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, I opened the wrong door and ran straight into that week’s pig. He was hanging out (or rather hanging up) in a cold room. Across the hall – still not […]

It is, as they say, a good day to fly. Thirty minutes into my first private flip session with House of Air co-owner Dave Schaeffer and I’m flying higher than ever. I’m at the Presidio, the storied military base at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge – now the home of a state-of-the-art trampoline […]

Swine and Dine: Our writer hams it up at a Charcuterie course in France. “Squeeze the sausage tightly so that the meat cures evenly,” says cook and food writer Kate Hill, showing me how to churn the manual meat grinder with one hand while managing the growing coil of saucisse de Toulouse with the other. […]

I arrive at Price Canyon Ranch just as the sun is setting behind the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona. Half a dozen riders are ravenously tucking into ranch-raised flatiron steaks as I sit down across from the head wrangler, Randy Barnhart. I expect questions about my riding experience, but he just grins and asks if […]

“They don’t give you much in terms of nutrition,” shrugs Noland Johnson as he pulls down a tall frond of ocotillo and hands me its small scarlet buds. “But if you’re out walking in the desert and it’s really hot, they’re nice and refreshing.” Sure enough, when I put the bud on my tongue, I […]

Francis Ford Coppola’s most famous scenes may be set in New York, but he’s been a Californian since his days at UCLA. In 1972, when he started work on The Godfather, the director set up operations on Kearny Street in San Francisco’s North Beach neighbourhood. An acclaimed vintner and hotelier, Coppola also finds the time […]