“I have no right to cook Thai food,” Australian chef David Thompson said in his opening remarks of a session on authenticity in cooking at The Future of Food forum, an Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants event, held in Singapore. “Bullshit!” would be the honest Aussie response of any sane person with a palate who has … Read more
The best Halong Bay cruise boats range from petite boats with just a few berths that you can hire privately to big gleaming white boats with five-star hotel facilities. We’ve tested many of them over 15 years living in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, where we lived in Hanoi and Hoi An, and these are the … Read more
On a brilliant, bright, sunny Saturday afternoon in Sydney, Australia in 1990, Lara and I took a taxi to the slowly-gentrifying working class suburb of Rozelle. We were armed with three bottles of wine and were on our way to dine at a restaurant called Tetsuya’s ran by a Japanese expat chef named Tetsuya Wakuda. … Read more
Halong Bay in northeast Vietnam is a dazzling unspoilt seascape distinguished by clusters of verdant islands, craggy islets, limestone karsts, and schist outcrops that dramatically rise out of jade coloured waters, and cruising Halong Bay is a must when you’re in Vietnam. Immortalised in cinema, poetry, folk tales, myths, and legends, beguiling Halong Bay in … Read more
After getting a little misty-eyed while musing on our pre-Civil War travels in Syria and the special people we met, I decided it was time to look on the bright side and a destination recovering from a very tragic and violent past: Cambodia – and in this case Battambang. In Cambodia, the past is still … Read more