November! What a joyful month filled with wonderful gatherings with different groups of friends and the warmest sense of community. We start with a peek inside Brothers and Sisters, an adorable flower shop in Oakland. The Aesthetic Union, a shop next door to Tartine Manufactory. Sun and Elliot and their new baby boy visit San…
The last Saturday of my November New York trip, we headed to Brooklyn for a tour of Mast Brothers Chocolate. You might recognize the graphic, patterned papers that encase Mast Brothers’ chocolate bars. Every single bar comes from this very Brooklyn factory. This is my only photo of the actual “tour” part, as they don’t allow…
I headed toward the freezing cold chill of New York to celebrate Jesse’s birthday back in November. During the week, I made small excursions around his ‘new’ neighborhood in Midtown (my last visit, Jesse was still living downtown). And of course at night and on the weekends, we had plenty of foodie adventures all around Manhattan…
Many thanks go to my friends and to my boyfriend for celebrating my birthday with me. Jesse flew in for a few days, escaping the snow in New York and trading it in for some sunny California adventures instead. Our first meal: Roka Akor, a Japanese robataya house. We got seated at the bar, right…
For my boyfriend Jesse’s birthday this year, he had a dinner party with fifteen friends. But it wasn’t any dinner party– it was a privately catered event with Luca and Bri from MasterChef! If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll know that Luca is the lovable Italian guy who won the whole thing, and…
And now, part three of three, completing my posts on Japan! If you’ve missed out on the previous posts, just scroll to the bottom for the recap. For the last five nights of the trip we finally stayed in the same place instead of city-hopping, and we got to see a bit more of Tokyo…
We were to begin the day in Kyoto and end it in Tokyo. What happened in between was still up for debate. My original plan was to sneak in a side trip to Hiroshima and Miyajima, but the substantial detour southward was enough to make us think twice. Instead, we headed to the little town…
A special kind of magic happened as I sat down and first started going through these photos. Indeed, it was as if I had acquired a tiny new superpower. Just by looking at the pictures, I could taste each of the foods that I had photographed. I mean, it’s one thing to generally remember things…
I think I’ve found my new favorite holiday. It happens the day after Thanksgiving. After our meals with our respective families or other friends, we gather at Jenny and Kevin Yau’s home (“the Yauhaus”) and go for round two. And no, it’s not leftovers. It’s an entirely new Thanksgiving meal. We call it Second Thanksgiving….