At the Head of Its Class

On this sparkling summer day at the Muskoka Airport, a general-aviation facility about 90 miles north of Toronto, a dummy wearing a wool sweater and a Halloween mask springs from behind a parked car on the runway and into the path of an oncoming sedan. The car’s Cross-Traffic Assist—without input from the driver—applies full braking […]

Five of the world’s greatest chefs have charged the most promising talents of the next generation with preparing five remarkable feasts that their guests will never forget. But only one of these up-and-coming artists will be chosen by our readers as Robb Report’s New Culinary Master for 2014. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith […]

In San Diego native William Bradley, Thomas Keller discovers the great French chefs’ traditions transplanted to American soil. Thomas Keller is the most renowned, most revered, and most imitated chef in the country. His flagship restaurant, the French Laundry in the Napa Valley, is the culinary community’s Mecca, and its Manhattan spin-off, Per Se, consistently […]

Daniel Boulud savors the Portuguese inflections in the cuisine of George Mendes. To hear Daniel Boulud tell his story, he is a Lyon farm boy at heart—a farm boy who began cooking in a Michelin two-star kitchen in the city at age 14; worked for Roger Vergé, Georges Blanc, and Michel Guérard; and rose to […]

Like Jean-Georges Vongerichten before him, Alex Stupak is moving a classic cuisine in a fresh direction. It is no exaggeration to state that Jean-Georges Vongerichten revolutionized French cooking in the United States. The nouvelle movement had already lightened up the classics by the time he became the chef at Lafayette in the late 1980s, but […]

Masaharu Morimoto’s creative departure from traditional Japanese cuisine inspired Yoshinori Ishiito break boundaries of his own. Long before Masaharu Morimoto became Iron Chef Morimoto—and vanquished competitors such as Bobby Flay on television’s Iron Chef and Iron Chef America—he spent years studying sushi and kaisekiin his native Hiroshima. Those formalculinary genres were too limiting for the […]

Nancy Silverton discovers a decidedly West Coast point of view in New Yorker Justin Smillie. Nancy Silverton is a genius at taking the food people love and sometimes takefor granted—bread, burgers, neighborhood Italian cooking—and transforming it into a groundbreaking culinary movement. She gave Angelenos their first artisanal loaves when she created La Brea Bakery in […]

Adrian Lee, the young designer of the ultramodern interior of downtown Singapore’s Klapsons, the Boutique Hotel, brought his unique sense of style to Ocean Paradise, his family’s new 180-foot yacht. The Benetti-built vessel, which the Italian yard delivered to the Lees in June, offers a wealth of water toys and amenities, augmented by a crew […]

With its rugged wadis, ancient-fort-studded mountains, and 1,300 miles of coastline, the Sultanate of Oman has long attracted adventurous travelers, especially those from Europe. Like the United Arab Emirates, its neighbor to the northwest, Oman has recently started buttressing its natural and cultural attractions with new resorts and developments. But the country’s relatively low-key projects—which […]

No one likes a nuisance.As proof, consider Canada geese. Their behavior is so bad it has even affected demand for original plates (prints made from engravings) of John James Audubon’s depiction of them. “Plate number 201, Canada Goose, used to be one of the top prints,” says Marc Fagan, director of consignments at Neal Auction […]

“This run is called Sex Wax,” Rob Orvig says with a casualness that seems at odds with the crevasse-lined expanse stretching out below him. “It’s on a pretty real glacier, so stick by my tracks.” Without further instruction, the Bella Coola Heli Sports guide disappears into an explosion of white, leaving my fellow skiers and […]

The neurocom is beeping and blinking as I jump, squat, reach, lean, and hop from one foot to the other. Feeling like John Glenn in a scene from The Right Stuff, I huff my way through exercises that require me to follow with my body the movement of a tiny dancing dot on a computer […]

For the majority of audiophiles, the MP3 format falls far short on fidelity. These severely compressed music files are designed for maximum storage on mobile devices, such as Apple’s iPod, almost all of which forgo high-fidelity componentry to keep prices low.As a result, music played on these devices lacks depth, detail, clarity, and a realistic […]

Stefan Ahrens grew up riding dirt bikes on a 250-acre sheep ranch near his home in South Australia’s Barossa Valley. In 1999, the fifth-generation native of the vineyard-strewn valley attempted to acquire the ranch’s stone farmhouse, which dates to the mid-19th century. His first effort rebuffed, Ahrens waited a decade before finally purchasing the property […]

“When one does something,” wrote Gustave Flaubert, “one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds.” Such compromise—and the mediocrity it engenders—is as distasteful to Jayson Pahlmeyer as it was to the 19th-century master of French letters, who also […]

Maserati enthusiasts and other aficionados of exotic Italian cars from the 1960s should be familiar with the original Ghibli, a V-8 powered two-door designed by Giorgetto Giu­giaro, who would later pen the Bora, Merak (see “Star Turn”), and original Quattroporte for Maserati. The company produced coupe and spider variants of the Ghibli from 1967 through […]

The appeal of Chilean Patagonia lies largely in the region’s inaccessibility. Its untamed beauty—an arresting tableau of glacier-fed lakes, rolling pampas, and ultramarine skies—has endured at least in part because of its remoteness. Now a bold new initiative is making this pristine corner of South America more accessible to a lucky few homeowners while simultaneously […]

In the 1960s and early 1970s, when most society women wore understated jewelry—demure pearls and diamonds—the designer David Webb enticed a few of the haut monde’s leading tastemakers with big, bright pieces that served as golden emblems of a new era. Thanks to such creations as the giant Maltese cross that Marisa Berenson fastened at […]

A towering guard in a green-and-gold turban lifted an umbrella to shield me from the sun as we stepped from the launch onto the dock. We walked up a red carpet to the Leela Palace in the city of Udaipur, in the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan. At the hotel, a harmonium-and-tabla duo played the hypnotic, […]

The first-generation Range Rover Sport suffered from an identity crisis of sorts. Was it a rightful heir to Land Rover, the first family of sport-utility vehicles, or was it no more than a distant cousin, an illusionary vehicle contrived to cash in on the brand name? The letters on its bonnet spelled Range Rover, but […]

Calm waters lapping at the sides of the vessel indicate nothing more than another tranquil night in Burma…

Steve McPherson’s career decisions have been driven largely by his personal passions. After graduating from Cornell University, he turned his attention to the entertainment field—a move that proved creatively and financially rewarding. As president of ABC Entertainment, McPherson oversaw the development of such hit programs as Lost, Modern Family, and Desperate Housewives. After leaving ABC […]

Food is more than simple sustenance; it also serves as a lingua franca. Inspired hospitality, after all, transcends cultural barriers, and no civilization took the presentation of victuals more seriously than did the Roman Empire. The imperial kitchens conquered as many foes and won as many friends as the fabled legions, and with Rome’s influence […]

Casa Herradura, which invented the reposado category nearly four decades ago, recently reinvented the popular spirit with Herradura Colección de la Casa Reserva 2012, the first bottling in a series of planned annual releases of small-batch tequila. The indigenous wild yeast strain that the distillery uses imparts a distinctive flavor to all of its tequilas, […]