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Airlines Can’t Upgrade Every Plane – So They’re Upgrading the Menu
New cabins are expensive, complicated, and slow to arrive. Celebrity chefs? A faster way to serve up an upscale experience — and help justify the premium fare.
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Food and drink
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My search for the perfect Italian aperitivo in Verona
The classic pre-dinner drink and snack combo varies depending where you are in Italy. In this fair city, it’s an institution that can even be enjoyed first thing I arrived in Verona, I admit, without a particularly clear idea of what aperitivo meant. In Italy, the ritual – broadly, a drink and something small to eat before a meal – speaks a different dialect in every city. Milan has turned it into a polished after-work institution. In Venice, it is more itinerant: an ombra (a small glass of wine) along with a cicchetto (a bite-size snack) and then on to the next bacaro (one of the city’s tradi
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‘Delays are always welcome’: 10 of the best railway station pubs in England
Converted from Victorian buffet bars, ticket offices and waiting rooms, these station pubs offer beautifully restored interiors, real ales and a slice of railway history No prizes for guessing what this pub used to be… The Old Ticket Office has high ceilings, walls painted shades of locomotive green and booths resembling train carriages; there are outdoor tables on Station Square. A live train departures board theoretically prevents passengers lingering too long, and a canning machine means any draught beer is also available to take away (the hatch on platform 4 also does takeaway orders). The
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‘The champagne of pale ales’: my search for the perfect kölsch beer in Cologne
‘Kölsch is not a drink, it is a religion’ in Cologne, and it’s only brewed in and around the German city. But which of the many beautiful, storied beer halls serves up the best? There’s a saying in Cologne, repeated with the mild smugness of people who know they’re right: kölsch is the only culture you can drink. It sounds like a line lifted straight from the tourist board’s brochure. Then you spend a day working your way around the city’s traditional brewhouses and realise it’s a statement of fact. Since 1997, kölsch has held a protected geographical indication within the EU, guaranteeing tha
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The Flavors That Connect Us
Travelers remember and return for experiences that can only be produced in a single time and place.
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Kent is having a champagne moment: ‘English wine has gone from a joke to world-class’
French champagne house Taittinger is helping produce a premium fizz in the Garden of England – and now visitors can visit the beautiful winery and sample it The grapes are turning purple on tall green vines, which stretch down towards the distant flint-and-limestone tower of Chilham church. These rows of Pinot Meunier, destined for English sparkling wine, are 51% owned by French champagne house Taittinger. “England is now the most exciting wine region,” says host and sales executive Harriet Sharp as she leads me around Domaine Evremond vineyard, which opened its visitor centre last year to coi
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‘I never imagined such pleasure could be had from the simple sardine’: readers’ favourite foodie experiences in Europe
Your top culinary discoveries, from Bled cake in Slovenia to sardines in Portugal and seafood soup in Spain • Tell us about autumn days out in the UK – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher Last August, the smoky aroma of grilled sardines drifting over the beach in Portimão woke me up from my sunbathing on the beach. Attracted by the aroma of barbecued fish, we found ourselves in the old port where, for €12, I was served two delicious sandwiches on rustic bread of sardines in garlic and olive oil, with a small cold beer. I sat down, ate and chatted with locals on benches at simple communal
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Burrata and beyond: a foodie tour of northern Puglia, Italy
It’s the birthplace of the popular cheese, but the Barletta-Andria-Trani province in southern Italy has an array of local delicacies – from olive oil and yellow tomatoes to goat prosciutto ‘I don’t eat mozzarella outside Puglia,” says our friend Savio. “It’s not the same.” Savio is a very opinionated foodie, so I take his words with a pinch of good Puglian sea salt (see below). He was adamant about the superiority of the stretched-curd cheese from his home turf. Puglia is also the birthplace of ingredient du jour burrata, which originated in Andria, a few miles from Savio’s home town of Barlet
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The other side of Croatia: ‘a landscape that could out-Tuscany Tuscany’
Weekenders from Zagreb head to the rolling green Samobor Hills for nature, vineyards, delicious local food and Habsburg-era architecture ‘You’re going to Samobor? You must try kremšnita,” my Dubrovnik friends told me before I set off on my trip north. “But I’ve already had kremšnita in Zagreb,” I told them. They do it better in Samobor, they insisted. I wasn’t about to get embroiled in a battle of the cream cakes in a region where Croatians, Slovenes and Austrians all like to celebrate their own versions of this decadently thick, fat custard slice topped with puff pastry and icing sugar. But I