Our resident holiday expert Rob Farrow is here to provide guidance, advice and answers to your holiday dilemmas. In this edition he looks at getting the most from autumn and winter breaks. As the autumn draws in, traditionally people’s thoughts turn away from holidays and towards nights indoors, but things have changed. Gone is the…
Category: Travel
Venice - How Not to be a Tourist
It’s one of the biggest clichés, but, yes, Venice is magical. Or rather it can be. It can also be like something out of Dante’s Inferno (yes I know he’s a Florentine not a Venetian but I couldn’t think of an appropriate local to use for a simile). You arrive in the city by water…
Paris - The 6th or 16th
My memory tends to capture random moments in life, and one of which was a claim made by a French lecturer that she lived in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Not that I had any interest in her home address, but it was the tone of voice, an astringent sense of pride, that caught my…
The Bar Hemingway at The Ritz Paris
Hemingway, of course, is as famous for his boozing and womanising as he is for his writing, so it’s unsurprising that many bars around the world bear his name or serve a drink bearing it. This one, in the back of the Ritz Hotel Paris, is certainly one of the best cocktail bars in the…
La Bourse et la Vie
La Bourse et La Vie may not be one of the most well known restaurants in Paris, at least as far as tourists from London are concerned, but it is one with pedigree. After ten years of running Spring (sadly just closed – it was superb) American chef Daniel Rose has opened up La Bourse…
Mabel
In the back of a cheese toastie store you usually expect to find a store room with cheese and bread in it, not a bar, and not one that’s self described as a ‘Cocktail Den and Rum Empire’ – but that’s exactly what you’ll find at Mabel in Paris. Mabel, is a cocktail bar twice…