On Tuesday mornings, Susan does the Mercado Central run: two kinds of tomatoes, a bag of clementines, whatever fish the woman at stall 87 says is good, and a coffee standing up on the way out, all of it for less than the parking would have cost at her old supermarket in Ohio. Susan is …
Watch the evening paseo in any Spanish town and you will see them. Women in their sixties in pressed linen, walking arm in arm at a pace they could hold for hours, faces lined but somehow light. Men the same age in proper shoes, straight-backed, arguing about football with their hands. We see it every …
By the middle of July our kitchen here becomes a room you pass through, not one you linger in. The afternoon sun hits the west wall around four and the place holds the heat like a clay oven long after the light has gone. Lighting a burner in there feels like a small act of …
In Impruneta, a terracotta town in the hills south of Florence, the beef arrives almost black. It has spent four hours in a pot with red wine and an amount of black pepper that looks like a typing error, and it went into that pot raw. No searing, no crust, no thermometer. Every American beef …
An American friend stayed with us for a week last summer and said the thing out loud that a lot of visitors only think. She had not snacked once since arriving, and she could not work out why. At home she grazed all day, a handful of something here, a bar in the car, a …
In the spring of 2025, the share of Europeans holding a positive opinion of the United States fell to 29 percent, down from 47 percent the previous autumn. That is one of the sharpest drops Eurobarometer has ever measured across a single winter, and by last November the European Council on Foreign Relations found that …
I Stopped Taking American Vitamins. What Europeans Do Instead. The American vitamin industry is worth over $50 billion a year. That number alone should make you suspicious. Not because all supplements are scams. Some are not. But because an industry that large does not sustain itself on people who genuinely need vitamin D and iron. …
The first time many Americans are served a proper plate of food in Spain or Italy, a small disappointment flickers across their face. The plate looks underfilled. A modest piece of fish, a generous pile of greens dressed in oil, some good bread, and a lot of plain white china showing through. To an eye …
In October 2024, a panel of European food experts handed the island of Crete a title it had arguably earned several thousand years earlier. Crete was named the European Region of Gastronomy for 2026, the award it now holds, and around the same time National Geographic put the island near the top of its list …
Some dishes are weeknight quick, and some are labors of love that ask for an afternoon and reward you tenfold, and both of the dishes in this comparison belong firmly to the second kind. Ethiopian doro wat and Indian chicken curry are two of the world’s great spiced chicken stews, each built on a deep …
There is a growing fascination in America with the way Europeans eat, and not just with what is on the plate. People have started paying attention to when Europeans eat, the rhythm and schedule of meals that runs so differently from the American one. The observation underneath the curiosity is real: people in the Mediterranean …
A retired engineer from suburban Cleveland arrives in Aix-en-Provence with his wife in September 2022. He is 67. She is 64. They have planned this move for four years. They sold their Ohio house, shipped a container of furniture, secured their French long-stay visas, and committed to the Provençal retirement that French wine country has …