Author: Mildred Bell

A subtle form of annoyance has been growing somewhere between the cold line at the Folkestone Eurotunnel terminal and the espresso machines at Charles de Gaulle. Travelers from the United States who have just gotten off ferries or long-haul flights have been stuck in lines that didn’t exist a year ago. They came for the grilled octopus in Athens, the oyster bars in San Sebastián, the seafood, and the leisurely lunches in coastal Brittany. In many instances, they learned an unexpected lesson about border policy in Europe. After years of delays, the Entry/Exit System, or EES, went live on October…

The Choptank River appears brown-green, choppy, and slightly metallic in the light on a rainy morning, just like it always does in late spring. While two underwater drones hum across the riverbed, a graduate student named Keshav Rajasekaran is bent over a laptop, his T-shirt tied around his head like a hood, trying to keep the screen readable. He’s trying to find oysters. He continues to find sand. As you watch him work, it’s difficult not to consider how much unseen infrastructure lies beneath that one annoying sentence: “sand, sand, sand,” and how a century-old food safety system contributes to…

The South seems to deliberately slow down on a certain type of Saturday in May. It takes longer than usual for people to select their hats. Bottles of bourbon emerge from cabinets where they had been stored since Christmas. There’s a roast in the oven somewhere, and someone’s spouse keeps asking if the mint is fresh enough for the juleps. The first Saturday in May has always felt more like a minor national holiday, mostly observed by visitors from outside of Kentucky, than a sporting event. The food is more important than you might think if you’re hosting this year.…

When a serious chef comes across an ingredient so honest that it disproves everything they believed to be true, a certain kind of silence descends upon them. According to most accounts, Ferran Adrià experienced something similar on the day he strolled through one of Copenhagen’s central fish markets. This is the kind of low-key, unglamorous place where the fish appear to have been swimming twenty hours ago and the cold comes off the ice before you even reach the stalls. which they were, for the most part. You wouldn’t expect Adrià, the Spanish chef who spent twenty years at elBulli…

When something that was consistently present—quietly, dependably, generation after generation—suddenly announces its departure, a certain kind of grief descends upon a neighborhood. That’s what happened in Kalihi when Tamashiro Market announced that it would close on April 30, 2026, following 85 years of providing services to the people of Hawaii out of that distinctive pink building. The community’s reaction was not merely cordial. Even the family didn’t seem to be ready for how overwhelming it was. The owners, Cyrus and Guy Tamashiro, who centered their retirement around this occasion, most likely envisioned a low-key farewell. Instead, thousands of people abruptly…

It doesn’t take long to sense the gravity of what’s going on when you stand on the docks in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, on a Tuesday morning. Beyond the effects of sun and salt, the shrimp boats are weathered in a way that happens when no one has the funds to repair them. Some captains stay close to the water, doing mental math that never quite works out in their favor. This is the up-close appearance of decades of inexpensive imported shrimp. Not a figure. Not a graph from NOAA. However, a man is gazing at his boat and questioning…

A certain type of person finds something that works and just won’t let it go. Not because I’m stubborn. More akin to loyalty. That type of person is Marco Reyes. For the past eleven years, a 38-year-old surfer who lives a few blocks from Mission Beach has prepared fish tacos every Friday using the same basic recipe, battered white fish, warm corn tortilla, and shredded cabbage piled on top like a little mountain. He no longer measures much. He is not required to. He claims that it began almost by accident, just like most rituals. A friend gave him a…

You can tell that everything is going well when you hear a certain type of sound. When the battered cod hits the oil, there’s a deep, rolling hiss that fills a small kitchen and gives even the most experienced home cook the fleeting impression that they know exactly what they’re doing. It’s not a tired sizzle or an anxious splutter. It’s easy to get fish and chips at home. However, there are a few things that most recipes subtly ignore that are necessary to get it truly right, the way a backstreet London chippy has been doing it since before…

The word “Cajun” is likely to be found somewhere in practically every restaurant along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, whether it’s on the menu, painted on the wall, or sewn into the server’s apron. It’s the atmosphere. It’s its identity. Surprisingly, it’s also not totally truthful about what’s in the bowl. For years, shrimp that were caught thousands of miles away in Ecuadorian or Indian waters have ended up on Louisiana plates with local branding. The shrimpers who are most negatively impacted by this have been watching their livelihoods steadily decline. That is beginning to change. Over the past few years,…

A certain type of traveler has visited enough five-star hotels to understand that a rooftop pool and pillow menu won’t ultimately make a trip feel authentic. These are the people who are currently knee-deep in rivers in Montana at six in the morning, throwing lines into icy water that makes you feel uneasy. Waders were exchanged for the minibar. The majority of them say they would repeat the activity tomorrow. It is difficult to ignore the numbers that support this. According to the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation, 58 million Americans picked up a fishing rod in 2024, a post-pandemic…