Category Archives: Weekly Column

The whole thing started with restaurants. In 1999, when this column was young, the job was simple — eat somewhere, write about it, help the reader find something worth finding. That was it. That’s still it. Though somewhere along the way, the restaurant became a Tuscan villa. The villa became hotels in Spain, then aContinue reading “The Yonderlust Twenty”

Before the restaurants, before the trips, before any of it — there was my grandmother’s table. She had two of them that mattered. The one in the breakfast room, where we’d share Saturday morning pancake breakfasts and casual fried chicken lunches — nothing fancy, just food and family. And then the dining room table, formalContinue reading “A Life at the Table”

A twelve-year-old with a push mower and six neighbors who needed their yards cut — that’s as close to a business plan as I’ve ever had. My father died when I was six. My mother was a public school art teacher. The math was simple: if any money was going to be in my pocket,Continue reading “Work Is Not a Four-Letter Word”

PETROGNANO, TUSCANY— Most of the people I pick up at the Florence airport have never met each other. By the end of the week, some of them will be friends for life. That part I didn’t plan. None of it was on the itinerary. Fifteen years ago, my family and I landed in Stockholm, boughtContinue reading “Nobody Plans For This”

MILAN—There’s a moment — right before the northern lights appear — when the sky looks like it’s deciding whether, or not, to show you something. Then it does, and you understand why you traveled 4,000 miles. Twenty-five Americans stood beside me in the snow. Nobody spoke. The northern lights don’t require commentary. The aurora borealisContinue reading “4,000 Miles from Home”

BERGEN, NORWAY—Two years of planning a year-long trip collapsed in a single sentence at a Volvo dealership in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was August of 2011. We had just landed. My wife. My 10-year-old son. My 14-year-old daughter. The four of us had flown to Sweden to pick up a car and drive it across EuropeContinue reading “The Bridge”

STOCKHOLM—A restaurateur has no business leading tours through the frozen tundra of Scandinavia. Then again, a restaurateur has no business leading tours through Tuscany, either, and that was over 70 trips and 1,500 people ago. The 2026 Yonderlust Travel season officially kicked off this week, and for the first time in almost 10 years ofContinue reading “The Table Gets Bigger”

My ADHD is so bad that I just forgot what I was going to write in this opening sentence. That’s not entirely true. But it’s close. The attention deficit thing is real, and it’s been with me since birth. These days everyone and their brother claim to have ADHD. Not bragging here—who brags about theContinue reading “Squirrel!”

CHICAGO—Most people know they need to try other restaurants when they’re in a great food city. So do I. And yet every time the tortilla soup arrives at Frontera Grill, that plan is out the window. Chicago has been part of my life once a year since the late 1980s as I am typically hereContinue reading “Depth”