Men Who Like to Travel - David Latt

Heading inland from Seattle , a city he knows well, our foodie adventurer, David Latt, explores Spokane and Eastern Idaho in search of restaurants that fly the flag of the farm-to-table movement.  Like fashion, food delights the soul but is often subject to hype. "Organic," "Natural" and "Low Fat" have been co-opted by marketing campaigns, obscuring the true intent of the words. When we think of "farm-to-table," w e imagine a farmer driving a beat up 1980's Ford pick-up to the back door of a neighborhood restaurant and unloading wooden crates filled to overflowing with leafy bunches of arugula, round and firm beets, thick stalks of celery, fat leeks, freshly laid eggs, plump chickens, freshly cured bacon, ripe apples, dark red cherries and juicy peaches. The high quality product inspires the chef who quickly writes the menu for that day's meals.  In the ideal, a farm-to-table meal reconnects diners with the seasons and the land.

Many states in the U.S. have developed premium grape growing areas: the Ohio River Valley, Oregon's Willamette and Columbia Valleys, Washington State's Walla Walla and Yakim Valleys, the Hudson River Valley, and Napa Valley in California, to name but a few. If you love wine, there is no greater pleasure than taking a trip to a winery and sampling the wine where it is made. At a few wineries you can do more than just have a glass of wine. You can go behind the scenes and learn how wine is made. In California , Wine Bo ot Camp has 1-day workshops in Napa , Sonoma , and Paso Robles. Grape Camp offers a Sonoma Wine Country experience that follows the grapes "from the vineyard to the bottle." In New York's Niagara-on-the-Lake, Pel ler Estates hosts weekend boot camps that also teach wine-food pairings. For wine lovers with ample resources, Beautiful Places can provide a more private setting where you can stay in a villa in the middle of a Napa Valley vineyar