Men Who Like to Travel - David Latt

I am staying at the  Lost in Translation  Park Hyatt Tokyo, a beautifully sleek and elegant hotel. The trip is crazy-short. Only one day in Tokyo, then a bullet train trip to Kyoto. Three days there, then back to Tokyo to return to LA. Nutty and such great fun. After the flight from Los Angeles, I had dinner at  Kozue , the hotel's formal Japanese restaurant with floor to ceiling windows with a view the Tokyo skyline. The tasting menu had 28 "things" to taste that covered raw, grilled and simmered. Here are some photographs from the dinner. The beef was amazingly delicate and melt-in-the-mouth tender.  The soups had clear broths, refreshing to the palate and rejuvenating for a tired traveler.  Salt pickled vegetables were simple and clean tasting. Soba with duck broth and leeks, delicious. The portions start small to accompany cocktails and a small tasting of sake. Then the dishes ...

After his trip to Austin checking out the local food truck culture, our traveling foodie, David Latt, liked Texas so much he headed back in search of great barbecue and steaks. On a short visit, he took the long view and ate in twenty-five restaurants in thirty-six hours. I hadn't gone shooting since I was a kid, so the instructor's saying the shotgun "will kick a bit" was good to know. Overhead, the sky was deep blue.  You could hear traffic from the interstate a few miles away, but otherwise the air was hot, still and quiet. Hands sweating, two shells loaded into the shotgun, one eye squinted closed, the other aimed down the barrel, I was ready. "Pull," I said and from the left, the hockey sized puck flew into the sky. I moved the barrel of the shotgun to follow the skeet as it arced in the sky. The puck seemed to move in slow motion when it reached its highest point. That's when I slowly squeezed the trigger and...missed. Luckily I had a ful...

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. ...