A Beginner's Guide to Sake
Sake occupies a peculiar position in Western drinking culture — revered in theory, misunderstood in practice.
2026-06-08
TN
Thomas Nakamura
133 articles
Showing 61–80 of 133 articles
The Art of Making the Perfect Steak at Home
The perfect steak is not a restaurant exclusive.
2026-06-08
A Guide to Oyster Varieties and How to Shuck Them
The oyster is the only animal most people eat alive, and that simple fact sets it apart from every other food on the table.
2026-06-07
A Weekend in Montreal
Montreal is the city where North America's French and English identities collide, negotiate, and produce something entirely original.
2026-06-06
How to Choose Olive Oil Like an Italian
In Italy, olive oil is not a condiment — it is an ingredient as fundamental as salt, and choosing it carelessly is as unthinkable as cooking with bad wine.
2026-06-06
A Weekend in Copenhagen
Copenhagen has spent the last two decades transforming from a charming but quiet Scandinavian capital into one of Europe's most exciting cities for food, design, and architecture.
2026-06-05
How Porcelain Painters Train Their Hands to Ignore Tremor
A porcelain painter at Sevres, France's national manufactory founded in 1740, begins training by spending six months painting nothing but straight lines.
2026-06-02
What Handmade Paper Tells the Fingertips That Machine Paper Cannot
Close your eyes and run your fingertips across a sheet of handmade paper from Hayle Mill in Kent or Khadi Papers in India.
2026-06-02
How One Workshop in Jura Turns Horn into Spectacle Frames
In the village of Morez in the French Jura, Maison Bonnet has produced spectacle frames from natural buffalo horn since 1950.
2026-06-02
Why the Best Chisels Are Hollow-Ground, Not Flat
A chisel sharpened with a hollow-ground bevel, the concave profile left by a grinding wheel, outperforms a flat-ground chisel in the critical operation of paring: controlled removal of thin shavings.
2026-06-02
The Master Plasterer Whose Ceilings Hang in Stately Homes
Geoffrey Preston, one of Britain's foremost decorative plasterers, has executed ornamental plasterwork for Chatsworth House, Kensington Palace, and numerous National Trust properties.
2026-06-01
What Makes Japanese Hand Planes Superior to Their Western Counterparts
The Japanese hand plane, or kanna, pulls rather than pushes, uses a laminated blade of carbon steel and soft iron, and is adjusted by tapping rather than turning a mechanism.
2026-06-01
What Happens When a Heritage Brand Opens Its Archive to Young Designers
When Loewe appointed Jonathan Anderson as creative director in 2013, one of his first acts was to open the Spanish leather house's archive of patterns, techniques, and materials to a new generation of artisans.
2026-06-01
The Sandstone Quarry That Rebuilt a Bombed Cathedral
When Coventry Cathedral was destroyed by German bombers on 14 November 1940, the ruins were left standing as a memorial.
2026-06-01
The Art of Finishing: What Happens After the Last Cut
In fine woodworking, construction may consume eighty percent of build time, but the finishing determines ninety percent of how the piece is perceived.
2026-06-01
The Patternmaker Whose Templates Exist Only in Memory
In the fishing port of Essaouira, Morocco, master boatbuilder Mohamed Guennoune constructs wooden fishing boats without drawings, templates, or written measurements.
2026-05-31
What an Antique Tool Collector Learns About Ingenuity
A Stanley No.
2026-05-30
What Marquetry Demands of the Eye and the Blade
A marquetry panel by Andrew Crawford may contain over five thousand individual pieces of veneer, each cut to a tolerance of a tenth of a millimetre and assembled into a pictorial composition achieving the tonal range of an oil painting.
2026-05-30
How One Man Revived the Lost Craft of Damascus Steel
In 1998, metallurgist John Verhoeven of Iowa State University and bladesmith Alfred Pendray announced they had replicated the distinctive banding pattern of genuine wootz Damascus steel after fifteen years of systematic experimentation.
2026-05-29
What CNC Machines Cannot Replicate About Hand-Cut Dovetails
A CNC router can cut a dovetail joint in forty-five seconds.
2026-05-28