I’m always interested to hear well-traveled folk list their top five or ten favorite cities. Of course the locations become interchangeable the more you travel. Perspectives change and the list of places you’ve been vs. places you want to go is in constant metamorphosis.
Sometimes the people in a place affect your interest, sometimes its the food, or the architecture or the music. But usually its a simple combination of mood and sense of place balancing out to fit your personal ethos.
Here is my list of top ten cities around the world. So far.
1. New York City - I spent three years of my life here post-college, and there are a million and one reasons why it makes the top of the hit list. There is no place on earth where the synthesis of street food, high-end dining, bakeries, cafes, coffee, pizza, Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Italian, Jewish, Mediterranean, fill-in-the-blank foods meld together to create the stew pot of just how diverse a city this little island has become over the past 100 years. That doesn’t take into account the museums, the creative and media nucleus of the planet, the parks, the stories that live in the penthouses and the row houses, and the ten million people that call greater NYC home. It is a place where you genuinely get to be the truest version of yourself.
2. Paris - Not because it’s an idyll of all the romantic images people have of it with frolicking children in parks with toy sailboats and baguettes and berets and red bicycles and balloons. Those people have never been to Paris. I love Paris for everything it is, and is not. For being the creative birthplace of the Belle Epoch that made way for the Lost Generation that made way for generations hence to stumble into Monet in the Orangerie and Degas in the Orsay. The tree-lined streets of Montmarte, once the home and inspiration for Picasso, Lautrec, Modigliani, Renoir that are just a few blocks behind the seedy underpinnings of prostitution that is alive and well on the Rue de Clichy. The reality of Paris is that the hotels are shitty and 80% of the restaurants are exceedingly bad. The fairytale and stereotypes of Paris carry so wide a berth that none of this matters. Over time, the rest of the world has caught on to French cooking, the art of slow food, local produce and why real food matters. Many other corners of the earth do it better. But if you stick around long enough to seek it out, you’ll find why Paris is still a culinary heavyweight. It starts in the daily markets that are abundant in all 20 arrondissements and extends to the best bakeries, food halls, falafel stands, creperies, chocolate shops, bistros and ethnic eateries the city offers. But you have to know where to go. Paris is not a place for coffee, but it is a place for cheese—over 200 locally produced varieties, fresh, creamy, soft, hard, pungent and perfect. It is not a place for traditional flea marketing. The idea of finding amazing Parisian procurements in the flea markets is of a bygone time, prior to Ebay, Etsy and the technological shrinking of the universe. The Clingancourt market is filled with Louis chairs and chandeliers, with lots of junk interspersed. It serves a very narrow clientele. The treasures of Paris must be stumbled upon in the side alleys, the lesser known markets and the places where years and years of tourists haven’t dried up the mystique and flavor of the place. Paris is forever filled with accordion players in the metro, clinking plates and forks in the outdoor cafes, and a sparkling tower at night. Taxi past the Lourve after dark, and you feel as though you’re on your way to an immaculately produced film set, where someone is about to be crowned into royalty, and a director like Christopher Nolan has turned your dreams into a palace on the Seine. So yes, in some ways, it’s on another level. Paris is best, for the things that it isn’t. Because even without, its the closest thing there is to fantasy.
3. Prague - Virtually untouched by the bombs of WWII, yet frozen in time during the Cold War, Prague is a colorful amalgamation of the best architectural styles of the last century. Its dreary and imposing with its sad Jewish cemetery, and the fortress of Prague Castle looking down on the old town, but its a lovely and mysterious glimpse behind what was once the Iron Curtain, from one of its most beautiful and interesting capitals.
4. Seattle -Grunge, Nirvana, strong, dark coffee, flannel, rain, rugged coastline not far off, a Nora Ephron movie set - what’s not to love about the place. It’s got unlimited dungeness crab, water on one side, the Cascades on the other, and about twenty locally born and raised coffee roasters that put Starbucks to shame. It has more consistently incredible restaurants than most U.S. cities combined, with a robust Asian culture and the best French fare on the West Coast. The brilliant and local Metropolitan Market has six outposts through its neighborhoods, along with PCC, Madison Market, a few Whole Foods and a generous array of farmer’s market. Combine all this with the local seafood and it doesn’t get much better, if we’re standing around a kitchen. It’s cozy bungalows and Queen Anne neighborhoods are enviably cute (minus the price tag) and being the HQ to Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks and Nordstrom means that the restaurants and shops and hopefully Elliott Bay Books, will continue to flourish in what I consider one of America’s most beautiful and best kept secrets.
5. Krakow -Think of Poland and images of potatoes, peasant women in wool scarves, Jewish ghettos, and pierogis come to mind. But Krakow is one of the most beautiful and enchanting cities I’ve seen, in part, because it was winter and snowing when I was there. Which is also what most people think of when they think of Krakow. It has the second largest main square (Bratislava’s is the largest) and like Prague, it too was spared much of the bombs of the Second World War. Which is ironic, considering two of the most heinous concentration camps were only an hour away. Krakow has beautiful churches, Wawel Castle, the Tower Clock at St. Mary’s Basilica and in the square’s Underground Museum, you can view the actual layers of the city as they were razed and built up over the past centuries. Some of the best food I’ve had in Europe, was eaten in the freezing cold of Krakow, from the potato pancakes and steaming soups to the Christmas market street food. It’s lore, history, warm people, cold nights, jazz clubs, hot chocolate, and great food made it one of my ultimate favorite trips among all my travels to date. If you venture this far into Eastern Europe without making the pilgrimage to Auschwitz/Birkenau, you’re missing one of most educational and searing history lessons you could get. Haunting, but necessary.
6. Dubrovnik -Dubrovnik, the crown jewel at the tip of Croatia’s marvelous Dalmatian Coast isn’t really a city. More, its a place to spend a week happily exploring the narrow cobbled alleyways that always end up leading to a swimming hole or vantage point of the Adriatic. The best part of Dubrovnik is the boats that take you elsewhere - to the slow paced and rarely touristed islands of Miljet, Lokrum, Elephiti, etc. If you have more time in the region, even better for driving into Bosnia, Montenegro and even further south to Albania. Bosnia is surprising easily to slip across the border to - and what a reward to see the formerly war-torn country proudly accepting visitors and tourists across Mostar’s old bridge again. There’s something special about the rock lined edge of the Croatian coast. It’s rough, and untamed, often with the mar of a cruise ship coming or going. But you sense that most of the people in the water are the locals, from generations of families who are still keeping the region what it remains today.
7. Aix -Take the leafiest neighborhood in Paris and plop it a few hours south in the middle of the French countryside—add as many food markets as you can, and you’ve got Aix. Classy and sophisticated, with a penchant for the best olive oils, woven baskets, fresh produce and roasted chickens, Aix is pretty and relaxed, with one of the best farmer’s markets around. The locals know the meaning of the good life, and as the former home to Paul Cezanne, there’s a small art scene in Aix beyond the food and the tree-lined Cours Mirabou. About one to two hours from St. Remy, Avignon, Arles, Marseille, and Cassis, Aix is in a good location for spending a week in the South of France. As long as you have a car. For how to spend a good 36 hours in Aix, click here
8. London -I studied abroad in London’s tony South Kensington neighborhood in 2000, making life-long friends and memories through Boston University’s tightly run internship program. London is a massive, historic, regal, ethnically diverse global melting pot of Eastern culture mixed with the old world of British nobility. It’s more like many small villages inter-connected, rather than one of the world’s most pulsing cities. One street has the feel of a Dickens novel, while another feels like the closest thing to the future of art, music and street culture as it evolves. London houses some of the world’s best museums, universities, fashion houses, and parks, and the National Gallery is one of my favorites. London is everything in that it’s Mary Poppins one minute and club culture the next. The Chelsea, Belgravia and Kensington neighborhoods house diplomats and oil barons, immigrant nannies and children dressed as Madeline dolls, while the East End is the stuff of the soap opera. Cockney, pub-centric, and poor. East really does meet West in London - in more ways than one.
9. Strasbourg -One of my favorite spots in all of Europe. Located on the winding L’ill River in the Alsace, Strasbourg—along with Colmar and Mulhouse were formerly property of Germany. The Bavarian style old towns mix perfectly with Alsatian cuisine and French fashion. It’s a city with surprises, as it’s small enough to see in a weekend, but big enough to actually live in, happily entertained with scores of cafes, restaurants, and sleek shopping. It’s the seat of the European Parliament and a central springboard to other areas of France, eastern Switzerland and northern Italy. I would love to make Strasbourg my permanent home.
10. I’m reserving this spot for future travels.