About Me
After stints as a music critic and celebrity interviewer, I began my travel and food writing career exploring the world for a newspaper syndicate, the Copley News Service, but came home to write a book, the Access Guide to New York restaurants, a neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, mapped by numbers, exhaustive survey of all things pertaining to food in New York: restaurants, food markets, kitchenware stores, etc. At the same time, I was one of the restaurant reviewers for the launch of Time Out's New York edition.
I went next to the magazine Departures, American Express's upscale magazine for Black and Centurion Card holders, as the contributing editor for travel. During eight years there, I reviewed hundreds of hotels, restaurants, stores, specialist guides, airlines and destinations overall, compiling the front travel section Blackbook and contributing to special issues on Italy, the South of France, New York, California and Islands and to every regular issue.
I joined Forbes afterward, first as a contributing editor of the lifestyle magazine Forbes FYI, later renamed Forbes Life. When it shut down, I transitioned to the website Forbes.com. Stories for both range from digging for dinosaur fossils with a paleontologist in China, observing Laos's transition to a tourism hotspot, bead throwing on a float in New Orleans' Mardi Gras, observing Maui's recovery efforts following the devastating 2023 fire, attempting to achieve serenity in retreats in India and Indonesia and observing gorillas up close in Rwanda to a myriad of hotel, restaurant and destination reviews nationally and internationally.
Other publications I've contributed to include Departures international issues, Centurion, The Robb Report, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit and Saveur.