Umami Mart

Believe it or not, I was only in Kuala Lumpur for four days, one of which was spent with family outside KL and another stuck in traffic in KL. Did I mention how terrible the traffic is over there? We spent 1.5 hrs in what should have been a 15 min journey. Sigh. After arriving […]

I went to France for the first time. As I packed for the trip, all I could think about was the scene from The Devil Wears Prada where Anne throws her cellphone into a fountain. Everyone looks so stylish in that scene, or in any other film set in Paris – going around the Eiffel Tower […]

*Johnny Lopes is based in San Francisco and is currently traveling through Southeast Asia for two months. Follow what he’s eating on his Flickr feed.

This post is so delayed, but better late than never for such an epic guide to tacos in California. After being open seven days a week during the holiday season, Yoko and I took a much needed 10-day break. Hooray! Yoko traveled to Tokyo, and I went to San Diego to visit my best friend […]

I used to loathe this city when I lived here. That was back in 1998 and I was poor as a peasant poofter pigeon. I went looking for the hip & happening 1990’s London which I’d always dreamt about while listening to BritPop all through high school — the city of Blur, Oasis, Suede, Elastica […]

I woke up on January 1, 2013 ready to shred on the tatami mats at my husband’s parent’s house in western Tokyo. After a great workout I took a walk and saw Mt. Fuji in clear view. It was a memorable Jan 1 already. At 12 o’clock, my in-laws and I all piled into a […]

Spending two weeks in Brazil the middle of the Umami Mart build-out was a bit disorienting. But the abundance of tropical fruits on street stalls, in the grocery store and in fancy restaurants forced me forget about home and embrace the fact that I was living amongst wild coconut trees and bossa nova. As a […]

*Nahoko Morimoto is a Tokyo-based photographer. Her work has been featured in Brutus and Vogue Japan.

For my birthday this year, I went to Tulum, Mexico with Johnny. It was our first trip we would be taking together and it took ages to decide where to go. Buenos Aires? Mexico City? CUBA??? I hadn’t taken a tropical vacation in forever, so the requirements were a nice beach and good food. And […]

Tourists and tapas. Two things in this world which I am not a big fan of. Why then, would I go to Mallorca? The infamous Spanish tourist trap of an island, overrun by chubby European expats from the 1960’s and forward. Cardboard hotels, hoards of purple-haired 65 years old suburban working class wives smoking in […]