Getting the flavor of...

Sailing with Top Chefs

Fans of reality-TV cooking shows are getting a chance “to get up close and personal” with their favorite chefs, said Joe Yonan in The Washington Post. Recently, Top Chef: The Cruise took 2,000 guests round trip from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico, with the judges and popular contestants from the Bravo show Top Chef. There were cooking competitions each of the four nights, challenging select fans to share an apron with a chef and used one hand to prepare a dish. These competitions revealed the popularity of the cruise’s “alcohol package,” as the proceedings turned into messy food fights. Non-cooking events allowed guests to join chefs in jogs around the boat or games of volleyball, Ping-Pong, or poker, and to hear head judge Tom Colicchio play blues guitar. Every meal featured recipes by the show’s chefs in addition to the regular menu. The consensus: “By and large,” the Top Chef dishes were best.

The locals’ Martha’s Vineyard

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“Scratch the surface of any vacation town” and you’ll find a separate world inhabited by the full-time residents, said Danielle Pergament in The New York Times. On Martha’s Vineyard, that world comes to especially ebullient life after Labor Day, and the best of it is even open to outsiders. Head west from the island’s busiest towns and beaches, and the land gives way to cow pastures and crop fields. The farmers, fishermen, cheese-makers, and restaurateurs here don’t hit the beaches often, but they’ve turned the area known as Up Island into “an ad hoc New England utopia,” where barter is as good as cash and every meal is a celebration of the local bounty. “It’s a bohemia that’s both real and not”: On the one hand, the women picking kale in their small plots could be mistaken for models; on the other, those are real turkeys wandering into the road and the typical farm stand trusts even tourists to leave payment in a cash box.