Hi there, I’m Diana. I’ve lived in six countries on three continents and have worked as a food and travel journalist for nearly a decade. My byline has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Eater, WIRED, Condé Nast Traveler, VICE, Playboy, Architectural Digest, The Independent, and Travel + Leisure, among other places.
Each Thursday, I’ll share one great little place I know, along with a few thoughts and a small selection of articles that speak to me and might speak to you. I’ve chosen to anchor this experiment in the kinds of restaurants, bars, galleries, creative spaces, dives, holes-in-the-wall, and other places I would like to share with you, both because I hope you’ll be able to visit them someday and because I want to remind myself that such things exist. Some may be fancy or famous, but many won’t be. I’m going to start right here in Berlin, because it’s a city I have loved for many years.
This newsletter is named for a column in The Guardian that, like much of travel publishing, no longer exists. During my time in this industry, I’ve watched as budgets have dried up and the deluge of content has grown ever greater. When I visit a city, I have no interest in Top 10 lists half-plagiarized from press releases. Instead, I tend to turn to people I trust to find out the places they go when they’re off the clock. I’ve sent dozens of such personal, off-the-record guides to Berlin, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, New York, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and other destinations to friends and friends-of-friends over the years and that is more or less what I’m hoping to create here.
If you subscribe, I hope this helps cut through some of the noise. I hope you’ll find work here that makes you think and places that make you want to travel, once we are all able to do so.
