The collins is a classic cocktail with a confusing past. The original was named for its creator, John Collins, who worked as a bartender in a London hotel during the early 19th century. His recipe, which combines dry gin, lemon juice, sugar, and club soda, is identical to a fizz, except that it is served in a tall collins-style glass with an orange wheel or cherry garnish. It’s also closely tied to the sour, but includes club soda.

Learning to perfect a classic like the collins is a great way to build skill…

Up until the mid-18th century, European brewers aged their beers in oak barrels, but they abandoned the technique during the Industrial Revolution when metal vats became the new standard vessel for fermentation. More than two centuries later, U.S. craft breweries resuscitated the practice. Today, those breweries are making more varieties of beer using oak barrels than their European counterparts ever did, and they’re doing so with a truly American sense of exploration. From those exploratory efforts have come …

I was invited to judge Iron Chef America once. The battle was Bobby Flay versus chef Hong Thaimee, chef and owner of the New York Thai restaurant Ngam. The Chairman did his dramatic thing to unveil the special ingredient through a thick mist of disco-era fog. I was hoping for Kobe beef, turbot, whiskey—some glamourous or luxurious foodstuff worthy of its own fog machine.

But when the fog dissipated, I was left staring at a table overflowing with . . . tamarinds. Harrumph. My mouth puckered on instinct.

T…

Chicken soup is the tonic that soothes all wounds, from a light sniffle to an emaciated IPO. And yet ordering chicken soup at a great restaurant seems a bit like going to a cocktail haven and ordering a tall rocks glass full of the city’s finest tap water.

For all its cockles-warming charms, chicken soup is a simpleton bore of a dish. That is, unless you’re in a Thai restaurant. Thai cuisine’s version of chicken soup is tom kha gai, and it’s wondrous. The literal translation is “chicken galangal soup,” but …

Mauricio Cordoba fidgets in his seat at a corner table of his cigar club. Scanning the room, Club Macanudo’s general manager takes note of patrons reclining on various leather couches or seated at the dozen or so candlelit tables—tables that recast the main gathering space of the club into an upscale dining room as much as the leather couches transform it into a relaxed cocktail lounge.

Billows of cigar smoke waft upward from a group of businessmen seated on a couch in the room’s center and also from a jovi…

York Street Studio, a Connecticut design company that specializes in luxury home decor, has introduced its first handcrafted backgammon set (starting at $1,800). Founded in Brooklyn in 1988, York Street Studio originally specialized in designing bespoke furniture for clients but has since expanded into home accessories and decorative hardware. Though the materials of company’s new 28-inch backgammon set can be customized to suit the customer’s preferences, the standard interior is made with fine-grained calf l…

VIP Completions has announced that its latest custom jet interior will feature a world’s first: a flowing-water display backlit with LED lighting, known as a bubble wall. The owner is able to manipulate the colors of these LED lights via a smartphone app. The bubble wall is the centerpiece of the new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner’s interior, which emphasizes light, reflections, and a palette of black, silver, and gray—creating a clean, relaxed, contemporary look. 

The forward section of the Dreamliner’s cabi…

From October 31 through December 6, Les Enluminures gallery in New York City will showcase 41 rings from the personal collection of the renowned gem dealer and collector Benjamin Zucker. Cycles of Life: Rings from the Benjamin Zucker Family Collection includes items once owned by notable scholars and jewelry connoisseurs such as Joan Evans, Ralph Harari, the Rothschild family, and Melvin Gutman.

The exhibition features highly detailed, handcrafted rings dating from the first century to the mid-19th century….

Cancer has, until very recently, been regarded as a collection of diseases characterized by, indeed defined by, abnormalities in cell division (mitosis). This is logical in that the most obvious attribute of most cancers is the formation of masses, called tumors, and the cancer cells found in tumors clearly arise by mitosis. But this is only a part of the story. Much recent evidence points toward another characteristic of cancer that might be as or even more important: abnormal cell mobility. In fact, fro…

It’s a bird! It’s a pangolin! No, it’s andBeyond’s new Sandibe Lodge.

Why Go: Have you ever heard of a pangolin? If you are unfamiliar with the term, do a quick online image search. The scaly anteater, native to Africa and Asia, was the inspiration for the architecture of the new andBeyond Sandibe Okavango Safari Lodge. One of several high-end camps on the Okavango Delta, Sandibe opened in 1998 on the banks of the Santantadibe River. In January the camp closed and was rebuilt, with the pangolin-inspired mai…