Weather in the City by the Bay is famously fickle — foggy one moment, gloriously sun-splashed the next — but San Franciscans know how to enjoy the great outdoors (dress in layers).

I didn’t visit Lance Winters, the master distiller at St. George Spirits, with the expectation of going on a stroll through the redwoods.

The birthplace of bohemia and a certain inimitable street style, Berlin is best seen on foot.

Last in an occasional series on traveling with baby.

Want an amazingly affordable way to eat the food of a chef with a Michelin-star-studded background? Head to the Mission District, on the corner of 24th and Mission streets, a few doors down from McDonald’s and within shouting distance of countless taquerias and burrito joints.

My mother and her family fled the communist takeover of China to Hong Kong in 1950.

My son is 8 months old. He has been on 15 airplanes, has four foreign stamps in his passport, and learned to crawl during a layover in the Singapore airport.

Long a gritty downtown district hugging the city’s waterfront, Gastown is now the white-hot center of a culinary hipster renaissance.

First of an occasional series on traveling with a baby.

18 Reasons hosts classes and hands-on educational evenings as a way to make community food knowledge more accessible to visitors.

Petaluma is still the kind of farmstead place where, on a winding country road just outside the historic area, traffic stops for a hefty wild turkey hustling across the road, head down and red wattle flying.

I’m standing at the top of a 100-foot birding tower in Perry Lakes Park, the platform at eye level with the tree canopy and overlooking a magnificent topography of oxbow lakes and tupelo and cypress swamp.

The classic cocktail is back, and so is classic speakeasy style.

The sun slants low across the sky as I paddle my surfboard out from shore. It’s late winter on Cowell’s Beach in this northern California surfer town.

The olive tree was first introduced to California by Spanish priests of the Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit orders who founded missions in the New World.

Maybe it’s the fact that the First Family hails from here, but Chicago has lately upped its hipness quotient.

Between 1910 and 1940, a million immigrants passed through Angel Island, a speck of land in the middle of San Francisco Bay.

Mortimer Mouse?

My day in the life of a sommelier started in the cramped quarters of the wine cellar for the Fifth Floor Restaurant in San Francisco, where I helped Emily Wines—yes, that’s her real name—restock her upstairs bar.

Vineyards and a culinary aesthetic put sleepy Anderson Valley on the map.

Sunday morning along Brick Lane is a kaleidoscopic mix of colors and cultures.

Turks and Caicos Islands are not too crowded—yet.

In the epic Chugach Range, just 250 feet above sea level and overlooking the majestic blue expanse of Turnagain Arm, Alyeska Resort is a bit unusual when it comes to ski resorts: It has the lowest base elevation of any large ski area in the United States.

When you walk through the Lower East Side these days, it’s easy to believe you might have strayed into Nolita, its chic, boutique-lined neighbor to the west.

The light here is different: A silvery-gold sheen seems to blanket the landscape as we make the 2-hour drive from Canberra, the country’s capital, to the ski resort of Thredbo.

In New York’s pickle palaces, the divinely brined.

Throughout my childhood, dim sum was always a family affair.

Vancouver’s design influences have moved with gusto into the Canadian home arena.

Jackson Hole is undergoing a renaissance apparent in its dramatically shifting landscape.

Black lava fields glitter on the dramatic, sun-drenched Kona side of the Big Island, a reminder that here, on the youngest of Hawaii’s key islands, the volcano goddess Pele is still restive.

The first thing that comes to mind when I enter the McMenamins Kennedy School—an impressively original bed-and-breakfast housed in a former elementary school here—is the sense of being lost on the first day of class.

Every month, three of my closest girlfriends and I get together for a food reunion.

Under the Alhambra’s glow, Plaza Nueva offers a taste tour.

In feudal times, the Chinese believed that the eve of the New Year marked the Kitchen God’s departure to heaven, in order to report on the household.

There’s a picture hanging on my bedroom wall that I look at every day: A young waiter in a black vest, crisp white shirt, and long checked apron is standing sideways in an open doorway, chatting with another waiter.