The desert palate is grey and yellow now. The grey of sagebrush, and the vibrant yellow of daisy-like brittlebush that bursts in great round humps among the rocks. In fact, it's gloriously golden absolutely everywhere in Palm Springs. These plants flower only once or twice a decade, so I feel enormously grateful to have been there at the right time, not that my Hipstamatic does them justice.
Sunday was the last day of the Coachella Valley music festival and the girls had very reasonably agreed to a 5pm pick-up, forgoing the chance to see Thom Yorke or Phoenix. It's a school night, after all. With a happy two hours to spare, annotated map in hand, I embarked on an architectural tour of Palm Springs. Some of the best examples of mid-century modern can be found within spitting distance of Palm Canyon Drive. I tried but failed to visit the Elrod House (1968, John Lautner) on Southridge Drive, saw the Ship of the Desert (1936, Earl Webster & Adrian Wilson, and the stunning Kaufmann House (1947, Richard Neutra).
Some ten years ago, I went to dinner one night with no expectations. A
London newspaper had asked me to write about Lapérouse, an old warhorse
of a restaurant overlooking the Seine on the Left Bank—it was doing
historic Paris restaurants, and this one’s been around forever. I
politely suggested that there might be better candidates, because as
far as I knew, this place was still a slumbering tourist table flogging
its past: it has several charming tiny private dining rooms with badly
scratched mirrors—as the legend goes, these cuts were made by ladies
testing the veracity of newly offered diamonds (real diamonds cut
glass). 
We’d been at the Barcelona Cathedral, the old one, not the Gaudi one that’s never finished, extraordinary gothic architecture graced with gargoyles and an adjacent museum with jewel encrusted crosses, too many carats to count. The cathedral is the resting place of Santa Eulalia. Almost like a film credit, she is the co-patron saint of Barcelona and the cathedral is guarded by thirteen white geese as she was thirteen when she died. (I know this is true because I counted them.)
A couple of nights before we left for Paris my sister came to my house for dinner and told me she heard a story on NPR about this man in Paris that invites guests for dinner every Sunday evening at his house. “Do you want to go, sounds interesting, don’t you think?” This did sound interesting, it could be very interesting or not, but either way it surely would be an experience. Jim requested that anyone that wants to come to his house send him an e-mail and tell something about yourself, pressure was on to say something short and creative to get his attention. Waking up in the morning I opened up my e-mail and there was a response from Jim. He said that there was a waiting list for the Sunday night dinner which he added us to and we should call him at noon on Sunday to see if anyone had cancel making room for us. He also invited us for a glass of wine sometime during the week if we had time. I guess the e-mail sparked his interest.
The first time I ate at Coco Lezzone in Florence, it was at the invitation of film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who knows a thing or two about Italian cooking: 