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      36 Hours in Joshua Tree, California: Things to Do and See

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      7 a.m.
      Hike to the site of a real-life Western drama
      California’s high-desert scenery often feels like the backdrop of an old western (in Pioneertown, northwest of the park, a set used for many films of the western genre still stands). For the nonfiction version of Wild West-like drama, enter the park via the west entrance and hike to the site of a showdown near the Wall Street Mill, once used to process gold mined in the area. In 1943, two neighbors entered into a fatal duel over a property line disagreement along what’s now the trail. On the path, a sign commemorating the shootout reads, “Here is where Worth Bagley bit the dust at the hand of W.F. Keys.” The sign is a replica of the original one that Keys, the mill’s owner, made and installed himself. At the end of the path, you’ll reach the ruins of the mill, flanked by rusted-out antique cars. The relatively easy hourlong round-trip feels like traveling back in time. More

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      36 Hours in Melbourne, Australia: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Explore a lane that’s gone from rags to riches
      Flinders Lane was the center of Melbourne’s rag trade, as its textile industry was known, until production moved offshore starting in the 1960s. Today, it’s home to a number of gorgeous shops and restaurants. The city’s most beautiful retail space must belong to Alpha60, a local brother-sister fashion label (think boxy shirts and breezy culottes), whose store inside the Chapter House building occupies a cathedral-like space with lofty, vaulted ceilings, pointed-arch windows and a baby grand piano. Across the road, Craft Victoria, a subterranean gallery and store, features experimental Australian ceramics and textile art. After your shopping, drop into Gimlet at Cavendish House, a glamorous restaurant where crisply dressed waiters sail by with caviar and lobster roasted in a wood-fired oven, but you don’t have to go all out: Squeeze in at the bar right after the doors open at noon for an expertly made gin martini (29 dollars) before the lunch rush. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ Review: A Beautiful Collaboration

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      For his 44th documentary, Frederick Wiseman journeys to the French countryside to examine the workings of a family-owned, Michelin-starred restaurant.Frederick Wiseman’s transporting documentary “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” centers on a dynasty of French chefs who live and work in a pastoral region in central France named Ouches, some 65 miles west of Lyon. There, amid rolling green hills and under the canopy of a century-old oak, the Troisgros family has a celebrated restaurant whose beginnings date back to 1930. The current paterfamilias, Michel, who’s in his mid-60s, has been cooking his whole life, and while you could say he makes food, it feels more like an expression of love.Making food sounds too pedestrian for the meticulously prepared, strikingly plated dishes that come out of the kitchen at their restaurant, Le Bois Sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), and certainly this is cooking on a rarefied level. It has long been acclaimed, receiving its first Michelin star in 1956 and holding on to its third since 1968. (It’s gone through several iterations and name changes.) Michel’s father and uncle, Pierre and Jean, were widely considered to be nouvelle cuisine pioneers, emblematized by a famous salmon and sorrel dish they invented. The chef Daniel Boulud includes the Troisgros salmon recipe in several of his cookbooks.“Menus-Plaisirs” is Wiseman’s 44th documentary and the first that he’s made since “City Hall” (2020), which notionally focuses on the administration building for the city of Boston. (In between “City Hall” and “Menus-Plaisirs,” he made one of his rare forays into fiction, “A Couple,” about Sophia Tolstoy.) Wiseman’s great subject is institutions, though more rightly the tension between organizations — with their spaces, norms and rituals — and the people moving through them. The bluntly descriptive titles of his movies are an authorial signature (“Hospital,” “High School,” “Boxing Gym”) and suggestively and purposely generic; one of the profound satisfactions of his work is seeing how he turns the general into the specific.Wiseman directed, edited and served as one of the producers on “Menus-Plaisirs,” which runs a heroic four hours (about a half-hour shorter than “City Hall”!). It’s absorbing from start to finish. Much of it takes place inside the bright, nature-inspired Le Bois Sans Feuilles, which is part of a larger complex set in a mid-19th-century estate that the family restored a few years back and includes a boutique hotel overseen by Michel’s wife, Marie-Pierre. Wiseman also pops into another Troisgros restaurant, Le Central, in the neighboring city of Roanne, making a more leisurely visit to a third, the nearby La Colline du Colombier, which is in the countryside.Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.The movie is arranged in distinct sections that suggest the rhythms of running a restaurant. The inaugural segment (call it Prep) introduces Michel and his sons: César, who cooks alongside his father and some dozen others at Le Bois Sans Feuilles, and the younger Léo, the chef for La Colline du Colombier. The sons run into each other at the market, where they’re hunting and pecking among the perfectly arranged leafy greens, bouquets of beets and radishes, and astonishing clusters of oyster mushrooms. In this section, the sons also meet with Michel to discuss menu options, and then the movie shifts to Le Bois Sans Feuilles.It’s there in this restaurant’s spacious, quietly humming open kitchen that the movie begins to gather momentum as Wiseman moves about focusing on one and then another station: One chef expertly filets a large salmon while another trims and butchers some ribs. Elsewhere, Michel and a sommelier discuss some outrageously priced Burgundies, and a brigade of servers ready themselves for the fast-approaching service. “Menus-Plaisirs” has all the virtues of a Wiseman movie, but its focus on beautiful food that’s prepared and served with equal beauty makes it especially seductive, even if you’re not keen on everything on the menu. I now know, for instance, more than I ever cared to about cooking veal brains.Once the customers arrive (call this section Service), the rhythms of the kitchen appreciably accelerate. Anyone who’s ever watched great cooks in action (in life or on TV) knows how enjoyable, even hypnotic it can be watching people with superb craft and technique at work, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Wiseman is sensitive to the sights and sounds of kitchens, including the tempos of chopping knives and the syncopated hiss and burble of pots on a hot stove. He also underscores the hard work on an individual level and when the chefs are in the flow together. These kitchens thrum with quiet intensity, not ego.As “Menus-Plaisirs” continues, its focus widens as the chefs meet with some of their providers — at a small cattle farm, a vineyard, a cheese cave — where the mutual respect is palpable and the talk is sincere and often turns to sustainability. Each of these interludes could be spun off into a separate documentary, but together they expand the prismatic portrait of a family for whom cooking is an aesthetic, a passion, an expression of love, an ethic. There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.Menus-Plaisirs — Les TroisgrosNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours. In theaters. More

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      36 Hours in Acadiana, Louisiana: Things to Do and See

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      10:30 a.m.
      Time travel to a historic village
      When the British forcibly removed the Acadians from parts of Canada in the mid-18th century, an event known as Le Grand Dérangement, the French-speaking Acadians started making their way down the Mississippi River, creating settlements in South Louisiana. Vermilionville was the name given to Lafayette when it was established in the 1820s as one of those settlements. Today, Vermilionville, a 23-acre, open-air living history museum along the banks of the Vermilion River, tells the story of that migration and how the Acadians’ mingling with Creole, Spanish and Native American traditions created the unique culture of today’s Acadiana. Visitors can embark on a guided boat tour of the grounds, be entertained by costumed actors and historical reenactments, or join Cajun dance lessons and jams. The on-site restaurant, La Cuisine de Maman, also hosts an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch. Adult admission, $10; handicap-accessible. More

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      36 Hours in Glasgow: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Browse Scandi home goods and woolly Scottish knitwear
      Glaswegians have an appetite for sustainable shopping and for secondhand goods of all stripes. Hoos, next to the Botanic Gardens, stocks chic Scandi home goods, while the Glasgow Vintage Co., farther along Great Western Road from Papercup, has a thoughtful selection of second-hand Scottish knitwear alongside show-stopping coats and dresses from the 1970s. Up the hill on Otago Street, above Perch & Rest Coffee, Kelvin Apothecary sells a nice range of gifts including handmade Scottish soaps and wooden laundry and cleaning tools. In the cobbled Otago Lane is the chaotic Voltaire and Rousseau secondhand bookshop, with teetering, vertical book piles. Unlike many Glasgow shops, this store isn’t the most dog-friendly, because of the resident cat, BB, who supervises from his perch at the till. More

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      in Television

      Michael Chiarello, Chef and Food Network Star, Dies at 61

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      His culinary empire included several restaurants, an olive oil company, a winery and a retail business with a robust catalog.Michael Chiarello, a hard-working, TV-ready chef from California’s Central Valley whose culinary prowess and intuitive knack for marketing helped define a chapter of Italian-influenced Northern California cuisine and the rural escapism of the Napa Valley lifestyle, died on Friday in Napa. He was 61.His death, in a hospital, resulted from an acute allergic reaction that led to anaphylactic shock, said Giana O’Shaughnessy, his youngest daughter. The cause of the allergic reaction has not been identified.Mr. Chiarello was a member of a generation of Northern California chefs who by the 1980s had freed themselves from the conventions of continental cuisine. They swapped olive oil for butter when they served bread, and they used seasonal produce and locally made cheese and wine long before the term “farm to table” became a menu cliché.He would later get caught in the #MeToo movement, when two servers filed a sexual harassment lawsuit in 2016 against him and his restaurant company, Gruppo Chiarello. The case was settled out of court, but his reputation was tarnished and television opportunities dried up.Michael Dominic Chiarello was born on Jan. 26, 1962, in Red Bluff, Calif., in the Sacramento Valley, and raised surrounded by almond trees and melon fields 200 miles south in Turlock, a farming town built on the rich soil not far from Modesto.He was the youngest child of a couple with roots in the Calabria region of Italy. He credited his mother, Antoinette (Aiello) Chiarello, for his earliest culinary lessons. His father, Harry, was a banker who suffered a debilitating stroke when he was in his 40s.“We never had much money and always had to scrape by,” Mr. Chiarello told The St. Helena Star in 2006. “We foraged for our food. The kitchen table was our entertainment. If we had pasta with porcini mushrooms, we’d talk about how we picked them. How wet and rainy it was that day, or how the truck broke down. There was a story to all the food we brought home, and it made everything taste even better.”By 14, he was working in a restaurant in between wrestling practice and classes at Turlock High School. By 22, he had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and Florida International University in Miami, where he earned a degree in hotel and restaurant management.Even though he was starting to receive national attention for his cooking — he opened his first restaurant in Miami in 1984 and was named Food & Wine magazine’s chef of the year in 1985 — his father wasn’t pleased.“When I decided to be a chef, it wasn’t what it is today. It was just a trade, not sexy like today,” he said in the 2006 interview. “I remember my father was concerned about me. One of my brothers is a Ph.D., one an attorney. I was a cook. He’d say, ‘The family came all this way from Italy. He could have done that over there.’”Mr. Chiarello in 2005 after his Food Network show “Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello” won a Daytime Emmy Award.Mathew Imaging/FilmMagicMr. Chiarello caught the attention of Cindy Pawlcyn, who had recently been on the cover of Bon Appétit magazine for her restaurant Mustards Grill, a pioneering Yountville roadhouse with a giant wine list where the great winemakers of the era would walk in covered in farm dirt. She was looking for someone to run a new restaurant in St. Helena called Tra Vigne.Mr. Chiarello arrived for an interview wearing a chef’s neckerchief and brimming with ambition.“Michael was a very driven man; there was no doubt about that,” Ms. Pawlcyn said in a phone interview. “Tra Vigne was a good place to start, because Michael was outgoing and exuberant and could be charming on the spot. He met a lot of people there.”Indeed, Robert Mondavi and other top winemakers would become regulars, and guests often included culinary and Hollywood elite, from Julia Child to Danny DeVito.The restaurant was a jumping-off point for Mr. Chiarello’s empire, which would eventually include several restaurants, an olive oil company, a winery and a retail business with a robust catalog.Mr. Chiarello ran the Tra Vigne restaurant in St. Helena, Calif., until 2001. Robert Mondavi and other top winemakers would become regulars, and guests often included members of the culinary and Hollywood elite.Peter DaSilvaHe left Tra Vigne in 2001 to pursue a career in media and merchandise. His first TV show, “Season by Season,” debuted that year on PBS. And he opened NapaStyle, a website and a small chain of retail stores where he sold panini, flavored olive oil and other specialty foods, as well as cookware, table décor and wine from his own vineyard.He jumped to Food Network in 2003 with “Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello,” which landed him a Daytime Emmy Award. He would go on to compete on “Top Chef Masters” and was a judge on “Top Chef.”Mr. Chiarello wrote eight books, one of which, “The Tra Vigne Cookbook” (1999), was at one point as popular in Bay Area bookstores as Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential,” which came out shortly after.He was one of the first to see Napa Valley as a lifestyle and a brand, said the Northern California food writer and cheese expert Janet Fletcher, who wrote two books with him.“He really was a very good cook but also an amazing marketer and merchandiser,” she said, adding that “they didn’t come more charming or handsome.”“Walking through the dining room at Tra Vigne, you could just see the star power,” Ms. Fletcher said, “but there was substance, too. You wanted to eat every dish on his menu.”Mr. Chiarello was one of the first to see Napa Valley as a lifestyle and a brand, said the Northern California food writer and cheese expert Janet Fletcher, who wrote two books with him, including “The Tra Vigne Cookbook.”Chronicle BooksMr. Chiarello jumped back into the restaurant world in 2008, opening the casually elegant Bottega in Yountville. Five years later, he added Coqueta, a Spanish-focused restaurant on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and in 2019 he expanded it to Napa.Sexual harassment claims dogged him. Two servers at Coqueta named him in a lawsuit in 2016, claiming that he presided over a sexually charged atmosphere, touched employees inappropriately and, among other things, made lewd gestures with a baguette.Mr. Chiarello vigorously denied the charges and vowed to fight them. The parties eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.In addition to Ms. O’Shaughnessy, his daughter from his marriage to Ines Bartel, which ended in divorce, Mr. Chiarello is survived by two other daughters from that marriage, Margaux Comalrena and Felicia Chiarello; a son, Aidan Chiarello, from his second marriage, to Eileen Gordon; two brothers, Ron and Kevin Chiarello; and two grandchildren. A company spokesman said that Mr. Chiarello and Ms. Gordon were legally separated and in the process of divorcing when he died.Despite his outsize career, Ms. O’Shaughnessy said, Mr. Chiarello was a family man at heart who wanted to keep his family’s stories alive. He made a point of teaching his children how to make the gnocchi his mother taught him to make when he was 7, and he named various bottlings of wine from Chiarello Family Vineyards after his children.“In the restaurant business I lost a lot of time with my girls,” he said in 2006. “I don’t want that to happen again. I don’t want to be saying anymore that I should have spent more time with my children, more time with my wife. If I get hit by a bus, I don’t want my last thought to be about a wine deal I was doing with Walmart.” More

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      36 Hours in Santiago, Chile: Things to Do and See

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      10 a.m.
      Hike a city-center hill
      Clear a sore head with a sharp ascent up Cerro San Cristóbal, a green islet of native trees and plants in the city center. At 10 a.m., the cable car opens, getting you to the top in under 10 minutes (a hop-on, hop-off day ticket costs 7,900 pesos and includes the funicular railway and shuttle buses within the 1,821-acre Parque Metropolitana). If you’d rather do the hour-long hike, start at the Pedro de Valdivia Norte entrance. As you climb, enjoy panoramic views of the city and mountains, incongruously punctured by the 980-foot, needle-like Gran Torre Santiago, South America’s tallest building. Your reward at the summit is a mote con huesillo (around 2,500 pesos), a refreshing, sweet juice containing a rehydrated peach and a handful of corn, available from the many stands at Estación Cumbre. To descend, take the funicular down the far side, leaving you in Bellavista — and just a block from La Chascona, the poet Pablo Neruda’s quirky home. More

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      in Television

      Sam Heughan’s 5 Favorite Places in Glasgow

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      “The part of ‘Outlander’ that I love the most is the history: the clan culture, the folklore and back stories (and consequences) of the Jacobite Rising,” said Sam Heughan, 42, who has played the heartthrob Highland warrior Jamie Fraser in the time-travel series since 2014.The Scottish actor Sam Heughan has portrayed Jamie Fraser in the time-travel series “Outlander” since 2014. Charlie GrayThis love of history feeds his passion for the ancient city of Glasgow. A typical day for Mr. Heughan involves meandering past medieval cathedrals, Victorian cobbled lanes, Georgian architecture constructed when the city was a major tobacco and sugar hub, and 19th-century tenements built during the Industrial Revolution, when steel and ships were mass-produced here. “Glasgow has got beautiful parts and grit. The combination, plus incredibly good-natured people, are the city’s charm,” he said.Beyond the long-running series, Mr. Heughan just completed shooting a television show called “The Couple Next Door” for Starz and Britain’s Channel 4, and is launching a “wild Scottish” gin under the Sassenach label, a whisky-focused spirits brand that he founded in 2020. (The name means “a foreigner” in Gaelic, and is also Jamie Fraser’s term of endearment for Claire, his wife, played by Caitríona Mary Balfe.)When he does have free time, Mr. Heughan is out and about. “I love walking and running along the River Clyde to Glasgow Green with a possible stop at the microbrewery Drygate for a beer,” he said. Hiking is another pastime (Mr. Heughan’s recent memoir, “Waypoints: My Scottish Journey,” chronicles his experience tackling the 96-mile West Highland Way hike). “A wee walk, or stravaigin in old Scots speak, is good for mental health,” he said.He is also a fan of Citizens Theatre in the working-class Gorbals area, which puts on avant-garde productions and is involved in community engagement. “I came here as a child, performed here as a student and did my first professional show here called ‘Outlying Islands.’ It holds a lot of memories,” he said. (The theater is currently closed for refurbishment. )On the topic of the kilt, yes, Mr. Heughan does sport one in real life. “Kilts are about a feeling. They make you stand taller, and walk stronger. Scots wear them for any excuse. If you go to a pub in one, you’ll be getting a free drink at some point in the evening.”Here are five of his favorite places in Glasgow.1. The Ben Nevis BarThe Ben Nevis bar is a Glasgow institution, the actor Sam Heughan said he has visited for years. Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesA tiny whisky bar tucked into the Finnieston area, a hipster pocket of the West End, is deemed “a Glasgow institution” by Mr. Heughan. “I went there as a student” — he studied drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland — “and I go there now. People speak Gaelic, and there is live traditional Scottish music, sometimes planned, sometimes impromptu. It’s a special place.”A whisky tasting in the Ben Nevis bar, which also offers live music.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesA bartender reaches for one of the many bottles behind the bar at Ben Nevis, which is named for the highest mountain in Scotland.Robert Ormerod for The New York Times2. Kelvingrove ParkKelvingrove Bridge is part of the 85-acre Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow’s West End. Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesIn the West End, bisected by the River Kelvin, this 85-acre park dappled with Victorian fountains, grand stairwells and an arched stone bridge with carved balustrades is where locals come to hang out during the warmer months.“You can have a picnic, walk under the bridges and visit both Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, as well as the University of Glasgow, which is just up the hill,” Mr. Heughan said. For a craft ale pick-me-up nearby, he recommends a “secret” bar called Inn Deep just under the Kelvingrove Bridge.Glaswegians come to the park to picnic and enjoy drinks in the sun.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesInn Deep is a “secret” bar under the Kelvingrove Bridge.Robert Ormerod for The New York Times3. The Dakota HotelThe Dakota Grill specializes in grass-fed Scotch beef. Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesHe may not stay overnight, but Mr. Heughan dines at the restaurant inside this modernist, Scottish-founded hotel in the city center close to the West End. The Dakota Grill specializes in grass-fed Scotch beef simply grilled over coals, and is also known for ethically sourced seafood and contemporary takes on venison and lamb. “The interior is dark and sexy, and I like their cocktail menu (whisky sour, naturally) and simply grilled Scottish steak.”The bar at the Dakota Hotel, where Mr. Heughan likes the cocktail menu. Robert Ormerod for The New York Times4. I.J. MellisI.J. Mellis is an old-world-style cheese shop on Great Western Road.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesThis old-world style shop on Great Western Road is Mr. Heughan’s go-to for locally sourced cheeses and accompaniments (quince paste, cornichons, olives, chutneys, oatcakes). “I’m not a dessert guy, but at the end of a meal, I can damage a cheese board, especially one with Orkney and Isle of Mull Cheddars,” he said. The shop also offers tastings led by cheese mongers on Thursday evenings.I.J. Mellis is Sam Heughan’s shop for cheeses and the accompaniments needed for a cheese board. Robert Ormerod for The New York Times5. Crabshakk FinniestonThe seafood platter at the Crabshakk Finnieston, is packed with langoustines, mussels, scallops and more. Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesSince 2009, this hot spot in Finnieston been serving up stellar seafood in a buzzy atmosphere. Mr. Heughan sits at the counter facing the open kitchen and orders the seafood platter with langoustines and scallops and some champagne. “The food tastes like a celebration of Scotland, which has the best seafood in the world,” he said.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More