Cocktail Hour Series Episode 3 – LIVE in Phuket

Late July on the Côte des Blancs, the vines heavy and the houses holding their breath, and a chalk cellar cool enough to taste the ancient sea.

Everyone is fighting for a sun lounger up north. The oysters are colder, the whisky is warmer, and every fire on the island is already lit.

World Travel Magazine has eaten its way through this city before, but the Thai capital’s table keeps deepening, and this is the fuller map: who’s cooking, what they’re cooking, and why it matters.

The gastronomy frontiers the world’s most discerning eaters are quietly moving toward. Read the signals before they become reservations you can’t get.

Nine seats in a basement, sixteen at a pizzeria, an invite-only bar inside a hundred-year-old mill. In 2026 the flex is no longer the spend. It is the reservation.

For years the world’s most exciting Asian food story was told in Tokyo and Bangkok. In 2026, the plot moved to China — and anyone who isn’t paying attention is about to be left behind.

A first-person guide to the granitic Inner Seychelles — Mahé, Praslin and La Digue — with North Island, Frégate, giant tortoises, and why summer is the season.

When to visit the Kimberley and how — the July dry-season window, luxury expedition cruises (True North, Ponant, Seabourn) and where to stay.

On the slowest, most beautiful train ride in Asia, a carriage full of strangers, and a grandmother who found her childhood at 6,000 feet.

On swimming with humpbacks in the South Pacific, the fear that comes before wonder, and the day the ocean rearranged what I thought I knew.