Looking for the perfect gift for that friend, family member, or colleague who loves Italy and/or is a rabid chocoholic?
01.11.2023 - 14:37 / theguardian.com / John Lennon
Many visitors come to Liverpool for its football or music heritage. But away from those obvious attractions, it has exciting food and drink, unique cultural institutions and a dynamic nightlife and live music scene that stays true to the city’s legacy.
The city centre food scene is at its best on Bold Street, with its independent shops and restaurants. Chairs and tables now fill the pedestrianised street during warmer months – a happy addition from pandemic times – and St Luke’s Bombed Out Church provides a cool backdrop. Bakchich (mains from £11) offers Lebanese and Moroccan food, and the welcoming and attentive staff live up to these countries’ reputation for hospitality. There’s shakshuka and shawarma, hot and cold meze, colourful plates of couscous, and warming tagines.
A short walk from Bold Street is Duke Street Food and Drink Market, an industrial-chic food hall that’s home to six kitchens and an independent restaurant, Barnacle. Ginger serves Asian-inspired dishes such as Korean salmon bibimbap, while Cahita’s speciality is Latin American street food – its Cubano sandwich is a thick stack of pork shoulder, roast ham, pickle, mustard and gouda cheese.
Smithdown Road, south-east of the centre, has become a dining destination in recent years. Belzan is a neighbourhood bistro that makes the most of simple, seasonal ingredients. The regularly changing menu might include melt-in-the-mouth Guinness rarebit potato or smoked beetroot with tahini and whipped sheep’s yoghurt. It also has a range of natural wines by the glass.
From relaxed pubs to speakeasies and chic cocktail bars, Liverpool has a slew of independent drinking venues. Hopping from one to another is easy in the relatively compact centre: most pubs and bars are in the trendy, cobbled Ropewalks neighbourhood. Ye Cracke is a proper backstreet boozer frequented by John Lennon and his art school friends in the 1950s, with a craft beers, spontaneous acoustic music and a proud certainty about its political leanings. On Slater Street, one of Liverpool’s main party streets, The Merchant is a blend of bar, canteen and garden, suited to casual drinks, but also to grand nights out, with DJs playing till 3am against tastefully decaying walls. McGuffie & Co was Liverpool’s leading chemists for more than 200 years; now, whether your medicine is beer, inventive cocktails (from £8.50) or fancy wines, you’ll find a prescription in this sleek cocktail lounge.
Liverpool has raised its cultural game since 2008 when it was European capital of culture, with a range of world-class museums, art galleries and theatres. The Maritime Museum and The Beatles Story aside, lesser-known cultural spaces worth seeking out include Open Eye Gallery on Albert Dock: it’s the
Looking for the perfect gift for that friend, family member, or colleague who loves Italy and/or is a rabid chocoholic?
New Hotels in the Cayman Islands for 2024 Scheduled to open in Q2 2024 is Hotel Indigo Grand Cayman. The 282-room 10-storey beachfront property will provide an upper midscale experience featuring multiple restaurants, a 6,700 square foot ballroom, a pool deck and a rooftop bar. Indigo’s restaurants and bars around the world are known as a favourite destination for visitors and locals alike. With sustainability in mind, the hotel is being built to LEED standards, which ensures high-performance buildings that have less of an impact on the environment. Hotel Indigo will use a geothermal/ice storage combination and will feature insulated glazing throughout to reduce energy consumption. The latest in Cayman real estate developer, Dart’s, hospitality portfolio, Hotel Indigo is expected to generate several hundred jobs when it opens. In 2022, Dart launched its Hospitality Training Programme, which provides Caymanians with the opportunity to obtain first-hand industry experience via a three-month work experience within the Dart hospitality portfolio.
Revisiting Panem, the dystopian country in which The Hunger Games novels and movies are set, in prequel film The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes offered director Francis Lawrence an opportunity to present the world through a new lens. Set 64 years before those earlier works, the new film (based on a 2020 novel of the same name) showcases the familiar country just 10 years post-war—the thriving political Capitol, 12 outlying districts. As part of reconstruction, the Capitol has introduced the series' titular competition.
This year has been a good one for Vilnius. The Lithuanian capital celebrated its 700th birthday on 25 January 2023, and a few months later it was named the European Union’s green capital for 2025. Perhaps most symbolically – as Lithuania continues to firmly reject its Soviet past and align itself closer with the west – Vilnius played host to the Nato summit in July.
One British childhood winter experience remains the same, despite all the changes of the past century. It’s the one where you gaze out of the window, mesmerised by the falling snow, and start fantasising about building an igloo or a snow cave, then sleeping in it overnight. A few fortunate kids get to follow that up, but for most the fantasy is quickly quashed. The blizzard stops, the snow melts, you lob some slush at your mates then go inside to watch Ski Sunday.
A stray cat in Poland made international headlines earlier this year after being voted the best tourist attraction in the city of Szczecin.
Anyone interested in food as a window to class could do worse than exploring the options available on the RMS Titanic. The handful of menus that survived the wreck reveal important differences in the way the ocean liner's passengers ate. While third-class passengers dined on rice soup, gruel and cabin biscuits (essentially, a stomach-settling hardtack), first-class diners had a panoply of options.
This is part of our global guide to the Best Places to Go in 2024—find more travel inspiration here.
A fat black-and-white cat that became the top-rated tourist attraction in Szczecin, Poland, has been taken off the streets — and even adopted a healthier lifestyle.
The best hotels in the world become so because they know how to enchant and surprise their guests; thinking through every aspect of the stay, from decor to food and service. It’s not a surprise to learn that they are also able to source and curate superb gifts.
For many families, the most wonderful time of the year isn't complete without a visit to the big man in red. And one of the best spots in the U.S. to see him is at Macy's on 34th Street in New York City.
Girl dinner doesn’t have to be basic. And if you know someone who indulges in girl dinner on a regular basis, this gift guide will help them make the most of doing the least, deliciously of course. Whether it’s specialty tinned fish, internationally sourced snacks, gourmet pasta or dishware that make girl dinner feel gourmet, these girl dinner gifts from around the world elevate the humble meal to a truly gift-worthy occasion.