The Good Life: Editors’ Picks
In every The Good Life: Editors’ Picks column, we round up our editors’ favorites—restaurants, cocktails, experiences, exhibits, and everything in between. Here is our latest list.
SARAP: Essays on Philippine Food and PALAYOK: Philippine Food Through Time, On Site, In the Pot, Republished by Exploding Galaxies
I first began writing about food thanks to Doreen Gamboa Fernandez.
An essay about my great-aunt’s Kapampangan cooking won the Doreen Gamboa Fernandez food writing award back in 2005. That impressed our Arts and Culture editor at Bloomberg News, and she soon gave me a job covering New York restaurants, a welcome change after years of writing international news and business stories. Best gig of my life.
Doreen and Edilberto Alegre are two of the most admired essayists on Filipino food and history. They penned a well-loved collection SARAP: Essays on Philippine Food back in 1988, which friends from away begged me to look for copies for them in the past, but to no avail.
The good news is SARAP and PALAYOK: Philippine Food Through Time, On Site, In the Pot (first published in 2000), have been republished by Exploding Galaxies. The publisher is focused on bringing back the lost classics of Philippine writing, and has so far rediscovered three novels: Wilfrido D. Nolledo’s But for the Lovers, Linda Ty-Casper’s The Three-Cornered Sun, and Erwin E. Castillo’s The Firewalkers.
“We started Exploding Galaxies so that we could bring the best of Philippine literature back to readers. Novels and fiction have been our focus, but we heard the call of Doreen Fernandez’s books as something just as urgent to republish. These books have long been out of print and yet so sought after,” says Mara Coson, publisher of Exploding Galaxies.
She describes the writers as “two humble giants who were not only the best guides to Filipino food culture, but among our most important voices in Philippine literature.”
The publication of Sarap and Palayok marks Exploding Galaxies’ first of what they hope to be many more titles on food. We can’t wait to see what’s next. – Yvette Fernandez, Chief of Editorial Content
Books will be available on www.explodinggalaxies.com starting October 15, and in select branches of National Book Store, Fully Booked, Kultura, Mt. Cloud Bookshop (Baguio), and Everything’s Fine (Makati).
Gohar World
Surrealism has been rattling around my brain lately—the witty shock of Elsa Schiaparelli’s lobster and skeleton gowns (and in Daniel Roseberry’s paintbrush dress at his SS 2026 presentation a few days ago); the dream logic of René Magritte’s apples or Leonora Carrington’s feasts. Gohar World sits in that lineage, translated to the table: a little surreal (candles that look like flan), a little clever (elegant lemon squeezers that look like swans), and genuinely useful. (Sometimes. But who is keeping tabs?) The brand’s universe is part cabinet of curiosities, part Old World salon, with handworked linens and handblown glass that feel inherited and tabletop objets with a wink of trompe-l’oeil. Think ribbons and shells, fruit and eggs, lace and silver; familiar things rearranged so the ordinary feels strange, but in their craftsmanship, very special.
What I love most is the brand’s sense of occasion. Hospitality slows down and guests look twice. You can set a serious table and still invite surprise with a Fried Chicken candle or a wine bottle with an apron, trimmed with Battenberg lace. Not everything is so quirky: there are things that feel collected rather than consumed, like something forgotten that you might discover in your lola’s display cabinet and decide to keep for yourself: very sweet and demure Egyptian cotton linens embroidered with tiny flowers, charming things like an artichoke tureen, or silver serveware. I’ve got my eyes on their pretty, shell salad servers shaped like doves.
Gohar World is founded by sisters Laila and Nadia Gohar. Laila came into the New York scene with a brand of—I guess one would call it catering?—that was witty and whimsical and which quickly propelled her as an art and fashion world go-to for launches (and lunches), with surprising setups like sausage links dozens of feet long for guests to slice into and which sometimes were suspended from the ceiling, or blocks of butter molded just like Neoclassical sculptures.
Their online shop pops up in real life every so often, and they just opened in New York again. If you find yourself in New York anytime soon, do give it a visit and cross some things off your Christmas list. – Kimberly Rocha-Delgado, Digital Editor
The Gohar World pop-up is located in 98 Orchard Street, New York. Shop online at https://gohar.world/ and follow them on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/gohar.world.