The Cuban

The glamour of Cuba in the 1950s is legendary. In the favoured holiday destination of movie stars and celebrities, at chic bars and stylish restaurants, tables were laden with food and mojitos flowed. Socialites partied on in a haze of cigar smoke, their drivers waiting outside in Studebakers lined along the street. But trouble was […]

Winter Solstice Dinner at Mavis’s Kitchen

As we reach the shortest day of the year, winter chills creep in as the sun sinks behind the hills. We linger in tracky dacks, loathe to venture out, content to reach for comfort food in the shelter of warm homes. The winter solstice or ‘Yuletide’ marks a turning point from which days get longer, […]

Opera at Mavis’s Kitchen

Many storms are followed by a rainbow. When we gather on a bright winter’s day in June for a long table lunch beside the lake at Mavis’s Kitchen, we are thinking celebration. But the sobering trip along the Tweed reminds us of the devastation caused by the flood just two months before. Grass, beaten into […]

Mavis’s Wild Food Garden Feast

It was to be a ‘wild food’ garden feast – five courses made from local and hyper-local produce held in the gardens of the magnificent Mavis’s Kitchen, Uki. As the sun descended on the afternoon, seventy people gathered to have a dinner with friends and strangers at two long linen-clad tables strewn with magnolia branches, […]