Review: Gramercy Park Hotel, New York

"What are we buying – fame? Art? Junk? I looked up. On the walls in front of me hung eight Warhols"

Galactica Star

With engineering smarts and design flash, Heesen Yachts have created what might be the world's ultimate yacht

Doll parts | The New York fantasy world of E.V. Svetova

"I don't pretend to be an artist, I just play with dolls." Moscow-born New Yorker E.V.Svetova's intricately fashioned characters and the urban scenarios she puts them in are as compelling as anything that Cindy Sherman has created.

Grace Belgravia | London’s women-only private members club

"If I designed a women-only club, pungent cocktails and meaty tapas would be served up between treatments"

Review: Conservatorium Hotel, Amsterdam

Ridiculously heavy doors and a fabulously heavyweight restaurant anchor the most lavish and visually pleasing new hotel to open in Amsterdam in living memory - right opposite the revamped Stedelijk Museum

Yastik by Rifat Ozbek | Turkish contemporary

Think Bridget Riley meets Joseph Dirand in the Grand Bazaar: Rifat Ozbek's new collection of Yastik cushions is sparse, graphic and surprisingly urban

Review: Bones, Paris

Bobo chat, full-throated laughter, Iggy & the Stooges… and Australian chef James Henry cooking in a small open kitchen in the rear

Review: Al Maha Desert Resort & Spa, Dubai

“In my country, if I saw a camel I would run away,” laughs Shahzab. Tahir looks like he still might

Recipe: Momo pigeon pastilla

The pigeon pastilla with orange confit at Mourad Mazouz's Momo is as much a Mayfair classic as a Moroccan one

Aesop Resurrection Rinse-Free Hand Wash | Travel essentials

One of our favourite brands in the world has created our new favourite travel essential. We won't fly without it

Review: Ox, Belfast

Paris-based food writer Trish Deseine returns home and finds the shoots and leaves of a new Belfast dining scene

Vivienne Westwood x Virgin Atlantic

From Seditionaries to the World's End Pirate Squiggle, Dame Vivienne Westwood is as much an iconoclast as she is a national treasure. Now, in the most radical catwalk and airline collaboration since the days of Pucci and Braniff, she is clothing Virgin Atlantic's cabin crew

Review: Brompton Asian Brasserie by Novikov, London

Arkady Novikov's new restaurant in Knightsbridge is a more casual relation to his Mayfair mothership, serving sushi, dim sum and some not quite Asian burgers, chips and Veuve Clicquot. "It's a West London thing"

Review: Fontainebleau Miami Beach

"It shouts 'Supersize! Go large! Upgrade me! Turn it up!' and chants 'U-S-A!' in the pool"

Snakes, Ladders and Tweets

Gossip, posing and PR palaver: El Celler de Can Roca goes up, Noma goes down at the World's 50 Best Restaurants

Review: Tom Aikens, London

The flame-haired chef has technique to burn, but… what next?

Review: Asunder by Chloe Aridjis

The characters in Chloe Aridjis's second novel Asunder may be stuck – but Neil Stewart finds their story strangely moving

All on expenses: high times and hangovers in adland – 1980s London style

"One copywriter, enraged by requested edits to his script and fuelled by a good lunch, staggered to the open window and threw his enormous IBM Golfball typewriter out"

Massimo Bottura

The superstar chef who takes inspiration from Thelonious Monk, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, feeds Lou Reed and Cindy Sherman, and reinvented osso buco

Extremadura! Extremadura!

Read all about it: tapas, rare pork and culinary sketches of Spain with José Pizarro

Review: Bailiffscourt Hotel & Spa, West Sussex

"I was genuinely shocked to learn that it only came into existence in the late 1920s, and is in fact a totally (albeit lovingly and meticulously) reconstructed medieval-style homestead with about as much history as your local boozer"

Review: Reflets par Pierre Gagnaire, Dubai

“It reminds me of a sophisticated gay bar in Manchester,” said my dining companion, who, as it turns out, used to work in a sophisticated gay bar in Manchester

Evil Robots at the InterContinental London Westminster

This high-gloss new hotel in Westminster, converted by Dexter Moren Associates from a former government building, houses a confident, handsome grill room and some surprisingly subversive contemporary art

Why the best table in the room is always the booth

Mark C.O'Flaherty ponders the irresistible allure of the restaurant booth – from Balthazar to Bob Bob Ricard, dive bars and beyond

The Phuket list

"I have a theory that the modern Russian venturing abroad resembles the clichéd British holidaymaker of the 70s and 80s: highly excited to be overseas, not quite sure yet of the etiquette"

Cast iron chef | Sat Bains

"Aside from his tall frame and muscular shoulders, he has hands like hams" - David J Constable heads to the Midlands to meet the colossus of the modern tasting menu

The Phantom and The French

Simon Rogan's new restaurant in Manchester is where Mr Rolls first met Mr Royce

Heavy holiday reading

Secret small spaces

From Memphis, Milan to Echo Park, L.A

Michael Cunningham on Provincetown