Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday, along with monthly travel and beauty guides, and the latest stories from our print issues. And you can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com. STAY HERE A Kyoto Hotel That Draws on Traditional Architecture
In Kyoto, Japan, centuries-old wooden townhouses, or machiya, still line some historic neighborhoods including Miyagawa-cho, just east of the Kamo River. Capella Kyoto, a hotel that opens there next week, was heavily influenced by those traditional structures. “We designed the hotel to blend seamlessly with its surroundings,” says the architect Kengo Kuma, who in 2020 designed Tokyo’s National Stadium ahead of the Olympics. The adjacent Kennin-ji temple, founded in 1202, also served as a source of inspiration for the project: At the heart of the 89-room property is an enclosed courtyard in which one wall is hung with a Kara-hafu gable — an elegant, wavelike roofline that was historically reserved for temple gates and castles before it was adopted by Kabuki theaters and dance halls. Inside, local materials like cypress, cedar and bamboo, as well as lustrous Nishiki-ori silk, were used to create a minimalist, natural-toned palette that is “less about how Kyoto looks, and more an interpretation of how it feels,” says Robert Cheng, the founder of Brewin Design Office, which designed the interiors. Guest rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows, while bathrooms feature deep stone soaking tubs, a nod to Japan’s onsen culture. The main restaurant, SoNoMa by SingleThread, is a collaboration between the hotel and the three-Michelin-star restaurant in Healdsburg, Calif. Its founders, Kyle and Kate Connaughton, worked with Capella on a menu that showcases regional agriculture through a Northern California lens, with dishes such as foraged vegetables and bamboo shoots paired with sauces made from soft tofu, lemon and olive oil. Capella Kyoto opens March 22; from $2,500 a night, capellahotels.com. GIFT THIS Spring Cookbooks With a Sense of Place
This spring, a set of new cookbooks take their readers on journeys around the world. “The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook” offers a tour of the Indian and Sri Lankan regenerative spice farms that supply the Berkeley, Calif.-based company. Written by Diaspora’s founder, Sana Javeri Kadri, and the brand’s longtime recipe developer, Asha Loupy, the book contains 85 recipes gathered from 35 women in the kitchens on the farms, such as Kerala-style squid with bird’s-eye chilies, cilantro and curry leaves and a turmeric-banana snacking cake. In “Lebanon: Cooking the Foods of My Homeland,” the Lebanese Syrian chef and food historian Anissa Helou explores the country’s regional specialties and how they’re linked to its various religions. If she had to pick a favorite dish, she says, it would be lubiyeh bit-zeyt, green beans cooked in a fresh tomato sauce. “Soomaaliya,” the debut cookbook from The New York Times Cooking contributor Ifrah F. Ahmed, out March 17, features recipes for Somali dishes such as cambuulo iyo bun (sweet adzuki beans with fried coffee beans) and spiced beef sambuus (dumplings) with basbaas (green garlic hot sauce) alongside photos of beaches and markets in Mogadishu. In “Obsessed with the Best,” the T contributor Ella Quittner’s compulsion to find the ultimate way to cook everything from meatballs to biscuits takes her to Rome (where she accompanies an Italian home cook to a butcher shop) and Alabama (where she learns from the Southern chef Scott Peacock). For those who crave an afternoon in Joshua Tree, “La Copine: New California Cooking from an Oasis in the Desert” (out April 28) is filled with scenes from the renovated 1930s Southern California diner as well as recipes for the abundant salads that the chefs describe as “hunky.” SEE THIS Houseplants Inspire a Series of Photorealistic Oil Paintings
For the London-based artist James White, household detritus has an inherent charge. “I’m interested in crime scene photography and insurance claim photography, where there’s an implied narrative,” he says. His black-and-white oil paintings of the past two decades similarly nod to life outside the frame, training the gaze on a haphazard pile of hangers or bent venetian blinds. “House Plant Paintings,” a new exhibition at the Manhattan gallery Rodder, centers on these leafy cohabitants. “They sit quietly in the corner of our domestic spaces and witness all the dramas and non-dramas that carry on around them,” he says. The nine paintings on view depict offhand glimpses in exacting detail. In one work, a scraggly spider plant brushes up against Hello Kitty and Glossier stickers; in another, the window behind a potted succulent catches the camera flash. The artist paints onto brushed aluminum panels, leaving a strip of exposed metal at the bottom — an effect that underscores the sterility of the grayscale foliage. A thin coat of varnish amplifies the glossy photorealism, but the paintings stand in opposition to the endless scroll of digital imagery. Like the plants themselves, which reward sustained attention, this series draws you in to notice the pale brushstrokes along thirsty stems or the lacy shadows cast onto the wall. “It’s a way of pressing the pause button,” says White. “House Plant Paintings,” at Rodder in New York, runs through April 18; rodder.nyc. EAT THIS The Pastry Chefs Adding Black Sesame to Galettes and Doughnuts
Black sesame has long been a staple of Asian confectionery, whether ground into a fine powder, blended into a smooth paste or left whole to be sprinkled atop a dish. Prized for its deep, nutty flavor and striking charcoal hue, the seed has also been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries; it’s believed to support digestion, among other benefits. Now it’s increasingly appearing in Western pastry kitchens, where bakers are drawn to both its visual drama and its complex, earthy taste. Last month, the London-based author and pastry chef Nicola Lamb shared the recipe for a blood orange and black sesame galette in her newsletter, Kitchen Projects, in which the dough is coated with a base of blended black sesame beneath slices of citrus. “The best galettes have a thin layer of frangipane between the fruit and the pastry,” Lamb says, “and I wanted something high-impact and not too fatty, since blood oranges are so juicy and bright.” In Copenhagen, the pastry chef Marie Frank pairs black sesame with cocoa in a not-too-sweet soft serve ice cream that appears in her cookbook, “More Than Sweet,” out next month. The Chicago restaurant Boka is currently serving a black sesame namelaka, a Japanese-style cream with a consistency similar to ganache or mousse, with pieces of apple crisps and crème fraîche, while in Manhattan, the bakery Elbow Bread recently sold sourdough doughnuts with candied kumquat and black sesame. In Los Angeles, Ashley Xie and Hedy Yu founded Rooted Fare, a Chinese American pantry brand that aims to bring distinctive Asian flavors to grocery store staples. Their first product, black sesame crunchy butter, was inspired by a nostalgic childhood dessert: sweet tang yuan, glutinous rice balls typically filled with ground black sesame seeds, lard and brown sugar. “Black sesame is naturally umami and, when roasted, ultra nutty,” says Xie. “We’re betting that black sesame’s popularity will explode in the way matcha has.” VISIT THIS Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes, on View in New York
In 1965, Roy Lichtenstein made his first Brushstroke paintings, among them an enlarged yellow squiggle with a hard black outline and backdrop of blue Ben-Day dots. The series was, he said, “a depiction of a grand gesture” — that is, a meticulous construction of a spontaneous action, right down to the spattered paint drops. That year and the next, Lichtenstein made more Brushstroke works, and he returned to the concept again from the late 1970s through the ’90s, eventually casting his cartoonish swashes as large-scale glossy sculptures. “Painting with Scattered Brushstrokes,” a new exhibition at Gagosian in New York, takes one of Lichtenstein’s most enduring motifs as its subject. Named after a 1984 canvas that’s included in the show, it assembles paintings, watercolors, drawings and a sculpture produced during the 1970s and ’80s. Studies in colored pencil and graphite are also on view, such as “Landscape with Red Sky (Study)” from 1985, whose vibrant palette and undulating forms have a Fauvist quality. “He made very few studies,” says Stefan Ratibor, a managing director at Gagosian in London who organized the exhibition with the Lichtenstein family, “and those that do exist reveal just how close he was to the final work at the start of the process.” “Painting with Scattered Brushstrokes” will be on view at Gagosian’s 541 West 24th Street location in New York from March 19 through April 25, gagosian.com. READ THIS In a New Book, Kit Kemp Looks Back at Her Eclectic Interiors
“I don’t want tasteful. I’d rather see something that says ‘character,’” says the interior designer Kit Kemp. That philosophy has guided her in the creation of 11 hotels in London and New York for Firmdale, the brand she co-founded with her husband, Tim Kemp, in 1985. Her fifth book, “Design Stories,” details the making of the most recent hotel, Warren Street in TriBeCa, as well as other colorful, textured projects, including two by her daughters Willow and Minnie, who now work alongside her as design directors. At a private residence in Westchester, N.Y., bespoke aquamarine wallpaper decorated with flowering bowers and butterflies creates a whimsical backdrop for a dining room with spoon-back chairs upholstered in fabric inspired by English needlepoint. At Ham Yard Hotel in London’s Soho, rusty red walls provide the canvas for a trove of furniture, folk art and antiques in shades of royal blue and scarlet. Every space has a focal point — whether it’s the ceramic Mud Studio pendant chandelier that hangs in the Kemps’ Barbados beach house, or a series of wooden sculptures by Carol Sinclair in a corner of their country house in New Forest, England. For Kemp, “There has to be one thing that holds the room together, that says, This is what this room is about.” $60, rizzolibookstore.com. FROM T’S INSTAGRAM In Milan, an Endlessly Adaptable Family Home
After the designer Mario Milana and his wife, the actress turned somatic therapist Gabriella Campagna, moved to Milan, they spent the past year creating a 4,000-square-foot flat that’s part Casa Milana showroom, part family refuge. Click here to read the full story and follow us on Instagram.
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