The right place.
The right room.
The right meal.

It started with a text from a neighbor. He and his wife wanted a long ski weekend before he had to be at a conference — three days, flying in from San Francisco, out to Dallas afterward. It needed to be easy on the logistics, have real skiing, a town with actual character, and somewhere great to eat. Not just a mountain with a resort bolted on. I asked a few questions, thought about it, and sent back a plan. A few weeks later he texted again: "You should charge for that."

Maybe he was right.

I've been obsessed with travel since my mid-twenties, when I could first afford to go somewhere worth going. When I met my wife, it became a shared project — finding places with real personality, real food, and something that felt earned. We didn't always have the budget to go to the most obvious place, so the pleasure was in the research: digging until you found the boutique that hadn't gotten the press yet, the one that would make for a trip people would still be talking about years later. We still travel that way. The budget is more flexible now, but the hunt is the same.

Food is the other half of it. I keep a running list — loosely, in my head — of the best thing I ate in any given year. It's almost never the most expensive meal. It's the one that was just right: the right place, the right moment, the right dish. Those are the restaurants I find myself telling people about when they're headed somewhere I know.

Tarr & Compass is what happens when both of those obsessions meet a family.

Last summer, we went to England. We wanted countryside, but not just the Cotswolds. We wanted somewhere our son Graham could roam. We found the Pig at Combe — a farm estate in Devon where we ate dinner outside at sunset overlooking the fields, wood-fired pizza and local hard cider, while the light turned gold over the working farm. The next morning, Graham went out and harvested raspberries and strawberries from the kitchen garden, played on the green with a few other kids, and then climbed into an old Land Rover Defender to help feed the sheep, pigs, and chickens. We'd booked the family suite because we knew — from having done the research — that it had a separate bunk room for him.

That's the whole thing, really. The right place. The right room. The right meal. And knowing before you get there that all three are waiting for you.