About

For most of my life, the best meals I’ve ever had lived in a spreadsheet.

I know how that sounds. But if you love food and travel the way I do, you understand — there’s a specific joy in finding the place. Not the place everyone posts. The one that ruins you a little for everywhere else. The dinner you’re still talking about on the flight home.

I’ve chased that feeling for years. And somewhere along the way I became the friend people texted before every trip — “where do we eat?” So I started writing it all down. A quiet little Excel sheet of the places that earned it: the rooms worth dressing up for, the counters worth the wait, the bars worth crossing a city for. The ones I’d stake my name on. The ones I’d send my own family to without a second thought.

That sheet became a kind of love letter — to food, to travel, to the people I wanted to share it with. And the more it grew, the more I kept wishing the real version existed. Something beautiful. Something honest. Something that treated a great meal like the occasion it is, instead of burying it under hype and star-averages and noise.

Nobody was building it the way I wanted it. So I built it myself.

This is Lux Palate.

Nearly 1,000 hand-vetted restaurants across 21 cities — every speakeasy, omakase counter, world-class bar, and destination tasting menu chosen the same way I chose them for my own table: because they’re worth it. From New York and Chicago to New Orleans, Charleston, Vegas, and right here in Orlando.

What makes it different is what’s missing from it. No crowdsourced star-averages. No sponsored placement. No noise. Just a guide curated by someone who actually cares where you eat.

And it has an AI Maître d’ — tell it the night you’re after (“somewhere romantic and Italian,” “a quiet seafood dinner away from the scene”) and it’ll point you to real places from the collection, like a concierge who actually knows the room. It won’t ever invent a spot or fake a city it doesn’t cover. Just honest, beautiful recommendations — the way a trusted friend would give them.

This began as something I made for myself and the people I love. If food and travel light you up the way they do me — come in. Stay a while.

And tell me: what’s the one restaurant in your city you’d defend to the end? I want to know.

Curated. Uncompromising.