Monaco Press - louise simpson

Louise is Monaco's leading travel journalist. She has interviewed numerous celebrities for her Lunch with Monaco Life series, while she is best known for her acerbic restaurant reviews in Monaco Life which became a viral sensation. Louise is a food & wine columnist for Monaco’s daily news site and periodical, Hello Monaco. As well as writing about the principality for publications across the globe, she is interviewed regularly about life in Monte Carlo (such as BBC Radio 4 and CBS Broadcasting with Peter Greenberg).

Monaco’s answer to Giles Coren, Louise is at once erudite and down-to-earth. She has changed the face of the principality’s dining scene with such spellbinding style that readers and restaurateurs alike respect her."
Ian Brodie, Editor-in-Chief @ Monaco Life

Buy local or bye local

I passed a sign at a farmer’s market in the UK recently that said: “Buy local or bye local.” As a farm-bred girl, I endorse the philosophy of buying local. Indeed, I hanker back to the halcyon days of my youth when my family lived a self-sufficient utopia with an organic vegetable garden, a chicken coop, bee hives, and fields where a local farmer grazed his sheep and paid us annual rent in half a lamb for our freezer.

Cocoa and Creativity

I have a confession to make: I’m a chocoholic. Legend has it that I ate so much chocolate during my last pregnancy that I single-handedly kept Ladurée’s place des Moulins branch in business. My post-pregnancy cholesterol levels imposed a six-month chocolate hiatus: by the time I returned to my chocolate obsession, the shop had closed down.

Greens for the Future

The great and the good of French hospitality turned out en masse at a recent press conference in Monaco to discuss food trends for the forthcoming trade fair Agecotel 2014. I was dozing off to the usual spectacle of up-and-coming chefs vying for attention and swapping gastronomic in-jokes, when there was a sudden lull as the godlike Joël Robuchon took to the stage.

Insects on the menu

Yesterday I returned home from a writers’ conference at Yale University in New Haven where some locals raved about the city serving the best pizza in the world. After being underwhelmed by their legendary pizza, I was tempted to conclude that these New Haveners hadn’t even crossed the Atlantic, let alone visited the Mediterranean.