Who is taking you there
Shannon Bard staged at Arzak in San Sebastian - one of the most respected kitchens in the world. She has cooked at the James Beard House. Won on Food Network. Spent nearly two decades building relationships in kitchens that don't advertise themselves.
She built Flavors And Frontiers because she kept seeing the same thing everywhere she traveled. Performance marketed as culture. Watered-down versions of local food passed off as generational. Culinary tourism that extracts from a place and gives nothing back. And in doing so, slowly hollows it out.
The knowledge lives in the hands. When those hands stop, it is gone.
Every journey she builds is access to the working version of a place. The kitchen that feeds the neighborhood, the technique passed from grandmother to daughter, the market before the vendors set up the tourist section. Not because it makes a better trip. Because it the only version worth preserving.
You are not a guest being managed. You are a person being taken somewhere real. The difference matters to the culture.
Culture isn't in the museums.
It's in the kitchens.
Shannon Bard
Upcoming Journeys
Morocco
April 22 - 29, 2027
Marrakech will hand you a version of itself the second you arrive. Smoke, spice, noise, too many choices. Most people stop there. We don't.
We move through it. And then we leave it behind for the Atlas Mountains where the food slows down, the fire is real, and what you're eating actually belongs to the place you're in.
Registration Opens June 15 - 10 Seats
Thailand
Jan 18 - 24, 2027
Bangkok will give you something to eat every five steps. Markets, street stalls, a floating market built around the water. Easy to think you've understood Thai food.
You haven't.
We move through it. Then north to Chiang Mai, where the coconut disappears, the charcoal takes over, and you realize how much of this country you never actually tasted.
Registration Opens May 15 - 10 Seats
Bali, Indonesia
June 8 - 13, 2027
Ubud hits you differently than anywhere else. The air is thick with incense, the sound of wind drifting through the rice fields, offerings placed at every doorstep before the day even begins.
It looks complete. It isn't.
We follow the food past that. Into family compound kitchens, where what's cooked for the house, what's set out for the gods, and what you eat all come from the same place.
Registration Opens July 15 - 10 Seats
“We brought Shannon in for a private dinner and she turned our kitchen into something unrecognizable.
The food was extraordinary, but that’s not what stayed with me.
It was what happened at the table. The feeling of being part of something real, something you don’t usually get invited into.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward.”
William, New Hampshire
The stories. The kitchen. The world. The market.
