California

Deep in San Francisco’s storied North Beach neighborhood, Jacqueline Margulis has been making soufflés for her café’s customers five nights a week for more than 40 years. Welcome to our story—and mini-documentary—on the only restaurant in the U.S. that specializes solely on this challenging but famously scrumptious symbol of French cuisine.

Craftsmanship‘s editor-in-chief, Todd Oppenheimer, sits down with Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser, a husband-and-wife farming team who have been at the forefront of the regenerative agriculture movement. Hear how regenerative techniques help fight the effects of climate disruption; some of the mind-boggling results they found in testing their soil and produce; and how they harness Mother…

Against all odds, and despite the efforts of Hollywood and Silicon Valley to make movies in digital form, old-fashioned, analog, motion-picture film is hotter than ever. What is it about the mystery and magic of celluloid that digital production methods, with all their high-tech tricks, can’t seem to match?

A white stucco building with blue trim rises on the corner of 48th and Shattuck, just a block from the hotspots in Oakland’s buzzing Temescal district. Built in 1933 as the Ligure Club—a social center for the area’s Italian garbage men—it later became the Omni: a live music venue that hosted concerts by Blue Oyster…

As our timepieces have become increasingly digital (and their functions increasingly invisible), we’ve almost forgotten that these devices were once handmade masterpieces—with miniature gears, chains, springs, and balance wheels that kept time with amazing precision. Today, most watchmakers don’t even know how to repair these old mechanical wonders. Jean-Pierre Bourroux is a notable exception. A…

In many of our favorite gathering places—schools, churches, concert halls, jazz clubs—pianos still take center stage. Some of these instruments are still going strong more than a century after their birth. Come enjoy a remarkable documentary that follows one shop of technicians that keeps these beloved, complicated beasts alive. The best of these shops can also improve a piano, even when it’s well into its elderly years.

In a corrugated tin shed that somehow survived California’s massive fires in Sonoma Valley, Gary Freeman labors to keep old VW Beetles and vans—the cars that defined the counterculture of the 1960s—chugging along. Some become great “daily drivers” for as little as $15,000; some get auctioned for more than $200,000. It’s all part of one man’s quest for automotive immortality.

In a corrugated tin shed that somehow survived California’s massive fires in Sonoma Valley, Gary Freeman labors to keep old VW Beetles and vans—the cars that defined the counterculture of the 1960s—chugging along. Some become great “daily drivers” for as little as $15,000; some get auctioned for more than $200,000. It’s all part of one…

Of all the wind instrument players in an orchestra, oboists are among the few who have to spend more time making their reeds than playing their music. As the comic monologist Josh Kornbluth has painfully learned, just one of the myriad micro-adjustments that reed makers create will make a world of difference in their music.