They are energetic, diverse destinations intent on preserving local heritage and revitalizing undervalued neighborhoods, and they possess distinct personalities that set them apart from other metropolises. Whether it’s the city you’ve called home for years or one you only just stumbled upon during your travels, the best destinations are intriguing cultural centers that can’t be replicated anywhere else. No city proves this better than Kyoto, Japan, which returned for the second year in a row to the No. 1 spot on Travel + Leisure’s annual World’s Best list.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Steve Jobs – Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference, 1997

Readers called it the quintessential Japanese experience, offering visitors everything from history (in the form of spiritual shrines) to notable cuisine (shojin ryori) and encounters with Geisha. Italy’s classic crowd-pleasers, Florence and Rome, once again appear on Top 10 list — as they have for 10 consecutive years. Bangkok, likely bumped from the list in 2014 due to governmental unrest, has returned to the number six spot. Below is the full list of the World’s Best cities in 2015, which is compiled based on reader surveys. For more of Travel + Leisure’s 2015 World’s Best Awards, which cover everything from hotels to airports, click here: www.travelandleisure.com

For globetrotting travelers, it’s easy to recognize a spectacular city. They are energetic, diverse destinations intent on preserving local heritage and revitalizing undervalued neighborhoods, and they possess distinct personalities that set them apart from other metropolises. Whether it’s the city you’ve called home for years or one you only just stumbled upon during your travels, the best destinations are intriguing cultural centers that can’t be replicated anywhere else. No city proves this better than Kyoto, Japan, which returned for the second year in a row to the No. 1 spot on Travel + Leisure’s annual World’s Best list.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Steve Jobs – Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference, 1997

Readers called it the quintessential Japanese experience, offering visitors everything from history (in the form of spiritual shrines) to notable cuisine (shojin ryori) and encounters with Geisha. Italy’s classic crowd-pleasers, Florence and Rome, once again appear on Top 10 list — as they have for 10 consecutive years. Bangkok, likely bumped from the list in 2014 due to governmental unrest, has returned to the number six spot. Below is the full list of the World’s Best cities in 2015, which is compiled based on reader surveys. For more of Travel + Leisure’s 2015 World’s Best Awards, which cover everything from hotels to airports, click here: www.travelandleisure.com

It takes enormous amounts of hard work to seem effortless. There’s the dancer who can appear to hold in the air for a quarter of a second longer than is strictly decent, as if the rules of gravity don’t quite apply to them as to others; there’s the jazz pianist whose blurred fingers pick the perfect pattern from one end of the keyboard to the other; or the painter who can drop a line on to the canvas which is the very essence of the sitter’s profile, with barely a flick of the wrist.

They do not break sweat while doing so for one reason and one reason only: they did all their sweating elsewhere. They practised and practised again so that, when the moment came, you couldn’t see their workings in the margins.

There is a lot of that effortlessness in Brunswick House, the restaurant in Vauxhall run by chef Jackson Boxer, both in the food and the sense of place. I am probably now meant to apologise for not having eaten in the place before – it has been there a few years now – but as a south Londoner I think I can be excused. The 18th-century house it calls home sits on the roundabout at Vauxhall, an urban abscess which can rarely be a Brixtonite’s destination. I view the roundabout as an obstacle to be negotiated, a carousel only there to throw you out over Vauxhall Bridge into the big city beyond or down along the Embankment. Certainly the handsome building sits proud and unlikely among the deformed and Viagra-ed apartment blocks that have been seeded here at the once-unfashionable edge of the Thames.

Brunswick House, all brick and portico and history, is now in the care of Lassco, an architectural salvage company, which has filled one of the high windows looking out over the roundabout with the sheen of glorious copper pans. They could stand as a come-hither for all those looking to be well fed. Inside the restaurant side of the business, the decor has not so much been designed as assembled. There are old rugs, bare wooden tables, a few booths made from red-leather banquettes pushed into place and, dangling from the ceiling, myriad old chandeliers which stop you noticing the polystyrene tiles above. It works in much the same way the food does. Things appear thrown together randomly but make an awful lot of sense when they find their way into each other’s company.