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One of only four examples of the Jaguar XK140 bodied by Carrozzeria Ghia, it will be offered through Mecum Auctions on May 16. One of only four examples of the Jaguar XK140 bodied by Carrozzeria Ghia, it will be offered through Mecum Auctions on May 16.

The Ocean Rebirth experience unfolds over a transatlantic journey from Portugal to Barbados. The Ocean Rebirth experience unfolds over a transatlantic journey from Portugal to Barbados.

Elite Traveler test drives Halcyon’s electric Rolls-Royce Corniche restomod – an EV conversion that modernizes the iconic Riviera cruiser. 

A good swing is important, but so is your wardrobe. 

The Concours Club is one of Miami’s most in-demand memberships – here’s what you need to know about it. 

From Miami to Monaco, the global spectacle of Formula 1 is also a lifestyle event nonpareil, where even top celebrities vie for a souvenir selfie with Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen, and other stars of the world’s fastest sport.

Here in Miami, The Concours Club offers members year-round experiences that even Brad Pitt or an Emirates prince might envy. Such as: Flying a personal jet into Opa-Locka Municipal Airport, to find your own supercar or vintage classic, fueled and waiting on the tarmac. Then, driving straight onto this country-club-style racetrack abutting the airport for a lapping session with a professional coach, with 11 corners across 2.0 miles. Afterwards, perhaps, a meal prepared by Bradley Kilgore, the club’s culinary director and one of Miami’s most-awarded chefs.

The Concours Club membership privileges

In a world whose streets are increasingly inhospitable to fast cars, The Concours Club is part of a wave of country-club tracks in the US, Europe and Asia. Luxury residences, clubhouses and lavish amenities are part of the attraction. The Concours Club opened in 2020, in a city teeming with Lamborghinis and other South Beach-friendly supercars, but in a state notorious for snarled traffic and flat, straight, monotonous roads. 

Aaron Weiss, president of The Concours Club, estimates roughly half the club’s members hail from Florida, the rest from other states and countries. Members tend to fall into three categories: Collectors who want to store valuable cars at the track, with expert maintenance from the club’s technicians. Secondly, people who lean into the social scene, bonding with fellow car fanatics or attending curated dinners by Kilgore and Master Sommelier Dan Pilkey. Finally, committed drivers who soak up professional instruction and compete at tracks. This includes The Concours Cup, a club championship where members rival in delightful BMW M2 CSR racing coupes. Drivers may find themselves racing against Helio Castroneves, a member and four-time Indy 500 winner, or a former F1 star such as Felipe Massa. (The big names are scored separately from other drivers, keeping competition fair).  

With enough coaching, ambition and natural talent, members can graduate to serious competition. Custodio Toledo credits the club with making his racing dreams a reality. The Brazilian-born Toledo grew up watching the F1 exploits of the late Ayrton Senna, and never imagined he’d own a Ferrari, let alone drive one on track. But in just six years, the Miami-based businessman, 56, has gone from a raw track novice to a seat with the Richard Mille AF Corse Ferrari team. He’s now competing in the European Le Mans Series in a Ferrari 296 LMGT3 Evo, a formidable track version of Ferrari’s 296 GTB street car. Toledo logged 700 laps in his first six months at the club, a sign of his near-obsessive dedication to learning the craft. This summer, he’ll take on an epic challenge, driving the fabled 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in France. 

“Custodio went from never having been on track in his life, to one of our fastest guys,” Weiss says. “You can’t imagine the pride I feel, watching one of my members drive at Le Mans.” 

See also: Rolls-Royce Unveils Secretive ‘Project Nightingale’: An Electric Roadster for Just 100 Owners

The Concours Club review

My first experience of The Concours Club Lounge was this year, where I attend a glamorous trackside watch party at the Miami International Autodrome, the F1 circuit that snakes for 3.36 miles around Hard Rock Stadium, home of the Miami Dolphins. Before Saturday’s opening round of F1 qualifying, club members can be miles ahead of even the most-VIP racegoers, having donned a racing suit and experienced the sport’s g-force thrills firsthand. 

After any stay in Miami, members can drop their Ferrari, Porsche or McLaren back at the club for detailing, maintenance and pampered storage, and hop back on the Gulfstream. If they’re lucky, they may spot a driver like Kimi Antonelli – the 19-year-old wunderkind who I’ll soon watch win the 2026 Miami Grand Prix – as he boards his own private jet at Opa-Locka. Go ahead, spray the Mercedes-AMG driver with a bottle of Krug that’s older than him: Members can have the club’s catered wine and food waiting onboard their plane as they depart. 

See also: What Watches Are Formula 1 Drivers Wearing This Season?

Looming thunderstorms force F1 organizers to scramble and move the race’s start back by three hours: These drivers are always prepared to show off in the wet or at night, but lightning is another story. Somehow, the rain never arrives, and the tropical party is on. I ascend stairs to the two-story Concours Lounge. It’s built from scratch over weeks leading up to the race, with new design flourishes every year. Previous editions integrated a swimming pool, a handy spot for a celebratory plunge for a winner of one F1 support race. 

No dips are possible at the track’s artificial marina, yet it’s possible to pay $10,000, $20,000 or more for a nautical vantage point here. The lure is 10 actual yachts that sit in dry-docked splendor, a cheeky nod to the Mediterranean vibe of the Monaco race. Those yachts appear to float atop 25,000 square feet of vinyl-covered wood that mimics turquoise waves. 

With an estimated 800 million fans worldwide, Formula 1 ranks among the world’s most-popular sports. Yet much like soccer, F1 flew below the radar in the United States for decades. That changed when F1 added races in Austin, Miami and now Las Vegas to its globehopping calendar. The phenomenon of Drive to Survive, the Netflix docuseries that follows the lives and intrigues of these dashing young racers and their ruthlessly competitive teams, has drawn new fans to the sport. Last year’s F1: The Movie, starring Brad Pitt and co-produced by seven-time series champion Lewis Hamilton, also cranked up the cultural spotlight. Apple’s foray into a theatrical release became the surprise hit of the summer, grossing more than $630 million worldwide. Now in its 77th season, F1 has gone from an American obscurity to a sports staple since the inaugural Austin race in 2012. And for Miami’s international travelers, the May race has become the closing bookend to a high season that kicks off with Art Basel Miami Beach in December.

With so many sensory and social distractions at the Lounge, it’s not always easy to save mental bandwidth for the Grand Prix itself. The racers howl past the Lounge’s posh vantage point at Turn 3, in groundbreaking 2026 cars that, controversially, now derive 50 percent of their power from hybrid electricity.  

I make my own well-timed move through a secret door in a bookcase into an intimate, wood-lined space. This is almost surely the first private omakase speakeasy at any F1 race. It’s the vision of Kilgore, a multi-time Miami Chef of the Year, and recipient of a ‘Best New Chef in America’ nod from Food & Wine magazine. In a room that seats just ten, I sample omakase courses such as kanpachi with truffle ponzu vinaigrette, smartly paired with champagnes from Moet & Chandon. They include a desert-dry Brut Natur, the Collection Impériale Création No. 1. It’s the house’s first ultra-luxury ‘Haute Oenologie’ line since their introduction of  Dom Pérignon in 1936. Drivers won’t be dousing each other with this stuff on the podium. 

What cars you’ll find at The Concours Club

The club features more than 40 trackside “Autolofts,” where owners can store and display up to a dozen cars on a ground floor, and entertain guests on a balconied upper level. 

“The sweet spot is a car-museum feel, with six to eight cars,” Weiss says, typically encompassing some precious specimens. “We have some individual cars here worth tens of millions of dollars.” 

A paddock garage is stuffed with fantasy cars that would wobble the knees of any enthusiast or fan of automotive design. A triple-stack of models along one wall recalls a child’s Matchbox collection. Only these cars are real: A Pagani Huayra, the DaVinci-like hypercar from Argentine-Italian engineer Horacio Pagani. An Aston Martin Valkryie, with only 150 coupes and 85 convertibles ever made, originally priced from $3m to $4.5m. A McLaren Senna GTR. A vintage, open-wheel Formula 2 racer. And invariably, serious drivers are drawn to race-prepped Porsches that dominate tracks around the world, such as 911 GT3 Cup cars. 

See also: Porsche’s New 911 Turbo S Hits 0–60 in Under 2 Seconds

The Concours Club membership cost

As with many exclusive clubs geared to high-net-worth individuals, The Concours Club doesn’t publicize entry fees or annual costs. The club confirms that founding members paid $350,000 to join five years ago, and that fees have risen since. Prospects are often referred by other members. Those prospects invariably tour the club for a full immersion, and are thoroughly vetted by club management. 

With a cocktail bar, dining room, and entertainment space, Celia can host everything from fancy dinners to dance parties. With a cocktail bar, dining room, and entertainment space, Celia can host everything from fancy dinners to dance parties.

In Sardinia, bar snacks are no longer an afterthought – they’re part of the main event. 

For centuries, the rules of serious dining have felt firmly established: wine belonged to fine dining, cocktails belonged to dimly lit bars. Sommeliers spoke reverently about minerality and structure while bartenders slid over bowls of olives and hoped nobody was hungry. One pairing was considered an art form. The other came speared with a cocktail stick.

But that distinction is beginning to dissolve. Increasingly, chefs and mixologists are recognizing that cocktails – with their acidity, smoke, spice, bitterness, and botanical complexity – can be more expressive partners for food than wine is.

And in many cities, the best eating experiences now happen perched on a velvet stool with a drink in hand. That certainly felt true for me in Cagliari, Sardinia, where, inside the rooftop bar at Palazzo Tirso Sardegna, the line between fine dining and cocktail culture suddenly felt very thin indeed.

See also: Why London Restaurants are Embracing a New York State of Dining

I was there to interview Pichaya ‘Pam’ Soontornyanakij (more famously known as Chef Pam)– the Bangkok-based founder of Michelin-starred Restaurant Potong and one of the most influential voices in contemporary Asian fine dining – about her new line of elevated bar snacks created for MGallery Collection. “I think back maybe five years ago, [bar snacks were] very underestimated,” she tells me. “People don’t just put nuts and chips out anymore. They put something more meaningful and that represents who they are as an establishment.”

Spanning 16 MGallery properties from Paris to Seoul, Melbourne to the Middle East, the collaboration aims to celebrate World Cocktail Month, with each bar snack being paired alongside a complementary cocktail. Each of the 16 properties will serve the same five signature bar bites, thought up by Chef Pam, alongside two regionally inspired creations tailored to local tastes and ingredients. “I traveled the world,” she says. “Paris twice, Korea, Australia, Hong Kong… to meet the MGallery chefs and share my flavors.”

In Korea and Japan, guests will find crispy rice topped with tuna on the menu; in Hong Kong, a luxurious mantou-style burger filled with glazed lamb. Elsewhere, there is fried squid paired with squid ink, caviar-crowned tartare, delicate crab creations, and beef tartare, which Chef Pam dubs as “beautiful, with a kick.”

See also: Michelin Star Recipes You Can Make at Home

For her, the challenge of moving from a fine dining menu to snacks was rooted in creating food suited to the unique psychology of the bar environment. “It has to be something simple, but also surprising,” she says. “Sometimes it can surprise you in the way it looks when it’s served, or the taste being bold.”

The collaboration, with its regional links, also reflects a broader shift happening across global fine dining, one moving away from inherited European conventions and towards expressions of heritage and place.

“Right now, fine dining around the world is going towards localizing the cuisine,” Chef Pam explains. “Before, fine dining was usually French cuisine or maybe Italian or Japanese. It’s very generic.”

Now, she says, chefs are becoming increasingly interested in hyper-local traditions and regional specificity: “new chefs are pushing towards their heritage cuisine. It can be as small as a village cuisine or a region.”

In the six years since he turned his childhood passion into an adult hobby, Ron Janssen has amassed a stunning collection of prehistoric remains. 

Ron Janssen can still recall the spot on the side of the Maas river where he found a few teeth in the mud as a child — now 62, he often returns there when the tide is low, hoping to find something more. Back then, he picked up the teeth, assuming they were from cows or horses in nearby fields. “I later found out they went back 10,000 years — they were from boars and other animals that were alive then,” he says. That find sparked a passion for fossils that the Dutch businessman now indulges with more splashy acquisitions, like his latest, a spectacular ichthyosaur or prehistoric dolphin.

It was Janssen’s grandfather who sparked a curiosity for curios, a man whose attic and barn were stuffed with unfamiliar, exotic-looking objects. So he started picking up whatever caught his eye during walks along his local river, stashing the shells, stones, and bones in ever greater numbers of shoe boxes. Soon, Janssen spotted some of those finds in vitrines when he visited museums with dinosaur collections. “I picked up literally anything,” he says, pausing, “But I had a good eye for things.”

He only turned that childhood passion into an adult hobby five or six years ago. “It was a time to spoil myself,” he says of finally indulging in a major investment — in this case, a very different tusk from those he’d found in the mud. He spent five figures on a mammoth tooth with Dutch specialist dealer Roy Masin. It wasn’t the story of the animal that transfixed him, but the object itself. “I immediately fell in love with the shape, the texture, the patina of it. For me, it’s as good as a painting.”

From there, he quickly became an avid, if picky, acquirer of such ancient treasures. Janssen doesn’t rely on a certain period — Jurassic or similar — to steer his buying, but rather on gut and instinct. “I don’t need much, but I need good things,” he says, noting that he first started casting around for an ichthyosaur after a visit to London’s Natural History Museum, where a corridor of similar fossils left him dazzled.

It took him two or three years to find the right piece, and he considered where and how to install it at one of his two homes before resolving to buy it. Another proud part of his collection: a large, white ammonite — rare both in its color and size. “To be honest, my home is a museum. I live between my collections,” he says, while promising that his partner doesn’t object to such a designation. “It’s a world she didn’t know before, but it also interests her.”

Janssen’s collecting urge isn’t limited to fossils. He wants his homes to resemble a Renaissance-era wunderkammer or ‘cabinet of curiosities’ showcasing the natural world — think taxidermy or Vienna Bronzes. He also never considers deacquisition, so the resale value of a piece rarely troubles him. “In my basement, I have quite a lot of boxes, and sometimes I open one again and I’m in love with what I find when I haven’t seen it for a year or two.”

The dinosaur collecting world is small, he notes, with barely a dozen core proponents in The Netherlands at most, but he loves meeting other enthusiasts. At one fair in Amsterdam, for example, he spent the day combing the aisles for potential purchases. He ended up seated next to a museum director at a fair dinner that night, and was delighted to discover a fellow dino-lover with his own private collection, whose taste mapped almost exactly onto Janssen’s. “We compared the pictures we’d taken at the fair, and they were the same,” he says.

While he isn’t eyeing a specific next acquisition among the prehistoric treasures on sale, it’s always the same: he’ll assume he’s not in the market for anything new until that gut reaction strikes while he’s strolling the aisles of a fair in Paris, London, or Amsterdam. “If I wake up the next day and it’s still on my mind? When it’s lingering, that’s when it starts to get dangerous.”

The Brentwood home’s sun-filled rooms pair dark-stained hardwood floors with saturated earthtones and bold stonework. The Brentwood home’s sun-filled rooms pair dark-stained hardwood floors with saturated earthtones and bold stonework.

New Riff has been releasing batches of this whiskey since 2023. New Riff has been releasing batches of this whiskey since 2023.