What It's Really Like to Eat Your Way Around the Globe
'Our Australia critic went on a whirlwind dining tour for two magazines. Here’s what happened.
On Mother’s Day, I lay sprawled across a bed on the top floor of a riad in the middle of a medina in Morocco, trying desperately to remember where I’d woken up that morning.
I couldn’t recall the room or the building where I’d been less than 12 hours earlier, but more distressingly, I couldn’t remember the country. As I listened to the long, low moan of evening prayers ringing out over Fez, the closest I could guess was Europe. That morning I had been somewhere in Europe.
For four months this year, I traveled across the globe eating myself silly, trying to find 30 restaurants worthy of the title “Best in the World” for a joint project by Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure magazines. In total, I visited six continents, traveled more than 100,000 miles and spent almost 300 delirium-inducing hours on airplanes.
In Fez, my mind whirled through all the places I’d visited that week: Paris; London; Cork, Ireland; Naples and Puglia in Italy; the mountains of Slovenia; Copenhagen. None of them were the answer. I could feel the synapses in my head sputter and fizzle. Humans were not built for what I was doing.
I finally gave up and checked my itinerary: That morning I had been in San Sebastián, Spain. I had spent my time there gobbling pintxos and freshly grilled seafood, sitting through long and elaborate tasting menus, and staring longingly at beautiful Basque cheesecakes in the marketplace. I was, heartbreakingly, entirely too full to consider buying one.
And, as always, I’d been contemplating the nature of the word “best.” . .
There were many moments of sheer joy: sitting at a table in the Peruvian Andes, a moody clear light streaming in through the window, a procession of gorgeous plates of truly lyrical dishes appearing on my table; pulling up to the counter of the Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco, eating its “Sicilian sashimi” (raw fish drizzled with olive oil, red onions and capers) and making friends with the people seated next to me; gobbling pizza in Naples, surrounded by families chattering in Italian.
On the first leg of the project, over the course of 19 days, I flew to 14 cities, from Australia to the United States, to Mexico, to Canada, back to the United States and then back to Australia. . .
The fine-dining restaurants were the easiest to identify as worthy or not — for every stunning, truly magical meal I ate in world-famous rooms, there was another just-as-famous restaurant that was stuffy and self-serious, wildly expensive and completely un-fun.
The Nomas of the world were predictably fantastic — but Noma has also spawned so many imitators (often led by chefs who spent time interning at the Copenhagen restaurant) that there’s a lot of sameness in the highest levels of fine dining these days. It’s strange, given the Noma chef René Redzepi’s emphasis on singular creativity and locational specificity above all else.
The thing I was looking for, that moment that distills the beauty and culture of the place where you are, happened more often in modest or midrange restaurants.
And sometimes it happened right in the midst of the infuriating logistics. In Slovenia, I was unable to find a cabdriver (as the spreadsheet suggested I do) to take me the two hours from the Ljubljana airport to my hotel. I improvised, rented a car and drove over the mountains to the Soca Valley. I spent that ride with my mouth agape at the alpine-fairyland beauty of Slovenia in spring, the tiny, ancient towns clinging to the sides of steep mountainsides, sprayed with tiny yellow and purple flowers.
I had to pull over several times to step out of the car and catch my breath and giggle and ask myself: How is this my life?'
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/dining/worlds-best-restaurants-besha-rodell.html?
