Chinatown kid RAK:

New York Times lists 10 best restaurants of the world and 2 Chinese
restaurants (one in Shanghai, one in Sydney) are on the list but no
Japanese restaurants on the list. RAK, where's Japanese
restaurants???

http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/travel/22apple.html?pagewanted=1&n=Top%%2fR...

An Epicurean Pilgrimage: Meals Worth the Price of a Plane Ticket

AFTER half a century of assiduous eating in restaurants around the
world, first avocationally and more recently professionally, I have
become accustomed to certain questions: "What's your favorite
restaurant?" "What will you order for your last meal on earth?" "Which
is best - French cuisine? Italian? Chinese?" All unanswerable, of
course. Now comes a more modest proposition: Name 10 restaurants
abroad that would be worth boarding a plane to visit, even in these
fraught days.

O.K. Here's my list. Please note, this is neither an enumeration of my
favorites (though some of those are included) nor a ranking of the
world's best (like those fatuous lists put out each year by Restaurant
magazine in London). Rather than reciting a long list of two- and
three-star gastronomic temples, I have chosen purlieus both grand and
small, better to reflect my own eating habits. And rather than loading
up my list with French and Italian addresses, I have arbitrarily
restricted my choices to one per country, for much the same reason. I
would expect no one else to choose the same 10, but on the other hand,
I would be astonished if many of my nominations disappointed.

FLEURIE, FRANCE Auberge du Cep, Place de l'Église; (33-4) 7404-1077;
perso.orange.fr/mercurebeaujolais/cep.htm.

French country cooking - or bistro cooking, as its urban variant is
called - deserves, but is not often accorded, a place among the
world's culinary glories beside French haute cuisine. Based on
regional products, honestly handled, "unfoamed and unfused" in the
words of my friend Colman Andrews, late of Saveur magazine, it is the
specialty of this small restaurant on the main square of a prettily
named village in Beaujolais. It is a specialty unflinchingly embraced
by its proprietor, Chantal Chagny, who five years ago banished lobster
and truffles from her menu and turned her back on two Michelin stars
in favor of the simpler dishes she adores, like herb-crusted,
perfectly fried, never-frozen frogs' legs, crisp-edged sweetbreads,
soup made of garden herbs, roast wild duck from a local river and rosy
tenderloin of regional Charolais beef, France's best.

Love and skill are lavished on the simplest dishes - tiny, tender lamb
chops, neglected freshwater fish like perch and pike-perch (sander),
eggs poached in red wine (oeufs en meurette), toothsome squab, black
currant sorbet, even snails - great fat ones, bubbling happily in
their shells, bathed in garlic, parsley, butter and Pernod. Here is
the food most of us travel to France to taste, and who can resist it
once tasted? Here, too, are the little regional wines we search for -
especially Beaujolais, 60 of them, including 30 from Fleurie itself,
one of the 10 designated crus known for excellence.

SANT'AGATA SUI DUE GOLFI, ITALY Don Alfonso 1890, corso Sant'Agata 11;
(39-081) 878-0026; www.donalfonso.com.

Americans of my vintage (b. 1934), weaned on the red-tablecloth food
of the Italian south, were later taught that it was uncool, compared
with the blander specialties of Milan and Venice. But we were also
taught that in Italian cooking, the quality of ingredients is
everything, and it is the south - the Mezzogiorno - that produces the
juiciest fruits, the briniest clams and tuna, the best buffalo-milk
mozzarella cheese, and the world's most sumptuous tomatoes, known as
San Marzanos and raised near Mount Vesuvius, just south of Naples.

Alfonso and Livia Iaccarino (she of the zippy white patent-leather
boots) grow herbs, lemons and peaches, artichokes and eggplants and,
of course, prize tomatoes, plus the olives for their own tangy, fruity
oil, in a sun-kissed garden facing the Isle of Capri near their
restaurant on the Sorrento peninsula. In their lovely pastel dining
room, they serve fresh, understated, unmistakably Italian food in
great profusion - ravioli with caciotta (a sheep's milk cheese), wild
marjoram, barely heated chopped tomatoes and basil; rolls of baby
sirloin filled with raisins, pine nuts, parsley and garlic, atop a
ragout of wild endive; rabbit simply but exquisitely grilled with
herbs; squid and baby octopus of a very high caliber. The tufa cellar,
first excavated by the Etruscans, is stocked with wines from all
around the world.

SAN SEBASTIÁN, SPAIN Arzak, Avenida Alcalde Jose Elosegui, 273;
(34-943) 27-8465; www.arzak.es.

I'll take a pass here on El Bulli; for one thing, you don't need me to
tell you about it, and for another, Arzak is more to my taste. It is
nicely poised between an older, French-inspired style of innovation,
as represented by Juan Mari Arzak, who trained in the nouvelle cuisine
kitchen of the Troisgros brothers in Roanne (where I myself spent a
few happy days long ago), and the new wave of ground-breaking Spanish
cooking, as exemplified by Ferran Adrià and his disciples, including
Mr. Arzak's daughter, Elena.

The result is an enriched, reinvigorated Basque cuisine that retains a
sense of tradition and place. One fine Easter day, my wife, Betsey,
and I ate our Paschal lamb - a custom throughout Christendom, and
especially among the sheep-herding Basques - at the Arzaks' 110-year-
old roadside tavern, rated three stars in the Michelin guide. Rather
than run-of-the-mill gigot, however, a faintly gamy deboned chop came
to the table wearing a tissuelike coffee-flavored "veil" - a taste-
enhancing shroud made by baking a layer of café con leche between
sheets of Silpat pan liner. With the pan juices poured over the meat,
partly melting the "veil," you get a sauce remarkably reminiscent of
American red-eye gravy.

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Jonathan Player for The New York Times
At Wilton's in London, whole Dover sole is the choice of
connoisseurs.
Arzak's food is modern and entertaining like that, often witty, never
overwrought, limited largely to local ingredients - white tuna, fresh
figs, fino sherry. Or a hyperfresh egg, seasoned with house-made
truffle oil, wrapped in plastic film, poached and served with a slim
txistorra sausage made not just with the traditional paprika but with
dates as well. The egg emerged looking a little like a flower, and
cutting into the ravishingly milky white revealed a richly orange
yolk. Magic.

BRUSSELS Comme Chez Soi, Place Rouppe 23; (32-2) 512-2921; www.commechezsoi.be.

I'm an unapologetic classicist, no particular fan of foams and
chemical legerdemain in the kitchen (although I have maintained a
fondness for the then-revolutionary cuisine of Haeberlin, Bocuse and
Guérard since encountering it for the first time in the 1960's). I can
still find refined food that tastes like what it is, to quote
Curnonsky's maxim, at Paris three-stars like Taillevent, but no place
there or elsewhere excels Comme Chez Soi in this genre - and at Comme
Chez Soi you dine in a superb décor of warm, tawny wood in the style
of the great Belgian practitioner of Art Nouveau, Victor Horta. Nor is
price a minor matter: a set-price meal is served at lunch and dinner,
for 67 euros (about $85, at $1.30 to the euro), no snip but a real
bargain in these days of watery dollars.

There is originality, even alchemy, in Pierre Wynants's sole stuffed
with crab, which comes to the table with shrimp in a tarragon sauce,
but there is no trickery. Betsey and I feasted years ago on a saddle
of lamb that was merely perfect, a triumph of technique.

Even on the small menu, generous to a fault, there is no dearth of
imagination or regional and international inspiration; on one recent
visit, it included a shimmering green pea soup with oxtail and Chimay
beer, filets of eel with Espelette peppers from the Basque country,
chicken with turmeric and apple chutney and the silkiest, most
delicate floating island of my life, better even than my sainted
grandmother's.

LONDON Wilton's, 55 Jermyn Street, SW1; (44-207) 629-9955; www.wiltons.co.uk.

Clubbish in location, in looks and for the most part clubbish in
clientele, wonderful Wilton's in fact affords a cheerful, courteous
welcome to all who show up in properly sober clothes, ready to pay the
sobering prices. The best English food (as opposed to the best food in
England, which is so grandly cosmopolitan these days) is still that
which has been least messed about with. That is just what Wilton's
delivers. "Noted since 1742 for the finest oysters, fish and game," it
says of itself, with every justification.

You might start with a half-dozen oysters. They will set you back a
pretty penny, but then they are imposing creatures, five inches
across, pale beige rather than silver-gray, in shells as flat as
saucers. They come from West Mersea, on an island off the Essex coast,
from beds that are harvested exclusively from rowboats, lest oil or
gasoline pollute the waters. They are opened by London's best
oysterman, Patrick Flaherty, a 40-year veteran when I last checked.
None of the briny juices escape. No nasty bits of shell creep in. Then
maybe a wild salmon from the Spey in Scotland (increasingly rare), or
a snowy hunk of halibut - "a nice piece of fish," as I once heard Rex
Harrison call it.

But whole Dover sole is the overwhelming choice of English
connoisseurs: brushed with melted butter, sprinkled with salt and
pepper, turned quickly on the grill so that the grill bars burn a dark
lattice pattern into the fish, then cooked under the intense heat of
the broiler for roughly 12 to 15 minutes. Perfectly simple, simply
perfect and entirely sufficient. This is the porterhouse steak of
fish. No sauce is needed, partly because cooking the fish whole ("on
the bone") helps to keep it moist. You may well come across an
occasional apostate who insists upon tartar sauce (much too robust, in
my view) or hollandaise (too rich). In game season, both partridge and
grouse are exemplary.

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Sjomagasinet, Klippans Kulturreservat 5; (46-31)
775-5920; www.sjomagasinet.se.

I envy the Swedes their social conscience, their gift for design and
urban planning and their fish. Especially their fish. And among their
fish - sole, cod, plaice, scallops, langoustines - especially their
unmatched herring. Leif Mannerstrom, who owns and cooks at this
charming former warehouse of the Swedish East India Company, built on
the waterfront in 1775, is so widely admired for his knowledge of
things piscatorial that he is pictured on a national postage stamp,
and more than 10,000 people come from all over Scandinavia each year
for his Christmas-season feast of 16 herrings.

Matjes, pickled, fried or bathed in mustard-and-dill-sauce - the
richly flavored herring - is, of course, available all year long at
Sjomagasinet, to be devoured with well-aged, Cheddar-ish Vasterbotten
cheese, with or without cumin, and icy draughts of O. P. Anderson,
Gothenburg's favorite aquavit. And all year long, Mr. Mannerstrom
turns out a definitive version of Janssons Frestelse, or Jansson's
Temptation, a confection of scalloped potatoes, onions and herrings
cured in the style of anchovies, which I find an inspired combination
of salty and creamy flavors.

BUENOS AIRES Avenida Cabaña las Lilas, Alicia Moreau de Justo 516;
(54-11) 4313-1336; www.laslilas.com.

I can hear you sputtering from here. What? Fly all night to Argentina
to eat in a parilla when every big city in the United States boasts
steakhouses promising (some even delivering) prime U.S.D.A. beef?
Well, this is grass-fed beef, raised on the vast ocean of chlorophyll
called the Pampas. It's different. Some, including me, would say
better, with a rounder flavor, leaner texture and sweeter fat. You eat
in a handsome wood-and-leather room in the redeveloped Puerto Madero
docklands area, and drink from a wine-wall stocked with fine Mendoza
reds like those of Nicolas Catena.

Octavio Caraballo, the owner, supplies all the beef from his own
ranch, or estancia. We flew there with him - big guy, bigger cigar,
even at 8 in the morning - on his private plane, admired the spread
and ate beef (what else?) for lunch. The selection was bigger at
dinner back in town, with medallón de lomo (tenderloin) and cuadril
(rump) and ojo de bife (rib-eye) covering every inch of the big
grills. Little "bombon" sausages and sweetbreads, too.

Warning: They will ply you with so many delicious breads, so many
salads and such superb cheese and olives and peppers, that you might
not be able to do justice to the beef. Which would be tragic.

SHANGHAI Jean-Georges, 3 Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu 1; (86-21) 6321-7733;
www.jean-georges.com.

I have lived in Asia and eaten more than my share of Chinese food,
Lord knows, but I remain a man of the West, not the East, and I still
find the Chinese passion for "gristly, slithery and squelchy
textures," as the English writer Fuchsia Dunlop calls them, hard to
cope with. Delicacies like sea cucumber and bird's nest have little
taste, Asian friends tell me, but great "kou gan," or mouth feel,
which escapes me.

Hence I tread lightly here. I would happily fly to Shanghai to eat the
seraphic - yes, seraphic - soup dumplings at Nan Xiang, or the snails
with chopped, spiced pork at tiny Chun. But I would be more likely to
go to Jean-Georges Vongerichten's glamorous place on the Bund, the
best of all his places, in my view, where the food is a little
Eastern, a little Western.

A year ago, as I reported in the Travel section, Betsey and I ate a
nearly flawless meal there. A single Kumamoto oyster wreathed in
Champagne jelly was followed by raw tuna brightened by Thai chili
paste. Then cubed raw kingfish with Taiwanese mangoes and chili-lemon
granita was utterly irresistible - peppery, sweet and acidic, yellow
and orange and red, all at once. A second trio, equally satisfying,
comprised crab dumplings with black pepper oil and tiny local peas;
seared sweet scallops from Dalian, nestling with clams in a tomato
jus; and superbly fresh snapper with crunchy cucumber strips. Vaut le
voyage, as Michelin would have it.

MUMBAI, INDIA Trishna, Birla Mansion, Sai Baba Marg, Fort; (91-22)
2270-3213.

This, I think, is the only truly remarkable restaurant I have ever
discovered solely on the recommendation of a friend of a friend.
Dubious, Betsey and I made our way there one night years ago and liked
it so much that we went back 72 hours later. It was not the décor,
which is shabby, or the service, which can be surly, and certainly not
the menu, which is very nearly useless. It's the food, stupid, the
seafood.

Enormous king crabs fresh from the Indian Ocean, awash in butter, and
seasoned with garlic and pepper until they make the lips tingle but
not sting, draw an eager crowd of Mumbai businessmen and Bollywood
stars to this little establishment on a crowded, noisy alley in the
old Fort district. If you like, your crab will be brought to the table
before cooking, still alive and dangling from a string held by a
waiter.

These are among the world's choicest crustaceans, and I say that as
someone who lives 25 miles from the Chesapeake. But Ravi Anchan has
plenty of other savory delights up his sleeve, including tender little
pomfret (a kind of butterfish) barbecued in the style of Hyderabad,
with black pepper; deep-fried squid; and gorgeous, never-frozen tiger
prawns grilled with mint. Don't mind the waiters; insist and they will
bring what you want.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Billy Kwong, 3/355 Crown Street, Surry Hills; (61-2)
9332-3300.

Among Sydney chefs, Tetsuya Wakuda, with his confit of Tasmanian ocean
trout, and Neil Perry of Rockpool, with his mud crabs, get most of the
international ink, and rightly so; they are as gifted as any of their
counterparts in Europe or America. But I would head from my Qantas jet
for Billy Kwong, my favorite neighborhood restaurant (whose
neighborhood, unfortunately, is exactly 9,758 miles from mine). This
is the trim, dark, bustling domain of Kylie Kwong, a 36-year-old
wunderkind whose mile-wide smile and black-framed glasses are as well
known Down Under as is Jacques Pépin's cherubic face Up Here.

Her food is delicious, and her place gives off none of those Chinese-
speakers-only vibes that plague us Anglophones; Ms. Kwong, Australian-
born, speaks no Chinese herself. So order to your heart's content, in
English, and flail away as the plates arrive, rat-a-tat: prawn
wontons, little flavor bombs bursting with the tastes of shellfish,
black vinegar and chili oil; star-anise-flavored tofu and black cloud-
ear fungus, with Thai and Vietnamese herbs; chive crepes with smoky
caramelized eggplant salad; steamed line-caught blue-eyed cod with
ginger and shallots; spectacularly crisp-skinned duck with a sauce
made from ruby grapefruit; and sung choi bao - wok-fried mouthfuls of
moist, gingery pork and vegetables, wrapped in crisp lettuce leaves.
The inspiration is Cantonese, absorbed by Kylie at her mother's table,
but the execution is all her own.

I have shortchanged Turkey, Thailand and Japan. I know, and I
apologize. Put it down to limited space and inadequate depth of
knowledge. There should be enough here to hold you - hopefully to set
you soaring - for a few weeks or months, or even years.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/travel/22apple.html?pagewanted=1&n=Top%%2fR...