> 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...
>
> 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.
>
> Skip to next paragraph
>
> 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...