> 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 ...
>
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