I travelled a lot this year, often for promotional reasons, and I also ate a lot. Here are my favourite restaurants in chronological order (limited to one per city, and leaving out cities where I didn't eat anything notable). This may seem like the document of a life of excess, but please note that only two of these meals cost more than £10.
Paris: L'Office
This
year I realised that I
tend to
like bars and restaurants in foreign countries in proportion to how
much they feel like bars and restaurants in New York.
Then at
the end of my trip I touch
down at JFK and breathe a sigh of relief because most bars and
restaurants in New York feel 100% like bars and restaurants in New
York. Yes, I
am a pitiful tourist, hostile to new experiences. Anyway, you
know how a low-end
washing machine has more processing power than the mainframe used to
launch Apollo 11? Sometimes in New York it feels like they've put
more thought into the house bread alone -– more agonising debate,
more Hegelian synthesis, more statistical meta-study – than they
would have put into the entire steak
dinner for
two back in the old days.
And they will not let you forget it. To
be honest, I love that about
the place, but I also enjoyed the
unfussy, down-to-earth
quality of
the better restaurants I went to during my two months in Paris.
And
my favourite was this restaurant near the Gare du Nord, which had a terrific 33€ set menu. I
can't remember what I ate.
New York: Xi'an Famous Foods
My
spirit shall find eternal
happiness in the arms of my lord, my saviour, the
first and last, the beginning and the end
– Gotham. I have
eaten so much good food in this city.
And of all the restaurants
here, my most beloved is the
northwest Chinese fast food chain
Xi'an Famous Foods, which
has six locations plus a new
sister place
called Bi'ang. When I was
living in a sublet in East Williamsburg for a month in March, I was
only ten minutes' walk from the Greenpoint branch, so I ate there
several times a week – mostly for
$3.50 cumin lamb burgers and
$6.50 hand-ripped pork noodles. No, it's not the most refined cooking
I've ever eaten, but no other
restaurant in the world has
come close to giving me, in
aggregate, so much
joy. Plus, there's the adorable earnestness of the warning on their
menus: 'Food tastes best when fresh from the kitchen. When hot
noodles cool down, they get bloated, mushy, and oily. If you must
take your noodles to go, please at least try the noodles in the store
or right out of the to-go containers when it's handed to you, so you
can get the best possible Xi'an Famous Foods experience.'
Quemado, New Mexico: nameless
barbecue truck
Quemado has a
population of about 250. The general store sells souvenir T-shirts
that make fun of how sleepy it is. We camped nearby only because
Quemado is where the Dia Foundation pick you up to take you to the
Lightning Field. And yet, bafflingly, this town is a bit of a food
mecca. I had marvellous burgers in two different diners here, plus
there's a third which I didn't visit but which is apparently just as
good. Above all, we got some of the best barbecue I've ever tasted
from a truck parked on Main Street – on the Land Art Road Trip we ate a lot of brisket and ribs, but these won easily. I can't find
any reference to the truck on the internet, so I don't know anything
more about it. Maybe it was a dream? I realised recently that you're
most likely to lose yourself in a meal – really abandon your
faculties – when you have to pick up the food with your hands and
bring it right up to your face to gnaw on it. If it's good enough,
you close your eyes and forget where you are, like a meaty tongue
kiss.
Roswell, New Mexico: Henry's Tacos
These
were probably the best tacos I've ever eaten. I had three, then went
back for two more. My friend only had one. Many
people on the trip didn't
have any, and never will. We are
playthings of an unfeeling universe.
London: Wild Honey
After
spending nearly a year
away from the city in 2011-12, it was a real shock to come back and
find that from nearly anywhere
in south London you could now look up at
the Shard like a shiv in the gut of the sky.
But compared to that, the hyperaccelerated maturation of London
restaurant culture in my absence has been as disorienting as about a
dozen Shards. Everything's
changed! You can find a
really good meal pretty easily now! (At least if you're willing to
get on the Tube; we're still not at the New York stage where you can
be confident of finding one within walking distance in almost any
neighbourhood.) For all
that, though, the best meal I had in London this year was at a
restaurant that opened in
2006. I know 2006 doesn't seem like that long ago, but it is. Just
cast your mind back – in
2006, we were all still
going to Pizza Express, and
we were grateful for it.
Order
the smoked eel here.
Also, try to arrange for
someone else to pay.
Delhi: Karim's Hotel
You
hear so much about how Anglo-Indian
food isn't real Indian food, a lot of the best 'Indian' restaurants
in London
are actually Pakistani, real Indian food is a lot of vegetables and
not much meat etc. that I basically arrived in
Delhi expecting to eat
nothing but subtle chickpea curries for a week.
Sheer blithering ignorance, of course:
it's not as if Anglo-Indian
food was invented in the 1970s by
bureaucrats at
the Meat and Livestock
Commission. It has a
historical basis, and at least some
of that, I now know, is Mughlai cuisine. At
Karim Hotel I devoured the tandoori chicken like a starving hyena,
and although the intensity of the experience must be attributed at
least in part to the panic hormones still effervescing in my
bloodstream after a high-speed tuktuk ride through Old Delhi at
night, I can nevertheless assert objectively that this is
one of the world's great meals.
Kathmandu: Newa De Cafe
In
Kathmandu Airport there are signs on the walls with facts about the
country, one of which observes that the nation of Nepal has never
been conquered. When I mentioned this to one of the Nepali literati I
met in Kathmandu, he told me that although
Nepal has never been conquered from the outside, it's certainly been
conquered from the inside: in the eighteenth century, the Ghorkas
crushed the Newari people of the Kathmandu Valley. I'd never even
heard of the Newari people, let alone Newari food, and between you
and me my first thought was that 'the Newari' sound like one of the
alien races from Babylon
5. Anyway, it's
apparently a 'purer' Nepali cuisine, with fewer Indian influences. I
can't describe the chicken
and buffalo dishes I ate at
Newa de Cafe in any detail – they
were strikingly
distinct from any other ethnic cuisine I've ever tried – but it was
all so
good I went three times in three days. This stuff should be
ubiquitous. Every market town in England should have several mediocre
Newari takeaways.
Seoul: one
of the restaurants on Gul Bossam Alley
The
Seoul Food Tour section of the Visit Seoul website has twenty
sections, hundreds of photos, and its own cartoon mascot. It seems to
assume that you, the foreign tourist, are not just interested in
Korean food but pathologically obsessed by it. All
tourist information websites should be like this. The truth is,
before I went to Seoul, I never thought of myself as much of a fan of
Korean food, but I now know that Seoul is one of the greatest dining
destinations in the world. The highlights were the various 'food
alleys', which have a dozen or more small restaurants all
specialising in the same dish. Almost
every one of them is
able to display stills from a TV news feature on its cooks, because
the Koreans, unlike the British, think that cheap food prepared by
unassuming professionals is important enough to be worth celebrating.
I'd only heard of bossam because it was the original, failed premise
for David Chang's Momofuku Ssam Bar in the East Village. You wrap up
steamed pork, raw oysters and kimchi inside a
lettuce leaf, but before you take a bite it's important to put on a
protective helmet – you're probably
going to have some sort of grand
mal seizure because it's
so delicious and you might bang your head on something.
Bangkok: open-air
buffet around the
corner from Chatuchak Market
I
love Thai food more than any other cuisine, and
I'm happy to
trek all the way across London or New York or LA because I've heard
a new Isan
place has opened under a pub or in a strip mall, but
I'd never actually been to
Thailand. So
after all these years to
find myself eating real Thai food in Bangkok
was, inevitably, both climax
and anticlimax. I was like Jessica Chastain's character at the end of
Zero Dark Thirty,
when she's spent her entire career tracking Osama Bin Laden from a
distance and then she finally gets to touch his corpse and she's so
overwhelmed she doesn't know what to feel. Is that a strange analogy?
My point is, I've been to the Heron in London and Ayada in Queens and
Pok Pok in Brooklyn and Jitlada in LA. I've methodically eaten my through the best (non-fancy) Thai food
you can eat in the western hemisphere. I
wanted the food in Bangkok to be ten times better than that but
most of the time it was only a bit better (which is either an indictment of my dining choices there, or, more optimistically, a tribute to the abilities of the top 0.1% of Thai cooks in the US and the UK). However, there were
exceptions: one
was the unidentifiable peppercorn-heavy curry I ate on my first morning there, which
literally made me weep
with happiness, and I wasn't
even hungover.
