Travel Blog: Food: The Moveable Feast
The Last Bite and the Other Part of the Fish
by David Farley | 06.29.09 | 4:25 PM ET
Photo by David Farley Few people are lured to the Czech Republic for its cuisine, but I’m one of them. Actually, hearty Czech food is a taste acquired over time (accompanied by lots of pints of hoppy pilsner). Until recently the pub grub—rich goulash and pork made just about every way you can imagine—functioned more as stomach filler than actual taste bud pleasers. But things are slowly changing.
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Yahoo! BuzzThe Secret is Out on Secret Dining
by David Farley | 06.19.09 | 10:38 AM ET
I met a woman at a party a few months ago who, when she witnessed my eyebrow-raising eating prowess, revealed she knows of a few secret dining spots: places only known by the covert band of dining cognoscenti, a cabal of eaters who fetishize the idea of eating in places that no one else knows of. I know, it’s exciting. I tried to extract the information from her that night with the grace of a tooth-pulling dentist, but she wouldn’t budge.
The Secret World of Airline Food
by David Farley | 05.26.09 | 2:45 PM ET
A friend of mine recently recalled a story about booking a trans-Atlantic flight for someone else. She was gleeful about it. That’s because she pre-ordered the “kid’s meal” for her adult friend.
I laughed out loud when I heard about it, imagining an airline attendant setting down a colorful “Happy Meal”-like box in front of a grown man, saying, “Here is your children’s meal, sir.” Inside the box, he was likely to find a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a pack of M&Ms and, perhaps, some French fries. Which might actually be better than the glop we’re usually relegated to eating on airplanes.
The Subtle Bouquet of Cat’s Pee and Other Wine Aromas
by David Farley | 05.12.09 | 2:29 PM ET
In the 1980s, the University of California, Davis gave a gift to wine snobs everywhere by creating the “Aroma Wheel, ” a lexicon that allowed your average wino to stick his nose deep into your long-stemmed Riedel and then emerge using words like grapefruit, blackberry, banana, black pepper and oaky.
Some of the Wheel’s vocabulary bordered on the undrinkable-sounding: sweaty, barnyard and wet dog, for example. Which allowed for descriptions like this: This deep red blend offers an intense bouquet of wet dog balanced by hints of banana and sweaty barnyard with a body robust enough to be, as the Italians would say, perfectly corposo.
Interview With a Celebrity Chef: Govind Armstrong
by David Farley | 04.30.09 | 4:15 PM ET
Photo courtesy of Table 8 at the Cooper Square Hotel Govind Armstrong may not yet be 40 years old, but the dreadlocked chef is already a veteran in the kitchen, having logged time in some of the world’s most famous restaurants.
It all started at the improbable age of 13 when Armstrong found himself working at Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s celebrated Los Angeles restaurant. Now, after working in some of the most acclaimed kitchens in Los Angeles and Spain, he’s on the verge of his own restaurant empire. The Los Angeles and South Beach outposts of Table 8 won rave reviews, and now he’s about to take his biggest leap yet: New York.
On his way up the celebrity-chef ladder, he’s found himself on Iron Chef America, as a judge on Top Chef and on People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” list.
I met up with Chef Armstrong at the Cooper Square Hotel in New York’s East Village where he’s putting the finishing touches on the Big Apple outpost of Table 8.
The Last Taco in Playa del Carmen
by David Farley | 04.17.09 | 10:19 AM ET
Photo by David Farley I was dying for a good taco. I’d been on the tourist-board-branded Mayan Riviera (the coastline south of Cancun) for a few days and had been planted in beachside, tourist-crammed towns where a legion of mediocre restaurants lined the sea like B-grade culinary sentries guarding tourists from the locals-only edible delights off the beaten path.
The last straw came when my wife, Jessie, and I picked the most salt-of-the-earth eatery in Playa del Carmen and sat down, thinking the place might yield something more authentic than what we’d been served so far.
Eating Penguin with Ernest Shackleton in Scotland
by David Farley | 04.09.09 | 1:02 PM ET
In March 1901, the RRS Discovery set sail from Dundee, Scotland, its crew pointing it toward largely unexplored Antarctica. The ship was a wooden three-masted sailing vessel and, as it turned out, the last of its kind to be made in Britain.
But that’s not exactly what makes the RRS Discovery significant. Ten months later, the crew members definitively found what they were looking for. In fact, the ship was stuck, frozen in ice, leaving captains Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott with no choice but to wait it out until the spring when the ice would thaw. The next few months were harrowing ones, the crew eventually having to munch on seal liver and roasted penguin (described as tasting like “leather steeped in turpentine”).
Invasion of the Hungarian Pigs
by David Farley | 04.03.09 | 12:15 PM ET
There are several different types of pig species (or, if you will, sub pigs). The bearded pig is one I’d certainly hate meeting in a dark pig pen. The Indo-Chinese warty pig is another ominous-sounding swine. In all, there are over two billion pigs on the planet right now (and if they’d ever join forces with monkeys, we’d be in big trouble). Most of the pork we eat comes from the generic domestic pig (or sus scrofa domesticus) and, thanks to mass breeding, its offerings have taken on rather bland notes. Not that we’d know it unless we began eating another species of swine. And, in fact, some restaurants around the country are letting diners do just that.
Jamie Oliver to G20 World Leaders: You’ll Eat British and Like It!
by David Farley | 04.02.09 | 4:13 PM ET
In the 1970s and ’80s, Great Britain had a reputation for bad teeth and even worse food (I wonder if there’s a connection?). Dentists were finally imported from parts of the erstwhile empire while British chefs began looking outside Britain for influences. They found it in France, the Mediterranean and even Southeast Asia. The results, however, were anything but British. Nonetheless, it helped bring England out of its culinary cellar. Five years ago, Gourmet magazine proclaimed London to be the best food city on the planet. This wasn’t a surprise to those who had been paying attention to global dining trends, but most people were caught unaware of London’s “new” prowess in the dining sphere.
The Thrill of Gel and Other Disappearing Edible Delights!
by David Farley | 03.27.09 | 1:30 PM ET
Grant Achatz, the avant-garde Chicago chef, went to Madrid to attend Madrid Fusion, a congress of 50 of the world’s best chef, and all he got was a crappy food-stained T-shirt. Moreover, in this article he penned for the Atlantic, Achatz bemoans on a grander scale by wondering if molecular gastronomy is dead. Most of the world’s population didn’t even know that it had been born. But Achatz sat there during the meeting as chef after chef took the mic and felt pangs of emptiness:
“Where were the culinary fireworks? The introduction to the next ingredient that was going to enable us to turn oil into powder, serve a gelled liquid hot, or thicken an infusion by simply blending in a magical white substance? Where were the explanations of new techniques? Like the ones used to create raviolis with skins made from themselves, making pasta from stock, and aerating food to produce sponge-like textures?”
Raviolis with skins made from themselves? Aerating food to produce sponge-like textures? Sheesh. And he wonders why people may be losing interest in it.
Tradition, Change and the Fate of the Irish Pub
by David Farley | 03.26.09 | 4:17 PM ET
A couple decades ago, the authenticity of Irish pubs both within and outside the Emerald Isle was never questioned. Pubs abroad, one assumed, were likely started by an Irish immigrant, looking to offer homesick lads a taste of home and the wanderlust-stricken a rehashed memory of that last trip to Dublin.
Today, however, things are different. Welcome to the Irish Pub Company, which has birthed hundreds of near-identical “Irish” pubs from Shanghai to Sienna. Yes, the décor in that pub you’re nursing a Guinness in isn’t decades- or centuries-old; it wasn’t transported from a farm house or old church in County Cork. It was manufactured by a company that’s making a killing exporting Irishness.
Bill Barich’s fascinating book, A Pint of Plain, released in February, details the history, the present state and the inevitable fate of the Irish pub. Both in Ireland and abroad. Barich, an American in Ireland, travels around the isle, chatting up publicans and pub owners and discussing how modernity and globalization have led to falling attendance at Irish pubs as well as the movement to dispatch cheap prefabricated models across the planet. The only problem with Barich’s book is that you’ll start to wonder if that Guinness you’re crying into is real, too.
Free-Range Squirrel and Other Appalachian Delights
by David Farley | 03.26.09 | 11:33 AM ET
Ever wonder what Appalachian cuisine is? I haven’t either, but Eat Me Daily is running a four-part series on it. Part two, in which the intrepid journalist (in this case, Kathleen Wilcox) goes on the hunt for fried squirrel, is a great read. And before you wrinkle your nose, think about this: that squirrel is not only natural, it’s free range.
The Great New York Nacho Fail
by David Farley | 03.25.09 | 10:58 AM ET
These aren’t nachos, I thought to myself as I stared at a plate rimmed with neatly placed tortilla chips, each one gently topped with chicken, blanketed in cheese, and, for good measure, crowned by one single jalapeño slice. I might expect something like this if Jean-George Vongerichten put nachos on the menu at this eponymous eatery on Columbus Circle. But I was at a hole-in-the-wall eatery in Brooklyn bedecked with all the trappings of a salt-of-the-earth Mexican restaurant. Dressing up each chip as it were a microcosm of the usual mountain of nachos seemed unnecessary. And just plain wrong.
Rats! The DOH Are Here!
by David Farley | 03.19.09 | 11:58 AM ET
The guys at the sushi restaurant across the street from my apartment in New York’s West Village were always friendly. Except for one time about a year ago when I stopped in at lunch to pick up a take-out order. There was only one other person in the restaurant—a guy typing away at a small laptop—but the two employees were short with me, acting as though the place was packed. As I tossed out requests—extra wasabi, for example—the sushi chef nervously nodded back in that officious anything-you-want manner as if I had been pointing a semi-automatic at his family. Then I noticed what was printed on the back of the jacket of the other customer: Department of Health (DOH).
Interview With Ferran Adria: Spain’s Super Chef
by David Farley | 03.17.09 | 9:04 AM ET
REUTERS/Victor Fraile Superlatives and Spanish chef Ferran Adria seem to make the perfect pairing. His restaurant, El Bulli, located north of Barcelona, is often referred to by foodies, travelers and restaurant critics as a culinary heaven. The best restaurant in the world. And, as a result, nabbing a reservation is like winning the lottery: 100,000 requests for reservations per year come in. If you’re lucky enough to get one, you arrive in Spain hungry.
Adria spends six months out of the year in his Barcelona workshop, creating a menu (some have dubbed it “molecular gastronomy”) that is so avant-garde that it’s hard to find anything else like it (unless, of course, a chef is copying Adria—and many are).
I recently exchanged emails with Chef Adria and asked about his interest in travel—and I tried to be extra nice in the hope he’d grant me one of those impossible-to-get reservations.
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