12 restaurants across the world that will leave you salivating
IF THERE’S a clichéd concept for food travel, it’s the bucket restaurant list. The idea, popularly thought to have come from the 2007 film The Bucket List, might be 10 years old, but it feels as if it’s been kicking around much longer and destination restaurants make for a gratifying list. What follows is a list Bloomberg’s two restaurant writers compiled that represent places we’ve travelled to that were so good we want to shout about them, along with spots that are on our own bucket lists.
An unexpected dining destination, Maaemo is in a modern office block overlooking the train tracks near Oslo’s main station. Yet Maaemo is worth a trip to Norway. It holds three Michelin stars, the only Norwegian restaurant to receive that accolade.
The cuisine might loosely be called new Nordic in the sense that it uses local ingredients and employs cooking techniques, such as pickling, that are necessary in such a cold climate. But chef Esben Holmboe Bang has his own voice, independent of culinary fashion. There are just eight tables in the main dining room, so good luck getting one.
If you do, you might experience lightly frozen fresh cheese with smoked wild salmon eggs and langoustines served with dry ice to create a mist that smells of Norwegian pine.
Steirereck is frequently described as the Noma of Austria, a time-tested restaurant with a modern menu in a city not known for gastronomy. The old building was essentially rebuilt with walls of glass to look out on the surrounding Stadtpark (City Park); the view feels as thrilling as chef Heinz Reitbauer’s inventive cuisine, with such plates as coconut-water-poached crayfish with celery root salad, and barbecued beef forerib with potato cream, blue poppy seeds, and alpine sorrel.
The mood is relaxed, which is good because meals tend to stretch over several hours. There’s a more casual option: the wine-focused Milchbar is hidden below Steirereck.
Set in a minuscule Spanish beach town between Bilbao and San Sebastian, Elkano is legendary for fish. Chef/owner Aitor Arregui sources all his seafood locally and cooks it over a battery of charcoal grills.
The speciality is turbot, barbecued in a grill basket with a few squirts of a secret mix of oil, vinegar, and salt created by Arregui’s grandmother.
Arregui maintains that part of the secret is to have the turbot skin blister enough for the flames to flavour the meat itself.
French Mirazur, located at the foot of mountains overlooking the Mediterranean, is easily reached by train from Nice, yet it feels exotic, almost isolated.
The dining room, housed in a 1930s rotunda, offers spectacular views. Argentine-born chef Mauro Colagreco uses local produce to create seasonal dishes inspired by the sea, the mountains and the garden. The menu features signature dishes such as blue lobster, French cocoa beans and chamomile broth.
Single Thread is restaurant to make you believe in the tired phrase “farm to table”.
In the sleepy Californian town of Healdsburg, chef Kyle Connaughton uses ingredients from the 2-hectare farm tended by his wife, Katrina.
Canapés such as caviar-covered local oysters decorated with tiny flowers are arrayed on a mossy branch.
Connaughton, who cooked in Tokyo for years, emphasises Japanese influences with California ingredients for such dishes as cured foie gras flavoured with cocoa and rooibos tea.
Many bucket list restaurants fall into either the impossible-to-get-to or impossible-to-get-into category.
Stone Barns is neither. A 45-minute drive from Manhattan, the restaurant is set in an old stone building on a former Rockefeller Estate. Its magnificence has everything to do with chef Dan Barber’s explorations of the 30ha of land surrounding him.
Guests are given small notebooks instead of menus, and pristine baby radishes, turnips, and other tiny vegetables are pinned vertically on a wooden slab for snacks.
Later in the meal, you might have the best eggs of your life, warmed in the heat generated by a compost pile.
In an impossibly scenic setting of a converted grist mill, chef Erin French has created an incredibly personal experience at The Lost Kitchen in the tiny coastal Maine town of Freedom.
The place is open only four days a week, eight months a year, for 40 guests a night. Thousands of people compete for those seats in a simple dining room. French serves exquisite, simple dishes using local ingredients such as clams for her New England chowder with homemade saltiness and Maine bluefin tuna with the tiniest turnips.
Raymonds is a throwback dining room on a remote coast in a small Canadian city. Under the stewardship of chef Jeremy Charles, the seafood and game of eastern Canada is wildly compelling.
An avid fisherman and hunter, Charles serves moose finocchio (salami); thick, sweet local sea scallops with a garnish of smoked roe; and woodsy wild partridge with tart elderberry sauce.
Joel Robuchon, the French chef who has compiled 31 Michelin stars, has called Saito the best sushi restaurant in the world, and the eight-seat counter in Roppongi, Tokyo has three Michelin stars of its own.
Takashi Saito sources such seafood as aji (which he serves with ginger), lean-to-fatty tunas, voluptuous uni and sweet and salty anago, and the classic tomago to finish.
It’s the extraordinary quality and the quiet little tweaks in ageing some pieces, as well as finessing the rice, that elevate this spot to a new plane.
There’s no question about what you’ll eat at this non-descript upstairs restaurant, Cha ca la Vong restaurant in Hanoi. It will be sizzling catfish, vibrant with herbs, spices, and chilis.
The dish’s name is that of the restaurant that’s so popular it’s also the name of the street, to which such notable chefs as James Beard award-winning Chris Shepherd from Houston have come to sample it.
It’s a DIY experience – a burner with a worn skillet is set up at your place at a communal table for turmeric-marinated fish, sizzling in garlic oil with copious amounts of dill and shrimp paste.
The diner adds the accoutrements that come to the table, including bowls of herbs, marinated hot chillies, peanuts and unadorned rice noodles.
You probably wouldn’t go to Helga’s Folly in Sri Lanka for the food alone, although it’s a reliable mix of suchlocal dishes as spicy coconut soup, fish cakes and hoppers (rice flour pancakes) with curry.
But the pilgrimage to this gothic hotel on a hillside in dense jungle makes the trip worthwhile. Just a taxi ride from the historic city of Kandy, it’s a million miles from convention. The warm air is thick with exotic scents and the sound of insects. A wall is all that separates you from leopards and other wild animals. The rooms are filled with mysterious paintings, and wax from candles drips to the floor in stalactite formations.
Visitors to the house have included actors Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Peter Finch, William Holden and Gregory Peck.
Over it all presides enigmatic owner Helga de Silva Blow Perera, celebrated by Brit pop stars, The Stereophonics in their song Madame Helga.
While Peru’s food is much in vogue, neighbouring Bolivia has yet to rise to the level of dining destination.
But Gustu is worth considering, both for the quality of the cooking and for the importance of its mission of educating disadvantaged young people and supporting the country’s farmers.The ingredients are sourced from farms across Bolivia, and a school is attached to the restaurant.
The dishes may be unfamiliar – you might find yourself eating raw lama with salty capers from Tarija, washed down with Bolivian wine.
Gustu was opened in 2013 by Claus Meyer, who installed Danish chef Kamilla Seidler to run the kitchen.
While it is a social experiment, it’s also a place with very interesting food. – Washington Post.