My Ten (and more) Most Favourite Places To Eat Around The World (2011 Edition)

at Kaffekoppen, hot drinks get served in ceramic bowls. Imagine - a soup bowl of your favourite latte or their amazing hot chocolate!

My brother and I both have restless feet.  No, not the medical condition by that name – more the fact that though we’re both rather young, we’ve gotten around the world, each in our own way.  We laugh about it, because while he tends to travel as much as his free time permits him and backpacks through whatever disreputable Burmese jungle or Peruvian demonstrations he can find, I tend to move places.  Or I have been and now hopefully settled here in Stockholm and will henceforth travel in a less permanent and luggage-laden manner.  You know, more like other people – for vacations, not to live.  Of course, who knows, T and I may one day take off for Australia if life goes that way – I mean, we haven’t been there before, it’s a new place.

In the meantime, however, I have decided to take a tally of my favorite places to eat in all of those places I’ve lived – and visited – so far.  An important note here is that, while I have been to – and eaten – at many, many more places than these, and that many of those places were far higher-rated and pricey, what I am listing here is the places which had (at the time I ate there, hope they still do have!), hands-down, the best food, regardless of how prestigious or hole-in-the-wall sorts of places they are.  In all the years of my travels, these are the places I remember for the sheer eating pleasure itself – if I pass by those locales again, these are the places I would wish to revisit.  And eat at.  Obviously.

In no particular order:

1. Mai Lee Vietnamese Restaurant – Saint Louis, USA  The place which both, introduced me to Vietnamese cooking, and then set the standard for it so high that most other places I’ve been since pale in comparison.  Fresh greens, homemade sauces, and fascinating regional dishes make the place really unforgettable.  And, they have fantastic Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk!
2. Fred’s House and Market Seafood Restaurant – Hyatt Regency Grounds, Cancun, Mexico.  The seafood is the catch of the day, caught the same day – and you can pick out which specific one(s) you want to eat, before you order, from an iced market-style display!  Simple preparations that highlight the flavor of really, really fresh fish and shellfish and fantastic cocktails.  I’ve still not forgotten the Almendra Tostada I drank there after a mountanous dish of a broiled spiny lobster tail!
3. La Fattoria in Chester, UK / Mama’s on the Hill (formerly Mama Campici’s) in Saint Louis, USA.  The former is hands-down the best Italian food I’ve ever had, and the latter is the runner-up.  Both offer non-standard Italian dishes, and I won’t go through their huge arrays of dishes as I’ve never had anything there that was less than wonderful.  Though… I am weak, and Mama’s crab-stuffed mushrooms and Fattoria’s calamari both merit far more than just a mention – my mouth waters even at the thought!  I’m sorry Italians, best Italian food I’ve had was… not in Italy.  But, it was still made by Italians abroad, and it was gorgeous!  And, Tuscany DOES have the best wines!
4. Cafe Piastowska – Stockholm, Sweden.  A quiet corner of a less-touristy area of Stockholm city is home to this tiny tiny eatery which has ground floor and cellar seating, and serves amazing Eastern-European fare (I had entrecote in caper sauce with crispy potato pancakes… mmmm!) to candlelight and old Russian music.  Expect your tea service to be properly brought in glasses stabilized by ornate tea-glass holders.  On a weekend, booking a table is recommended.
5. Olympia Kebob House and Taverna – Saint Louis.  I have been to Greek islands, and Greeks-in-Greece, I offer you my apologies as well – best Greek food I’ve had was at this tiny out-of-the way eatery deep in the continental USA.  This place is home to the best homemade taramosalata I’ve ever had, and to cheese saganaki served in sizzling cast-iron dishes and flambéd in armagnac in front of your table in an applause-worthy display of pyrotechnics.  The mavrodaphne wine is nothing to sneer at, either!
6. Cafe Natasha – St Louis, USA.  Persian cuisine.  Amazing traditional osh soup, tender marinated lamb chops over herbed basmati rice, and Persian ice cream with rosewater.  The place needs no more recommendation – and, like in case of Cafe Piastowska, being tiny, requires reservations on weekend evenings.
7. Toffs Restauraunt and Lounge in Luton, UK / Ann Marie at the Taste of the Taj in Hanger Lane, London – tie for best Indian food (no I haven’t been to India… yet, but when I go, they will be hard-pressed to compete with these places).  Toffs is indian cuisine done post-modern glam style, while Taste of the Taj is traditional, but the quality of food is astounding.  Both are situated in less-than-star locales, but should you find yourself in the vicinity, either is really really well-worth the trip.  I have eaten at the more premier and expensive (not naming names) indian restaurants in the London area, and none hold the candle to these two.
8. Chaophraya in Liverpool, UK – best Thai.  Second place goes to The King and I in Saint Louis, USA (same as for Indian food, I’ve not been to Thailand yet!).  Again, I have not had a single dish at either place which was less than amazing, but I particularly recommend the Ganang Panaeng curry in Chaophraya – that with duck breast.  All I can say is that despite their large and varied menu, it’s the one thing I had a hard time giving up in order to order anything else to try!
9. A Popeye-looking guy armed with an oyster knife and a barrel of iced seawater and oysters on a pier somewhere near Annapolis, USA who served us paper plates with freshly-dragged-out-of-barrel-and-shucked oysters garnished only with lemon wedges, to eat where we would, standing up.  Best oysters I’ve ever had.  To be honest, I am not sure I could even find the place again – all I remember is that it wasn’t very far from the Annapolis Naval academy.  My hat off to you, Popeye, whoever and wherever you and your oysters are!
10. Brick House Grill – Hot Springs, Arkansas, USA.  Birthplace of Bill Clinton.  The ciy also boasts thermal spring baths.  The restauraunt mentioned?  There really isn’t much to say, except – Best. Steak. Ever.  Real, hugely tall American strawberry cheesecake, too.

Honourable mentions:

• Gelateria di Piazza in San Gimignano, Italy.  Best ice cream I have ever had.
• The Bears Pub – Haifa, Israel.  Smoked goose in wine and butter, how I miss thee!
• Miss Aimee B’s Tea Room in Saint Charles, USA.  It’s been years since I’ve gone to university and would occasionally eat a meal here on long days, but I still remember your mouffaletta sandwiches and the Hungarian mushroom soup.  And I still wish I’d managed to weedle the recipe for the latter out of you back then (when I failed).
• Le Pot de Fer – Paris.  When trying to find a website for this tiny cellar eatery in Paris, all I found was a couple of sadly unfavourable reviews of the place from recent years.  If the restaurant has gone downhill, it is sad, but I hope it’s just a fluke – when we ate there, years ago on my trip to Paris with some family, the atmosphere and service were down to earth and friendly, and the “bleu” (un)cooked steak I had was tender, juicy and fantastic.  I hope it stays so not just in my memories.
• Brew Tea Bar – Liverpool, UK.  A real tea shop and cafe where the motto is “Letting the tea out of the bag” and the tea is good, the coffee is amazing, the male barista is cute and courteous and they have (as proclaimed by the message scrawled on a napkin by some happy customer and now proudly displayed near the dessert case) BEST LEMON CAKE EVER!  I kid you not – it really is.  Really.
• The Leaf – Liverpool, UK.  A few doors up the street from Brew, another real tea shop and cafe.  They serve proper English afternoon tea.  They have a great leaf tea selection, and a lovely revamped-warehouse-style dining room with a stage.  They also have utterly amazing wild mushroom soup that has more mushrooms than liquid in it.  All worth visiting the place for!
• Cafe Antipasti – Glasgow, Scotland.  Fantastic old and rebuilt building, wonderful atmosphere and honestly, the best 1kg of mussels I have ever had.
• Kaffekoppen – Gamla Stan, Stockholm.  Other than the pictured bowl of coffee (or hot beverage of your choice), you can also enjoy amazing homemade raspberry or blueberry pie, or Swedish kladdkaka (chocolate cake) – thin, rich and sticky, and oh-so-amazingly good!  And, how many coffee addicts haven’t wished that their poison of choice was served in slurpworthy soup bowls?!
• Mike Anderson’s in New Orleans – sadly closed post-Katrina disaster, but I hear there is one around in Baton Rouge.  Shrimp broiled in sherry are to die for.  Or maybe not die, but certainly to make a detour for, should your road trip ever take you within range of Baton Rouge, USA.
• Tachibana in Saint Louis, USA – All-purpose Japanese restaurant.  I’ve had sushi in many places since (yes, in Vancouver and in London, and in Liverpool too), but this place still sets the standard in variety and quality of both, sushi and other simple non-pretentious Japanese food.  Ume sushi rolls, fatty tuna nigiri, spicy tuna hand rolls and red-and-white clams were my personal favorites.  Also worth mentioning are the green-tea ice cream (!!!) and the very fresh and wonderfully mild fried rice.  No, I haven’t been to Japan yet.  This IS the 2011 edition, so perhaps I may revise my views – who knows?

I imagine I could go on and the list would just grow longer and longer.  And I imagine this will certainly change as time goes, so perhaps the 2012 will find new favorites – but, considering how many years and places have gone into the making of this list, and how monumentally they have impressed me, the placement of new eateries onto this list does not come easy.  And while I may go back to some of these places and revisit, or may not, if you are within a reasonable distance of any of these, they are really, really worth the trip – or at least they were when I ate there last.

Of Ruined Fondue And Unnecessary Disappointment

The following post is half a rant and half the instructions for those wishing to avoid the aforementioned disappointment.  And I will try to go gently on the rant bit, as I try to avoid those without a good cause.  Sadly, this is a good cause.

I make no secret of the fact that if I have to pick my one favorite celebrity chef for cookbook-buying (I don’t normally watch TV so I have no idea of how entertaining or useful their shows are, so I go by the reading and cooking quality of recipes myself), it’d be Nigella Lawson.  (If I had to pick two, the other would be Nigel Slater, and if I could have three, Emeril Lagasse deserves an honorable mention.  Just so you know.)  Now, as she herself says, her qualifications regarding food are not those of a chef, but rather of an eater – and, incidentally, also a cook.  Which is also fine by me.  I tend to find her recipes easy, good to eat, and generally have nothing but positive things to say of her.

Which makes last night’s occurrence all the more sad and disappointing.  The story is simple – I had some decent smooth-melting-type cheeses in the fridge which needed to be used, leftovers of a box of white wine, and a freshly-baked loaf of sourdough bread and I thought I’d make a lazy dinner of fondue.  Now, I’d not made fondue before, but being a decently good cook, I did not feel it should be too difficult if I got a good recipe and followed the instructions.  And because I like and trust Nigella’s cookbooks, I did not turn to my usual internet-scouring for tips, but opened up my Nigella Express book and found the fondue recipe I’d seen it on previous read-throughs.

Note, that I am not saying the book is bad in general – in fact, I’ve cooked out of it, and done so successfully, and the food was gorgeous as always.  But not this recipe.  I have followed it to the letter.  Unfortunately, the instructions were, simply put, wrong, and my cheese clumped despite my best efforts.  Again, I had at first thought the fault was mine, but a bit of research on the net (something I should have and would have done before ruining the cheese had I not trusted said cookbook so well) showed that there are several steps and an ingredient omitted in the recipe as it is written which actually have to do with cheese clumping prevention.

So, here are the steps you’d need to take in addition to the aforementioned recipe to make it workable:

1. Add 1-2 teaspoons of lemon juice to the white wine.  Most traditional fondue recipes have this, and one or two helpfully explain that it helps break the cheese down.  Why it is omitted from generally lemon-in-fridge-assuming Nigella book, I do not know.
2. Preheat the wine.  Nigella’s recipe says to add wine and cheese to the pot and heat it.  No, no and no!  Preheat wine with the lemon juice, specifically until hot but not quite boiling to help melt the cheese as you later add it.
3. Add cheese to hot wine in little batches and stir in figure-8 to avoid clumping.  Add cheese as previous batch more or less melts.
4. Use low heat once the wine is hot and while you add the cheese.  The recipe simply does not mention the heat setting and sadly, it really should have.
5. There is also the additional bit where the cheese should ideally be at room temperature and not straight from the fridge, but I suspect if the previous 4 items are followed, this step could theoretically be skipped as cheese does not have a very high heat capacity (unlike meat).

So there you have it.  A recipe that would have been fantastic had it been actually complete.  That is to say, it still tasted good, it just was clumped and not pretty enough that I’d have served it to any visitors.  T and I ate it, and were happy, but it was a bit labor-intensive with the long cheese-gone-stringy bits in what should have been smoothly melted sauce.

Better luck next time, and I will make it with the addition of lemon juice and the above instructions and feel confident that it will work just fine.  And taste fine again, which is why I will be reworking it.

I am by no means disappointed in the food writer herself, nor in the book as a whole, but I think – shame on you, Nigella, you really could have easily done better.  And, in my opinion, should have.

Review: Yee Rah @ Liverpool One

Last weekend I have been visited by a friend from Norway. It was a little bit spur-of-the-moment, but as both she and I have needed some girl-time, and we both have a limited supply of female friends (women are terribly hard to get along with, I have no idea how most men manage!), it made perfect sense to have her call me early in the week and ask if I were going to be available, and then just drop by.  For the record, I do so much love living in the globalised world – years ago this sort of thing would not be possible, except maybe to the super-rich (which neither one of us is).

Since we had a couple of evenings, we split the food ideas evenly between a dinner cooked by yours truly (photo and recipe to follow in a separate post), and going out to a very nice place in Liverpool One called Yee Rah, which is a sort of an oriental-fusion food restaurant, very modern, and with a fantastic ambience that I had wanted to try for a while, but never had the occasion to.  The hall itself is designed in muted shades of natural green and brown, reminiscent of a tropical rain forest in palette.  It is double-level (ground and upper), comfortable, and softly lit, providing a very relaxing atmosphere.  The kitchen is open, and an array of food at various stages of preparation is displayed under lights to anyone passing through.  I must say, though we did not end up having dessert in the end, those made us salivate even as we walked by.

We were greeted promptly, offered a window table overlooking Chavasse Park, and most importantly, the servers neither abandoned us, nor hovered, but were rather responsive to a raised hand and eye contact, the way too few restaurant staff seem to know to look for these days.  I give the staff full marks for exemplary service.

Regarding the food – we ate one of the Tapas platters, the one including squid rings, which was both, generous in size, and incredibly good (the pork spare ribs are to die for!).  Then I had Beef Teriyaki, and Hanne – a Koreah-spiced breast of duck.  Having tried each other’s food, I have to say I preferred the duck.  Hanne did, too – it was warmly spiced and not too sweet, as well as incredibly tender, and I’d order it next time I go there!  The beef was also very decent, despite the sauce being a touch too salty for my preference.  Portions were generous, and presentation beautiful, despite it being a busy Friday evening (which I can imagine is hell in restaurant kitchens).

The cocktail menu was short but well-chosen, and though it didn’t have a Margarita listed, it was furnished complete with properly salted glass on my request.

Unfortunately, I have no photos.  All I can say for myself is that we were too busy eating, talking and enjoying ourselves to remember to snap pictures before wolfing the food down.

In short, I would gladly recommend this to anyone who wants a classy and stressless evening out, without it being overly formal or stuffy.  For the price-conscious – while the price of food and cocktails is not cheap, it is certainly not unreasonable.  For us, a large shared starter platter, a hot drink, main entree off the “Grill” section, and a cocktail ran to about £60 total for two (not including tip, which had been richly deserved, as we had a wonderful time!).