Wednesday December 9, 2009
Food-loving travelers can be hard to shop for -- the best gift, after all, is a plane ticket to a lovely culinary destination. (You'll find some great ideas of places to go here.)
But if you need something more substantial to wrap, check out National Geographic's Food Journeys of a Lifetime. ($40). As you'd expect from the good ol' gold rectangle, this is a lavishly illustrated book which details 500 food-focused trips and experiences.
Sized to sit on a coffee table, this is a veritable encyclopedia of culinary travel, including a comprehensive overview of what you can expect to consume in the world's best food town, from Hong Kong to Paris to Charleston.
There's terrific coverage of food markets, cooking classes, and loads of handy lists guaranteed to appeal to every interest. For instance, the top 10 cheese tours of France tells you where to find the dairies that specialize in your favorite cheese variety, whether it's Brie (Coulommiers), Camembert (Normandy), Chevre (Loire Valley). Other top ten lists include bike tours for foodies, historic candy shops and a guide to New Year's feasts around the world. So if the book inspires you to book a ticket to, say, Vietnam, for the mid-February Feast of the First Morning (Tet), to sample kho, which is camel stew with fish sauce -- you'll still have plenty of time to pack.
Sunday December 6, 2009
Spritz at Bacaro Bar in Venice
On the other side of the spectrum from the overpriced Bellini that I had at Harry's in Venice, a few Euros on the counter of almost any bar in the city will net you a cheerful cocktail called a Spritz, made with a mixture of Aperol, Prosecco and sparkling water. Aperol is an orange-colored apertif made with bitter orange, gentian (a blue flowering plant), rhubarb and various herbs and roots, you can also get a Spritz made with Campari, which looks redder in the glass. I can see how it would be a perfect summer refresher, although it worked just fine on a chilly early December night. Read more about the Spritz and its history here, a recipe here, and bone up on your liqueurs -- including Aperola and Campari -- here.
Photo: Alison Stein Wellner
Sunday December 6, 2009
The guidebook said it flatly: you have not been to Venice if you've not been to Harry's Bar in the San Marco neighborhood. Harry's Bar was the very first venture of a young man named Giuseppe Cipriani, who went on to found a veritable restaurant empire, but it all started in what was then a blind alley near the Grand Canal in the city known as the Serenissima. It's where the Bellini was invented -- that refreshing cocktail made of Prosecco and peach purée -- and it's also a highly elegant restaurant where you're definitely not going to want to turn up in jeans. But that's not why Harry's is deemed essential for visitors. The place has a rich political, cultural and literary history -- Ernest Hemingway hung out there, as did Somerset Maughan, Noel Coward, Truman Capote -- the list goes on and on.
To me, all of this adds up to a place where the food and drink are sure to not knock my socks off. In general, I've found that the quality of the food declines as the impressiveness of a restaurant's setting, view, or historical context increases. It makes sense when you think about it: the more a restaurant has to offer besides the food, the less they have to impress in the kitchen to keep people coming through the door, and this is particularly true when they're catering to tourists. (If you're, say, a taco truck, with zero ambiance, you'd better have great food or you're going to go out of business.) By these measures, Harry's would definitely be on my "to avoid" list, but, the problem with Venice is is that it has so few permanent residents -- approximately 60,000 residents in the historic city center, with as many as 50,000 tourists a day in season -- and so very few places truly qualify as local. Also, when I was in Venice a couple of days ago, I happened to be re-reading Ernest Hemingway's short stories. Plus, the vaporetto (Venice's boat-version of a public bus) stopped right in front of the bar, and just at cocktail hour. So in I went.
I opened the menu to find a bold-faced warning that it would be unlawful to take photos of the interior. The furniture was cozy, well-preserved but well-worn mid-century modern wood tables and chairs, the walls were covered with warm yellow fabric. The lighting was a little bright for a bar, it felt sort of like it could have been a classroom. There were several tourists reading guidebooks in several languages. I ordered a Bellini, and it arrived in a very small glass, perhaps four or five ounces. It cost 15 Euro. With the exchange rate being what it is, I paid well over $20 for a few sips. They were tasty sips, and the small dish of green olives were complimentary, but was it worth it? Probably not. I paid the bill and left.
Every city has its Harry's, where other factors besides the culinary tempt you in the door. Occasionally, you're going to do what I did and give them a whirl. If you must give in to this temptation, the trick is to limit the damage -- make it a drink or a coffee or something small, soak up the atmosphere and save your serious eating for a place where the food is the main attraction.
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Photo: Alison Stein Wellner
Santa Fe, New Mexico is home to several fine chocolate shops that have wisely marketed themselves as a circuit -- and it was a path I was willing to take during my recent visit.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be bringing you news and photos from Santa Fe's Chocolate Trail, starting with Kakawa Chocolate House, 1050 E. Paseo de Peralta. This is a store that prides itself on its drinking chocolates, although the truffle (cherry cardamom pictured here) and brownie that I sampled were also in the very fine category.
