The Best Restaurant(s) in the World

Image(Restaurant Guy Savoy, Paris)
If you take it as a given that French restaurants are the best in the world, it only stands to reason that the best restaurant in the world will be in France.
Don’t get your panties in a bunch, I’m not here to dismiss the cuisines of entire countries — only to point out that, like sushi, Mexican street food, and pasta, the places where some food was invented are generally where you will find the highest elevation of the art. And Paris, in case you’ve forgotten, is where the modern restaurant was born in the latter half of the 18th Century.

Of course, the “best” of anything is a conceit and highly subjective. Measuring a “winner” or “the best” of anything — from wine to women — is a nice parlor game, but ultimately a waste of time unless there’s a stopwatch involved.

Whoever wins these accolades usually comes down to who got fawned over the most in a few influential publications — not who objectively gives diners the best food, drink, and experience. Anyone who thinks the several hundred voters who weigh in on these awards have actually eaten at the places they vote for as “the best restaurant in the world” (as opposed to forming their opinions based upon reading accounts of the few who have), has rocks in their head.

“Awards” of this sort are simply a way to give a deceptively false measuring stick to those who don’t know much about a subject. Subjectivity disguised as objectivity, all in the name of marketing to the wealthy with more money than taste. Same as with wine scores and Oscar nominations. The rich need these adjudications to convince themselves they’re doing the right thing, and “The “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” is there for them. As Hemingway puts it in “A Moveable Feast”:

The rich came led by the pilot fish. A year earlier they never would have come. There was no certainty then.

Back when El Bulli was garnering these awards (and I was voting on them), I heard from several colleagues who ate there, and what they described was more of a soul-deadening food slog (an edible marathon, if you will) than an actual pleasant experience.

A close friend (who also happens to be a chef) told me he stopped counting after 40(?) courses of (often) indecipherable eats, and was looking for the door two hours before the ordeal ended. (The trouble was, he said, there was literally no place to go — El Bulli being, literally, in the middle of nowhere.)

But Feran Adrià (like Thomas Keller before him and Grant Achatz and René Redzepi after), was anointed because, as in Hollywood, a few influential folks decided they were to be christened the au courant  bucket list-of-the-moment, and woe be to anyone in the hustings to question these lordly judgments. In the cosseted world of gastronomic beneficence (and the slaves to food fashion who follow them) this would be akin to a local seamstress suggesting Anna Wintour adjust her hemline.

Because of this nonsense, we’ve been saddled with the tyranny of the tasting menu for twenty-five years (Keller, Achatz, et al), disguised foods and tasteless foams (Adria), and edible vegetation (Redzepi) designed more for ground cover than actual eating.

As far as I can tell, neither molecular cuisine nor eating tree bark and live ants has caught on in  the real world — beyond trophy-hunting gastronauts, who swoon for the “next big thing” the way the fashion press promotes outlandish threads to grab attention.

Which brings us back to France. More particularly, French restaurants and what makes them so special. Let’s begin with food that looks like real food:

Image(Surf & Turf: Langoustines au Truffes La Tour D’Argent)

….not someone’s idea of playing with their food, or trying to turn it into something it isn’t. This cooking philosophy alone separates fine French cuisine from the pretenders, and gives it a confidence few restaurants in the world ever approach.

For one, there’s a naturalness to restaurants in France that comes from the French having invented the game. Unlike many who play for the “world’s best” stakes, nothing about them ever feels forced, least of all the cooking.  With four-hundred years to get it right, and French restaurants display everything from the napery to the stemware with an insouciant aplomb that is the gold standard.

You don’t have to instruct the French how to run a restaurant any more than you have to teach a fish how to swim. Or at least that’s how it appears when you’re in the midst of one of these unforgettable meals, because, to repeat, they’ve been perfecting things for four hundred years. Everything from the amuse bouche to the petit fours have been carefully honed to put you at ease with with being your best self at the table.

Image(Gruyère gougeres have been around longer than America)

Having been at this gig for a while, I’m perfectly aware that the death of fine French dining, and intensive care service accompanying it, has been announced about every third year for the past thirty.

I’m not buying any of it. When you go to France (be it Paris or out in the provinces), the food is just as glorified, the service rituals just as precise, and the pomp and circumstance just as beautifully choreographed as it was fifty years ago. The fact that younger diners/writers see this form of civilized dining as a hidebound, time-warp does not detract from its prominence in the country that invented it.

Whether you’re in Tokyo or Copenhagen, the style and performative aspects of big deal meals still takes their cues from the French. Only elaborate Mandarin banquets or the hyper-seasonality of a kaiseki dinner  match the formality and structure of haute cuisine.

These forms of highly stylized dining follow a path straight up the food chain. There are rules and they are there for a reason, usually having to do with how you will taste and digest what is placed before you. Light before heavy; raw before cooked; simple before complex — you get the picture
You usually begin with something fished directly from the sea. Oysters and other shellfish are a natural match, as is a shrimp cocktail. (A good old-fashioned American steakhouse has more in common, with high falutin’ French than people realize.)  Their natural salinity stimulates the appetite without weighing you down.
Man’s evolution into a more cultivated forms of eating is represented by bread, as is the domestication of animals by the butter slathered upon it. (If you want to stretch the symbolism even further, look at olive oil and the fermentation of wine and beer as representing mankind’s earliest bending of agriculture to his edible wants and needs.)
Image(Early man struggled with the whole pommes soufflé-thing)
From there things get more elaborate, depending on whether you want to go the seafood, wild game, or domesticated fowl route. Vegetables get their intermezzo by using salad greens as a scrub for the stomach to help digest everything that precedes them. (The French think eating a salad at the start of a meal is stupid, and it is.) You finish of course with cheese (“milk’s leap toward immortality” – Clifton Fadiman), and then with the most refined of all foods: sugar and flour and all the wonderful things that can be done with them. A great French meal is thus every bit the homage to nature as Japanese kaiseki, albeit with a lot more wine and creme brûlée.
As I’ve written before, French food is about the extraction and intensification of flavor. Unlike Italians and Japanese, a French cook looks at an ingredient (be it asparagus, seafood, or meat) and asks himself: “Self, how can I make this thing taste more like itself.” All the simmering, searing, pressing, and sieving in a French kitchen is as far a cry from leaving nature well enough alone as an opera is from the warble of a songbird.

With this in mind, we set our sights on two iconic Parisian restaurants: one, as old-fashioned as you can get, and the other a more modern take on the cuisine, by one of its most celebrated chefs. Together, they represent the apotheosis of the restaurant arts. They also signify why, no matter what some critics say, the French still rule the roost. Blessedly, there is no chance of encountering Finnish reindeer moss at either of them.

LA TOUR D’ARGENT

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If experience is any measure of perfection, then The Tower of Money should win “best restaurant in the world” every year, because no one has been serving food this fine, for this long, in this grand a setting.

A restaurant in one form or another has been going on at this location since before the Three Musketeers were swashing their buckles. What began as an elegant inn near the wine docks of Paris in 1582 soon enough was playing host to everyone from royalty to Cardinal Richelieu. It is claimed that the use of the fork in France began in the late 1500s at an early incarnation of “The Tower of Silver”, with Henry IV adopting the utensil to keep his cuffs clean.

Apocryphal or not,  what is certainly true is that Good King Hank (1553-1610) bestowed upon the La Tour its crest which still symbolizes it today:

History, of course, provides the foundation, and the setting continues to provides a “wow” factor unmatched by all but a handful of restaurants in the world. No place but here can you dine with the ghosts of Louis XIV, Winston Churchill and Sarah Bernhardt, all while seeming to float above Paris on this open door to the city’s past — all of it available to anyone with the argent to book a table.
But the proof is in the cooking — that has been, on our last two visits, as awesome as the view. It’s no secret that the glory had started to fade twenty years ago, and that Michelin — the arbiter of all things important in the French food world — had taken notice, and not in a good way.
A reboot of sorts was announced over five years ago, and by the time we visited in 2019, the kitchen was performing at a Michelin two-star level at the very least. Independent of the view, the service, and the iconic wine program, the cooking (and presentation) was well-nigh perfect. It was all you want from this cuisine: focused, intense flavors put together with impeccable technique and an almost scientific attention to detail.
When we returned this past winter, things seemed be have gotten even better. This time we showed up with a party of six. It was a busy lunch, filled with local gourmets and some obvious big business types, but also a smattering of tourists who (like us) had to keep picking their jaws up off the table as spectacle of Paris and its finest French food was spread before them.
I have never been to La Tour at night, but for my money, lunch is the way to go. The food is unchanged (lunch specials are offered, but you can order off the dinner menu and we did), and the sight of the Seine River stretching beneath you and Notre Dame and the Ile de la Cite in the distance are worth the admission all by themselves.
I suppose the ideal time to dine here would be arranging for a table at dusk, so you could see the lights of Paris come alive in all their blazing glory. But as I’ve argued before, lunch has always been the ticket for us when we want to eat and drink ourselves silly in a fine French restaurant.
There’s nothing silly, of course, about the food. This is serious stuff, but there’s nothing stuffy about it, despite its pedigree — French service having retired the snootiness thing decades ago. Meaning: if you show up and are well-behaved, they are friendly to a fault.
(Canard au sang with a side of burns, coming right up)
Credit for that has to lie with owner André Terrail, the third generation of the family to be at the helm. (The Terrails have owned the restaurant since 1911.) Since taking over a few years before his father Claude’s death in ‘o6, Terrail has kept all the historical provenance of his venerated birthright intact — upgrading the cuisine while still managing to keep the whole operation true to its roots. No easy feat that. We don’t know what the problems were twenty years ago, but on our last two visits, we didn’t see any missteps, either on the plate or in the service. And what appeared before us was every bit as stunning as any Michelin 3-starr meal we’ve had…in Paris or elsewhere.
You take good bread for granted in Paris, but even by those lofty standards, this small baguette was a stunner:

Image(Face it: you knead this)

Perfect in every respect: a twisted baguette of indelible yeastiness — perfumed with evidence of deep fermentation — the outer crunch giving way to ivory-pale, naturally sweet dough within that  fought back with just the perfect amount of chew. It (and the butter) were show-stoppers in their own right, and for a brief minute, they competed with the view for our attention. We could’ve eaten four of them (and they were offered throughout the meal), but resisted temptation in light of the feast that lay ahead.

Soon thereafter, these scoops of truffle-studded foie gras appeared, deserving of another ovation:

Image(Home cooking this is not)

From there on, the hits just kept on coming: a classic quenelles de brochet (good luck finding them anywhere but France these days), Then, a slim, firm rectangle of turbot in a syrupy beurre blanc, or the more elaborate sole Cardinale:

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….followed by a cheese cart commensurate with this country’s reputation.

The star of the show has been, since the 1890s, the world-famous pressed duck (Caneton Challandais) — served in two courses, the first of which (below) had the deepest-colored Bèarnaise we’ve ever seen; the second helping bathed in the richest, midnight-brown, duck blood-wine blanket imaginable. Neither sauce did anything to mitigate the richness of the fowl, which is, of course, gilding the lily and the whole point.

Image(You can never be too rich or have too much Béarnaise)

We could go on and on about how fabulous our meal was, but our raves would only serve to make you ravenous for something you cannot have, not for the next ten months, anyway.

Yes, the bad news is the restaurant will be closing today, April 30, 2022 for almost a year — until February 2023 — for renovations. This saddens us, but not too much, since we don’t have plans to return until about that time next year. In the meantime, the entry foyer probably could use some sprucing up (since it looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1953), and we have confidence Terrail won’t monkey with the sixth floor view, or this skinny little pamphlet he keeps on hand for the casual wine drinker:

Image(Not found: 2-Buck Chuck)

If the measure of a great restaurant is how much it makes you want to return, then La Tour D’Argent has ruled the roost for two hundred years. (Only a masochist ever left El Bulli saying to himself, “I sure can’t wait to get back here!”) Some things never go out of style and La Tour is one of them. We expect it to stay that way for another century.

À Bientôt!

RESTAURANT GUY SAVOY

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If La Tour represents the old guard of Parisian dining at its finest, then Guy Savoy — both the man and his restaurant — provides the connective tissue between haute cuisine’s past, present, and a future where new chefs will take up this mantle and teach the world what elegant dining is about.

The Adam Platts of the world may decry the “irrelevance” of the “old gourmet model”, but I stand with Steve Cuozzo in maintaining that the call for luxury and refinement in how we eat (admittedly at rarefied levels of expense), will never go completely out of fashion. Quoting our friend Alan Richman, Cuozzo writes:

As critic Alan Richman eloquently expressed it in the Robb Report a few years ago, fine dining is more than “a demonstration of wealth and privilege . . . It is an expression of culture, the most enlightened and elegant form of nourishment ever devised. Without it we will slowly regress into the dining habits of cave people, squatting before a campfire, gnawing on the haunch of a bar.”

All I can say to the Adam Platts of the world (and younger food writers who echo the same sentiments) is: If you think “the old gourmet model” is dead or dying, plan a trip to France, where formal restaurants are poised to come roaring back, indeed if they haven’t already done so.

Put another way: get your goddamned head out of that bowl of ramen or whatever Nigerian/Uzbekistani food truck you’re fond of these days and wake up and smell the Sauvignon Blanc.

Or just go to Guy Savoy.

(Savoy at his stoves)

If the world’s best restaurant can’t change your mind, nothing will. Before you accuse me of bandwagon-ing, let me remind you that I’ve been singing the praises of Savoy’s cuisine since 2006, and have even gone so far as to travel between Vegas and Paris to compare his American outpost with the original. Back then (2009), the flagship got the nod, but not by much.

Since its move to the Monnaie de Paris (the old Parisian Mint) in 2015, Savoy’s cuisine and reputation have attained a new level of preeminence (which is all the more incredible when you consider he has held three Michelin stars since 1980).

With mentors like Joël Robuchon and Paul Bocuse having departed to that great stock pot in the sky, and Alain Ducasse having spread himself thinner than a sheet of mille-feuille, Savoy now rules the French gastronomic firmament as a revered elder statesman. The difference being that he and his restaurants haven’t rested on their laurels, but are every bit as harmonious with the times as they were thirty years ago. To eat at Guy Savoy overlooking the banks of the Seine from a former bank window, is to experience the best French cooking from the best French chefs performing at the top of their game. There is something both elemental and exciting about his cooking that keeps it as current as he was as the new kid on the Michelin block back in the 80s.

Dining in the dead of winter can have its challenges. Greenery is months  away, so chefs go all-in on all things rooted in the soil. The good news is black truffles are in abundance; the bad news is you better like beets.

The great news is: in the hands of Savoy and his cooks, even jellied beets achieve an elegance unheard of from this usually humble taproot:

Image(Savoy heard we hated beets, so he tried to hide them from us)

As mentioned earlier, a French chef respects an ingredient by looking at it as a blank canvas to be improved upon. Look no further than this beet hash (Truffes et oefus de caille, la terre autour) lying beneath a quail egg and a shower of tuber melanosporum, both shaved and minced:

Image(Beet-i-ful)

Neither of these would I choose for my last meal on earth. Both gave me new respect for how the French can turn the prosaic into the ethereal –food transcending itself into something beautiful.

Which, of course, is what Savoy did with the lowly artichoke so many years ago, when he combined it with Parmesan cheese and black truffles and turned it into the world’s most famous soup.

There’s no escaping this soup at Guy Savoy, nor should you want to. Regardless of season, it encapsulates everything about the Savoy oeuvre: penetrating flavor from a surprisingly light dish, by turns both classic and contemporary:

Image(Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen)

We may have come for the truffles, but we stayed for the filet of veal en croute (below), once again lined with, you guessed it, more black truffles.

Image(Filet de veau et truffes cuits en croûte is French for: the most delicious meat dish in the history of the world)

From there we progressed through a salad of roasted potatoes and truffles, a bouillon of truffles served like coffee in a French press, then a melted cheese fondue over a whole truffle:

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…and even something that looked like a huge black truffle but which, upon being nudged with a fork, revealed itself to be a chocolate mousse. All of it served by a staff that looked like teenagers and acted like twenty-year veterans.

Suffice it to say the wine pairings were as outstanding as the food, all of it meshing into a seamless meld of appetite and pleasure — the pinnacle of epicurean bliss — high amplitude cooking where every element converges into a single gestalt.

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We then went nuts with multiple desserts, including a clafoutis (above) and the petit fours carte (like we always do), and rolled away thinking we wouldn’t be eating again for two days. This being Paris, we were at it again later that night, taking down some steak frites at Willi’s Wine Bar

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I write these words not to convince you that Guy Savoy is the greatest restaurant in the world, or even that such a thing exists, but rather to persuade you of the transcendent gustatory experiences you can have at places like it. Until I’ve been to every restaurant in the world, I won’t be able to proclaim one of them “the best.” Even then, the best would only be what best fit my mood, my likes and my expectations at the very moment I was there.

Adam Platt was right about one thing: “the best restaurant in the world” doesn’t have to be fancy. The best restaurant in the world can be something as simple as a plat du jour of boeuf bourguignon , studded with lardons and button mushrooms in a run-down bistro smelling of wine sauces and culinary history. It can be at a tiny trattoria on the Amalfi Coast or a local diner where everyone knows your name, or that little joint where you first discovered a dish, a wine, or someone to love. But your favorite restaurant, no matter where or what it is, owes an homage to the place where it all started.

Emile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” describes the markets of Les Halles as “…some huge central organ pumping blood into every vein of the city.” Those markets may be gone, but their soul lives on in the form of Parisian restaurants, which remain, one hundred a fifty years later, its beating heart. To eat in the great restaurants of Paris is to be inside the lifeblood of a great city, communing with something far bigger than yourself. To be in them is to be at the epicenter of the culinary universe and the evolution of human gastronomy — where the sights and smells of the food, and the way it is served, reflect the entire history of modern dining.

I Once Flew to Paris Just to Have Lunch

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I once flew to Paris just to have lunch

To Paris I went without care, without crunch

I once flew to Paris just ’cause I could

On a plane, on a whim, on the hopes of meals good

To Paris I flew, alone as it were

Leaving the wife to her toils, don’t think me a cur

A fantasy it had been throughout my manhood

To fly just for lunch, thinking I should…

Learn French, eat France, explore all things Gaulois!

My fate I once thought, it wistfully was

Today on this day, I thought of such things

And the swings of good fortune which enabled such flings

To meet Mariani, a gastronome friend

Paris did beckon us fellow curmudgeons

On landing that morn, I rubbed out the sleep

Where I’d dreamed to myself of lambs, ducks and geese

Image(Duck confit with summer vegetables)

To the Ritz as it were, did we travel that day

Where a meal was awaiting the French call déjeuner

The difference you see, is one of degree

For in France you can feast, and here we just feed

A pity it seems, so to France I did fly

To eat like a king and kiss troubles goodbye

How much do you ask, would be this repast?

Expensive it is, too much for mere mortals

But walking is free among these luxe portals

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This is insane, I thought on the Seine

To travel for food so many disdain

But undaunted I was, so to lunch I did go

For dining so fine it sets me aglow

The Ritz is The Ritz, as ritz as they come

As were our courses, one after one

So beautiful they were, elegant, precise

Both John and I could’ve eaten them thrice

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And the bread, oh the bread, for which French are so famous

Rising and baking Français are not aimless

Crusty, yeasty, with softness yet crunch

One travels an ocean to have it for lunch

Image(Pan-fried Dorade with mussel tortellini and artichoke purée)

And while we’re at it, did we mention the fish?

Nowhere on earth, is it found this delish

The French have a way with all things that swim

While America flounders with fins the most grim

Image(Raisin Einset en compotée et sorbet, crème montée et meringue croustillante)

Image(aka grapes in vanilla cream sorbet in meringue crust)

And it goes without saying that desserts reign supreme

Anywhere the French are whipping some cream

The Ritz, as you imagine, is kingly of sorts

When it comes to sorbets, meringues, tarts and tortes.

An art form lunch is, in France like no other

With wine, with cheese, with friends or a lover

I once flew to France just for a feast

On food so sublime all troubles did cease.

Image(Crab “Napoleon” with lobster sauce)

Image(Tomate stracciatella, crémeaux basilic poundré à l’olive noire – but you knew that)

 

 

Letter of the Year – The Meals of a Lifetime

Image result for Antoine's New Orleans

Bryan writes:

Indulge me for a minute. Thanks for your work. I think I was born with all the right inclinations for wonder and curiosity for all the good things the world has to offer. I stumbled onto your blog, via NPR, maybe as early as 2005, right after I got married. I really appreciate your “52 Essentials” book and still have my first edition!

I grew up in very religious home, and it wasn’t really until the summer of 2010 when I discovered wine at Steve Wynn’s place out at Shadow Creek. Before that, I didn’t know a Pomerol from a Pomeranian, but set myself to learning, at least from books, about these tiny areas and how the people and land have come together in such a meaningful expression of life.

I hadn’t ever even tasted alcohol until perhaps 2011, when I was 33. My then wife and I, along with our extremely bright Francophile 2 year old, went to France for a couple weeks in 2012 to see first hand what all the fuss was about. We went all around Normandy, and tried every stinky and homemade thing they wanted to expose us to (a cheese course? what is that?).

The kicker was when we visited a wine shop in their old town called Cave Voltaire, and I saw scores of different labels, all from right around the town! The shop owner described the wines, the patch of soil, and the guy who made it with so much love and reverence. I took home as many as would fit in my suitcase. And so cheap! People would visit at the tables outside the shop, late into the night and enjoy the local product. I just just couldn’t believe it.

 I just saw you post about your ‘meal of a lifetime’ at Lameloise, which got me thinking about this. I have had ‘lifetime’ meals I think, probably at a much simpler level, which really had so much to do with how I felt about everything around me in the moment. The most high-end experience I ever had was on your blog recommendation…. I took my wife to Alex at the Wynn, completely on a whim. That was a ton of money but it opened me up.

I never felt more cared for than when we went to Le Cirque for her birthday — though I still think that a $40 upcharge for truffle shavings on my risotto wasn’t worth it.

I mention this because this, as the ritziest of my experience, was not necessarily the best. I have never been to Burgundy, or Lyon, or the Alsace, or Italy even though I have a touch of Provencal/Piemonte ancestry. I felt bad when that ‘Bocuse’ fellow died because maybe I had missed the boat to see some heritage cooking.

SO….. I am stuck on the idea of “Meals of a Lifetime”. Where have your top 10 been found? How do you find them? How do you know them when you see them? I wouldn’t mind some guidance on how to find mine.

My response:

Dear Bryan,

Ahhh…the meals of a lifetime. How do I even begin to encompass a half-century of serious eating into a few short rules? Have there been only ten? Or perhaps many, many more?

I’ll start by listing them. with the caveat that, even as obsessive as I am about what goes into my mouth, I’ll probably miss a several memorable ones. Then we’ll explore how they came about — which, you’ll discover, runs the gamut from serendipity to meticulous planning, sometimes months in advance.

I like to break down my “Meals of a Lifetime” into three categories:  stepping up my game, the getting of wisdom, and reaping the rewards of a galloping gastronome.

The first category encompasses the epiphanies — those times in one’s early epicurean education when you sit up and take notice. When the clouds part and suddenly, with exquisite clarity, you understand something both elemental and ethereal has gone into what you are shoveling in your piehole.

 Upping My Game (1977-1991)

Image result for Four Seasons restaurant new york(The Pool Room of the Four Seasons)

Antoine’s – New Orleans 1965

Casa Grisanti – Louisville, Kentucky 1978

Pigalle’s – Cincinnati, Ohio 1979

The Mandarin – San Francisco – 1983

Le Français – Wheeling, Illinois 1983

Lutèce – New York 1986

Four Seasons – New York 1987

Lafayette – New York 1988

Your first step is acquiring information. Along with that comes the accumulation of experience. From there it’s a steady climb to knowledge, appreciation, and eventually, wisdom.

As with art, music, and other transcendent experiences, you have to be open to the educational process — needing both hunger and a thirst for knowledge based upon early exposures. If the bug doesn’t bite, you’re out of luck. A certain kind of person can tour the Louvre and say, “Those pictures shore were purty!” while another immerses herself in the history, philosophy, technique and imagination all around them.

If you look at a great restaurant as just another better-than-average re-fueling station, you will never enter the zone of curiosity, learning and refinement necessary to appreciate every nuance of a fabulous meal. It will be no more moving than a quick glance at a Vermeer or a momentary gaze at a Gentileschi.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that quantity equals quality, i.e., simply amassing information makes you an expert. (Many Yelpers, “influencers,” and bloggers fall into the delusion of thinking that just because they’ve been somewhere, they know something.) Restaurant-hopping is as poor a way to learn about food as concert-going is to learn about music.

Related image(Antoine’s now, just the way it looked then)

With me, the epiphanies started as a pre-teen when a small, gleaming silver tureen of lump crab meat bubbling in a butter-sherry sauce was placed before me at Antoine’s in 1965. I can still see the bright-tiled dining room and starched white shirts and just-so tuxedos of the waiters as they took the order from our table of six (Mom, Dad and four children).

Then and now, Antoine’s is a 19th Century throwback, and from the moment we sat down we knew we were in for something both historical and special. A great restaurant does that to you — makes you feel like a bond has been formed between you and it from the moment you take your seat. When you can still remember a meal 50 years later, it was a meal of a lifetime.

Most of my culinary education in my 20s and 30s took place in world-famous French-American restaurants. Before I got to them, however, I remember a pasta-tasting menu at Casa Grisanti in Louisville when I was a newbie lawyer. It was the first time the glories of northern Italian pasta were laid before me, and it was a revelation. Cream sauces instead of tomato! Light dustings of cheeses, rather than a mountain of melted mozz. Ravioli stuffed with real meat! And what is this stuff they call risotto? These were unknown to me and many Americans in the 1970s.

With Kentucky being to Italian food what Rome is to fried chicken, this might not seem like much now, but forty years ago, Casa Grisanti was the shit in Louisville (where I went to law school), and they treated a wet-behind-the-ears budding gourmand (who was just learning to be a grownup) with respect, and I’ll never forget it.

From there it was all about research. Decades before the internet, you learned about the best restaurants from newspapers and magazines and that was it. In the early 1980s, Playboy magazine published “The 25 Best Restaurants in America” by John Mariani, and I scoured the article (Yes, I got Playboy SOLELY for the articles!) for places to conquer. It was my road map for several years and led me and the second Mrs. Curtas to San Francisco’s The Mandarin — Celia Chang’s seminal Chinese restaurant — the first time we (and most Americans) discovered there was more to Chinese food than sweet and sour pork, egg foo yung, and General Tso’s chicken.

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We were novices and we knew it, but so was everyone else. The restaurants (heady with success, but still humble) treated everyone like a king. The only thing you were there for was the satisfaction of eating the best food money could buy. There were no pictures; there were no bragging rights. Because there was no one to brag to. I could’ve told everyone I knew in the early 80s that I had “bagged” these trophy restaurants and no one would’ve known what I was talking about.

What is so easy now took a lot of work forty years ago. You had to subscribe to the New Yorker to read Calvin Trillin, and New York magazine to read Seymour Britchky, and get Gourmet and Bon Appetit once a month to have even an inkling about what was going on on the national food/restaurant scene.

You’d watch Julia Child on PBS and when Jay Jacobs wrote a book (or James Villas wrote anything), you bought it. But mostly, you had to learn to cook (from cookbooks!) to learn about food.

Burying my head in the works of Pierre Franey, Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and Jacques Pepin gave me a foundation of knowledge of food that has paid dividends for decades.

And I haven’t even mentioned the ten years I spent immersed in Chinese cooking. (Another failing of the Instagram generation: precious few people under forty – even some notable food writers – know anything about actual cooking. All they know is gleaned from the insta-information the internet provides. This creates is a food culture where everyone’s knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep. Welcome to 2018.)

 The Getting of Wisdom (1992-2003)

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Le Grand Véfour (above)

L’Auberge d’Lill

L’Ambroisie

Georges Blanc

Troisgros

Dal Bolognese

Spago Los Angeles

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Trattoria Milanese (above)

Lameloise

Norman’s Coral Gables (closed)

Pierre Gagnaire

Le Cirque New York

After fifteen years of honing the fundamentals and calibrating my palate, it was time to get serious. You don’t realize it at the time, but what you’re doing (when you are constantly cooking, reading, traveling and tasting) is creating a mental Rolodex of flavors and sensations to call upon every time you try something new. I know many poor souls who are content eating the same pizza, from the same pizzeria every week for most of their lives. They have their favorite taco truck and steakhouse and Italian food and couldn’t be less interested in driving across town to sample something new.

But when you do, what you’re creating is a data bank — information you can draw upon to compare and contrast what you’re eating now with everything that’s come before.

And what I did in the 1990s was cram a fuckload of food data into my maw and brain. Two things always assisted me: an insatiable curiosity and endless appetite. (It also helped to live near New York City in the late 80s-early 90s, and have a job that flew me around the country.)

How did I find these life-changing meals? Again, through a lot of reading and research. Zagat guides were popular then and they helped, but it cannot be overstated that ethereal restaurant experiences are also the product of volume. For every jaw-dropping moment of epicurean bliss, there were dozens (nay hundreds) of comme çi comme ça meals.

Along the way, though, you will find many disappointments and travel up many a blind alley — in the restaurant world, coasting on reputation and phoning it in are time-honored traditions. And just because “everyone says it’s great” doesn’t mean it is. I’ve been let down by everyone from Thomas Keller to Charlie Trotter to Alain Ducasse, mainly because their restaurants seemed more impressed with themselves than trying to impress me. It is for this reason I seek out one and two Michelin-starred restaurants when I’m in France and Germany — like Avis, they usually try harder.

Explorers never start at the summit. Forty years ago, when it came to restaurants, it was impossible to start at the top. You didn’t even know where the top was. You had to work your way up — starting in your own humble kitchen, through less expensive restaurants of a genre, then, when the opportunity presented, to bigger and bigger game.

I’ve said it a thousand times: to get the most out of restaurants you have to eat out a lot, travel a lot, cook a lot and read a lot.

And that’s what I did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Reaping the Rewards (2002-present)

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Dal Pescatore (above)

Daniel

Cello (closed)

Le Bernadin

Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare (closed)

Schwarzwaldstube

Le Cirque (New York and Las Vegas)

Restaurant Guy Savoy (Paris)

Joël Robuchon

Narisawa

Pierre Gagnaire (again)

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Cecchino dal 1887 (above)

Cracco Peck

L’Auberge d’Lill (again)

Le Calandre Alajmo

La Bouitte

Edulis

Lameloise (again)

The Inn at Little Washington

Once you’ve put in the leg work, finding exquisite meals becomes easier. You’ve become a big game hunter who knows exactly where to look for your prey. Just as important, you develop a sixth sense about what to avoid. You’ve learned to skip the hottest places (always too stressed to serve you a memorable meal), and look for sustenance where your fellow diners are as serious about their dining as you are. (It will be a cold day in hell before I compete for some treasured on-line reservation at some mega-hot venue. Trendiness and transcendental dining go together like oysters and chocolate.)

Of course, being a restaurant writer, I’m privy to more tips and invites than most people. Being located in Las Vegas has been YUGE as well. The bar here may be set pretty low (being the the best known food writer in Vegas in like being the best violinist in Vermont), but the strength of our restaurant scene has allowed me to punch way above my weight.

This why I’ve been privileged to have had the great French chefs of our time (Savoy, Robuchon, Gagnaire, Boulud) personally serve me, and why other chefs and food writers provide an infrastructure of information I can call upon whenever I travel. Which is is how I found the beyond-gorgeous La Bouitte in the French Alps (a local chef – John Courtney had staged there years ago), and how the lovely Edulis came up on my radar (Toronto food critic Chris Nuttall-Smith said I “had to go there” and he was right — it was one of the finest, simplest, most perfect two hours of eating I’ve ever had.)

Many times, though, I’m just like anyone else, plowing through endless info on the internet, trying to find a good place to reserve a table when I’m out of town. As the Food Gal® says, in many ways we’ve come full circle. Where forty years ago you had to scrape and claw for scraps of information about where to eat when you traveled, now, the blizzard of white noise makes finding quality information just as difficult.

But research is just as essential today as it was in 1977. Google is essential but the first page is almost always worthless — that’s where all the paid TripAdvisor, Booking.com, and Yelp stuff is. Dig a little deeper, go to pages 2-4 of a google search to find independent articles/reviews/websites about where you’re headed. Go to bookstores (or Amazon) and buy books! People still publish interesting/informative guidebooks to eating in certain cities and they can help immensely to steer you to hidden gems.

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And don’t forget wine writers and wine websites — great food and wine go hand in hand, and wine writers know a thing or two about out-of-the-way jewels known only to the industry. That’s how I found Auberge du Pot d’Étain (above) when I was in Burgundy a year ago. It will never make anyone’s “50 Best” list, but Burghounds the world over know about it, and the wine list alone is worth a flight across the pond.

Finally, remember that nothing worthwhile comes easily. Many of the world’s greatest restaurants are hard to find, hard to book (they can be quite small), and even harder to get to. Le Calandre (my most recent MOAL) is in a forgettable suburb of a small Italian city, and takes four distinct rides  (plane, train, rental car and taxi) before you arrive at the front door. Our cab driver in Tokyo is still looking for the entrance to Narisawa.

Alsace, Chablis, Beaune, L’Auberge d’Lill, Troisgros, Dal Pescatore, and the Black Forest are all pains in the ass, location-wise, but once you get there, something magical happens.

Thank you, Bryan, for indulging me on my trip down memory lane. I’ve given you a very long answer to a very short question, but I hope I’ve also imparted some useful information.

In the end, though, the best answer is always the shortest: How have I found my meals of a lifetime? By always looking for one….and never forgetting that climbing a mountain is so much more rewarding than being helicoptered to the top.

Best and bon appetit,

John