World’s 10 best cities for foodies
Increasingly, there is a particular type of person that travels to eat.
For us, monuments and museums have had their day; shopping is passé, and the hotel is all but irrelevant. The eating is everything.
After all, you have to do it three times a day anyway, so you might as well make it the center of the trip.
It takes effort. Research is done before you leave, options pored over, reviews consulted. And it can be disappointing: all cities have dud restaurants, all cities have tourist drags, most restaurants have a bad night every now and then.
But the good cities have restaurants that make the duds fade from memory.
My rule of thumb? A successful trip is when you find a couple of meals that stay in the memory. Food that resounds and stays with you for years to come, comes to mind when you detect a particular aroma or eat a particular dish that makes you long to return.
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1. London, for offal
Think English food and some still think watery vegetables, overcooked meat and chips. Fools.
In the past couple of decades, London has emerged as a serious place to eat -- brilliant tapas, high-end French, the best pizza outside of Naples (Franco Manca, unit 4, Market Row, Brixton, to be precise; +44 20 7738 3021).
But modern British food is what makes this place such a pleasure to eat in, and it’s best at Fergus Henderson’sSt. John (26 St. John St.; +44 20 3301 8069) -- there are two restaurants, a hotel and a bakery, all functional and white.
Henderson is known for exquisitely plain food -- think ox heart with beetroot, or Jerusalem artichokes, gently roasted. But the bone marrow salad is what defines this place: chunks of shin, roasted, served with chopped up parsley and sourdough.
Deadly simple, and sublime.
2. New York, for pork
New York has more obsessive eaters per capita than anywhere else, and pork is chiefly in their affections.
There’s Southern-style barbecue at Williamsburg’s Fette Sau (354 Metropolitan Ave., Williamsburg, Brooklyn; +1 718 963 3404) and the life-changing roast pork sandwiches of Porchetta (110 East 7th St.; +1 212 777 2151).
But if there’s a chef who has typified modern New York eating, it’s David Chang and his three Lower East Side restaurants, all called Momofuku.
Chang is Korean-American and Momofuku serves modern Korean, where we can recommend the whole slow-cooked pork butt (book ahead; take a lot of people) and the pork buns, which are a twist on classic Peking duck, only 10 times as good.
When I was last there, it was a toss-up between the Empire State Building and Momofuku. Momofuku won.
3. Portland, Oregon, for punk locavorism
A year or so back, one of Portland’s best-known chefs got in a fistfight about local pork.
Across the city, menus change daily depending on what’s available, while chefs play with local heritage ingredients and single-source meat and your waiter, likely, has tattoos.
All of which would be very boring if the food weren’t this good. You can see this at Gabe Rucker’s Le Pigeon(738 East Burnside St.; +1 503 546 8796), in the city’s northeast -- all brick walls and distressed timber.
There are wooden tables and a long bar looking into the kitchen. Think local organic pork chops, brined and pan-roasted, served with flash-roasted green beans, ricotta and chili. It’s a punk take on French food, and it is very good indeed.
4. Singapore, for street food
There is fine dining and there are international chains, and often these have air conditioning.
But we go for streetfood: some decades ago, city authorities moved the island’s ubiquitous hawker stalls inside huge covered halls, where you can get hawker classics that come with hygiene standards.
You will find yourself making excuses to have a second lunch, or perhaps a pre-dinner -- there’s everything from Malay-style curry laksa to the city’s specialty, fish ball noodle soup to mee goreng.
Start at the Maxwell Road Food Centre near Chinatown, two long halls filled with some of the best food you will find anywhere.
5. Shanghai, for dumplings
It is a dumpling that somehow speaks for the Shangainese food, which is possibly the most under-rated in China. All dumplings here are good, xiaolongbao are the best.
You can find them all over the city, a delicate parcel filled with pork or crab and stock, carefully gathered closed at the top and steamed. When you eat them, you bite a hole in the top, suck out the soup and then eat your way through the rest of it.
The best can be found at Jia Jia Tang Bao (90 Huanghe Lu, near Fengyang Lu; +86 21 6327 6878), a bare-bones place just of Nanjing Road where the dumplings are heavenly. There is no English sign, no English menu and where you’d better not muck around ordering -- though they know what you’re here for.
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It's official: this dish is not called "chicken without a sex life" anymore. Next time you travel to Beijing, you will be less likely to find a particular Chinese specialty on restaurants' menu: hilarious Chinglish dish names.
The Beijing authorities have published a manual listing the official English names for 2,158 Chinese dishes and 944 foreign foods, hoping to help the city's 70,000 restaurants rectify their English translations.
Chinglish is funny, but might be misleading
Jointly published by the Beijing Foreign Affairs Office and Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Programme (BSFLP), the 196-page book covers most mainstream Chinese dishes in the country's eight most influential cuisines, from the RMB-5 hand-pulled noodle soup to the extravagant braised abalone and seafood in casserole.
"[Chinglish] might be a funny culture to international travelers, but the translation of dish names shall not be misleading to foreigners," said an anonymous officer from BSFLP, a governmental organization dedicated to raising Beijingers' awareness of foreign languages.
If you have never read an English menu in a local Chinese restaurant, here are a few examples of what you've been missing.
- Chicken without a sex life (童子鸡): A poultry dish which only uses mature but yet-to-mate chickens due to their tender texture. Or simply call it Spring Chicken as the book suggests.
- Red burned lions' heads (红烧狮子头): Braised pork balls. "Lions' heads" is the direct translation of its Chinese name, which reflects the huge portion of each meat ball.
- Tofu made by woman with freckles (麻婆豆腐): Mapo Tofu, which is named after its creator, a freckle-face woman ("mapo" in Chinese) from Chengdu who lived during the Qing Dynasty.
- Lamb piece explosive f--k onion (爆炒羊肉): There is really no excuse for this one and, in case you're wondering, it's sautéed lamb and onion.
More on CNNGo: 40 Shanghai foods we can't live without
(Got better examples? Share them in the comment section below.)
Different reactions
The book, which is called "Enjoy Culinary Delights" (美食译苑), was first published in 2008 as part of Beijing's linguistic rectification campaign for the Beijing Olympics.
The current version was updated in May 2011 by a team of linguistic consultants employed by BSFLP.
The organization held a meeting to officially promote the book in early March and the book has since been pushed into the public spotlight.
An anonymous official from Beijing Foreign Affairs Office told Beijing Daily that the book tried to translate the dish names from many different angles, such as depicting the ingredients or explaining cooking techniques.
"Some names are translated into English by putting Chinese history, culture and the names of famous people relating to the dishes," the official said.
But not everybody in the restaurant business is thrilled by the goverment's efforts at culinary and linguistic bridge-building.
"We will not update our English menu based on this book," said Mr. Wang, Dongbeiren restaurant chain's communication officer.
"Our restaurant has special names for each dish. For example, we have 'Communism-style' stewed beef with potatoes and 'mother-in-law' stewed chicken and mushroom."
According to Wang, the company has invited native English speakers to proofread the English menu.
"We also put pictures on the menu so foreign diners will have no problem understanding the dishes," added Wang.
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BSFLP noted that this book was not a mandatory guide in Beijing but restaurants are encouraged to print English menus following the official terms.
Read the book's digital version here.
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