Having traveled near and far, some of the Let's Go researchers have decided to share their favorite meals while abroad. Here we present the top cuisines that will be sure to make your mouth water:
Heather Buffo, France
The best food I had, by far, hands-down, no questions asked, was at a creole restaurant in the Bastille neighborhood of Paris. The chef and his family own the restaurant and are from Île de la Réunion in the Indian Ocean (east of Madagascar). They serve the food in the pot straight from the stove. We had chicken in some sort of sauce with tons of spices I couldn't pronounce with rice and a delicious side of red beans in another awesome sauce. Foodgasm would be an understatement of what I experienced during that meal. The restaurant was tiny and hidden behind scaffolding (you wouldn't know it was there unless you walked in). The interior was entirely underwhelming: a rather pathetic beach mural, some ugly floral curtains on the windows, and the napkins were bright blue. But it just made the food that much better.
Reina Gattuso, Italy
Manarola, Cinque Terre: octopus salad with potatoes, tagliatelle with shrimp, white wine, bread, fizzy water, espresso, and grappa at the end. The octopus was tender and perfectly salty, the potatoes melty-buttery and drenched in the best olive oil I have ever had in my entire life, the shrimp—legs and head and eye stems and all—sweet and juicy and amazing. The grappa tasted like glorified nail polish remover, but I pretended to like it. Anyway, I sat there pouring olive oil and vinegar from the bottles directly onto my spoon because the olive oil was the fruitiest fullest richest most wonderful olive oil and the vinegar the sweetest thickest richest most complex incredible vinegar I have ever had in my entire life. Also, I was a little tipsy.
Anthony Ramicone, Portugal
My best meal happened to be in Braga, which isn't renowned for being particularly chic or cosmopolitan, but nevertheless, this meal was fantastic. The restaurant had your standard modern decor (black and white furniture, sharp lines, etc.); the most interesting part was the ceiling which had pictures of strange, naked, bionic women taken by the photographer up the street. Very avant-garde. Anyway, started off with a pitcher of the white sangria, which was crisp and refreshing. I then dug into some delicious lamb chops served with a special butter that had some kind of magical nasal-passage-opening ingredient. This was accompanied by perhaps the bougiest mashed potatoes I have ever seen. I'm not sure how bacon bits and cheese looked so refined, but they made it happen. On the side was a half of a juicy, cooked tomato with oil and herbs. Everything was so good that I still can't decide what was the best thing on my plate. Since everything else was so phenomenal, I had to spring for dessert. Two words: cinnamon mousse. It was so rich and so tasty that I am now disappointed by the inferiority of every dessert I see.
Christine Ann Hurd, Austria
There is only one food group in Austria that is appropriate for review: coffee. Anyone can make a Wiener Schnitzel and tweet pictures of it to his constituents, but a brew that doesn't taste like it moonlights as a rainbow-shimmering gasoline puddle is worth its weight in…apparently, sterling silver (at $0.30 per oz.). The best coffee I had was in Graz. For someone whose adrenal glands gave their last surge of happiness sometime in the late ’90s, coffee has been the apple of my uncontrollably twitching eye and desire of my ever-palpitating heart since our first encounter when I was no higher than a Starbucks counter. This mélange slipped down my throat like a slow-motion animation of gold being poured into a mold. The foam wasn't so thin as to awkwardly float upon the top, but not heavy enough to feel like I was drinking a cappuccino instead. The coffee itself had notes of toffee and feelings, the later of which stayed with me long into the night as I gently cried caffeinated tears.
Ian Armstrong, Spain
“Life is short—eat dessert first.” It’s one of those tired old quotes that we’d all be tired of if it didn’t justify skipping whole grains and heading straight for whole pints of ice cream. Nevertheless, the whole eating backwards thing has caught on like wildfire in Astorga, a bite-sized little town in Castilla y León. Astorga is well known in Spain for its cocido maragato, a traditional meal in which a variety of meat dishes are served first, followed by garbanzos, then finishing with soup—in other words, moving from heavy to light dishes instead of the other way around. After a long morning of tough researching (the Chocolate Museum was particularly strenuous), I went to a famous restaurant near the cathedral to try this local specialty, and was treated to the best meal of my trip for €20. There weren’t many people there—something which can be said of most restaurants in Spain as a result of la crisis—but that just meant I got more attention lavished on me by Santiago, the serious but affable waiter. He brought out each dish in the distinctive order, always asking me if I wanted more of anything. Everything was so good that I had (free) seconds of everything, and I also made good use of the bottle of wine he left on my table. As I laid down my soupspoon, for the first time in my life I was in physical pain because my stomach was so full. Of course, dessert was still on the way.
Chris Holthouse, Italy
For all the right reasons, it is not an easy thing to pick my favorite meal of an 8-week tour in Italy. In Naples it was the pizza and in Ravenna it was the piadina. One cannolo I had in Sicily was a serious contender for the title. But looking back, my favorite meal, for both its oddity and its deliciousness, was a bowl of blueberry pasta with an incredible meat ragu in Cortona. The dish, which was inconspicuously set in the menu between other less-questionable pasta choices, arrived in front of me as a heap of steaming, visceral-looking, purple confusion. I was skeptical at first, I must admit; but one taste of this stuff and I was hooked. The pasta ribbons seriously tasted like blueberries, which was basically the coolest thing of all time, and the meat ragu wasn’t some pansy-ass, mostly-tomato-sauce smear—it was legitimate cow chunks, which sated my inner carnivore, to be sure. I still have no idea who came up with this dish, but I doubt they’ll get much competition: no one else has the gall to try something so strange, and no one else could actually pull it off.