Vedat Milor's Blog

We’re in Longyearbyen on Spitzbergen Island of Svalbard, above the 78th parallel. That’s as far north as the northernmost tip of Greenland. To get there, we sailed in the Hurtigruten ship Trollfjord for two days north across the Arctic Ocean from North Cape, Norway, which is the farthest north point of land in continental Europe. When you dock in Svalbard, you’re greeted by a sign warning of the dangers of polar bears.

This wouldn’t seem to be promising territory for fine dining! But Longyearbyen is home to Huset, the northernmost restaurant on Earth. Amazingly, it holds one of the biggest and most extensive wine cellars in Scandinavia.

Huset, which means house, was built in the 1940’s as a community hall for the coal miners and their families who were the only residents of this remote island. By the 1970’s, the building came to house a restaurant to serve the growing population of what was still a one-company mining town. The menu then featured polar bear meat.

In the 1980’s tourists began to visit Svalbard, drawn by its bleak arctic beauty. Hroar Holm, Huset’s manager, came up with the idea of offering fine dining and began to collect wine. He insulated the basement set in the permafrost to provide ideal stable year-round temperature for a cellar. The concept is the same as the Svalbard Global Seed Bank which relies on the permanent cold to preserve samples of all the world’s agricultural seeds.

The collection grew to over 20,000 bottles. Today the list has more than 1000 different wines. I don’t think Michelin has visited Svalbard, but Wine Spectator did recently and awarded Huset their Best of Award of Excellence.

Over the years, Huset’s commitment to serious fine dining grew. Chef Alberto Lozano was recruited by Hurtigruten Svalbard to helm the restaurant. He’s from Albacete, Spain and brings some Spanish elements into his cuisine, but his palette has become first and foremost Arctic. He showcases not just Arctic ingredients, but local methods of preservation and preparation.

Chef Alberto Lozano

We sometimes talk about going to the ends of the earth to dine, but Svalbard is truly the end of the earth. It’s the furthest north land mass on the planet.

More than half of the archipelago is covered with glaciers. Here’s a shot I took on the fjord in which Huset’s town Longyearbyen sits.

The near complete absence of fertile soil and the extreme climate make growing anything here—except for a few herbs in a greenhouse—impossible. But there is much to hunt and forage.
Reindeer, seal, ptarmigan, mushrooms, various kinds of seaweed some herbs and berries—cloudberry, bilberry, mountain sorrel—head the list of indigenous Svalbard foods.

Fish are abundant. I asked one local about the fishing here. “It’s pretty good. We went out last week and I got about four or five hundred.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Four or five hundred kilos,” she explained. On rod and reel. In a couple of hours.

Our dinner at Huset was a fourteen-course tasting menu. We were brought glasses of a California sparkling wine as soon as we sat down. I generally choose standard rather than prestige wine pairings, but interested to see what their famous cellar held, I went for their top-level pairing. I was somewhat disappointed to see that only about half of the selection came from their cellar collection and half were recent acquisitions. But nevertheless, there were a good number of wines in the pairing that I especially enjoyed.

The amuse bouches began with Svalbard Cold Cuts and Bread.

Reindeer heart, smoked and dried, and reindeer chorizo were served with a black shallot paste and a Pan de Aceite, showing the chef’s Spanish roots.

Dry aged reindeer neck

Local beer sourdough bread came with butter cut in the shape of a ptarmigan and infused with that bird’s dried and finely ground meat. I loved the bread but found the butter an unsuccessful attempt to combine a local ingredient with a foreign one. Ptarmigan are native to Svalbard but butter, of course, is not.

The reindeer chorizo, on the other hand, used Spanish paprika that the chef brought from a trip to his home to make an exceptionally flavorful and enjoyable local/foreign sausage.

I’d like to include here the chef’s description of the care they take to use every part of the reindeer they get from a local hunter and trapper:

Once the reindeer arrives in our kitchen, we hang the meat for an additional two weeks, building on the time it spent in the trapper station. We then carefully separate each muscle to ensure the highest quality throughout the process.

The finest cuts are vacuum-sealed and frozen, while some legs undergo a traditional Spanish ham curing method, which takes at least nine months. This involves curing the meat in salt for 14 days before hanging it, covered in Spanish paprika, to develop rich flavours.

We transform the neck into cold cuts, and with the leftovers, we create chorizo, pâté from the liver, smoked heart, and brined air-dried tongue—delicious when fried.

Finally, we roast the whole carcass to produce a rich demi-glace. Any leftover fat is repurposed in our kitchen or shared with our friends at Green Dog [a Svalbard dog sledding service company.]

This meticulous process allows us to honour every part of the reindeer while bringing the authentic taste of Svalbard to the table.

Next among the starters came Rype (the local name for ptarmigan) served two ways: pralines of ptarmigan leg meat prepared confit-style with black currant compote, and “anchovies,” crafted from breast muscle rillettes, preserved in Røros butter, and served with a lacto-fermented tomato sauce on toasted seed bread, replicating the classic anchovy experience. On top of the “anchovies” were seeds found in the bird’s crop, a local traditional practice.

The amuse bouches concluded with Svalbard ingredients in three examples of preservation:

Svalbard cod marinated in escabeche and topped with its foamLocal pickled fjellridderhatt mushrooms, hand-picked by the kitchen teamLacto- fermented radish.

All three preparations were fascinating and tasty.

These opening dishes did a fine job of introducing us to local ingredients and preparation methods, increasing our curiosity of what the rest of the menu held in store.

To conclude the amuse bouches, we were served this “umami shot,” a dill and sea buckthorn cocktail with cloudberry foam in a miniature guksi, the traditional Sami drinking cup.

Then our server ushered us from the lounge where we were first seated to the downstairs dining room.

The first of the main courses was Seal Mojama in ajobianco with fermented tomato water, almond and parsley oil.

I found this dish to be a hodge-podge of ingredients that, while enjoyable individually, didn’t enhance one another. Mojama is the Spanish technique of preserving meat or fish by salting, pressing, soaking and drying. It makes tuna into “ham of the sea.” Our Spanish-born chef used this method to cure the seal meat. The seal was tender and had a pleasant saltiness. On its own, it would have been interesting, but why was it floating on the ajobianco, and what were the almonds doing there?

As an aside here, I want to note that I am holding Chef Alberto Lozano to the same standard that I would a top restaurant in mainland Europe. I recognize that he faces challenges that a chef in Paris would never dream of having to deal with. Almost everything has to come across the Arctic Ocean, often ordered weeks in advance. The pool of competent help is tiny or nonexistent on Svalbard. The availability of locally foraged ingredients is subject to the unpredictability that the extreme arctic environment imposes. And the arrival of customers is far harder to forecast than on the mainland. But he aspires to world-class excellence, and I hope that my critiques will be taken for what they are: suggestions that a well-wisher hopes will be helpful.

To accompany the seal – there’s a phrase I’ve never used before! – the sommelier brought a Louis Michel Chablis Vaudesir 2004. A promising start to the journey ahead of us.

Next came a dish called King Crab Art.

Finely sliced Norwegian king crab was combined with local flowers, fermented red cabbage, pickled cloudberries and dill to make an abstract impressionistic painting on the plate. I found this combination of ingredients somewhat more successful than the previous dish. The fine slicing of the crab meat gave it a pleasingly delicate texture, and the fermented cabbage and pickled berries enhanced it in an interesting way. But honestly, I found the attempt at artwork off-putting and would have preferred a more straightforward presentation of these ingredients.

With the crab, we were brought a Marcel Diess Engelgarten 2020, a simple and pleasant wine, but surely there were more interesting single-grape Alsace wines in their thousand-bottle collection that would have done a better job.

The next dish was the best so far: Scallop and Sea Urchin. It’s hard to go too far wrong with those two ingredients, but here the creativity of the chef shone through, enhancing them both in surprising ways. The scallop was cured with amazake, a sweet thick sake in which the rice starch is fermented into sugar instead of alcohol. This gave the already excellent local scallop a unique creamy texture and sweetness. But where is the urchin, I asked? The urchin is the sauce, I learned. It was emulsified with black apple into a thick sauce that combined the deliciousness of the roe of local urchins with the concentrated flavor of apples fermented at controlled high temperature. Atsina, an anise-flavored green grown in Huset’s greenhouse, added just a subtle additional flavor. This was an excellent dish.

Accompanying the scallop/urchin dish was a 2009 Reichgraff von Kesselstatt Nies’chen GG, a creamy and floral Riesling, just off-dry. It complemented the dish well, but again I wondered if this is the best that Huset’s storied cellar has to offer.

Next came Arctic seafood rice with langoustine tempura.

The rice was cooked with squid ink, giving it a sweetness, and topped with dabs of mayonnaise, some seasoned with piquillo peppers (no doubt from the chef’s native Spain) and some with locally harvested plankton.

The chef came over to our table to tell us about this dish. The Norwegian langoustine was not cooked in the usual tempura method, he explained. The shell of the langoustine was dried and ground into a fine powder. This powder, instead of conventional tempura batter, coated pieces of langoustine tail before it was fried. He wants this to give the experience of the entire shellfish in each bite.

Alberto was charming. His enthusiastic sincerity made it clear he is on a mission that he cares deeply about. He loves the extremes of Svalbard and passionately wants to share the flavors this environment produces.

To accompany the seafood rice dish, the sommelier brought an Anne Amie Prisme 2008 from Oregon, a pinot noir blanc.

Chef Lozano introduced the next dish, cod kokotxas with ramps pil pil. Cod is one of the only ingredients that is common in both Norway and Spain, he explained. I was eager to try this Norwegian version of kokotxas, but it fell short of expectations. These cod cheeks should be gelatinously tender, but they were not. They were quite tough, probably because while the chef was chatting with us, his sous chef cooked them at too high a temperature. This was an avoidable mistake and made me sympathize with the chef, whose enthusiasm was undiminished in the face of the challenges of running a world-class restaurant near the North Pole. The pil pil sauce was excellent but it couldn’t make up for the toughness of the kokotxas.

What did ease my disappointment at the texture of the cod was the 1996 Savennieres Becherelle from Nicholas Joly, the first wine that seemed likely to be from their cellar collection rather than a new acquisition. This was a serious wine with complexity of taste and aroma and a unique personality.

We were served next a palate cleanser, an ice of fermented yellow beetroot with locally foraged mountain sorrel. It was excellent. Fermentation is a necessary method of preservation on Svalbard, and it also gave a zing to the beet.

The next dish was an unqualified success: Rype and sea buckthorn. Rype is the Norwegian name for ptarmigan, the only fowl that overwinters on Svalbard. Its winter coat is white, letting it camouflage in the snow. It tastes much like the pheasants I used to hunt when I lived in the Midwest. Rype breast came with a sea buckthorn sauce and a fermented chanterelle.

What pleased me most about this dish is that it combined local ingredients prepared simply and in familiar and necessary ways for the arctic. Without trying to be overly fancy, it shared some true Svalbard taste experiences.

Sea buckthorn is a common plant along the arctic coasts, where its salt tolerance allows it to thrive. It is an important source of vitamin C in the local diet. Its orange berries have a distinctive bright and sharp flavor.

A 2014 François Mitjaville Roc de Cambes accompanied the rype dish, probably another recent addition to the cellar but nonetheless an enjoyable Bordeaux, predominantly merlot, with a complex and lingering finish.

We were then served these lovely house-made brioches with smoked butter, black garlic and local seaweed. The server pointed out that the rock on which she presented them was found locally by the chef and contained fossilized tropical plants, showing that Svalbard was once located much closer to the equator. The tropical forest that grew here gave rise to the coal that was the reason for the island’s being settled and for Huset originally having been built.

Next came an entirely mushroom-based dish. We were there in peak mushroom season, mid-September. Since all of Svalbard is above the tree line, mushrooms that grow in association with tree roots—and that includes most of the mushrooms we eat in temperate climates—cannot grow there. But there are a number of varieties that thrive there, and people avidly forage them.

Common finds include Agaricus aristocratus (known as the polar mushroom or aristocratic agaric), which is large, fleshy, and thrives in areas with coal residue in the soil. Another favorite is Lepista multiformis (fjellridderhatt or clustered bonnet), which had been served to us in the amuse bouches.

I don’t know which species we were served in this dish, but they were tasty. The centerpiece was a mushroom “fiskboller,” or fish ball, a common Norwegian dish, accompanied by a pickled mushroom over rye bread “soil” and herbs from Huset’s little greenhouse. The server poured a mushroom broth and garum sauce around the composition. Garum, or fermented fish sauce, brought depth and umami to the dish.

To accompany the mushrooms, the sommelier brought a Barolo, Anselma Vignarionda Riserva 2011. Its tar and smoked meat bouquet worked well with the dish.

The next dish was one of my favorites: reindeer with a cherry glaze and a Jerusalem artichoke. The reindeer loin was tender and gamey, but in a good way. I suspect it was dry aged for a good long time. The cherry glaze was darkly sweet and perfectly made. It enhanced the meat nicely. The Jerusalem artichoke held a surprise: when I cut into it, out came a Jerusalem artichoke puree.

A 2000 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle accompanied the reindeer. Its age had mellowed its intensity but not its complexity. It was a fine match for the dish.

We were next served popsicles of fermented honey with sea buckthorn heart and flowers, and a glass of Mark Angeli Bonnezeaux Coteau du Houet 2004, sweet and floral.

Chef Alberto came out to serve the dessert, a beetroot filled with beet and rhubarb cream and a sorbet of Norwegian strawberries. Pickled rhubarb was fashioned into a stem for the beet. He explained that nothing could be more Norwegian than these three ingredients. I thought it was delicious–tart/sweet and refreshing.

With the dessert came a glass of Niepoort vintage port, 2003.

Petit fours were polar bear gummies of black koji and elderflower, and in the whale’s mouth, pralines of plankton, cloudberries and lavender. The swirling colors of the pralines were said to represent the northern lights that we saw that night.

The refined setting amid the harsh arctic landscape, the warmth of each of the staff and the passionate commitment of the chef to honor Svalbard’s environment and flavors all combined to make our dinner at Huset an unforgettable experience. I’ve pointed out a few shortcomings, but my overall impression was extremely positive. Is it worth going to remote Svalbard for? Absolutely, but don’t go only for that meal. Chef Alberto Lozano would be the first to agree that Svalbard itself is a fascinating destination, worthy of a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

In addition to Amador and Steirereck am Stadtpark, while in Vienna we also had a dinner at Sacher Hotel’s Rote Bar, which specializes in traditional Austrian dishes. All three were memorable meals—see my reviews of the first two—but after all that urban sophistication, we were yearning for something more country. We found that at two places, Taubenkobel and Steirereck am Pogusch. We spent two nights at each and loved every minute of our times there. I’ll review Taubenkobel here and then Steirereck am Pogusch separately.

Taubenkobel means dovecote or, more prosaically, pigeon coop. Its name modestly understates how charming the place is.

Taubenkobel is owned and run by its chef, Alain Weissgerber and his wife Barbara, daughter of the original founders, Walter and Eveline Eselböck. Under Alain’s leadership, Taubenkobel won two Michelin stars. He was named Gault&Millau’s chef of the year in 2024, an impressive honor for the tiny town of Schützen am Gebirge.

Chef Weissgerber’s menu focuses on cuisine of Austria’s Burgenland, with seasonal and foraged ingredients from the local meadows, hills, and Lake Neusiedl. Originally from Alsace, Weissgerber’s evolution as a chef included stints at Steirereck (under Heinz Reitbauer) in Vienna, Arzak (with Elena Arzak) in San Sebastian, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris, Tantris in Munich, and Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Los Angeles. This diverse background brought him to his focused style and strong preference for ingredients from the immediate local surroundings.

We planned to have his full tasting menu the second night of our stay, so we asked if we could have some a la carte items for our first dinner. We were especially interested in the wood-grilled whole turbot, for which the chef was apparently willing to make an exception to his locally sourced ingredients policy. They said it’s wild-caught in a Croatian bay in the Adriatic.

The size, placement and unique design of the oven/grill led me to believe it was at the heart of Alain’s cooking. They seated us at a wooden table right next to it so we could watch the show. It took only a few minutes watching him work with the wood fire to realize that he is a real master of its uses.

He came back and forth from the kitchen, where he was preparing a whole menu for a room full of guests, to grill the turbot for us. He also used the wood fire to make a butter caper sauce and a plateful of young artichokes. This all combined to make the tastiest turbot dish I’ve ever had.

Young artichokes to accompany the turbot

That night he also made a dessert for us on the wood fire simply called apple tart with hand-whipped vanilla ice cream. Do you like tarte tatin? Doesn’t everyone? Every bite of this tart is the very essence of the caramelized apple goodness that makes tarte tatin so delicious. The ice cream was spectacular. Neither the tart nor the ice cream look impressive in a photo, but if I ever find myself on death row and am asked what I want for my last meal, I will ask if it includes dessert. If so, I will order this tart of Chef Weissgerber.

Forgive me if I’m describing dishes out of sequence. I’m carried away by my enthusiasm for Weissgerber’s food. None of it will look like anything special on Instagram. That’s because he is aiming for one thing to the exclusion of all others: deliciousness. As another example, take this a la carte starter: smoked egg with Ruster almonds and Perigord truffles. Yes, I know. It doesn’t look good. Trust me, it was incredibly tasty. The uncooked egg was smoked for a long time in the wood oven. Ruster almonds are a traditional treat of sweet smoked almonds from the nearby town of Rust. The truffles were incorporated in abundance and not shaved conspicuously on top.

On the back of Taubekobel’s a la carte menu is a story. A little digging revealed that it’s the work of Alexander Rabl, one of Austria’s most renowned culinary writers, frequent evaluator for Gault&Millau, editor-in-chief of several food Austrian food magazines, etc., etc. His story treats fire as a character. Fire had become angry with humans for largely abandoning wood fires for cooking. It planned its revenge on humanity, but then discovered the oven of Alain Weissgerber at Taubenkobel. It happily took up residence there, feeling that it had finally found its purpose.

Our a la carte meal finished with a selection of cheeses from nearby farmers, each one full of character and perfectly ripe.

For our second evening at Taubenkobel, we had Alain’s full menu:

I’ll review some of the highlights:

Heart cherries (herzkirschen) are a local variety, especially big and sweet. They are topped with finely grated goose liver and acacia blossoms. Each of the three elements contrasts distinctly with the others—piquancy, earthiness and sweet fruit—a pleasing combination in this first of the amuse bouches.

Our server suggested we fold up the pepper leaf around the lightly marinated carabineiro and its condiments and eat it like a taco. Pepper leaf (Pfefferblatt, foraged locally) imparted a subtle spicy, herbal, and slightly anise-like flavor to the excellent prawn.

In the next amuse, thinly sliced radish and foraged clover leaves, drizzled with lovage oil, topped a goat cheese mouse in a delicate tartlet, a taste-awakening combination.

The next was the least visually appealing but, as it turned out, my favorite taste experience of the four amuse bouches. Little roasted potatoes of a deeply yellow-fleshed and flavorful Styrian variety were coated with edible clay and finished in the wood-fired oven. They were to be dipped in a green almond cream. The contrast between the crunchy clay and the fluffy hot potato was interesting. Cooking potatoes in clay like this is an ancient practice dating back to the first domestication of the potato in the Bolivian Altiplano near Lake Titicaca.

Sometimes I find that amuse bouches at top restaurants are so complex that it is hard to tell what you are eating–often a little one-bite tart of many ingredients that become indistinguishable in the mouth. This was not the case at Taubenkobel. Each amuse was distinctive, focused and comprehensible. I thought this bode well for the rest of the meal.

The first actual starter was described as marchfeld artichoke, raisins and iced foie gras. Tender young artichoke leaves were individually arranged into a bouquet. Some barely raisinified grapes hid inside. The server dusted the arrangement with finely grated shavings of iced foie gras. The three ingredients went so naturally together it made me wonder why I’d never had this combination before.

A small serving of caviar accompanied the artichoke dish.

Next came a cup of consommé of lion’s mane mushroom, reduced to an extreme concentration level of mushroomy essence. Along with it was a black pearl king oyster mushroom filled with hazelnut cream. Both the lion’s mane and the black pearl are exceptionally flavorful mushrooms. The combination highlighted their different tastes and made a statement about how varied and delicious mushrooms can be.

Note the dove-shaped pitcher, a cute reference to the name Taubenkobel.

The next dish was pike-perch (zander) with zucchini blossom, chanterelles and fig leaf oil. The fish is caught by local fishermen in the Neusidlersee, just a few miles away, and delivered same-day to the restaurant. It looked raw but I think it was lightly marinated, giving it a nice texture but not hiding the ultrafreshness. I don’t understand fig leaf oil. I’ve been seeing it used by a number of chefs. It has an intense green color, beautiful on the plate, but not much of a distinctive taste.

Pigeon from southern Burgenland with summer spinach and coriander was excellent. The pigeons are dry aged in a little room right next to the wood-fired oven and grill where they were cooked. This was to me the best dish of the meal, not counting the previous day’s turbot, which was in a class by itself. I attribute the excellence of the pigeon to Alain’s delicate skill with wood fire cooking. Like he did with the turbot, he used the different effects of the wood grill and the oven to bring out the best in the pigeon, giving a nice crust while maintaining the tenderness of the meat. The freshness of the spinach and coriander and the richness of the demiglace-like pigeon sauce added to the perfection of the dish.

As a bridge to dessert, we were served an alpin cheese and pickled apricot dish. Apricots are celebrated in Burgenland and the cheese was from a nearby farm. Both were delicious.

The dessert was described as Seewinkler Mieze Schindler, champagne granita, begonias. Mieze Schindler are a treasured variety of strawberry grown by the nearby Seewinkler group of small farmers. They have that intense flavor of wild alpine strawberries that is sadly lacking in commercially available berries. They are so beloved in Burgenland that it was thought unnecessary to mention on the menu that they are strawberries. Alain Weissgerber featured local ingredients in every dish of this menu, and it’s fitting that he concluded it with a local delight that is so fragile that it doesn’t travel beyond the area.

I recommend Taubenkobel wholeheartedly. Its regional focus, the care taken in selecting ingredients, the chef’s skill with wood fire cooking, and the exceptional charm of the inn all make it a one-of-a-kind experience.

Last summer we visited Costa Brava for one week and had some memorable meals. Here is a quick summary of the restaurants.

1. ESPERIT ROCA

The Roca brothers cook some of the traditional dishes that put them on the world gastronomic map in this new hotel-restaurant complex not far from Girona. Our experience, save for a very awkward five minutes when entering the complex and waiting – with many others – for somebody to usher us to the dining room, was top notch. Enjoyable one bites inspired by the Roca brothers’ voyages around the globe set the feisty tone. The excellent apple and foie timbale and the cold zucchini cream with pistachios and quisquillas shrimp (at least as good) are faultless, multi-dimensional and harmonious entrees. The charcoal grilled Mediterranean sole is not noteworthy (despite the five sauces), but both the suckling pig with pig trotters and espardenyes (sea cucumber) and grilled breast of pigeon with stuffed pigeon thigh are outstanding. The pig-espardenyes combination is my candidate for the best land and sea-type dish. If you feel like smoking after the meal, you can take a “trip to Habana”, a very classical dessert of Jordi. I also salute Josep Roca for the excellent and fairly priced wine list.

EVALUATION: 8.5/10

2. VICUS

We visited Vicus, which is in Pals, twice in a week as I always look forward to a visit there. The cooking is contemporary, colorful, with absolutely top notch ingredients and intelligent but not self-consciously creative combinations. The dishes are at the very least good, but often excellent. In our two visits we found the following top notch: Zucchini flower tempura stuffed with brandade of bacalao; Bonito in carrot escabeche; cigalas (escamarla) plancha which was the best of the trip; the freshest possible gambas XL of Palamos plancha; black rice with squid and pear aioli; crunchy lemon custard. The wine list is also very good featuring some natural gems with reasonable prices.

The only problem with Vicus is that it is not in my neighborhood.

EVALUATION: 8/10

3. ELS TINARS

This is one of our favorites in Costa Brava with one drawbeck: the wine list is outdated and too pricey with very scant choices to please the connoisseurs. But the cooking is very good, and the selections are almost all exciting. Hence we visited twice. The ajo blanco soup with tomato granita that the chef credits to El Bulli was so tasty and right for summer nights that we ordered it twice. Jamon bellota was also high quality. Besides both the arroz with pork feet and cigalas and the patates tinars (crisp potato chips topped by the most gelatinous parts of butifarra sausage like ear, feet and nose) are most satisfying dishes for gourmands. Their version of beef wellington was also quite good, although not as memorable as the other dishes I mentioned. In the second visit we repeated some dishes, but we enjoyed a fresh and expertly cooked besugo a la brasa, rather than red meat. We also indulged in a rich gnocchi of creamy potato, butter and imperial caviar. Also don’t miss the torrija with a caramelized and crisp top, lavender ice cream and lemon curd.

EVALUATION: 8/10

4. VILLA MAS

The cuising is fresh, bright and plant based. These are the words that come to my mind when I think of the two consecutive meals at this special spot for summer meals. Perhaps the two dishes that exemplify Villa Mas the best are the “tomato salad from our garden, spring onions and basil”, and the “calamar de potera de Palamos, acqua pazza”. Both are seasonal, simple but delicious and well executed dishes with local products. The chef here seems to value simplicity and authenticity over sophisticated and daring creations. Clearly they also buy top notch products as our Cantabrian anchovies and 3 different Jura comte cheese with varying maturation-combined with 2015 Vin Jaune “Les Bruyeres” from B&S Tissot”- were excellent. You will be very pleased if you don’t expect culinary fireworks. But expect to see an amazing number of some of the most interesting wines, esp. French Burgundies, for fair prices. The problem for a wine lover is that, since you have to choose 1 or 2 bottles at most, you will depart regretting the gems you left behind!

EVALUATION: 7/10

5. TOC AL MAR

Too bad that the owners over-expanded and let the quality slip in this popular restaurant at the Aiguablava beach in Begur. But given that the only other restaurant was a disaster we ate there 5 consecutive days. We tried almost everything on the menu, including the rice dishes. Almost everything was consistently mediocre with 2 exceptions. The Cantabrian anchovies priced the same with Villa Mas, were of very low quality, extremely salty and hardly cleaned (that is, still full of small bones). The only satisfactory dish was grilled langouste or spiny lobster (llagosta) from Cap Begur, but even this was not perfect as the presentation seemed perfunctory and it grilling technique was sub-par (too fast and too high temperature) compared to other Spanish restaurants. It seems like they are the victim of overcrowding and overextending (catering business).
The wine list is pretty good. Wine mark-ups are normal.

EVALUATION: 5/10

My dinner at Es:senz was one of my all-time favorite meals. As we go through the dishes, I’ll try to explain why this was.

Chef Edip Sigl was born in Hatay, Turkey, a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. It’s known as a crossroads of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Anatolian culinary cultures. Hatay is said to be home to over 600 dishes. Sigl moved to Cologne, Germany, where his love of meze—small bites of distinct traditional ingredients—fused with western ideals of high-end cooking. In my conversation with him, he said while he cares about how food looks on the plate, he cares even more about clearly defined and perceptible tastes of each ingredient. This certainly came through in his food.

Es:senz is in southern Bavaria at Das Achental resort in Grassau. Bavaria treasures gemütlichkeit, an untranslatable virtue that means something like cozy comfortable hominess. Es:senz takes gemütlichkeit to a higher level. The warmth of the surroundings and the genuine friendliness of the whole staff are the platform for a dining experience of exceptional refinement.

The meal began with four or five pre-amuse bouches that Sigl calls apero. The first is called The Cloud. It’s staggering to think of the effort that goes into making this little bite. The foam is somehow made of emulsified vinegar. Inside it, finely shredded smoky bacon and lightly crunchy breadcrumbs combine to give three distinct and surprising sensory experiences. To add to this, the stick itself is unexpectedly tasty.

The next aperos displayed rather than hid their complexity.

“Rossini,” a play on tournedos Rossini, combined wagyu tartare, foie gras and Périgord truffle, topped with a dab of caviar.

The tartlette was described simply as Breton lobster, lettuce, orange. While a few piquant flowers and leaves added subtle taste and visual notes, the textures and flavors of the main ingredients came through distinctly in the mouth.

In the macaron, a meringue shell held tartare of local Chiemgau trout topped with an herbal bouquet modestly called mustard pickle. Perfect ingredients perfectly composed, as was the case with each apero.

Bread and brioche was listed on the menu as a course of its own, and deservedly so. The house-made breads were truly superlative.

After a few bites I said I would enjoy the bread course as an entire meal. “We take our bread seriously,” the server replied. She then proceeded to drizzle an herbal mustard sauce on the butter plate to enhance the alpine salted butter.

Two other dishes held butter spreads decorated and infused with a “Chiemgau herb garden.”

The bread and butter course sets a very high bar for bread servings in any other top restaurant.

As a further accompaniment for the bread, they served a dish of pointed peppers with wild garlic bud, homemade cream cheese and chardonnay vinegar.

After all this, we hadn’t even had the amuse bouches yet. The two actual amuse bouches came next, one of pike perch and the other called fried chicken. The Chiemsee pike perch (zander), lightly marinated, sat in an herbal broth of elderflower, rhubarb and radish oil.

The “fried chicken” amuse was a little masterpiece. Topped with Périgord truffle and N25 caviar, a crispy moist morsel of fried chicken came with a miniature bowl of perfectly reduced chicken broth.

We were then invited to choose between two menus, the six-course Chiemgau Pur, consisting of only ingredients from the immediate local area around Chiemsee, and Chiemgau Goes Around the World, eight courses inspired by Chef Sigl’s travels. I picked the Around the World and Jenna picked the Chiemgau Pur. I thought that would facilitate this review, but we each liked our dishes so much that we were reluctant or downright unwilling to share them!

Around the World began with Hamachi / N25 caviar / leek oil / eggplant / lemon grass. It was an opening statement from the chef that he embraces ingredients that were truly from “around the world.” Unctuous Japanese hamachi topped with Chinese-raised caviar (N25 has become the go-to caviar in many top restaurants) was a decadently delicious combination.

Chiemgau Pur’s first dish was Chiemsee whitefish / anise / dill vinaigrette / cucumber / celery. Every ingredient seemed chosen to emphasize the bright, clean freshness of the fish with bracing notes. Whitefish is a small fish caught in the nearby Chiemsee, the biggest lake in Bavaria. It is a regional favorite for its sweet flaky white flesh.

Next on the Around the World menu came Langostino / lettuce / green almonds / piment d’espellette / bisque. It came in three portions:

The tail of the langostino sat in its excellent piment d’espellette sauce. If better langoustines exist, I have yet to taste one.

As was the case with many of the dishes, the server left an extra little container of the sauce on the table. And as was the case with many dishes, we used a lot of it. In texture and flavor, each was a textbook example of the ideal of that sauce.

The superb langostino bisque—velvety smooth and deeply flavorful—was enhanced with trout roe and droplets of a concentrated herbal oil (I think it was dill.)The claw, clearly from a very large langoustine, had a sweet and smoky glaze that underscored the tenderness of the meat.

Next on Chiemgau Pur was Crayfish /beans / chanterelles / tomato / sherry. I can’t comment on it because after one taste, my companion, swooning with a smile of satisfaction, refused to share it.

Around the World featured next “Cataplana” / plaice / cuttlefish / tomato / Tagglasca olive. It aimed to raise cataplana, a humble Portuguese seafood stew, to a higher level and succeeded elegantly. It would be repetitive to say that each ingredient was the best of its kind and perfectly cooked, as that was true of every item of every dish.

Chiemgau Pur’s next offering was Char by Thalhammer Mühle / sorrel / bacon / white pepper. Each of these three added a sublimely appropriate nuance to the excellent piece of char caught that day in Chiemsee.

A Bresse pigeon came next on Around the World, beautifully presented on a bed of aromatic leaves and flowers.

Then the breast and leg were individually served, each separately cooked and differently seasoned, sauced and glazed, accompanied by beetroot, porcini, herb hollandaise and Périgord truffle.

Bresse pigeons, like their chickens, are first raised free-range for a few months, feeding on local plants and insects, and then finished on a diet of grain and milk. The resulting birds are both more flavorful and more tender than others. This was evident in the inherent quality of Es:senz’s pigeon.

On top of that, the loving care given to its cooking is clear to see in these pictures. The glaze of the leg was smokier and more barbecue-like than that of the breast. In both pieces, the flavor and texture of the exterior contrasted beautifully with the tenderness and gaminess of the meat. I have never enjoyed a pigeon dish more than this one.

While I was enjoying the pigeon, my companion’s Chiemgau Pur gave her Szegediner: Achental wagyu / pointed pepper / sauerkraut. Just as the cataplana dish raised a humble and distinctively seasoned stew to a higher level, the szegediner dish appeared to similarly elevate that paprika-based Hungarian stew.

However much I went on about how good the pigeon was, she said she did not feel a bit jealous. While I didn’t get to taste it, I was struck by how each ingredient of the szegediner dish was positioned on the plate to be eaten for maximum enjoyment while simultaneously making a beautiful visual composition. As with every dish that Chef Sigl prepared, no ingredient was just for show, yet all were visually striking.

My next dish was a cheese course: Epoisses / pineapple / garlic bread / 20 year old balsamic vinegar. It was excellent for what it was, but I found its flavors too intense to fully enjoy after the delicateness of the pigeon.

It was time for dessert. Chiemgau Pur transitioned into the sweet courses with Beetroot: goat cheese / yogurt / hazelnut. I didn’t taste it, but Jenna loved it.

Around the World’s first sweet course was Saffron Ice / fermented rose hips /pumpkin seed oil. Why have I never had saffron ice cream before? Clearly because it takes a lot of expensive saffron to give the intensity of flavor that this one has. But if it weren’t for the cost, saffron would be right up there with pistaccio as a classic ice cream flavor. And this one was– unsurprisingly after the perfection of each of the savory courses– superbly made. The fermented rose hips gave just a hint of a contrasting flavor.

Pumpkin seed oil is an indespensible ingredient in Bavaria and Austria’s Styria. It is one of the essential flavors of the region, used in everything from scrambled eggs to salads to desserts. A local might have found it comfortingly familiar with the exoticness of saffron. Crowned by the finely crafted sugar spiral, this was a masterful dessert.

I didn’t get to taste Chiemgau Pur’s next dessert, Apricot / milk / nut butter / amaretto / pumpkin seed oil. It was certainly beautiful on the plate. Apricots are well loved in the Chiemgau region and the nearby Wachau valley. They are grown to give the pleasure that this fruit can provide but never does in commercially available varieties. There are even apricot festivals in the area. Together with the pumpkin seed oil, this combined two local classic flavors into a lovely looking dessert.

Around the World’s final dessert was Exotic / passionfruit / mango / ginger / coconut. All those things are exotic to Bavarians. To us residents of Kauai, they’re as familiar as pumpkin seed oil is to them. It was yet another beautiful and delicious composition.

The two menus converged with the petit fours. They were much more than the mere afterthoughts that such little after-dinner treats often are. Each combined the same excellence of ingredients, preparation and presentation as the rest of the meal. And as was the case with the rest of the dishes, each was modestly under-described on the menu:

Homemade pralines, lemon, apple pie, nut acorn, Aperol spicy ginger, toffifee.

I’ll talk a little now about the wine. I really enjoyed Es:senz’s sommelier. Many in his profession are knowledgeable, but sometimes they slip into a rehearsed spiel about each wine. Es:senze’s sommelier was, in contrast, conversational, personal, and sincerely interactive. “How would you compare this Alsace pinot gris with Zind Humbrecht’s?” I’d ask, for example. “Oh, I like Zind Humbrecht too,” he’d say. “I think this one is just as nuanced but perhaps a bit more elegant,” We then might have a little conversation about one or two under-rated but interesting wines. He seemed to enjoy it as if he were talking with a friend.

There was of course a pre-planned list of wines for the pairing, but he sometimes deviated from this based on our interests and preferences. Uncommon and much appreciated!

Here are a few of the more interesting wines that he shared for the two different menus we had.

By the way, the name Es:senz is as carefully crafted as its dishes. I chatted with chef Edip Sigl after dinner and he explained it. E and S are his initials, so the name means Edip Sigl’s sense. Essenz also implies getting to the essence of each ingredient. And essen, of course, means to eat in German.

To achieve the goal of getting to the essence of each ingredient, Edip insists on using no extraneous components. Every dish contains the minimum number of ingredients, with each of them serving a clear role and each providing a clearly discernible taste experience. This is in marked contrast to many of even the most highly regarded restaurants which tend to overcomplicate dishes. For me, this rigorous simplicity was the key to the pleasure that each of Edip’s courses gave.

I’d also mention that Edip prepares all this with a surprisingly small kitchen staff. “Your saucier is a maestro,” I said. “Actually, I make all the sauces by myself. I love doing it too much to share that job with anyone else,” he said.

It takes a lot to stand out among Michelin three-star restaurants. Es:senz definitely does. Three stars is supposed to mean worth a journey. This one absolutely is.

Am I ungrateful, I wonder, to write anything but an unqualified rave review of Juan Amador’s Vienna restaurant? It was, after all, the first restaurant in all of Austria to receive three Michelin stars, and it held them alone for over a decade until Steirereck came along.

Michelin stars are indispensable to the financial success of a high-quality restaurant, so it is understandable that a savvy chef must try to create what the Michelin reviewers want to see. Social media too plays a role in the viability of top restaurants, so it is likewise understandable that chefs aiming to draw in affluent and discerning diners must pay attention to what works there.

Both of these things are, sadly for me, at odds with what makes a restaurant enjoyable. The thing I value most is simple: the food has to be delicious. Instagram cannot depict how the food tastes. It can only show what it looks like. Michelin seems to value the cleverness of a chef in crafting unique and original compositions of ingredients more than it cares about how pleasurable it is to eat the food.

Juan Amador is a chef of the highest level of skill and creativity. You can almost hear how the gears turn in his mind when you are presented with one of his dishes. They are clever. Original. Ingenious. So much so that how they taste seems to come second in importance. It’s not that they aren’t enjoyable. Most of them certainly are. But I am left with the impression that he is hoping diners will say, “Oh, that’s so clever,” rather than, “That was delicious.”

Amador sits in a brick lined former wine cellar that was originally a part of Vienna’s underground water infrastructure.

The sole dinner option is the tasting menu. Here it is:

The first snacks are good examples of what I mean by prioritizing cleverness over taste.

The Viennese Tafelspitz 2.0 is meant to convey the essence of that dish in two mouthfuls. The spoon, shown for scale, is miniature, maybe a centimeter across. The soup is a very reduced beef broth over one star-shaped wafer each of carrot and potato. The roule is filled with beef tartare and topped with horseradish. Is the dish perfectly crafted? Yes. Is it better in any way than tafelspitz? Not really.

The next bite is called Walk in a Forest. I’ve had similarly titled dishes elsewhere, for example at Manresa, that were enjoyable compositions of vegetables, each carefully selected for excellence, individually prepared and combined into a composition in which each bite gave a distinct pleasure. This was nothing of that sort. The whole thing is one small mouthful, apparently sculpted with tweezers and a magnifying glass: an impressive miniature, but not especially enjoyable to eat.

I could go on in a similar vein about the rest of the snacks, but in fairness to chef Amador, each was masterfully prepared. Here are pictures of each:

Mar y muntanyaPotato crustillant, tuber melanosporum, quail egg

As an add-on, I ordered this composition, highly recommended by the server: oysters, caviar, beurre blanc ice cream, almond milk foam, tamarind oil. Each component was perfect. The idea of making ice cream out of beurre blanc is original, but did I enjoy it more than I would have a mouthful of excellent vanilla ice cream? Not really.

The bread and butter were delicious and, frankly a relief from the preciousness of the starters. The olive oil is a special cuvee made exclusively for Amador, and truly outstanding. The spread is made from buffalo milk with lovage oil. It was excellent.

Was I unfair in my criticism of the first dishes? Each showed the highest levels of craftmanship and creativity. But thinking it over, I stand by what I said. The chef prioritizes cleverness over pleasure. This was foreshadowed by the architectural style sketches of some dishes that are displayed in the entrance way. Here are a couple of them:

A server noticed me looking at them and came over to discuss them. “Yes,” he said proudly, “Chef has a clever and original concept for each dish he creates.”

Moving onto the main dishes, presented in a sequence Amador calls Momentum, I will try to be more balanced in my critiques.

The carabineiro with ajo blanco (a cold Andalusian soup that predates gazpacho) was an unqualified success. The prawn was an outstanding example of its species—exquisitely fresh and flavorful and cooked the exact right amount. The soup and the slight crunch of the green almonds complimented it nicely.

The Patagonian toothfish was flaky and sublimely tender, and the “escabeche,” really just a single ingredient (perhaps a slice of summer squash) stand-in for that complex preparation, the leek oil and the hazelnut foam underscored the fish beautifully. The percebes, however, did not do justice to how delicious those barnacles can be. In an attempt to pare them down to a simple bite, the flavor and texture that makes them so sought-after were mostly lost. Again, the tendency to favor cleverness over taste showed itself.

The turbot from Brittany, salted Wachau apricot, porcini and sweetbread was excellent. The sauce, which was a surprising Jerusalem artichoke foam, provided a subtle nuttiness that unified the perfection of each of the ingredients. I found no fault with this delicious dish.

Parfum de Siam was an excellent venison dish, so titled for the green Thai curry flavored sauce. The cauliflower foam, puree and wafer were masterful. Altogether a great composition.

The first dessert, Strawberry Fields Forever, is described as containing two varieties of strawberry, Mieze Schindler and Mara des Bois. Both are famed as exceptionally flavorful and delicate. I would guess the former were used in the rosé champagne ice while the latter were served whole.

The second dessert, pêche melba, was a deconstructed version of Escoffier’s classic. It was certainly enjoyable, but I didn’t think it improved upon the original.

We were now more than four hours into this odyssey and I was happy to see that the mignardises, which Amador calls pequenas loquras, arrived all together rather than one after another. They were tasty and, though I hesitate to reuse the word, clever.

My experience at Amador left me mildly exasperated and craving the excellence of simplicity. Is there any place these days that provides that? Happily, our journey took us next to two places that did: Taubenkobel in the tiny Styrian village of Schützen am Gebirge, and Steirereck am Pogusch, the country outpost of the owners of Steirereck am Stadtpark, which I previously described as a strong candidate for the best restaurant in Austria. My meal at Amador, Austria’s only other Michelin three star, made me feel more certain that Steirereck deserves that title. I will review Taubenkobel and Pogusch soon.

Austria is not generally known for culinary innovation. Its best-loved dishes are judged not for creativity, but for perfect adherence to traditional standards. Tafelspitz—boiled beef and root vegetables—and wienerschnitzel have not varied in a very long time. In the whole country there was just one Michelin three starred restaurant until this year when Steirereck was awarded its own. We had lunch there and found it to be miraculously original in Austria’s tradition-bound gastronomic landscape.

Steirereck means the Styrian corner. Styria, the region known as Austria’s green heart, is the home of many of the country’s iconic and ancient traditional dishes. The restaurant began over fifty years ago as a small local place owned by the Reitbauer family. Nothing about its origins, and certainly not its name, led anyone to envision the temple of originality it would become.

In the late 1990’s the family’s son Hans Reitbauer Jr joined the company with ambitions to transform Steirereck entirely. His efforts were met with skepticism and a fair amount of hostility from the public, fearing the loss of a well-liked homey traditional place. But with the backing of his family, he and his wife Birgit persevered and created something truly special.

The architectural marvel they built to house their vision alerts visitors that they’re about to enter something refined and entirely modern. Visually, it is a shocking surprise among the classical monuments of imperial Vienna.

Floor to ceiling mirrored glass panels bring the lovely green Stadtpark right into the interior. The design breaks up the space into a number of nooks that give diners the feeling of being in small intimate rooms.

Styria is Austria’s principal wine region and the sommelier was impressively knowlegable of the best Austrian wines, of course in addition to those of the rest of Europe as well. He brought us glasses of a Thomas Schwarz bubbly to begin the meal.

Before the amuse bouches, a gentleman whose sole job seemed to be bread sommelier wheeled the bread cart to our table. Did he visit each of Vienna’s best bakeries that morning and select their best? I suspect so. The cart held an astonishing variety of excellent breads.

A succession of amuse bouches foreshadowed the philosophy of the meal to come: complexity and originality not for their own sake, but to give pleasure. Many of the components came from Steirereck’s own farm at Pogusch and a rooftop herb garden.

We chose the seven-course tasting menu. Each course had two dishes to choose from. We usually each picked a different one.

The two first courses were:

Tomato Diversity with Citrus, Lavendar and Chamomile

Each little grilled tomato was prepared separately and then combined into a lovely composition. Some were marinated with citrus, bergamot and lemon balm, others pickled with lavender, verjus and lemon verbena, and others marinated in mushroom tea. A couple pieces of confit kohlrabi and some red onion pickled in chamomile blossom fond completed the composition. It sat in a soup of jellied tomato water and chamomile blossom oil. Each tomato vied for the title of best tomato I’ve ever tasted.

Young Carrots with Enoki, Apricot and Marigold

The carrots were glazed with cardamom butter, accompanied by steamed enoki mushrooms braised in carrot mushroom jus. The apricots were preserved in spiced verjus. Yarrow, amaranth and anise hyssop were marinated in ginger and lemongrass. Orange marigold oil brought the vegetable mixture together.

These first courses raised a question. Was it really worthwhile to combine so many ingredients? I’m not entirely sure, but each bite hit with an initial pleasure and then asked us to decipher its component flavors, an enjoyable exercise.

To accompany the first course dishes, we were brought a Nikolaihof Riesling and a Krutzler Gemischter Satz from Austria’s Südburgenland. Rather than blending wines from different vinyards, the gemischter satz approach grows several varieties in a single small plot, harvests and vinifies the grapes together.

Second courses were also entirely plant-based:

Sunflower with Chanterelles, Tomato and Field Cucumber

The grilled and glazed heart of a sunflower sat atop roasted chanterelles with preserved sunflower stems, dried field cucumber and tomato, in a pool of roasted sunflower and pumpkin seed sauce spiced with coriander, lime and perilla oil, an extract of the seeds of the shiso plant.

Young Artichokes with Melon Cucumber, Groundcherries and Poppy.

A young artichoke was split lengthwise, one half braised with madeira and thistle oil, the other steamed and glazed with poppy miso. Grilled and marinated melon cucumber and groundcherry slices sat on top of sauteed baby spinach, young coconut, and dried groundcherry, all in a pool of artichoke braising jus, coconut water, lime and poppy seed oil.

The chef makes so much use of groundcherries—they must be in season—that I thought I ought to mention what they are. They’re the fruit of the physalis plant. They grow encased in a paper-like skin and have a pleasantly tart flavor. They’re also known as cape gooseberries or Chinese lanterns.

With the second courses we were served a French Anjou Noir from Domaine Belargus, and a Polz sauvignon blanc from South Styria.

Next came two fish dishes:

Catfish with String Beans, Plum and Lemon Savory

Crisp grilled catfish and steamed yellow string beans, topped with a scoop of greengage plum jam studded with lemon savory leaves from the Steirereck garden all sat in a foamed string bean butter sauce.

Eel with pointed cabbage, spruce tips and pepperoncini

Flamed Bodensee eel, glazed with groundcherry and spruce tips sat next to braised and roasted pointed cabbage (spitzkohl) with little radishes in pickled cabbage butter sauce with pepperoncini and smoked eel oil.

The fourth course, which we both chose, was Kid Goat Ribs with Pointed Pepper, Elderberries and Grapefruit. It was accompanied by a Envínate Migan Tinto from the Canary Islands, vibrant, fruity and minerally.

Charcoal grilled kid goat ribs were deboned and glazed with elderberries. They sat on top of a delightful salad of sugar snaps, watermelon, grapefruit, shiso and lemon verbena in a pointed pepper watermelon sauce with lemon verbena oil.

Next came a dish I hesitated to try: Fawn with Summer Squash and Lemon Balm. Did I want to eat Bambi? Well, we think nothing of eating young lambs, I reasoned. The fawn was exceptionally tender and flavorful.

Along with it we were served Pranzegg from Italy’s Bolzano Valley basin, made from old vines of indigenous varieties and biodynamically grown.

The meat was roasted and glazed with red currant, fennel and Szechuan pepper, accompanied by lemon balm marinated spinach and summer squash with preserved salted lemon, sauced with an exquisite fawn velouté.

It was time for the cheese course, and one cart wasn’t sufficient to hold them all. The cheese sommelier brought two carts with a wonderful variety of soft, hard, strong, mild and blue cheeses. We took his recommendations for the best local cheeses. Each was perfectly ripe and excellent.

To go with the cheese, our principal server offered some bread varieties we had thus far neglected to try.

The desserts were in all respects up to the quality of the meal.

Bitterorange of Schönbrunn Palace with Buttermilk, Comb Honey and Bee Polen.

A granita of a variety of bitterorange once favored by the emperor was topped with honey and pollen from Steirereck’s hives and a delightful bitterorange cream.

Our server brought the honeycombs in a specially designed cart that hummed with the recorded sound of the bees. The sound effect was so convincing that I wondered if they were going to fly out into the room.

Viennese Mangomelon with Fennel Pollen, Passionfruit and Rice.

Mangomelon is a cucurbit that produces orange colored mango-flavored fruit. They were candied, dried, and made into an ice cream.

Mirabelle Plums with Coconut, Fig Leaf and Groundcherries.

A caramelized puff pastry shell held marinated Mirabelle plums, coconut, pecan praline, groundcherries, rummed raisins and roasted coconut ice cream in a whisky Mirabelle sauce with fig leaf oil.

With the desserts, we were served a 2019 Stadlman Auslese, and Nolandes Gut Warth Honigwein, essentially a mead.

The mignardise were each created in honor of specific pieces by Strauss, whose two hundredth birthday is now being celebrated.

Would we care for some herbal tea to go with the petits fours? Our server brought a cart of growing herbs and snipped some to make a concoction for us.

Not one but two other carts, wheeled in by their expert, brought a great variety of after dinner drinks, one cart full of local schnapps and the other of imported ones.

Espresso came accompanied by a couple of delicate little treats.

Steirereck is in my opinion one of the best restaurants in the world and a strong candidate for the best in Austria. If you visit Vienna, it would be a mistake to miss it.

I had dinner at Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare this week and enjoyed it thoroughly. Some consider it New York’s longest running soap opera of fine dining, and indeed its history is dramatic.

Moe Issa, born and raised in Brooklyn, began his career as a Pepsi truck driver in the 1980’s and 90’s. During those years, he dreamed of opening a high-quality neighborhood grocery store like some he admired in Manhattan. He opened Brooklyn Fare at the corner of Schermerhorn and Hoyt in downtown Brooklyn. The community welcomed it for its carefully chosen produce and sophisticated grocery items.

Not content to be only a grocer, Moe recruited César Ramirez, formerly chef de cuisine at Bouley, to open a restaurant in the back of the store. It thrived beyond what anyone could have expected in this modest setting, becoming the first Brooklyn restaurant to earn three Michelin stars. The NY Times described Issa as “Medici to Ramirez’s Donatello.”

In 2016 he opened a branch of Brooklyn Fare in Manhattan’s Hells Kitchen neighborhood, and Ramirez moved the restaurant, once again to a room in the back of the grocery store. It became one of the city’s most lauded fine-dining establishments.

Their partnership came crashing down in 2023 when Issa fired Ramirez, prompting lawsuits in which each accused the other of defamation and embezzlement. The ensuing publicity led to Michelin’s revoking all three of its stars and the closure of the restaurant.

Undeterred, Issa reopened later that year, with Max Natmessnig and Marco Prins as co-executive chefs. Both chefs were alumni of the restaurant, having worked under Ramirez in its early Brooklyn days. Natmessnig, an Austrian native, brought experience from Michelin-starred kitchens like Alois in Munich and Steirereck in Vienna, while Prins, from the Netherlands, had worked at Oud Sluis and Ukiyo in New York.

Michelin re-awarded two stars. Based on my experience there this week, I suspect the third star will be forthcoming soon. If it is not, it could only be because of lingering feelings from the bitter dispute and not from any shortcomings of the current menu.

You enter through the ordinary-looking small grocery store. “Where is the restaurant?” I had to ask. “Down that aisle, in the back,” the clerk told me.

Once through those unpromising doors, you’re in a different world. The highly polished wooden chef’s table, from which the place takes its name, wraps around a world-class kitchen in which toqued chefs perform a graceful ballet amid gleaming copper cookware.

There is no printed menu. In the morning of the day of our reservation, the maître d’ called to ask about our dietary preferences. I told him my brother didn’t want to eat any red meat. “Not a problem,” he said. “There are just two courses containing meat, and we can substitute seafood preparations for him. How about you? Would you like the same?” “No,” I said. “The meat will be fine for me.”

Then later in the day, he called back to ask how my brother felt about squab. I said squab would be fine. “Thanks, we’re deciding between squab and duck for that dish,” he said.

Sure enough, there were two dishes containing meat, and they prepared and served excellent alternatives to my brother without making any fuss about it. Such attention to detail is rare and much appreciated.

The meal began with bluefin tuna tartare from Japan with pickled grilled corn and Idaho potato taco. Piquant flowers and leaves and a hint of wasabi at the bottom gave layers of unexpected flavors. With it, the sommelier poured glasses of Krug Grande Couvée 171eme and advised that it was to go with this and the two other amuse bouches to come.

Next was a grilled California spring pea nori tartelette with Hudson valley foie gras. The peas were exceptional, barely grilled, tender moist and flavorful. The foie gras provided a nice textural counterpoint.

The final amuse bouche was a celery root tart with Japanese A5 wagyu tartare, gribiche flavors and dried jiidori eggyolk. For my brother, they replaced the wagyu with yellowfin tuna. He said it was excellent. I’m not ordinarily a fan of raw beef, but the wagyu was unctuous and the subtle caper flavor of the gribiche and the slight crunch of the dried yolk topping made the dish outstanding. The flavor and texture of the tart itself made it more than a mere container for its contents.

For the next two courses, our sommelier poured what she called the only Japanese sake she knew that had a French name, Kuheiji Eau du Désir. She said it especially appealed to both chefs who love to combine French and Japanese esthetics. She described it as oleaginous, and it indeed had a uniquely creamy mouth-feel. I could have happily drunk nothing but this with the rest of the meal.

The next dish was a standout. Nestled in a cedar box of cracked ice were a pacific northwest Center Bay oyster with agua chile vinaigrette, jalapeno foam and guacjillo oil, and a hot smoked Pemaquid mussel with a vadouvan lemon vinaigrette and codium seaweed.

I think that adding sauces to excellent oysters usually amounts to gilding the lily, but here the three different chiles of the vinaigrette, the foam and the oil were a three-note chord that underscored the perfection of the oyster. The mussel would have been fine on its own, but the sauce and seaweed brought a layered complexity that raised it to a much higher level of interest.

Next came an uni preparation the chef described as urchin panna cotta, with shellfish jelly, Japanese geoduck, Alaskan king crab, Portuguese carabinieros, shiso, grapefruit and Hokkaido sea urchin.

The uni itself was perhaps the star of the show, but the members of its supporting cast were no less remarkable. The urchin was about as good as that delicious roe ever gets, but the red carabinieros prawn was equally excellent. The urchin panna cotta, almost hidden beneath all this shellfish deliciousness, was a lovely accompaniment.

The next wine was described as an acquired taste. If so, I acquired it immediately. Anapea Village’s Kvareli ‘Sandro’ Amber Dry Wine is a distinctive Georgian wine crafted from the indigenous Kisi grape. The winemaking process involves fermenting the grapes on their skins in traditional qvevri—large clay vessels buried underground. The result is orange hued, bone dry, and reminiscent of dried apricots.

It was chosen to accompany just one dish, warm gently smoked Maine brook trout, with a grilled leek/trout bone vinaigrette, horseradish and trout roe. The trout was so tender it was easily cuttable with the spoon that also scooped up the roe. Their pop in the mouth was a pleasant counterpoint to the soft and smoky trout.

For the next two dishes, the sommelier poured a 2021 Wechsler Morstein Riesling GG, dry, highly concentrated, floral with a long intense finish.

The dishes this lovely Riesling accompanied were both finished on the restaurant’s binchotan grill. Binchotan is a Japanese oak charcoal, esteemed for its ability to maintain smokeless high heat for many hours. The placement of the grill high above the embers lets the grill chef delicately control the cooking.

I think scallop with caviar is always a winning combination, and CTBF’s version was especially pleasing with a vin jaune sauce, fig leaf oil and a generous helping of Kaluga Queen caviar.

Abalone from Ezo Japan, braised and then lacquered over the grill, was served over koshihikari rice, morels and white grilled French asparagus with a seaweed and grilled lettuce sauce. The abalone was nicely tender and smoky. The asparagus was remarkably soft and flavorful. Altogether an excellent dish.

The dishes were so uniformly excellent that it’s hard to pick a favorite, but the next was clearly a candidate: grilled Norway langoustine, nam prick chili paste, a sauce made from the heads of the langoustine with saté flavors, mango purple curry chutney and a pandan foam. The langoustine itself was superb, on par with L’Ambroisie’s, by which this curry-sauced version may well have been inspired.

To accompany the langoustine, the sommelier poured a 2022 Chablis from Domaine Servin, Bougros Grand Cru.

The next dish was something of a mixed blessing: wild caught Holland turbot with a szegediner goulash sauce, sauerkraut caraway foam and grilled wagyu beef tongue. The turbot itself was excellent, cut from a big 18-pound fish, gently and perfectly grilled. The smokey goulash sauce was a creative and pleasant accompaniment, and the foam was sublime. I take issue with the wagyu tongue. I didn’t get why it was paired with the fish and didn’t think it added anything to it, nor did it, in my view, go with the sauce and the foam, both of which went brilliantly with the fish. I would have much preferred to just have more of the delicious turbot.

The next dish more than made up for this. A dry aged Hudson valley duck, binchotan grilled, with a French duck press blood-fortified sauce. and Szechuan pepper foam, foie gras terrine, verjus pickled grapes, grilled savoy cabbage and black Périgord truffle. Perhaps there could have been more truffle, as what there was was hard to notice among the rich and diverse flavors of the rest of the dish. But aside from that nit-picking, each component was distinctively excellent and each gave a separate discernable pleasure.

The duck dish was accompanied by a 2022 Clos de la Chapelle “En Carelle” Volnay, perhaps the best wine of the evening, delicate with a long subtle finish.

As a sort of epilog to the story told by the complex duck dish, the chef gave us a little cup of consommé made out of the grilled duck bones infused with matsutake mushroom and pine needle oil. Its depth of flavor made it a fine closing statement.

To go with the desserts, we were served a Sattlerhof Trockenbeerenauslese, Styria 2017. There is no such thing as a bad or even mediocre trockenbeerenauslese. This was a fine example of the species. To make it, individual grapes are picked that exhibit just the right amount of botrytis-induced concentration of sugars. The resulting wine combines sweetness, structure and complex aromas. It’s the pinnacle of the old German system of wine classification.

The first desert was a pickled rhubarb rice pudding with strawberry sake granita and a pear hibiscus sorbet.

The second dessert was a laminated Japanese fujisan brioche lacquered with Japanese 30 year old whiskey and coconut ice cream.

More than merely tasty sweets, each of the desserts was a precisely executed combination of ingredients whose distinctive flavors came together to tell the story of the chefs’ desire to display the harmony of Japanese and French esthetics and techniques.

The mignardise consisted of:

white chocolate mocha opera cakesmores tartelette with espresso ganache, apricot jam and vanilla guimauve (the French precursor to marshmallows)yuzu raspberry pate de fruit

While maintaining the quality of the previous incarnation of CTBF, chefs Max and Marco told me that they want each bite to tell a story of their own life’s journeys. I think they succeeded admirably.

In Vedat’s review of CTBF in the Ramirez era, he compared it very favorably to other more widely knownplaces that were often named as NYC’s best. I believe that comparison is still valid. If anyone knows of a New York restaurant that provides more pleasure than the current version of CTBF, I’d love to know what it is. I doubt that there are any.

The only thing that distinguishes El Califa de Leon by sight, is the guy whose sole function is to take the cash. Few taquerias splooge on such a luxury, but El Califa needs an efficient system, given the swarms of Americans whose Iphone cameras clash like sabres in front of the plancha.

Those who follow such things will be aware that this hole-in-the-wall taqueria in Mexico City was awarded a Michelin star last year. It’s not the first taqueria to get a star, there’s one in Copenhagen owned by a Noma alumnus. Though fairly traditional, the Danish taco stand does apply some of that contemporary technical magic that you’d expect from an ex-Noma chef, say, cooking the pork in a plastic bag at 68°C. I prefer that no plastic bags are harmed in the tenderisation of the pork, but I’m old school.

I can tell if I’ll like a restaurant by asking a single question – has it been doing the same thing for ever? It could be a fancy French hotel, flambéing a crepe tableside, or St John serving hard boiled eggs to men in suits, Etxebarri with their Xtuleta, a trattoria of your choice. Because pleasure in eating is not simply the action of prepared food on the taste buds. Every gustatory experience is mediated by assumptions, habits and memories. We know how entwined yumminess and familiarity are – think about your favourite childhood dessert. So an eatery’s adherence to food traditions, for me at least, is an important precondition for pleasure.

The chef at El Califa de Leon, in the relatively humble San Rafael neighbourhood of Mexico City, tells me that they’ve been doing exactly the same thing since it opened almost 70 years ago, right down to the salsa recipe. They make no attempts to refine or modernise, and there’s not a plastic bag in sight.

You choose between four cuts of meat, 3 of which are from a cow that was slaughtered this morning, the other is from a pig, whose time of death is not advertised. The meat, the chef proudly tells me, has never seen the inside of a fridge, not even a glance. He peels back a dishcloth to show me the stacks of slithered muscle. They’ve been speckled with pieces of beef fat, which will render and coat the lean cuts when they hit the plancha. They look good, well dried and the vibrant red of haemoglobin-rich beef.

There are no seats, just a narrow bar with standing room for three slender diners to rest their plastic plates. One guy flips the meat, a woman cranks tortillas out of a pillow of masa, cooking them to order.

We each take a Gaonera and a Costilla, which I pair with a can of Canada Dry. Costilla means rib, but this is a thin slice of the belly muscle. The Gaonera is their signature, it’s beef fillet, a cut you rarely encounter in Mexico because they export their fillets to places where people pay a premium for lean, lower-flavour cuts. Here it works well, the rendered beef fat and deep sear boosting the underpowered muscle.

Left: The Beef Fillet , Right: The Beef Rib

Pink meat, cooked to cuisson, is not the national style. Meat is either cooked til it falls apart (eg Carnitas) or it’s nailed by high heat (such as El Pastor), in which the pleasure is closer to that of crispy bacon – lots of maillard reaction, a deep salty flavour and a total rejection of juiciness. It works, it’s just very different to the European style. Here, the tranche of beef fillet, cooked with a pinch of salt and a few drops of lime juice, is slightly pink! Hallelujah.

The tortilla is tender, almost mallowy, radiating the aroma of toasted corn. Both the meat and the tortilla are the best I’ve had in Mexico, but I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is simply that both elements are at their best – the tortilla only cooked thirty seconds ago and pressed 30 seconds before that. With no moisture lost, it steams as much as it toasts on the plancha.

I keep seeing people describe El Califa as ‘elemental’. As if by distilling tacos to their bare essentials, they have captured nature itself. Frustratingly, I find myself agreeing.

The current Mexico City taqueria du jour, Orinoco, is so dominant that a phenomenon known as Orinocificacion is documented on Tiktok. Taquerias all over the city are copying Orinoco’s red and white branding, and their short but toppings-heavy menu. They offer 6 salsas, roasted onions, a free side of crispy smashed potatoes, pineapple slivers and the usual raw onion / cilantro dice. As a sauce-orientated man who wants always for more, Orinoco is liable to give more pleasure than El Califa. El Califa’s great but sometimes I want a whole apothecary of toppings.

In Mexico it’s surprisingly difficult to get good ingredients. Almost half of the fruit and vegetables are imported, mostly from the US, who’s agricultural output is known to be about as bad as it gets. So, I wondered if this distinguished taqueria would be making its masa from ancestral Mexican maize? On asking, I found that no, the chef did not know where the local tortilleria got it, who delivered the dough each morning. He knew little more about the beef, but as the taqueria’s owner also owns a butchers, we imagine they get fairly good stuff. It seems that traceability and sourcing are not imperatives. Leave that for the likes of Maizajo and Paramo, the forgettable upmarket Mexican restaurants, banging on about heritage blue maize varietals.

I wondered, interrogating the chef while the checks backed up – are traceability and animal welfare bourgeois fetishes? Do they really matter? The chef had no truck with the notion that we must love our livestock. For him, good beef was fresh beef that hadn’t touched a fridge. For me, good beef is pasture-raised and has hung around, maturing in a fridge for at least a month. That’s the beauty of eating food from another tradition, you have to accept that the assumptions you bring to food are just that – assumptions or cultural tastes, and not universal truths.

This leads me to my next question. How, then, can a French tyre manufacturer judge the quality of a taqueria?

When appraising a cuisine you know little about, the best questions you can ask are – does this food work? Does it feel right for the place and time? Does is excel at what it intends to do? But your answers to these questions are still mediated by your assumptions. I want to eat cold, light food during the hot summer months, but try telling that to an Achari Murgh vendor in Delhi. You can certainly say ‘this dish pleases me’, but is it a stretch for the Eurocentric bible of food quality to rate taquerias?

It makes sense for Michelin to award Pujol 2 stars, their style of dining (if not the food) is modelled on Western fine-dining principles. But to come to Mexico City and say ‘this is the best taqueria’, is pretty absurd.

For me, Michelin cannot maintain its values whilst being more inclusive. This is the problem of a universal rating system. For a French company to have a monopoly on food quality assessment is just another example of a cultural hegemony, where certain flavours, styles and behaviours are rewarded because they appeal to the old-world gastronome.

Michelin’s taco dictates are, at best, under-informed. And little known is that nations pay Michelin to have their restaurants assessed. Somewhat unfairly, the poorer the nation, the more they pay. CANIRAC, Mexico’s national restaurant association paid a record 10 million dollars for their 16 stars, the most of any country. For comparison California paid $600,000 and won over 100 Michelin stars. In 2017, Thailand paid 4.4 million dollars, while the year before, the much wealthier South Korea paid only 1 million dollars.

As our tastes shift away from white tablecloths and fawning waiters, Michelin’s attempts to stay relevant do seem to be working. The hype surrounding the Mexico guide has, according to several featured restaurant owners, massively increased their custom.

But when I spoke to the owner of three restaurants in the city, which hit the criteria for a Bib Gourmand but didn’t make it into the guide, I heard a different story. He complained that business was worse than ever, before asking with a flourish of his hand, ‘What the hell do they know about tacos?’ The Michelin Guide validates the quality of a cuisine for an international audience, but for those left out, it can feel like a death sentence.

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