Catch Cuba while it’s still there, people say… Get a taste of the island and its revolutionary quirks before the opening-up of relations with the USA sweeps all its strange tropical-Soviet otherworldliness away, and it becomes just like any other country, like… (what? In this part of the world, maybe, the Dominican Republic, that shining success story). Cuba […]
Tapas: Spain’s foremost modern culinary export, leaving paella for dust, copied from Tokyo to Toronto via many other places in between. An old tradition perfectly suited to modern habits, ideal for grazing, eating on the hoof, informal with none of that restaurant fuss. So much so there are now umpteen books on how to do […]
There are places everybody’s heard of, so everybody goes to, and others that you discover just by accident. Recently, without ever really having planned it, I found myself spending a week in Écija. Where is Écija? It’s in the middle of the dusty plains of Andalusia, roughly halfway between Seville and Córdoba. Mention it to […]
Ruddy-black slices of sausage stand neatly piled up across plate after plate on long tables, in a sports hall on a Saturday morning in mid-March. Around 10am little groups of four or five people take their seats at one end of each table, and arrange their papers, and their forks. They have work to do, […]
The food gods have been kind. Last December I went to a one-off meal prepared by star Mexican chefs and René Redzepi, for some years number-one chef in the world. And now I’ve eaten in one of the most recent recipients of three Michelin stars, Emmanuel Renaut’s Flocons de Sel restaurant near Megève in the French Alps. […]
21 December 2012 was supposed to be the End of the Great Mayan Calendar Cycle. Everybody seems to have heard that, and that somehow this was supposed to mean the end of the world. Global attention was briefly focussed on the Yucatán in particular, where the local powers-that-are, feeling they had to do something, put […]
Al Pacino has a store on Hornsey High Street in north London, N8. It says so on the sign, with a little image of Al in Scarface mode. The owner, who’s Turkish, says he got the shop off his cousin, who’s a friend of a cousin of Al’s who still lives in Italy. And that […]
The island of Chiloé in southern Chile is not a place that promotes itself very aggressively in the world, but it is quietly proud of having given the entire world the potato. History traditionally holds that potatoes were first domesticated around 10,000 years ago in southern Peru and Bolivia, where they were first encountered by […]
Foodie reasons for visiting Chile, number 1: fish and seafood Firstly, because they’re so good, and the centre of much the most interesting Chilean food; and second, because, at least for anyone from the Northern/Atlantic hemispheres, they’re so fascinatingly new and unfamiliar. The most popular fish are reineta, congrío and corvina, and a star among the range of shellfish are machas. […]
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