Emirates’ love for eating out for breakfast is only exceeded by their love for brunch and two Aussie expats have satisfied both those needs in Dubai with their exquisite Melbourne-style cafe, Tom & Serg.
The first thing you notice when you walk in is the absence of the quintessential bearded and tattooed Fitzroy barista. From its hip decor to the pastries on display as you enter, you really have to pinch yourself to remember you’re not on Brunswick Street.
While you’d expect expats to be the cafe’s biggest customers, they’re not. The east-meets-west menu is a favourite with locals. Coffee beans are locally sourced and roasted and, the moment your espresso is placed in front of you, the thick crema means you know it’ll be good – Melbourne coffee good!
Try the masala fried eggs served on a bed of tandoori roasted cauliflower, chilli cashew nuts and green garlic oats. Aussie Benedict is also offered, as is smashed avo and Vegemite on hand-cut sourdough.
For lunch there is a more substantial menu that includes burgers, Moroccan chicken, risotto, tacos and plenty of vegetarian and vegan options. Be sure to leave room for the salted caramel French toast. Served with blueberry poached pear, crunchy pecan and lashings of cream, might just be the best French toast you’ve ever eaten. After you’ve satisfied your gluttonous urge wander over to the nearby arts precinct at Alserkal Avenue.
When you’ve been making one dish for 75 years, you’re sure to have it perfected. Tonkatsu Tonki in Tokyo is the epitome of understated eateries, with its white-clad chefs who prepare, while all the customers are watching, the three dishes they are famous for: pork cutlet in three different styles.
Breaded, deep-fried pork cutlets, known as tonkatsu, are a Japanese favourite, and Tonkatsu Tonki is the type of eatery people from all over Tokyo travel to. It’s not just the three types of pork – toasted tonkatsu, tonkatsu fillet and skewer tonkatsu – that sets this place apart. It’s the authenticity, the ambience, the customers crammed around the u-shaped bar, and the owner who remembers every order without jotting it down. Think Midnight Diner in Tokyo Stories.
What differentiates this tonkatsu from the rest of the pack is that the pork is not overcooked and chewy, but has a delicate, crispy outer layer with thick flavoursome juicy meat. The sauce is excellent, and the accompanying miso soup is to die for.
It’s often quite crowded, so you’ll be directed to a chair to wait before being shown to a spot at the bench surrounding the kitchen. It’s here you can really soak up the convivial atmosphere and process – the chef who covers the tonkatsu with flour, the cook who does the deep frying, another who cuts them up. Then there’s the chef who delicately places your tonkatsu on the plate. Watching this systematic flow is like watching the creation of art.
For between US$13 and US$19 you can have tonkatsu served with a piece of tomato, spicy wasabi and unlimited servings of sliced napa (cabbage) and rice. Wash it down with a bottle of Asahi and you’re night will be fulfilled.
Take a step back in time at Berlin’s Paris Bar. Beneath its glowing neon sign, artworks by German artist Martin Kippenberger adorn almost every surface of the bar’s interior, which was once the haunt of many A-list artists, actors and rock stars, including Madonna, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro and Yoko Ono.
Paris Bar is also the place of the infamous 1979 Rolling Stone interview with an inebriated David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and where Iggy drunkenly rolled around in the snow outside. It serves classical French cuisine and while a visit here is accompanied by a somewhat hefty price tag, it’s still worth sitting with the locals among the bar’s rich old-world glamour, admiring the art that decorates the walls and, if you’re lucky, rubbing shoulders with a celebrity.
This Mayfair townhouse is actually an adult’s playground in disguise. Flawlessly designed, furnished and finished with an artist’s touch, Sketch offers a range of rooms for the adventurous soul, each with its own theme, bar and menu. Even the dress code is different.
One of its rooms, called The Glade, is reminiscent of a mystical forest, only it serves brunch and cocktails. The room has been decorated with a single twentieth-century French postcard printed onto hundreds of metres of paper and decoupaged to the walls. Order some Coteaux de l’Ardèche rosé and slip into this fairytale setting before moving on to one of the other rooms. We like the dreamy pink setting of the Gallery, decorated with 91 of artist David Shrigley’s works.
With 300 days of sunshine every year, Denver is a city where people like to get outside, and one of the big draw cards are its outdoor patios – they’re almost always ready to welcome visitors to enjoy their farm-to-table cuisine al fresco. Especially at historic Larimer Square, which has become the city’s premier dining and shopping destination. Victorian buildings connected by fairy lights have been converted into stylish boutiques, lounges and hyper-local, chef-driven restaurants. And most of them have a patio.
TAG Restaurant is just one of the Square’s amazing offerings. The menu, inspired by chef Troy Guard’s Hawaiian roots, is a dazzling homage to the flavours of Asia made with local ingredients. Seafood potstickers with Korean soy vinaigrette, flash-seared hamachi (yellowtail tuna) tricked out with pop rocks, and taco sushi with Hawaiian ahi, guacamole and mango salsa are just some of the dishes you can try.
The city’s other source of prime entertainment real estate comes from up high. Places like 54Thirty Rooftop, Denver’s highest open-air bar, are popular for late-afternoon sessions. Cocktails, bar snacks and stunning views of the city are all part of its charm.
Welcome to the granddaddy of Madrid eateries. With its gold-leaf interior, wine catacombs and fascinating heritage, you better believe dining at Sobrino de Botín is quite the experience. It opened in 1725 and is now the oldest continually operating restaurant in the world (at least according to the Guinness Book of Records). In the past Spanish writer María Dueñas, Graham Greene and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Ernest Hemingway – the restaurant gets a mention in both The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon – have all sat at its tables, spread across four dining rooms.
Don’t come for the spectacle or its pedigree though. Here, it’s all about the food. Whether you fancy the scrambled eggs with black sausage and potatoes or the inky baby squid served with rice, you’ll walk away satisfied. We do have one very strong recommendation for you, though: the roast suckling pig, Botín’s specialty, is the dish to order. Such is the demand, special Segovia suckling pigs are delivered to the restaurant three or four times a week. They’ve been cooking it the same way in the same wood-fired ovens for a couple of centuries now and, man, have they nailed the right way to do it. This is the sort of meal you’ll be talking about for years to come.
If you want to really know Macao, let your stomach lead the way. Just a stone’s throw from Hong Kong, Macao has a rich and varied history that reflects in its tasty food. Yes, you’ll get dim sum and stir-fried Chinese vegetables but you’ll also get a whole lot of Portuguese cuisine, thanks to a period of settlement by the Europeans from the mid-sixteenth century.
Head to Lord Stow’s Bakery, set up by Englishman Andrew Stow in 1989, to tuck into a few of the egg tarts for which the bakery is famous. Up the cobblestone streets of historic Taipa village you’ll find Antonio’s, headed by Antonio Coelho. Antonio serves up sautéed clams with garlic and white wine sauce, alongside stuffed crab and homemade Portuguese sausage. With its colourful tiles and paintings inside, you’ll have to remind yourself you’re in Asia.
There are loads of other places to eat in Taipa Village, originally a fishing hamlet that’s hung on to its heritage architecture. O Manel is in high demand, along with Litoral, much sought after for its Macanese dishes such as African chicken, cod cakes and minchi (steamed rice and fried mince meat with egg on top).
Step back into the 1960s at Old Macao’s Lung Wah Tea House, with its retro furniture and huge windows overlooking Red Market. If you want to eat like a local, small street-side eateries serve up claypot and hot-pot meals alongside barbecued skewers.
For something truly special, investigate one of the 19 Michelin-star restaurants in Macao. Dim sum (yum cha) at The 8 Restaurant(within the Grand Lisboa), Wing Lei Palace (Wynn Palace Cotai) and Wing lei (Wynn Macau) will leave you wanting more.
With Macao having been designated a UNESCO Creative City for gastronomy, this is the place to let your taste buds go wild.
His hands move quickly and expertly dipping into a large dark bowl of soft white rice. A dab of green wasabi is added before he rolls the mixture into a ball in his palm and carefully layers it with a slice of raw pink fish. With a practised flourish he presents it on the bench in front of me. I reach for my chop sticks and am told no. “Use hands. Hands are better. Old way.” I pick up the yellow tail and rice portion, slip it into my salivating mouth and groan audibly.
I’m at Sentori Sushi in Kanazawa, central Japan eating the best sushi of my life. Nine more servings follow the yellow tail down my grateful gullet: flounder, shrimp soft roe, bail shell, abalone. My chef, Kazuhisa Yoshida, is the third-generation owner of the restaurant which welcomed its first customer seven years after the war (1952). He’s been to Australia twice and speaks English slowly and thoughtfully. He tells me about the local fish market and his grandfather and his fondness for the Australian artist, Ken Done. I watch him operate his knives and carefully wrap seaweed around another delicacy. This is real Japanese sushi, similar yet so very different from the kind we know in Australia and the USA. There is no avocado, cream cheese or cooked meat and the meal has been paired with a sweet local sake. I sip, eat slowly and smile contentedly.
At the meal’s conclusion I ask Kazuhisa about the secret to great sushi. He thinks on this a while. “Hospitality,” he decides. “Fresh ingredients and good rice are needed. But hospitality and presentation make for the best sushi.” When I leave a waiter appears with my winter coat and helps me into it. Kazuhisa follows me to the door and we thank each other gratefully and sincerely. It is the Japanese way.
You hear whispers of this secret sushi restaurant online and with friends. Someone says they know someone who knows someone who has been, but you think this is just another urban legend, like when Bill Murray spontaneously walked into a random bar and started bartending.
Well, it turns out that like the Bill Murray story, the restaurant actually exists. On the tenth floor of a very random midtown Manhattan hotel you will find one of the rooms has been converted into a full scale, fine dining, four-seat sushi restaurant. Global personality Chef David Bouhadana is the master itame at the helm of this 17-course, 60-minute omakase (dishes selected by the chef).
If you can get in, expect a treat. Chef David will let you know everything about him and his process, and will do so over a flowing river of sake. The food is perfectly prepared and the city views from the balcony are sublime.
This is an experience not to be forgotten. Ever. Even if your friends don’t believe you went.
Cleanse your palate and prepare to taste the flavours of Persia by learning how to prepare an iconic Iranian feast at a local family home on this sumptuous culinary adventure.
Tachin Morgh, which translates to ‘arranged at the bottom’, is the dish you’ll be making. It’s a traditional delicacy of saffron-infused rice and tender chicken layered in a rich egg yolk and yoghurt sauce, and baked to produce a crisp bottom layer bursting with flavour. The interplay of the crust with steamed saffron rice is both beautiful and irresistible, and just one of many moments you’ll have you tastebuds titillated on this Iran Real Food Adventure with Intrepid Travel.
You’ll begin your foray into the life of an Iranian Masterchef by plunging into the markets and bazaars with your tour leader, a local from the area, who will show you how and where to source the freshest ingredients for your dish. Once you’ve collected your bounty, you’ll venture to a local home to learn about each of the necessary steps for crafting the Tachin – especially how to achieve the perfect crisp bottom layer, known as tahdig.
Once you’ve finished cooking a storm, tuck in to your homemade Tachin alongside other traditional dishes and drinks. If you can drag your thoughts from the myriad flavours exploding in your mouth, you’ll also have the opportunity to learn about the local customs and Iranian culture from your host family.
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