Noma, Copenhagen. The World's "Best Restaurant"...

"Was it good?"

Everyone (who is foodie/geeky) has been asking me this since I got back to Hong Kong.

"It was interesting," has been my default answer, as a way of hedging my argument (and buying time to give it some more thought).

I want to just blurt, "no, the food wasn't the best I've had" but I think Noma deserves more than that (honest as that was). I've been putting off this post because I've been having an internal argument with myself about this, and the other obvious fact that it's been named "World's Best Restaurant" by the S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants award two years in a row.

Saturday Farmers' Market at Crossroads, Tuen Mun

Roselles (aka hibiscus), leaves intact

The weather in Hong Kong has been beautiful these couple of weeks. Crisp, sunny, temperatures hovering below 20C...  The perfect kind of weather for market-going.

Vegas for Vegans - Pura Vida

Black bean burrito

If you've been reading posts about my recent travels (thank you!), you'll know that my main travel companion, T, is vegetarian on the 1st and 15th of each lunar month. We happened to be in Vegas on one of these days - you'll know that we had dinner at Bartolotta, and that the Wynn is vegan and vegetarian friendly. But when I decided to set our GPS to Pura Vida, I had no idea it was a vegan "bystro". It was just sort of on the way to the outlets (I don't gamble, but I use/lose my money in other ways). In fact, T didn't even have to be vegetarian that day. The reason we came was because I saw pictures of pancakes on Yelp. Pancakes and shopping! How delightfully frivolous!

Geist, Copenhagen - late night New Nordic

Suckling pig with artichoke

When you try and Google "late night dining in Copenhagen", you get websites with lists of restaurants that include names like Pasta Basta and Ricepaper (for a Thai restaurant...). No offense, they might be fabulous, but I didn't fly all the way to Copenhagen to eat Thai. If you're a psychotic foodie, you'll know I'm here almost exclusively for New Nordic. Lucky for jetlagged me, Geist is open for dinner till 1am daily.

é by Jose Andres - Avant Garde-ism in Brash Las Vegas

Stairway to... Jose?

Jose Andres, a name not quite as well known outside of the US as Mario Batali or Thomas Keller, but within, he's been on the scene a long time, getting people to stop and look (and taste) avant garde Spanish. He's an elBulli alum (almost everyone doing avant garde is nowadays, no?) but that's about all I knew. When I told people I was going to Vegas, gourmet traveller kindly sent me a very detailed email of everywhere they went and heard about on a similar trip (SF > Big Sur > Vegas). One that caught my eye was é by José Andrés. Many people in the US know him by his other restaurant, the super-experimental Minibar in D.C.

Bartolotta - There's an ocean in Las Vegas (for vegetarians too)

Mushroom ragout tagliatelle

Being vegetarian in the land of steakhouses and poker seems counter-intuitive, but is entirely possible. Funny that I should even be thinking about it, as (clearly) I'm not virtuous enough to be vegetarian, but best-friend-T is doing the vegetarian-on-the-1st-and-15th-of-the-lunar-month thang, so there we were, in Vegas, on the 15th of the 10th month of the lunar calendar.

Red Door Cafe - Eclectic San Francisco, but what did you expect?

I suppose cliches and stereotypes all exist for a reason - a significant number of people who are seen as part of a particular "group" do indeed have similar qualities. San Francisco's stereotype, as a city, is probably hippy, eclectic and gay, so why should one be shocked when they arrive at Red Door Cafe?

Coi Restaurant - San Francisco Sophistication

So you might have heard that I recently quit my job to bum around go freelance and work on some passion projects. Well, before all that, I decided to reward my newfound unemployment by spending a nice thick wad of cash on travelling. I'm currently in Vegas, but my first stop was San Francisco, so let's start there.