A hundred entries, a thousand meals...

Editor's Pick Award

Our Editors awarded this travel blog entry for providing relevant information that may be useful and inspiring for other travelers.

So because I have a little bit of extra time (the Israeli guys I've been hanging out with are napping... big surprise), because this is my hundredth travel log entry (my, how the time flies), and because some RealTravel.com employee asked me to (her name is Carrie, and I think it's her job to sit and read this drivel all day long), I've decided to make a top ten list of restaurants around the world, according to me. 

These restaurants have been identified by me as the best in the world based on a number of factors, including the people I was with when I ate there, the value for money, and even occasionally the quality of the food.  Some are very well-known and prestigious, and others are little more than a hut with some bread and a smattering of condiments, but in every instance, they have been places where I have been happier for having eaten there.  Enjoy.

10)  Phoenician Resort

 Scottsdale, Arizona 

      The brunch here in Scottsdale was something not to be forgotten.  Scottsdale in general is sort of a miracle in itself: an oasis of lush green golf courses and champagne balloon-rides/Humvee tours through the Sonoran desert, and completing the incongruousness of the whole experience is the single most outrageous brunch I've ever experienced at a hotel or anywhere else for that matter.  I think the entire meal was made better by the fact that the cost is so exorbitant that you feel obligated to eat your own weight in fresh strawberries and chocolate crepes and wash it all down with mimosas, so that by the time you manage to roll yourself away from the finely-apportioned table, you've become a sort of wobbly French pastry champagne-and-orange -juice bomb.  It's fun.

9)  Poolville Country Store

www.pool villecountrystore.com

Poolville, New York

     The Poolville Country Store, like the entire city of Scottsdale, is a bizarre quirk of geography.  Poolville, New York is not a town in the conventional sense, or in any other sense, really.  It is a loosely-clustered group of crumbling houses with rusting farm equipment outside and little to no evidence of life.  The Poolville Country Store, however, is like sunshine after a month of rain.  You walk into a terrific, very quaint dining room with uneven floors, a roaring fire place, and a wine list that rivals most good restaurants in civilization.  Virtually anyone can take a good cut of beef and turn it into a halfway decent steak, but very few places--and even fewer places in towns with sizable cow populations--can make a good lobster ravioli and make an upstate New York winter seem endurable.  Recently closed because of management disputes, it has re-opened and will likely become a mainstay of Colgate graduations for years to come.

8)  Nando's of Mount Lawley

Perth, Australia

     I have already extolled the virtues of Nando's, and I don't think it's possible to overstate the joys of the first bite of a Chicken Supremo Burger with chips (fries), chip dip, rib sauce, and peri-salt, but the real joy of Nando's can be attributed to two things: the company and the price.  There's nothing quite as relaxing as sitting after a long day of sitting in on other people's university classes at UWA and listening to friends talk about Aussie Rules Football until they're blue in the face.  The huge--and quite satisfying--meal clocks in at a whopping $0 because if you go on Wednesdays, Blake's friend Maddie will give it to you for free.  You hand her a twenty, and she gives you two tens.  Maddie, if you get fired because of this, I'm sorry.  I owe you a chip dip.

7)  Restaurant Zvonice

www.restaurantzvonice.cz

Prague, Czech Republic

     I think I just like the idea of Restaurant Zvonice.  Built on the top three floors of a 600 year-old castle in the heart of Prague, diners at Restaurant Zvonice eat gourmet while sitting in the actual belltower (among the ancient bells, as a matter of fact).  I don't recall having anything there that actually knocked my socks off as far as the food was concerned, but there are precious few places more picturesque to take a meal than an ancient castle in a beautiful city.  This is a prime example of a setting overshadowing the meal itself, and rocking up to a piece of living history and eating by candlelight is one of those things you'd think only Hugh Grant could pull off.  It makes you feel like you're living a work of fiction as you eat.

6)  Sandwich guy

Chefchaouen, Morocco

     And from the fantastical to the very common.  No, I don't know his name.  No, I don't know if his restaurant has an actual title.  No, I couldn't give you his address or any way to contact this man except to say, "Jump on a bus to Chefchaouen, find the Plaza de Ute Hammam, and it's the shack next to the fruit stand."  Sandwich Guy opens at 2 or 3 PM (seemingly depending exclusively on his mood), and stays open until midnight or so, filling the cold Moroccan winter air with the smell of his french fries and the sound of him asking you, "Oui?  Oui?" as he points to each condiment.  You get no meat in the sandwich at all, just olives, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, white rice, mashed potatoes, hot sauce, some sort of tzatziki, and topped with french fries and ketchup.  And after stuffing your face with this foot-long monstrosity, you hand Sandwich Guy a whopping 62 US cents (79 if you got a drink), wipe your face with the piece of newspaper that he wrapped your sandwich in, and go on your merry way, waiting anxiously for the next time you'll be hungry enough to pack one in.

5)  La Cabrera

Palermo Viejo, Buenos Aires, Argentina

     Everyone talks about how great Argentine beef is, and everyone's right.  Making a good steak in Argentina is like tapping in for birdie when you're eight strokes up on the 18th green.  You could churn out a good "lomo de bife" (as it's called) with a trash fire and whatever the butcher had left over at the end of the day.  What Argentina doesn't do as well is flavors and spices.  A lot of the beef is spice-less, and side dishes--aside from the occasional uninspired salad--are few and far between.

     Enter La Cabrera, which brings an entire platter of about a dozen vegetable sides, sauces, and garnishes to the table along with the butterfly-cut beef on a wooden slab.  The wines are stacked to the ceiling, and if you're really feeling hungry, there's the option of adding provoleta (an entire cheese wheel char-grilled and served sizzling hot... no, I don't know how it doesn't melt) or french fried potatoes topped with sauteed onions to the mix.  Considering you're paying less for this than you would for parking at a nice restaurant in New York, it's a phenomenal choice.

4)  Lighthouse Pub and Restaurant

Swakopmund, Namibia

     There's nothing better than sitting at a table and having beers and huge steaks with some good friends after a long trip.  Swakopmund, on the coast of Namibia, offers an ocean breeze that is conspicuously absent in the 110-degree heat of the Namib Desert, and after a week or so of camping in tents and drinking piss-warm water out of five-gallon jugs to keep your pee from turning brown (classy, I know...), virtually any vestige of western civilization is welcomed.

     The Lighthouse Pub, in addition to serving up those icy-cold bottles of Windhoek, brings out burgers that are tall enough to need those red aviation warning lights on top.  These are serious burgers.  No-nonsense burgers.  Burgers that eat other burgers and are still hungry.  And when you see the sun setting over the South Atlantic and remember the fact that you are still, for all intents and purposes, in the depths of the Dark Continent, it tastes even better.

3)  Shed 5

www.thenourishgroup.co .nz

Wellington, New Zealand

     This was another instance where the company and the situation made the event better.  Shed 5 sits on picturesque Queen's Wharf in Wellington, looking out at the sailboats bobbing up and down in the harbor while silently enduring the ebb and flow of the ocean below the diner's feet.  The rare Ahi tuna steak was a pleasure, but even more so was a surprise mint chocolate chip ice cream dessert that they made from scratch.  As a traveler, and especially as one with a Watson-imposed budget that doesn't usually allow for frills and extravagance, it's hard to do something nice like this.  It's even more unusual to find someone worth doing it with.  At Shed 5, I happened to find both. 

2)  Restaurant Luna

Mount Kisco, New York

     This coveted second-place prize was going to be occupied by Restaurant Luna, which used to serve an amazing frisee with blue cheese and bacon salad and Belgian Trappist ales to go with their tender steaks, but the ownership has changed and it's now called Woody's Cafe, which sounds like a cross between an extreme sports outfitting store and a TGI Fridays.  I haven't tried the new place, so I can't say what it's like, but as of now, the owners and I are no longer on speaking terms.  All I can say is that it was a hell of a place to have a birthday dinner.

1)  Grampi's

www.grampis.ch

Zermatt, Switzerland

     And so to the best restaurant on Earth, so far as I can tell.  It was an easy choice because, simply put, Zermatt is the best town on Earth, and as such, my favorite restaurant in such a highly-acclaimed town should be by default the best restaurant.  Zermatt is a place without cars, without pollution, where the biggest traffic jam is a pack of goats being herded down main street.  It is hours from any airport (Milan is closest, but Zurich may be most convenient and has the added benefit of making you drive through all of Switzerland to get there), and as the Alps shoot up from the very edges of the road on either side, you as a driver feel humbled.

     So after nine hours on a flight from New York, and another four in a car, the only thing any sensible traveler wants to do is fill his belly and go to sleep.  I found Grampi's more or less by accident with Cary Frydman during my semester abroad in Prague, and we were so hungry and desperate for food that we actually petitioned the staff there to open a few minutes earlier than their designated 5:30 time to accomodate us.  Completely by chance, and with no knowledge of the local specialties at all, we both ordered Edelweiss beers with slices of lemon and dishes of lasagna.  The Edelweisses ("Edelweisses"?   I can't imagine that's the right plural) were frosty and delicious, and the lemons were just what we needed to refresh us after the flight and the ordeal of schlepping our crap from Geneva (we weren't attuned to the "right" way to get to Zermatt yet).  We had scarcely ordered when Cary said, "I wish he was coming back with our food right now."  We were that hungry.  You know that feeling when you're not even at the restaurant yet and you wish you had your food, and the prospect of waiting even longer for it seems unbearable?  Yup, that was us.

Anyway, two sizzling lasagnas came out on circular plates too hot to touch.  The lasagnas had been cooked in those same plates and taken straight out of the oven and onto our table.  "Shovel" is a verb that comes to mind when I think of how we ate.  No napkins, no class, utensils only because it was too hot to touch directly.  I was throwing bites hotter than lava into my mouth and cooling the scalding sauce with sloshes of Edelweiss.  About halfway through, there was a fleeting moment of panic when I thought the dish wasn't going to quite satisfy me, but as I sopped up the last of the tomato sauce with the last of the bread they gave us, it all added up just right. 

Fifteen minutes later, and after the construction of the Great Wall of Homophobia, I was asleep.

I won't go through the entire story of making the Grampi's Hajj with my father a year and a half later, but suffice it to say that I spent the entire plane ride from New York talking about the meal we were about to have, and my dad spent the four-hour drive from Zurich (when not running red lights and trying to figure out the German GPS) starving and telling me that this lasagna better be worth it.  I'd like to think that it was.

Go to Grampi's.  Eat nothing for days leading up to it, and cherish the memory for the rest of your life.