EAT AROUND THE WORLD
CHEFS ARE TRAVELERS. And travelers, when they’re lucky, can sometimes experience the most wonderful paradox: They treat themselves because they are on vacation, and yet often find they haven’t gained a pound. Walking the monuments of Rome apparently more than offsets the gelato you consume there. Same with croissants in Paris. (Would that it were so for pizza in New York.)
But eating on the road also has its challenges, and unfortunately not every time we pack our bags do we have the luxury of being tourists. There are business trips with little in ambulatory sightseeing. There are long flights plagued by boredom eating and bad meals. There are layovers with nothing but fast-food outlets in the airport. “It’s fascinating to me that we’ve come so far in the world, but transit dining is still in 1982,” observes Marcus Samuelsson, who travels frequently to Europe, Asia, Africa, and around the States. Being stuck interminably in a terminal with no good food is something with which he struggles. “As a chef, I spend a lot of time in the airport. It’s the hardest thing in the world.”
So here several chefs discuss two important points: One, how to avoid the worst offenses that airports, hotels, and jet lag inflict on our otherwise healthy habits; and two, how to embrace the best aspects of travel, from enjoying authentic ethnic meals to bringing home inspiration for eating well after you return.
Lesson 75: Smart chefs have a flight plan
“I try to eat before I go to the airport,” says Samuelsson. By doing so, he can usually ignore the poor offerings in most terminals. But when a three-hour flight turns into double that in delays, even he is not immune from eating the garbage on offer beyond the security checkpoint. “Sometimes I just punk out and have to do it. I don’t feel good about it after. I wish I could say I never do, but I don’t.” His alternative plan: “Sometimes I look at it as an opportunity to take my day of fasting.”
If there is someone who travels farther and more often than Alain Ducasse, I don’t know who he is. The multiple Michelin three-star chef has restaurants and hotels bearing his name in New York, Las Vegas, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Tuscany, and, of course, in Paris and his adopted home of Monaco. When I met him in December 2010, he was making plans for a new restaurant in St. Petersburg, Russia. “I am never more than a week without getting on a plane,” he tells me. We met at the launch of a Ducasse iPad app, designed for the world traveler to keep straight all the locales in the chef’s global empire.
This much travel can strain one’s diet, exposing the traveler to a flying circus of bad airplane meals. (I don’t care what sort of superior, premium, ultra-first-class you fly; it’s still reheated in foil.) But Ducasse appears to have it all in hand. Like Samuelsson, he says, “I eat before I get to the airport.” But never what’s served at thirty-five thousand feet. If he gets hungry midflight, his wife has usually packed him “very healthy” snacks, he says, such as vegetables or a homemade muesli. No sweets. “She doesn’t think I need dessert.” He also feels that eating a meal with plenty of protein and drinking lots of water when you land at your destination help put you back on schedule.
Wolfgang Puck is another peripatetic chef, on the road about two hundred days a year. “For me, the airplane is the best way to diet,” he jokes. “I never eat on the plane.” This usually comes as a relief to flight attendants who recognize Puck and feel timid about serving him the pod meals they sling at the rest of us. “I say, ‘It’s fine; I’m on a diet.’” Otherwise, he says, he eats a little at home before he takes off (or sometimes at the airport—he does sell a lot of pizzas there) and then “just go to sleep.”
Here’s another Puck suggestion for you to try someday, should you also find yourself the guest on the private plane of a casino magnate. “I just flew back to Los Angeles from Singapore with Sheldon Adelson on his plane, so I brought some steak, and I grilled steaks in the kitchen—they have a kitchen on the plane,” reports Puck. “We had a salad with it. Everybody loved it! That’s the only way to travel.”
Lesson 76: When they arrive, smart chefs eat like locals
Depending on where your travels take you, eating like a native can keep your weight in check. “In France, in Italy, in parts of China, you don’t find heavy people, because they have great food all the time,” notes Rick Bayless. “They eat, typically, with a little bit more patience. They don’t have to gobble food thinking they are never going to get another great meal—they are!” It’s an optimistic way of looking at the world, and pretty easy to subscribe to, even after you come home. There will be other good meals—don’t treat each one as if it is your plate-licking last.
Being far from home can feed you such novel sensory feasts that you may find that you don’t miss the worst parts of the standard American diet. Near the start of her career, Alex Guarnaschelli lived in Paris, where she worked for Guy Savoy. She was eating plenty, but also eating better than she had before. In France, she recalls, “My diet had next to no processed food in it. I love processed food like any American—I don’t want you to write, ‘She never eats Doritos,’ because I do. But there, I naturally gravitated to a diet with a lot less processed food. And I just didn’t eat as much—I was fed a lot by the sensory experiences of going to the market. I was in another culture, and I ate the way they did. We ate smaller portions, and the stuff I ate was so good. I ate cheese that would make anybody cry. There were cheeses that I ate in the south of France that weren’t available in Paris. Or cheeses in Paris that weren’t available in other regions. Sometimes eating something that doesn’t taste like anything you’ve eaten before has a different effect in feeding you. If you’re an emotional eater like I am, then maybe your emotions are fed in a different way and maybe you eat less. I think that is some of what happened. I’m simplifying it, but I think a different environment, different culture, different language, different foods can definitely change the way you eat, and I think in this case it was for the better.”
Lesson 77: They eat authentic cuisines
If you have the good fortune to travel abroad to a country with a great food lineage, don’t waste a moment eating in a hotel with an American-style breakfast buffet. Simpson Wong, raised in Malaysia but living in New York since 1988, has traveled widely: to Hong Kong, India, Southeast Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. (He was so determined to keep one Paris reservation, he asked his cardiologist for permission to travel days after a heart attack; permission denied.) He has one rule: “I never eat the breakfast in a hotel. Hotel breakfast is all sausage and bacon and eggs—it’s not my cup of tea,” he says. Instead, “I go to the market, and walk around and eat whatever they have to offer. I go see the old ladies selling vegetables—it’s a fun thing for me. I’m not interested in toast with butter.”
Another suggestion: Seek out local dining options while you do your morning workout, as Nate Appleman does. While running, “I see different parts of cities. I’ll just get lost. In Tokyo I was literally lost—I mean to the point where I was showing people my hotel room key and saying, ‘Where is this?’ That’s a good way to travel.”
Often the indigenous cuisine is generally healthier before being adapted to foreign palates. “U.S. Chinese food is not Chinese food,” says Wong. “If you’re eating General Tso’s chicken, you’re actually eating a McNugget. They take meat, coat it in a batter, and deep-fry it and serve it with a molasses-laden sauce.” He notes some other differences: “The English language says, ‘Eat soup’; the Chinese language says, ‘Drink soup.’ Real wonton soup is a chicken broth, a consommé with something to garnish it. In the West, the entire thing is wonton.”
At the same time, it’s wise to bring along your good judgment. Just because you’re eating in a land that is generally known for healthy food doesn’t mean everything can be consumed with abandon. “Look at what it is,” says Susur Lee, who offers this example: “There’s a Beijing dish that is fish ‘swimming’ in oil. It’s not what Western people are used to.” If you are going for that delicacy, make sure you enjoy it as the locals do, with chopsticks, tapping off excess oil. “If you eat it with a fork, you’ll get all the oil.” In Italy you don’t need to have antipasto, pasta, a secondo, and dessert at every dinner simply because it is there. Sometimes when in Rome, you should still eat to your own hunger cues.
Once you’ve enjoyed real versions of great cuisines, you can seek them out when you return home. When we came back from a family vacation in China, my husband and I were hardly experts (that would take decades). But we knew enough to now look for the best examples in New York of the spicy dishes we had enjoyed in Chengdu.
If you live in a good-size American city, you don’t need to leave town to enjoy “foreign” dining adventures on a regular basis. One morning, I accidentally found myself in a new corner of Brooklyn at a Russian coffee shop, which seemed to have its roots in both St. Petersburg and Seattle, with custom-brewed coffee and Russian specialties. (If you must know why I was there: My son forgot his gym shoes and I was passing time waiting for a shoe store to open somewhere near Cobble Hill—which sounds like it should have shoes everywhere, but doesn’t.) The coffee shop had kasha and onions on the menu—something I can’t get at any of my usual bruncheries just thirty minutes over the river in Manhattan. A great breakfast with whole grains and Soviet-era attitude from the staff—no passport needed.
Lesson 78: They enjoy some local specialties only on location
Raised in Mississippi, Cat Cora has long lived in California, and now exemplifies the best of that state’s healthy lifestyle. At home, family dinner is often outdoors around the grill: fish, chicken, vegetables, and stone fruit for dessert. But she hasn’t forsaken her favorite Southern specialties—fried chicken, biscuits, buttery grits. “I do crave that every once in a while,” she says. “When I go home, I’ll definitely stop for a really great biscuit or a big bowl of grits.”
Rather than making them a regular part of her life in the West, she limits them to visits to Mississippi. “It’s food you can’t eat every day,” says Cora. “I mean, a lot of people do, but that’s why we have a lot of obesity in the South.” Not to pick on the South, of course. California, too, has its once-in-a-while indulgences. Locals who have a problem with In-N-Out Burger addiction should probably leave those to visitors.
Travel can give you a pass to indulge in a way you would not at home. I will never go to New Orleans and not eat a beignet at Café Du Monde; for that matter I’ll never go to Disneyland and not queue up for the seriously substandard “New Orleans fritter” they sell next to the Haunted Mansion—environment is everything, and sugared dough fried in oil and nostalgia is hard to pass up. Do I ever eat fried dough at home? No, never.
As long as this sort of situational eating is an anomaly, it shouldn’t be a problem. It all depends on where you’re going and for how long. During his years running two eponymous hotel restaurants in Las Vegas, Alex Stratta would watch how people ate, and saw that they were not really there for spa cuisine. “I had vegan dishes,” which guests rarely ordered, he says. “People come to Vegas to get debauched for two days and go home. You don’t see as many people in the gym as in the nightclub.”
Lesson 79: They take home inspiration
Chefs travel as a matter of professional education—and because it’s fun. Just before we met up, Marcus Samuelsson had been in Texas as part of an ongoing exploration of American barbecue. “Part of being a chef is being completely humble about what you don’t know. If you’re in any creative field and take the opportunity to learn, you have an amazing opportunity to become really good.”
“I did a lot of traveling to learn food,” says Michelle Bernstein. “My favorite growing up was always fish and seafood. I lived in the south of France for a while. In Marseilles I learned a proper bouillabaisse. Then I went to Peru for a while to learn the ceviches and anticuchos and the beautiful tiraditos and all that good stuff. Then, obviously, I lived with what my mother taught me in the kitchen. My cooking is kind of a big mish-mosh of all that.”
“Eating is a good education, if you have the mind of a cook,” says Andrea Reusing. Sometimes when she finds herself facing an uninspired menu, she often thinks, This person just needs to travel! Travel, or read the cookbooks that can offer some of the same thing.
Like chefs, laypeople can learn something about the preparation of the foreign or regional cuisines we love, and incorporate new ideas into our home cooking for lighter and more flavorful dishes. While in Yangshuo, China, I took a cooking class at a school that overlooked the Li River. For me, simply learning the proper way to heat and add food to a wok with the right amount of oil was worth the whole journey.
You needn’t venture so far—I do only rarely. A summer vacation in Maine found me, quite accidentally, on a guided mushroom walk. I thought the only thing I might come away with was a good anecdote about tromping around with an amateur mycologist. Instead, I learned a lot. (The major takeaway: The most adorable mushrooms can destroy your central nervous system faster than the virus that killed off Gwyneth Paltrow in Contagion.) Further, I was prompted to come home and cook with mushrooms I often overlook in the market: chanterelles (did you know there are several wild varieties, not all edible?), lobster mushrooms (actually two fungi—one living off the other), and black trumpets (delicious, but not without indelicate repercussions if consumed in excess; eat them with pasta, not a plateful on their own). There’s a lot more to know about mushrooms, but that was just enough information on a memorably odd day to move me to experiment with a whole category of food I hadn’t much considered before. It’s a souvenir I hadn’t expected to bring home.
Simpson Wong’s Black Bass with Lemongrass Salad
serves 4 as a main course
FOR THE SALAD:
½ cup lemongrass, thinly sliced and separated into rings
½ cup celery, tough stringy parts removed with a vegetable peeler, and thinly sliced on the diagonal
⅓ cup chopped cilantro
⅓ cup thinly sliced scallions
½ cup diced red bell pepper
1 tablespoon minced shallots
1 small garlic clove, minced
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon of coconut vinegar *
2 teaspoons salt
1½ teaspoons sugar
¼ teaspoon chili flakes
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice*
FOR THE FISH:
4 to 5 ounces black sea bass fillets
Salt and freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
1. Toss all the salad ingredients in a large bowl so that the vegetables are coated with dressing.
2. Season bass fillets with salt and pepper.
3. Warm the olive oil in a large nonstick pan over medium heat. Place the bass fillets skin-side down. Press the top of each fillet lightly with a spatula to prevent it from curling up. Cook the fish until the skin is crispy, about 5 minutes. Turn the fillets over and cook for another 2 minutes.
4. Place each fillet on a plate. Divide the lemongrass salad evenly and place on the top of the fillet. Serve immediately.
*Coconut vinegar has a tartness and sharpness that’s different from other vinegars. You can substitute rice wine vinegar or white balsamic, but both tend to be sweeter. If using these, add another tablespoon of lime juice.
Adapted from Simpson Wong.
Andrea Reusing’s Tea-smoked Chicken
I first saw the recipe for Andrea Reusing’s tea-smoked chicken in Food & Wine magazine. Intrigued by the description of the unusual flavors and tender results of smoking, then roasting, I read it through—from cooking and cooling the ten-ingredient brine to fashioning a smoker on my stovetop—and promptly decided this was a dish best enjoyed in the restaurant that serves it. I might attempt it today, but back then I lacked the confidence. It’s a real chef’s recipe.
Fortunately, I eventually did get to Reusing’s lovely Chapel Hill restaurant, Lantern, for a dinner with our friends Steven and Jim, who are lucky enough to call themselves regulars there. I got to enjoy the juicy, smoky chicken that was, as described, fragrant with star anise and toasty tea.
Reusing didn’t start her career with a culinary school degree. She was working for a public-policy consultant in New York when she moved with her future husband, a musician, to North Carolina. “I’d line-cooked when I was in college. When I moved, I wanted to get involved in food, but I didn’t know how exactly. So I started an illegal home-catering operation. Then I was hired to open a restaurant for people who had never opened a restaurant before. I taught myself by reading and eating out.”
The small wine-focused restaurant was a success. But, tired of having bosses, Reusing eventually ventured out on her own, with a modern pan-Asian-influenced restaurant, though by that point she had yet to travel anywhere in Asia. “When I was catering, people responded to the Asian food I made. There weren’t a lot of Asian restaurants in the area,” she recalls. “So it was something I could do well and it filled a need in the community. People were still opening expense-account American restaurants, and I felt like that market was a little crowded. Initially my younger brother was my partner. We were both in the kitchen, and had a fun, tumultuous couple of years. Then he left, so we’re still friends.”
When she first opened, she worked without recipes. But after having two babies, she learned to delegate and is now meticulous about recipe writing. The tea-smoked chicken has been on the menu since day one. A lot of people have tried it and loved it.
One person who hasn’t tasted it happens to be married to the chef. Why? “He’s punishing me,” Reusing explains, only half joking. Her husband hasn’t tasted most of the dishes on her inventive menu, because he doesn’t eat anything with feet (he’s a vegetarian who sometimes eats fish). She blames his conversion on “a girlfriend he had when he was seventeen, who was a vegetarian.” The irony (and now Reusing is really fake-fuming . . .) is “now she comes into my restaurant and orders lamb! I’m sorry; I am not serving you lamb—you ruined my life! My husband won’t even eat stock!”
So at home with her family, Reusing cooks mostly meat-free (the kids seem to be taking after their dad). She makes beans, soups, egg dishes, pastas, salads. “Very simple things.” She adds, “I never cook Asian food at home. It seems like too much work.”
It can be, sure. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t sometimes try. Because it may be a while until I’m back in North Carolina, and I think I still have that chicken recipe somewhere.