Travel

When you board an airplane and walk past the first-class passengers settling into their double-wide seats, it’s difficult to avoid feeling like a second-class citizen. The issue isn’t only personal space. As the curtain closes behind the lucky few, you know the crew is preparing a nonstop feast for those with plenty of disposable income.

You can almost see the French cheeses and crackers on a tray with glasses of bubbly Champagne, an opulent first course meant to stimulate the appetite before a gourmet entree — chateaubriand, perhaps, or line-caught salmon with roasted asparagus. If you listen closely, you can hear the flight attendant whispering to leave room for the hot fudge sundae with fresh whipped cream and toasted almonds.

In coach, nothing is free. Sure, for now the sodas, water, and coffee are still complimentary, but if you’re hungry, have your credit card ready. Alaska Airline’s cheeseburger with chips is a relative bargain at $6, but Delta charges $9.49 for their hamburger and $10.99 for one of their wraps, and a vending-machine-type sandwich or salad is $9.99 on American Airlines.

You’ll do a lot better if you brown bag it and pretend you’re on a picnic.

My Hungarian grandma made the best apple strudel I've ever had. Here in Hungary it's apple season and apple strudel is showing up on many of the restaurant menus. Yesterday, on the Pest side of the Danube, I came upon the Strudel House. I ordered the sweet cottage cheese-filled strudel, mainly because it was served with a rosehip sauce, which I wanted to taste.

During my two days in the countryside, I saw rose bushes heavy with hips. This restaurant served sauce they had made with freshly harvested rosehips. The sauce had the fragrance of fermented grapes, and I think the little cottage I stayed in that was nestled in the middle of a vineyard in the countryside had bed linens sprayed with the fragrance of rosehips.

Well, the strudel had flakey layers surrounding the cottage cheese filling, the rosehip sauce was a delicious complement and one perfect scoop of creamy vanilla ice cream put the dessert over the top. It was a late-night treat. It wasn't as good as the one my grandma used to make, though.

An excerpt from  "Hungry for Paris"

Some ten years ago, I went to dinner one night with no expectations. A London newspaper had asked me to write about Lapérouse, an old warhorse of a restaurant overlooking the Seine on the Left Bank—it was doing historic Paris restaurants, and this one’s been around forever. I politely suggested that there might be better candidates, because as far as I knew, this place was still a slumbering tourist table flogging its past: it has several charming tiny private dining rooms with badly scratched mirrors—as the legend goes, these cuts were made by ladies testing the veracity of newly offered diamonds (real diamonds cut glass).

The editor was unyielding, so off I went. The stale-smelling dining room was mostly empty on a winter night, and though the young mâitre d’hôtel was unexpectedly charming and gracious, I was more interested by my friend Anne’s gossipy accounts of a recent visit to Los Angeles than I was by the menu.

Of course you surely know the only reason to travel is to eat, so when I got an invitation to attend the St. Croix Food and Wine Experience, I jumped at the chance. I admit to a bit of hidden skepticism. I mean how could an island sitting in the middle of the Caribbean Sea possibly have any interesting food?

I’ve been to several different spots in the Caribbean and have been universally underwhelmed, with one exception on St. Lucia where I met a stupendous Swedish chef running a five star restaurant in a waterfront hotel. That was Bobo Bergstrom’s “The Edge”, and he, who started his career as a mere boy cooking for the Swedish court, turns out astonishing Eurobbean Haute Cuisine, but I digress.

St. Croix is a different sort of place from the frenchified St. Lucia. It is the very soul of the American Virgin Islands and the choice for those who want to understand the culture and heart of the Virgin Islands. It’s exotic and foreign but you don’t need a passport and you will understand the money. It’s good old Dollar Bills.