I’ve eaten gourmet food in more than 100 cities – and this one was my favourite

I’ve been eating my way around the world since the late Nineties. I began blogging about the restaurants I visited while working as an internal auditor for BT, when I was able to eat out on business expenses in cities as diverse as Atlanta, Amsterdam, New Delhi and Leeds.

By 2004 I realised I was more interested in eating out than auditing. I resigned from my job and became a full-time freelance food, drink and travel writer. In the 20 years since then, I’ve dined in more than 100 cities around the world and written about my experiences in newspapers and magazines. 

It’s almost impossible to pick a favourite city for food. Each has its attractions and particular charms. Nowhere does haute cuisine quite like Paris, for example. The Eiffel Tower lighting up like a Christmas tree at the exact moment the sculptural chocolate desserts were laid on the table at L’Oiseau Blanc, The Peninsula Hotel’s rooftop restaurant, may have simply been a serendipitous moment, but it could not have happened anywhere else. 

San Sebastian on Spain’s northern coast is a perennial place of gourmet pilgrimage for good reason. Touring the city’s famous pintxo bars is as close to a sporting event as dining gets. 

The streets are thronged with locals and visiting foodies all jostling for a prime spot at places like Goiz Argi to sample its version of brocheta de gambas; skewers of griddled prawns with a delicious sweet and sour garlic, red and green pepper and onion vinaigrette. 

Lima was a gastronomic whirlwind. Before I’d even checked in at the hotel I’d eaten fried guinea pig (it tastes like rabbit), several versions of ceviche, and drunk numerous pisco sours at Restaurant Huaca Pucllana, inside a fifth-century adobe-and-clay pyramid in the city centre.

In a little over three days, I ate in a dozen restaurants. I tried giant Amazonian sea snail (surprisingly delicious) as part of a dazzlingly inventive tasting menu at Malabar and I still think about the wood-grilled octopus at chef Rafael Osterling’s El Mercado restaurant. It was so meaty and smoky that I mistook it for barbequed pork.  

Marathon meals have been a recurring theme. The record for the number of courses goes to the hip Michelin-starred Ernst restaurant in Berlin, where I ate 39 (mercifully small) courses at the 12-seat dining counter – including charcoal grilled spring onions with miso and lighter-than-air doughnuts made with Mangalitsa pork fat.

That meal was three hours long, but I spent around five hours at three Michelin-starred Manresa, on the outskirts of San Jose in California, eating a 21-course menu that included a confit of suckling pig with the roast fillet, braised shoulder, trotter, crackling, boudin noir and artichoke. 

Single dishes sum up some city experiences for me. Eating oyster omelette with fish sauce, sugar, spring onions and chilli sauce at the Nai Mong Hoi Nang Tort hole-in-the-wall restaurant on the Plaeng Naam Road in Bangkok; biryani in Lucknow, the city where it was created, at the luxurious Oudhyana restaurant in the Taj Hotel and the famous Idris Biryaniwala street stall in Patanala Chowk; helping to demolish a whole table of sticky hot and delicious wings at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, the birthplace of the world-famous bar snack. 

American cities loom large in my dining history. Touring Chicago’s many neighbourhoods in search of the city’s best restaurants was an unforgettable experience, from refined farm-to-table fine dining at Goose Foot in Lincoln Square to braised pork belly tacos at the casual Big Star in Wicker Park.

A gourmet road trip from LA to San Francisco and the Napa Valley included the opportunity to dine at chef Alice Waters’ legendary Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley. 

So I’ve travelled far and wide in search of good food. Yet my favourite city to dine in remains much closer to home: London.

A memorable lunch at Le Pont de la Tour in the early Nineties opened my eyes to how the combination of interior design, polished service and good food can deliver a truly invigorating experience. Since then, London’s dining scene hasn’t stood still and is today one of the most dynamic and creative in the world. 

New restaurants open at a dizzying pace and many of them are fantastic. Recent meals at Claude Bosi’s brilliant Lyonnaise-style Josephine Bouchon in Fulham, the southern Thai-style grill restaurant Kolae in Borough Market and chef Victor Garvey’s masterful modern American-influenced fine dining spot at Sola in Soho prove that the city’s magpie approach to cuisine is what helps make it one of the best places on earth to eat out.

You can even find great British food at The Devonshire pub in Soho where beef cheek and suet pudding draws the crowds.  

Despite the well-documented economic pressures that operators are facing all over the globe, we are living in a golden age of dining. A great restaurant requires the skills, knowledge, business sense and tenacity of a dedicated team of people to work, but most of all it needs their passion, as overused as that word might be.

As diners in the 2020s, we are lucky that passion is one of the few resources that is still in plentiful supply, especially among London’s brilliant restaurateurs.