ANYTHING BUT GREEK

TWO FED IN OHIO

One of the only gratifying things about being trapped in an Italian hospital for two weeks was hearing the occasional amazed: “You’re an American and you’re not fat!” I had the same reaction on a fast foray into the heartland. In two days I spotted only two college kids who would qualify as poster girls for the national health emergency my geriatric gynecologist believes should be declared. Except at the gate in the Columbus airport on the way home, the lumbering obese were not to be seen. Even more surprisingly, we actually found decent cooking out in the land that kumquats forgot. Unlike in so much of the Finger Lakes, where we last ventured, the food did not all seem to have come off the same Sysco truck.

We were in Athens, a town so small everyone seems to agree on the best restaurants. No. 1 was Seven Sauces, where the waitress described the lamb shank as “great -- like your mom’s pot roast” and where the eggplant and mushroom cakes were probably meant to evoke meat but would put you off vegetarianism. The beans with the lamb were al dente, unlike the spaghetti with the cakes. But the rolls baked there were New York-crusty and the salads that came with the entrees were exceptional, with easily the best cucumber I’ve eaten in years. And if the menu qualified as college cuisine, the wine list was almost endowment worthy.

The next night, though, we had to buy wine at the BP gas station before heading to Stephen’s, No. 2 in town, which has no liquor license and charges a $1.50-a-person “beverage service fee.” The cold choices were pretty much limited to Boone’s Farm and Mad Dog 20/20, but we did find a Murphy-Goode sauvignon blanc that cooled off in an ice bucket quicker than it took to soak in the arty atmosphere, with tattooed cooks visible behind a pig door to the open kitchen. Having been warned by the locals that almost all fish in restaurants is frozen (even though the town has a sushi joint), I realized this was one time when “more crab, less filling” on the menu might not be a selling point for crab cakes. I just got one, and it was saucer-sized, and actually quite good if a bit singed, especially with the sambal aioli. My consort risked the grouper North Carolina, and it was perfectly cooked, with no perceptible freezer burn. Once again, the salads were better than you get most places in New York.

Our two breakfasts, at the Ohio University Inn, were the kind that make you realize why so much of America is so big. I had a “country scrambler” one morning that comprised two huge biscuits, about three cups of twice-fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, five strips of bacon and sausage gravy over everything but where it belonged, on the biscuits. My omelet the next day was also double-wide, but I have only myself to blame for taking all three fillings (Cheddar, salsa and avocado). For our tea, however, we had a choice of either skim or 2 percent milk.

The best thing I tasted the whole trip was the “Italian-style” cappuccino at Donkey. It really was.

Seven Sauces, 66 N. Court St., 740 592 5555.
Stephen’s, 24 1/2 E. State St., 740 594 7132.
Ohio University Inn, 333 Richland Ave., 740 593 6661.
Donkey Coffee and Espresso, 171/2 W. Washington St., 740 954 7353.

DOWN MORIMOTO WAY

When you start a getaway with cream cheese croutons, on a Caesar salad, no less, you have nowhere to go but up. And was that ever true for 24 hours in Philadelphia, where the air seemed more electric than it has since the late Seventies. The municipal slogan right now should be, “See it before we tear it down,” with whole blocks disappearing under condo construction and conversion all over Center City. But the same the-hell-with-history attitude is translating into a new energy. Even the Reading Terminal Market had different stalls from my last foray just a year ago, including one selling organic stuff straight from a farm.

The croutons in question were the only food flaw at our first lunch, at Washington Square, where a new chef (who also oversees Striped Bass) is erasing all vestiges of Franklin Becker. They were mixed in with regular cubes of crunchy bread, and, local origins or no, they tasted like slimy overkill on the generously dressed greens with excellent anchovies. My consort’s spaghetti with shrimp in a caper sauce was a good combination but hard to eat in a rectangular bowl set over a napkin on a plate so that it rocked or spun whenever he tried to take a bite (Becker’s dinnerware is on its way out, too). But my crab cakes were sensational, not because of the main ingredient but because the whole dish was so brilliantly conceived and executed. A little tangle of pea shoots with doubly julienned carrots and zucchini sat on top of the crisp cakes, and layers of tomato chutney and horseradish cream pooled underneath. Different flavors and textures came through with every mouthful, almost in a cascade.

Our waiter was friendly if ditzy (I deliberately passed up a cappuccino because I knew it would be a gouge and he charged us for two in addition to my consort’s coffee), while the wine list was silly but informative. I got exactly the “white grapefruit” in my glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc that was promised, and my teeth ached at the thought of what the chardonnay described as “candied pineapple” must be like.

Choices in Philadelphia restaurants seem to be mostly Starr or BYOB, and we went for the latter that night, at Matyson, a k a “the next Django” (of many). The host was beyond charming; the place was far sleeker than the shoestring operation I expected, and the waitress can’t be blamed for getting confused with four bottles of wine on a four-top. The two entrees I tried were not blowaway, but the cooking was perfect and the combinations nice enough (duck breast with spicy sweet potatoes and pomegranate molasses; striped bass with pancetta and fregola). The fish, though, was way past high. I was impressed with the duck confit appetizer, first because it was clear the kitchen was making the most of the whole bird and second because it came on a “sticky bun” that was more interesting than sweet. Desserts are not my weakness, so I was underwhelmed by the overwrought coconut cream pie -- it had every garnish but gold leaf. And the place is New York pricey, but then we saved megabucks by stopping at the grim State Store half a block away.

In between I had a glass of Arneis at Tria, a cocoon-like wine bar right off Rittenhouse Square whose mission statement is celebrating fermentation in wine, beer and cheese. The great wine list ran from bubbly to “bold,” and I wished I’d had time to try something cheesy from the Murray’s selection (or at least the cranberry and mascarpone bruschetta). Like almost every other place in Philadelphia, this one was staffed by people who seemed to think their job was to give the customer pleasure. (What a concept.)

That was even more true at El Vez, where I met a friend for a fast lunch. I was the first person in the place and got a weirdly sunny window table for four and a waiter who was beyond engaging. Whatever they’re putting in the water down there should be exported to Manhattan. And the food held up against my warm and fuzzy memories, too. Crab enchiladas were fat with poblanos and Monterey Jack in a very tart tomatillo sauce, and the refried beans that came with Don’s huge beef burrito were Arizona-worthy. (He was unhappy with one detail, and he did have a point: Why don’t the people who do the resetting reflexively check to make sure the first impression a diner gets is not a table that rocks when you touch it?)

We stayed at almost the cheapest hotel in town, at least on Orbitz, the $109 Club Quarters, and so we had to fend for ourselves at breakfast. I steered us to the Illy sign just down 17th Street for excellent cappuccinos and pretty good croissants at the Miel patisserie. All it needed was one more stool at the window counter (and one less fat woman on a cellphone reaming out her assistant while brutalizing her male companion for trying to offer her Nutrasweet as if she needed it).

So how was the hotel? Fine, in a very efficient way. Clearly, every cost has been calculated to the millipenny, but the place had everything you need for a one-nighter. When we checked in, our room smelled so bleachy-clean it was almost as if an execution had just taken place, but the desk sent a maintenance guy to crack the window five minutes after we called. The only other weird thing is that so many of the businessmen guests were on the short side, maybe because the rooms are European-sized. I started thinking of it as the hobbit hotel.

But it could not be in a better location, right up 17th Street from the AIA bookstore and down Chestnut from the relocated and hugely expanded Di Bruno Bros. cheese and specialty shop, where you can make a second lunch just on all the samples. It’s even limping distance from the train, if you don’t have a friend to chauffeur you. Because you will have to leave when condos in the alleged sixth borough are renting for $3,000 and up a month. That's good for a laugh all the way home.

Washington Square, 210 West Washington Square, 215 592 7787.
Matyson, 37 South 19th Street, 215 565 2925.
Tria, 123 South 18th Street, 215 972 8742.
El Vez, 121 South 13th Street, 215 928 9800.

UNCHAINED

No one would ever mistake me for a grin-and-bear-it type, but I even amaze myself when I can look on the bright side of going back to Buffalo. The saving grace of this trip was contemplating how light a grip franchises have on the food scene; for a seriously depressed city, it’s rich in locally owned restaurants and takeout shops. Aside from one fast foray into the new Panera surrounded by big-box stores, we ate real food cooked to order at every stop. And since what we mostly did was eat, that was no small accomplishment.

For the first time, I had done some research on new restaurants before we trained off to Jet Blue and so I knew Brocco’s Ristorante was the place to try, mostly because it was in an old gas station with a great design. The meal started rocky, trapped as we were between raucous tables, but a superb waiter, a fine wine-by-the-glass list and special butter with warm bread had a calming effect. Good small salads were included in the entree price, and if the dressings had generic names they tasted house-made (pepper-Parmesan, balsamic vinaigrette, blue cheese). They were also harbingers of the main courses, which were excellent. Bob succumbed to “airline chicken” (a big breast with wings) cooked under a brick, while his mom had two huge pork chops, both set over a mountain of mashed potatoes with asparagus. I ordered a special of pancetta-wrapped monkfish on apple risotto, and it was spa size by comparison. Which to me is a good thing.

As our first stop straight off the plane my in-law equivalent suggested Creekview, a whole new Buffalo experience. Just about every patron at lunchtime had a drink, at the bar and at the tables, and hard liquor as often as wine. At one table we passed on the way in a woman alone was drinking a cosmopolitan; on the way out a different woman sat there drinking an old-fashioned. It was like a Cheever convention. Our table was out on the plastic-encased veranda right alongside the surging water, with a heating lamp to keep us warm, which was just another surreal aspect on a freezing-rainy day. I demolished a fried perch sandwich off the blackboard specials, while ILE really scored with an outstanding Cuban Reuben, stuffed with jerk pork and fresh pickles along with the usual ham and cheese. Bob got maybe the best beef on weck we’ve ever encountered in its birthplace. The fact that the waitress asked how well he wanted the meat done should have been a sign that this was not your usual gray tissue.

We all got lucky the next day when I refused to eat in the hospital cafeteria after ILE’s doctor’s appointment and a nurse sent us to Dagwood’s, where I regrettably passed on the pizza sandwich (a slice on a hard roll with lettuce and tomatoes) but where we scored with fat deli sandwiches assembled to order and better than they had any right to be in what felt like the middle of nowhere. The capicola was particularly nicely done.

Our biggest dinner was at Frank’s Sunny Italy, using a $50 gift certificate ILE’s neighbors had given her last Christmas, and I have to confess my hopes were beyond low when we walked into an overlit, oversized dining room to see plastic booths and tired plants and a plethora of fat people. Luckily, bottles of wine were prominently displayed, so I figured I could survive anything. As with all Buffalo Italian, this involved way too much food for very little money -- dinners for around $12 came with big salad, huge bread and butter and a side of pasta with red sauce. Bob and I split eggplant parmigiana, which was surprisingly great, and ignored the ziti with it. His mom and aunt were underwhelmed by their huge plates of ravioli, but his uncle ate precisely half of a massive portion of lasagne without complaining. The waitress was excellent and the wine decent, so much so that you could almost ignore the plethora of fat people. And anytime the conversation lagged, we could all marvel at how absurd the over-heaped plates on the other tables were.

The biggest revelation of this trip was stopping for a drink at the newly reopened Hourglass Tavern and having a long chat at the bar with the chef, whose resume includes Le Bec-Fin and who had come back to his hometown to raise his son. (I would have reserved there for our last dinner, but the menu looked too pricey. Next morning the local paper reviewed it and focused only on the $16 chicken and $18 pork chops, the same prices as at Brocco’s. And while it did mention the $600 wine on the list, there was not a hint of the $15 appetizers.) The chef said he and Brocco’s and the unparalleled Tsunami all opened so close to my consort’s old home for a simple reason: Location. They’re all right in the middle between the wealth in the suburbs and the money in town.

We were pushing our luck with one last meal before heading home, at the airport, but once again the independent streak paid off. We headed to the Landmark cafe near the gate, with its Frank Lloyd Wright motif, and were rewarded with a respectable warm beef on weck with lots of horseradish and a Dagwood-level salami-capicola panini with asiago. There could be no better argument for bypassing Burger King.

Brocco’s Ristorante, 2818 Delaware Avenue, Kenmore, 716 871 2411.

Creekview, 4629 Main Street, Williamsville, 716 632 9373.
Dagwood’s, Main at Delavan, Buffalo, 716 882 8628.
Frank’s Sunny Italy, 2491 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, 716 876 5449.
Landmark, Buffalo Airport, Gate 9.

RESURRECTION

I went once to Turin as a ghost and once as a cripple. The third time had to be the charm.

What I learned from this last trip is never to judge a city by August, or by its hospital. Turin was deserted in the eighth month of 2002 when we took the train there, lured by one of my consort’s photo workshop students who happened to mention the city was completely neglected by Americans. That it was, but then no one else was around either, including the student, only a few stocky, dour women on the street and a few more disengaged shopkeepers and restaurateurs. We had no interaction with any of them; we might as well have been invisible. And the city seemed profoundly less alluring last year after I checked into CTO with a fractured femur and was wheeled out 15 days later. When I went cruising in my wheelchair I could see its landmark, the Mole Antonelliana, from one hallway window, the Alps from another and sculls on the Po from a third, but otherwise I might as well have been in Lenox Hill without subtitles.

All of which makes it all the more amazing that I flew back most recently not just hating to come home but wishing I could live there. And not only because I finally got to walk into Lingotto, the former Fiat factory down the street from the hospital that has been converted into what has to be the world’s most stunning shopping center/hotel/gallery complex. Everything about Turin combines the sensuality of the Italian way of living with the brusque coldness of a big city that this survivor of a small-town childhood always finds simply irresistible.

A big difference on this trip, aside from my being ambulatory, was having a guide. The lovely, acerbic Laura showed us a completely new Turin, whether steering us to the back of the cathedral where all the worshippers were paying homage at the shrine to a plane-crashed football team rather than the ancient saints or taking us to cafes in full aperitivo mode, places where they pour great wine for one small price and serve tidbits of food for free. The other sea change was simply September. In the same way New York is reinvigorated by one flip of the calendar, Turin is apparently transformed when vacation month ends. And never more so than when the winter Olympics are looming. The whole city was torn up for construction of parking garages, arenas, even a subway; being there was like arriving at a dinner party while the stressed-out hosts are still getting dressed and screaming at each other over the un-set table.

Through it all we ate extremely well, without even trying. We staggered besottedly out of the totally seductive cinema museum and into Al 24, a sedate restaurant I remembered from our first trip, and without any bad flashbacks. The service was just as family-values smooth as the cooking was simple: rabbit agnolotti gilded with butter and rosemary; whole roasted branzino with amazing potatoes roasted with black olives. We followed my surgeon’s wife’s recommendation just down the arcade from her San Paolo Bank headquarters to Arcadia, a sushi-spaghetti crossover I would never have tried otherwise where the food was almost London-level and the prices almost cafe-low (mono-piatto special of gnocchi swimming in cream, followed by a zabaglione mousse, with wine and espresso, for all of 11 euros). I overindulged in duck sauced with honey and hot peppers with caramelized fennel after a vegetable strudel stuffed with vegetables and ricotta and thought I had died and gone to Paris.

Another night our guide took us to her favorite pizza place, a Neapolitan joint with admirable tackiness called Da Cristina, where the simplest pie (margarita with anchovies) was the very best. Other evenings we aperitived, to coin a verb. Laura and I sat out Bob’s sunset shooting by planting ourselves at Circus Bar and drinking local wines while picking at pistachios and olives before ordering lardo on crostini, tomatoes and fresh thyme on crostini and a form of hummus to scoop up with perfect grissini (the pride of Torino, she said -- if they don’t snap, leave).

Laura also introduced us to aperitivo as feeding frenzy at Free Volo, near the shroud’s storage locker: a sidewalk cafe was overrun with people chowing down at a happy-hour buffet complete with grissini, huge olives, chunks of pecorino, boccocini, pasta salad (yes, in Italy), mortadella, salami, pancetta, brie and focaccia. At Spazio, in the splendiferous Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo gallery of hyper-modern art, we ate two different foccaccia, one with olives, the other with anchovies, followed by bocconcini and little “snails” of puff pastry rolled around pesto. And on our last night we found the cafe in the back of the wine shop Rosso Rubino just as it was closing. Eight euros bought two good pours of arneis and barbaresco plus an overloaded plate of toasts spread with roasted pepper puree and with garlic mayonnaise and capers, olives, cheese, grissini wrapped in prosciutto and much more. It was dinner, Torino style.

Somewhere along the line there was a mushroom pizza with breaded veal as the “crust,” at the sidewalk cafe at La Pace, and a couple of orgies with fried porcini, and drinks in a cafe where the waitress was evidently a he in good heels and better makeup than the next Sandra Day. There was one scary lunch at a suspiciously sumptuous restaurant called Due Mondi where the only other patrons were hulking guys in sunglasses, one with requisite blonde moll, and where the grissini failed the snap test but we stupidly stayed. I also seem to recall several breakfasts in a sunlit room at the charming, affordable (and Kummer-/Willinger-free) Hotel Piemontese, deep in the funky heart of San Salvaggio, near the train station. The cappuccini were superb, the cheeses always interesting, the chocolate croissants a lesson the French could take (the flaky dough was braided, not folded, over the dark chocolate).

But one lesson of three years ago was reinforced: No one should ever go to Turin without wallowing in bicerin, the addictive blend of hot coffee and chocolate and chilled cream served in a glass. We had our first this trip with my surgeon extraordinaire and his family, at Baratti & Milano, in the miles-long arcade in the center of town that was built to protect the king from having to walk in the rain. And we had our last at the 1763 shrine, Caffe al Bicerin, near the Porta Palazzo market. As the web site promises, it will “make your heart flutter.” Just as the city can, the third time around.

Al 24, Via Montebello 24, 011 812 2981
Arcadia, Galleria Subalpina 16, 011 561 3898
La Pace, Via Bernardino Galliari 22, 011 650 5325
Free Volo, Piazza Emanuele Filiberto 7
Rosso Rubino Enoteca, Via Madama Cristina 21, 011 650 2183, rossorubino.net
Circus Bar, Piazza Gran Madre N. 10
Spazio, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, 011 983 1635, www.fondsrr.org/eng2/fondazione.htm (click through for the best kitchen shot ever)
Hotel Piemontese, Via Berthollet 21
Baratti & Milano, Piazza Castello 29
Caffe al Bicerin, Piazza della Consolata 5, bicerin.it

PARIS IN THE SUMMERTIME

It was hot, it was dirty, it was empty, and I still kept walking around thinking: There could be no city on the planet more beautiful than Paris when it’s overcast. Gray skies just bring out the best in the place, even when more beggars are holding out cups, when you can spot guys squatting in the archways of beautiful buildings with dogs to help them panhandle, when the garbage and graffiti on the Metro on the way in from the airport look like New York in the early Nineties. It’s Paris, and there is no place like it. Even in July, a month so French-forsaken a princess could wind up dead there.

The upside of emptiness is that you can eat almost anywhere if you don’t try on a Sunday night. I walked into Joel Robuchon’s Atelier on Monday at noontime and almost would have had the expansive place to myself if not for a pompous Dutch ass and his wife, a big dog with a bowl seated below his owners across the room and maybe two other couples. Even better, it proved to be a conceptual revolution, the antithesis of the Per Se/Tetsuya hostage situation for degustation. At Atelier, you can taste on your own terms, as little or as much as you like.

I got greedy and chose two courses from the do-it-yourself tasting menu and threw in a regular main course because I have a weakness for quail, especially when it’s stuffed with foie gras and teamed with Robuchon’s signature potato puree (vegetable transformed into dairy) overkilled with truffles. Nothing but that dish was what I expected: the crab with avocado brought the seafood in a springroll with the fruit mashed and beautifully seasoned on the side. The poached egg came in a frothy broth with chanterelles, and over a little bed of perfect spinach, all in a martini glass and all transporting. Dessert was a bit of a letdown -- a souffle is just a souffle, even when it’s chartreuse and filled with pistachio glace. But waiter was superb and so were the two wines he chose, especially the white, a Domaine Galby Calcinaires.

Contrary to what so many travel writers have regurgitated, the place is not small and not like a lunch counter (sushi, maybe). And it is drop-dead gorgeous, with gleaming surfaces and exposed cooktops with Creuset-type pots and with big bowls of cherries on ice (not to be sampled, judging by the disgusted reaction of the host when my pompous neighbors departed, leaving a mound of pits). It was as close to perfect as a restaurant can get, at least when it’s nearly empty.

The Pompous Asses said Robuchon’s other restaurant was far stuffier and less satisfying, so I decided not even to try it. That night I went to the other extreme, looking for a classic, classic bistro. Unfortunately, almost everything on the menu at Allard was meant for two, or even three. It was no place to eat alone, although the room was so beautiful it was almost entertainment enough: zinc bar, huge flowers, crazed mirror, vintage photos, ancient paint.

From the first bite of the pate de canard, it was like reveling in tradition, though, if at a scary price. My sole was $51; the second-cheapest half-bottle on the list, a sancerre, was 23 euros. But that was the best rendition of sole meuniere I will ever eat: fresh, firm, exquisitely cooked, and boned so fast by the waiter it was still hot when I put my fork into it.

Since everyone was buzzing about the Regalade chef come out of retirement to cook at Le Comptoir, I dutifully made my way there and was appalled to see it was in a tired old tartine joint where my consort and I had had a pretty grim experience two trips ago. But I couldn’t resist going back for my last lunch, braving the hordes latish for what turned out to be an ideal meal: foie gras terrine pressed with cepes, with eggplant puree and balsamic viengar on the side and a wedge of crisp lettuce in sharp vinaigrette on top; gratin of brandade de morue with crispy onions strewn over the center, right about where your mouth usually gets tired of the creaminess, and two glasses of rose. I’m not sure I would be able to suffer the cramped room for the six-course tasting menu at night, but the idea of brilliant food at an affordable price with cafe easiness is pretty seductive.

L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, 5, rue Montalembert (7th), 33 1 42 22 56 56.
Allard, 41, rue St.-Andre-des-Arts (6th), 33 1 43 26 48 23.
Le Comptoir, 9, carrefours de l’Odeon (6th), 33 1 44 27 07 97.

THE REDEMPTION OF ST.-REMY

The real reason I braved Europe for the first time since The Incident is taking some time to assimilate. But I’m glad I went if only to experience St.-Remy in Provence in a kinder light. The first time we breezed through we saw mostly souvenir shops, ate a good lunch at Maison Jaune and tasted some amazing confections at a brand-new shop opened by Joel Durand, who was mixing then wildly exotic spices like star anise into his deep dark chocolate. This trip we were lodged at a splendiferous new hotel for five nights and had all the time in the world to lean back and enjoy it.

Our first meal was at Alain Assaud, a name I plucked out of the Michelin at the TGV station as we staggered into town not sure where we were or what time it was after a late overnight flight. Not only was it one of those fantasy finds -- friendly, nicely appointed, interesting -- but it had a menu at 25 euros. My consort played around a la carte, with excellent duck pot au feu and a tomato tart with anchovies and basil, but I greedily took all three courses: eggplant flan, a quintessential grande aioli with mussels, whelks, vegetables and three kinds of fish, and then a rhubarb tart. We needed about half that after sitting down to tapenade and toasts, bread and superb butter, and a little plate of anchovies in puff pastry in various forms (snail, crescent and tartlet). A bottle of rose was doled out in tiny glasses the way the French do so brilliantly to make one bottle last as long as you need it.

Next night we met a friend who lives in what she described as a cow town, where locals sing karaoke and fantasize about bulls. Her restaurant choice was Grain du Sel, where we sat on the terrace at the mercy of a dramatic-looking waiter who apparently had much better things to do than tend to our table. At her instigation we both ordered tasting plates, meat for my consort and mostly vegetable for me, but we swapped right away to avoid giving him foie gras nightmares. Imagine a degustation on a platter and you have a sense of what it was like to dabble among foie gras terrine, magret, apple stuffed with duck gizzards, onion frites, duck confit, miniature fried ravioli, composed salad and more. At 25 euros a person, though, it was hard to complain about too much.

For our last lunch before the orgy began, we went back to Maison Jaune, the best choice on a beating-down-hot Sunday afternoon. I’m convinced we ate exactly the same market menu as our last trip, back in the last century, but I could face it down every day on that wondrous terrace: cantaloupe soup with fresh basil paired with a pigeon leg with tomato confit; pistou with beans and sliced goat cheese; duck breast with orange, fennel and olives; goat cheese with pine nuts and sublime olive oil, and fresh cantaloupe with strawberries and jam.

Joel Durand was closed when we staggered out, but just steps away we found Anne Daguin’s pastry shop, Le Petit Duc, where she sells candies and cookies baked from medieval recipes at seriously modern prices. And we were very happy to be staying just a short saunter away at Les Ateliers d’Image, where the staff was a singular combination of friendly and hyper-efficient and the modern room was starkly beautiful and the shower was such a world-class experience we never even tried the pool we could see from our little veranda. It was like a resort in the center of town, a town that may be the Santa Fe of France but does have its charms.

Alain Assaud, 13, blvd Marceau, 33 4 90 92 37 11
Grain du Sel, 23-25, blvd Mirabeau, 33 4 90 92 00 89
Maison Jaune, 15, rue Carnot, 33 4 90 92 56 14
Les Ateliers de L’Image, 36, blvd Victor Hugo, hotelphoto.com.

THE LAKE EFFECT

Buffalo has beaches. In the roughly 22 years since I first set wary foot off a plane there, I never even suspected locals take off most of their clothes and actually get into Lake Erie. On a couple of miserably hot days it would have been tempting to join them, even the blood-on-their-souls ones who drive Humvees and get seriously hammered at Dock on the Bay on a Sunday afternoon. Instead we seemed to alternate between eating, touring Frank Lloyd Wright houses and eating some more.

Tsunami holds up as the best restaurant in town, especially with its new menu. I had duck coated with cashews with gingery duck sausage on a crispy noodle cake, an assemblage that was both brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed (getting the breast juicy but cooked through seems to be far beyond most chefs’ grasp). The house variation on Caesar salad, with a miso dressing, was light and clean. Grilled pork with grilled peaches and huge tempura softshell crabs were also exceptional. The wildest choice was the beef on weck roll, with Kobe beef seasoned with coarse salt and caraway and wrapped in rice and then carpaccio. If the outer layer had not been too tough to bite, let alone cut, it would have been extraordinary. And unlike every other dish, it was also too big, a sin that way too many Buffalo restaurants commit. Luckily, a special dessert was a reversion to the dainty mode but was still enough for three of us. (Details? Sorry. Chocolate’s chocolate.)

Hutch’s had not slipped on a second visit, either, although the place still felt rough around the edges. Our waitress was four-star, adept not just at reciting the foot-long specials list but also at advising on the wine choices, insisting gruner-veltliner by the bottle was the way to go (the by-the-glass alternative she described as “Austrian moonshine”). My consort had a flawless beet salad with walnuts and blue cheese plus wild salmon with a saffron glaze and gazpacho sauce; I had too much of two huge appetizers (eggplant-mozzarella napoleon with unnecessary prosciutto and a softshell crab with spicy aioli and salsa) while his mom scored with jambalaya fettucine that was spicy enough to earn the name. Chocolate cake, though, was sweet overkill.

The big surprise was San Marco, which an e-correspondent out of the blue had planted in my feeble brain. No one I asked seemed to know anything about it, so we bravely made our way out on an early Sunday evening only to find ourselves deep in one of the ritzy suburbs I had never been through. By the time we walked in, I was quaking at the thought of what the menu prices might be, especially when I saw the grappa bottles on a sideboard and the ambitious window treatments and linen and all the other Michelin-one-star-in-Pompeii accouterments. And even more so when I saw only one other table was occupied, and that by a young girl in a strapless dress with what appeared to be her boyfriend and her straight-out-of-John Guare father. Aside from “Volare” on constant replay, the place did not feel like Buffalo Italian in the least.

And the menu certainly didn’t read like the usual megaportions with spaghetti and dressing-drenched salad on the side -- it had quail for an appetizer and wild boar for an entree. My consort put the kitchen to the test with a first course of risotto and gave it an A: the rice was perfectly cooked nubbly/creamy, fat with mushrooms and aromatic of truffle oil. The pappardelle with duck existed in menu description only, so I settled for the vitello alla nonna and was rewarded with three tender cutlets topped with asiago and mozzarella in a light sauce, with carefully chosen and grilled vegetables on the side. My consort’s special of sea bass with pine nut and herb sauce was also one of the best pieces of fish I’ve ever tasted in that town. His mom insisted on eating cheap and light -- stracciatella and a green salad -- and with a $22 bottle of vernaccia from San Gimignano and an acceptable tip for a waiter who could have been Steve Buscemi on Prozac, we got away for $116, a lot for Buffalo Italian but great value anywhere.

A docent at Graycliff, the second Wright house, suggested Hoak’s for lunch after our tour there, and it was a shock to the system to walk out of that airy summer house and into what felt like any old lakeside dive with cheesy Irish slogans and a rather large clientele. I gritted my teeth and ordered the special broiled scrod after seeing the monstrous fried fish sandwiches going by and before one landed on my consort’s plate. But both were actually as good as those kinds of dishes get, fresh-tasting and cooked to juiciness. Mine came with a big mayonnaise spill of coleslaw and potato salad, each nothing like the over-sugared, no-expiration-date commercial kind you get everywhere anymore. The menu even had wine recommendations for each category, and the pinot grigio was not swill. We sat inside rather than on the deck because it was so brutally hot, but every table had a view. Of the lake, though, and luckily not of any swimmers.

Tsunami, 1141 Kenmore Avenue, 716 885 0074.
Hutch’s, 1375 Delaware Avenue, 716 885 0074.
San Marco, 2802 Kensington Drive, Snyder, 716 839 5876.
Hoak’s, 4100 Lake Shore Drive, Hamburg, 716 627 4570.

WECKLESS IN BUFFALO

I never realized what a real American city my consort’s hometown is until we experienced it in an AARP-mobile. You are what you drive there, and if it’s not anywhere near as bad as LA, we did cause quite a scene pulling into the parking lot of hip Nektar in his mom’s loaner. A manager in a sport coat and trendy glasses literally ran out a window to beg us to pull its fat butt onto the sidewalk so the little guys could get in and out. Then he asked, “Did you come for Ambrosia, or will you be dining with us?” Ambrosia is a not-great diner up the block. I guess we looked as if we were out for the early-bird special.

We had gone to Nektar after passing it innumerable times on our way to or from a hotel, and it proved to be as alluring inside as from a car window. Unfortunately, the cooking was the weakest of our three high-end meals this trip. Salads were excellent, both the house one that came free with entrees and the up-sold baby spinach with smoky bacon dressing for $1 extra. My maple-marinated salmon was notable mostly for the side: new potatoes wrapped with prosciutto and sage and roasted. The swordfish special was just big, and Bob went into a rare snitfit at how “over” the pineapple salsa seemed. As always in Buffalo, though, we both had excellent wines for around $6 a glass. And the service was surprisingly snappy given how stretched the waiter was.

Hutch’s, our other breakout destination on a trip without either wings or beef on weck, looked just the way you would expect a Buffalo restaurant to look: a little dumpy, a lot unsophisticated, although the early-bird light made the front room rather appealing. The menu was bizarre, everything from $8.95 chicken-portobello sandwich to $31 steak, and I was thinking we should never have listened to chefs who had touted the place (let alone the Western New York Life Bob had picked up that rated it No. 1). Then the waitress arrived with a list of specials that went on so long she laid down her cheat sheet for us to keep reading. Halibut and lamb sounded like real food, and both portions were not just huge but creative and built on seriously great ingredients -- fish better than you can ever find in a store there, meat with pronounced flavor. A stuffed poblano appetizer was respectable although the cornmeal coating was missing something crucial, while the field greens salad was outstanding -- again, made from ingredients tough to find even at Wegman’s.

The prospect of lunch in a hospital cafeteria was enough to send us back into the AARP-mobile to the Greek diners close by (excuse me: Family Restaurants). Stop 1 was the Olympic, where I made the mistake of ordering a turkey club and was penalized with supermarket white bread, iceberg lettuce, anemic tomatoes, processed turkey and okay bacon. Bob, having been there before, was savvier with his choice of a chicken souvlaki sandwich, the real deal. It was the same thing next day at the Royal, just across the intersection, where I suffered a mini chef’s salad with turkey loaf and Mr. Smart Orderer got a far superior Greek chicken plate with pita and feta salad (his mom had excellent barbecued turkey on mixed greens). When in Buffalo, eat the way Athenians would in a Greek diner. The Olympic had better pie, the Royal better salad greens, not to mention a swankier atmosphere. Both were beset with lame service, and the rather large waitresses at the latter rubbed it in -- their polo shirts were emblazoned Flying Turtles (the name of a related restaurant) when it should have been Lumbering Hippos.

On our last night, neither of us had any stomach for trying another new menu and we all but flew over to Tsunami. Since the weather had turned almost summery after a huge snowfall over the weekend, Anderson’s was packed on our requisite stop for a frozen custard, and so was the parking lot at the best restaurant we know in the birthplace. But we got a table, then a waitress who admitted the place had been slammed, and we were soon drinking a lovely bottle of Gravina (at a lovely price of $23, for a mix of greco and malvasia, the waiter said) and picking at spiced nuts. Bob tore through sashimi that looked perfect and then crab cakes on truffled udon noodles, which are always good. Still in major feeding mode, I ordered the dim sum -- shrimp toast, dumpling, spring roll -- and nearly polished it off before I came to my Manhattan sensibility. With the salmon appetizer I chose for my main course, I just tasted the poke, the gravlax and the smoked spring roll and put down my chopsticks. When food is spectacular, I don’t need to clean my plate in search of satisfaction. Except for the prices (not one of our dishes was over $10), it was hard to remember we were not eating in a much younger, far more prosperous town.

Nektar, 451 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, 716 881 1829.
Hutch’s, 1375 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, 716 885 0074.
Olympic, 1681 Military Road, Kenmore, 716 874 0771.
Royal, 1320 Sheridan Drive, Kenmore, 716 873 0056.
Tsunami, 1142 Kenmore Avenue, Kenmore, 716 447 7915.

CASH AND CARRY

The good thing about eating around Philadelphia is that you save so much money on wine because so few restaurants have liquor licenses. The bad thing is that you have to pack so much money because so few restaurants take credit cards. You’ll also feel underdressed if you arrive with your bottle in a plain brown bag from the state store. The burghers all around you will be packing custom carriers containing labels you won’t find in the local equivalent of post offices selling booze instead of stamps. The $30 Chablis we bought at one of the better-stocked stores, on Chestnut Street, was struggling to hit undistinguished on the quality scale.

But what you get for forgoing modern conveniences like wine lists and plastic are generally good ideas, or at least ideas you haven’t encountered a million times in Manhattan.

At Pumpkin in Center City, I ordered the “grilled Romaine salad with creamy D’Auvergne dressing” just because it sounded so improbable. And of course it was great, the outer leaves of a skinny head of lettuce wilted to sweetness over the coals, the center leaves still crisp, all of them swathed in just the right amount of smooth dressing with just enough blue cheese bite. The roasted radicchio with fontina and vin cotto seemed leaden and too sweet by comparison.

Monkfish and clams with romesco sauce was an excellent rendition, with the right balance of soupiness and grilled bread. A whole dorade was perfectly fresh, perfectly grilled and well flavored with a coating of tapenade. I insisted we try dessert, though, and was rewarded with a lemon tart with a crust that needed a mallet to crack and a filling that tasted more of sugar than citrus.

The place was tiny and the staff entertaining: everyone from the chefs on down looked as if he or she had worked in bad restaurants before and was determined to show how to get everything precisely right. But there was nothing in the righteous program to allow for random requests -- we got bread from the pretentious basket once and never when we needed it to sop up dressing or sauce, even when we asked. You can forgive a lot, though, when the tab comes to all of $65.

I shouldn’t say anything about Alison at Blue Bell, since the chef/owner and her photographer consort are friends of ours and even drove us through the terrifying Lincoln Tunnel to get there for a gift dinner for two for Bob’s long-past birthday. But I can honestly report that the ginger-fried squid with wasabi sauce (points for not euphemizing it as calamari) was spectacular, and it was easy to believe a regular customer orders the Brussels sprouts with bacon, balsamic vinegar and Parmesan as both appetizer and dessert. The potato gnocchi were airily close to true Italian, and the crusted monkfish with foie gras sauce was a gilded lily. The menu bubbles with ideas: a “feta cigar” with the Greek salad (cheese deep-fried in phyllo, with a tendency to fly off the plate); bits of smoked salmon over the skate; truffled polenta under the exceptional cod; more truffle flavor in the smoked salmon tartare with miniature potato latkes. We didn’t need dessert, even the best of the lot, a mango upside-down cake.

The place itself is sleek and polished and understated, nothing like you would expect out in the suburbs where you can park only feet from the door, and from the cash machine at the local bank. Even if we had been paying, the most expensive things on the menu are all of $26 (crab cakes and snapper). Don’t trust me, but I thought it was worth it.

Manon in Lambertville, N.J., just across the river from some other friends’ compound in New Hope, is the kind of restaurant you always hope you’ll find in a tourist town -- small and charming but with a sentient chef. The food was far from cutting edge, but all of it was done right: monkfish medallions in lobster sauce; seared scallops; a respectable rendition of bouillabaisse. A special appetizer of mushroom rillettes with pistachios still haunts me. What was most amazing, though, was that one pigtailed waitress handled every table in the room without once losing her rhythm or her cool. Someone could do a training video of her to teach how to get water and bread baskets to tables, open wines and take and deliver orders so smoothly that every party leans back and enjoys the leisurely evening. Service is usually the fatal flaw in country restaurants. But this woman could have caught a flying cigar.

Pumpkin, 1713 South Street, Philadephia, 215 545 4448.
Alison at Blue Bell, 721 Skippack Pike, Blue Bell, Pa. 215 641 2660.
Manon, 19 N. Union St., Lambertville, N.J., 609 397 2596.

BIGGER BUT UNDIMINISHED

One of the best lines ever written about New York was Jeff Weinstein’s in the Village Voice eons ago when Dean & Deluca suddenly metastasized from a jewel box of a boutique to a massive food hall. “You destroy a cornucopia when you spread it out,” he wrote. I’ve felt the same way about Citarella, which was just a skinny storefront with nothing but fishmongers and fish when we moved to New York. Too often, bigger just means more of an arena for craziness (can you say Zabar’s, or Fairway?) Manhattanites get weird when there’s room to think, especially in spaces that are cobbled together because it’s too expensive to shut down and do a Dean & Deluca-style sleek and complete makeover.

So it was utterly unsettling to walk into Les Halles and find not one intimate brasserie but a double-wide. We had eaten lunch there just weeks before, and it was the same as it ever was on myriad visits. Now the butcher case was on the wrong side, the bar was longer and more commodious, there was a real hostess stand, and a whole second dining room had been added, with a half-wall down the center where the sick cow posters used to be. It was obviously another expansion where a second space had been renovated and then a wall had been broken through. We sort of staggered to our table and tried to get our bearings and were just about okay when I decided to, as my dad would put it, hit the head. I walked toward the kitchen on automatic pilot, turned right and freaked. “Where’d the bathroom go?” I asked the waiters clustered over their usual terminal.

Neither of us was looking forward to our food after that. Another absolute old reliable had gone and changed on us, and it was a 9/11 to boot. But we should have known from the crew eating lunch on the new side that the kitchen would be as untouched pyschically as it was physically. This is a place that does what it does day in and day out with no deviations, at least at lunch. It’s not about a chef, or trendiness, or anything but consistency, from the bread and butter on. The steak frites was the usual well-butchered slab of flavorful meat cooked to juiciness, with quintessential fries and a toss of good greens dressed just right. I was so disoriented I deviated from my usual and risked tartiflette, the kind of assemblage Bill Clinton would be pilloried for eating -- lardons, Reblochon cheese, potatoes and onions all melted together with a fried egg on top. It wasn’t bad, but I’m going back to the old Les Halles next time: steak or duck. 411 Park Avenue South, 212 670 4111.

ANTI-GLOBAL SEASON

Luxury is having a consort around to cook for and eat with just when summer ingredients are so good you want to cook and eat constantly. Restaurants aren’t very appealing when you can have two sit-down meals a day with someone on a weird schedule of bed by 8, up at 2, home by 9, sleep till noon, lunch at 4, dinner at 7. This was not a half-week but a full revel. One night it was Oppenheimer’s fat and perfectly trimmed lamb chops on Paffenroth’s amazing wild arugula, with potatoes sautéed in duck fat with Keith’s incredible rocambole garlic. One lunch was Blue Moon’s super-fresh flounder with Bialas’ super-sweet corn on the cob and Paffenroth’s intense red carrots (which go orange on you if you peel them). We had Blue Moon’s scallops on pesto from Paffenroth basil and Eckerton’s heirloom tomatoes with Keith’s aggressive mesclun with lemon cucumbers from the scruffy organic guy on 97th Street. We had Keith’s crookneck squash seared until it turned caramely and zucchini stewed with Cherry Lane’s field tomatoes and generic Greenmarket corn braised with Greenmarket chanterelles. And that’s not counting Fantasy Fruit blueberries in a sour cream cake and three different growers’ peaches just plain. And much more.

Which all makes it all the more bizarre that the Greenmarket needs a PR person, although she is earning her salary this summer getting well-deserved and well-placed mentions especially in the slick magazines. It says everything that I see lots of chefs at the markets, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a food reporter, and I go three to five times a week, downtown and uptown. This is where the news is in season, and it’s all about being there.

Oppenheimer, 2606 Broadway, 212 662 0246
Blue Moon, Union Square Wednesdays, Chambers Street Saturdays
Paffenroth, Union Square Wednesdays and Saturdays (the best vegetables and best prices, probably because they sell so much to chefs -- $1 for three or four kinds of basil, $2 for wild arugula, great corn for three for $1, the biggest herb bunches for $1; it’s like the 99-cent store-meets-Dean & Deluca)
Bialas, 97th and Columbus Fridays
Eckerton Hill, Union Square Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays
Keith’s Organic, Union Square Wednesdays and Saturdays
Cherry Lane, Union Square Wednesdays and Saturdays
Fantasy Fruit, seemingly everywhere all the time

SOUTH OF THE TRENTON BORDER

Mexican was desperation dining when I lived in Philadelphia, in those glory days from 1978 to 1981. I remember a choice between a really mediocre place on Sansom Street and a really dangerous place on Second Street, where one night of margaritas put me off tequila for almost 20 years after a trip to the emergency room with a dented skull. Things get better with every trip, as they do everywhere immigrants are importing authenticity, but my last Acela investment convinced me that my old stomping grounds may have hit on the best idea in chiles: blatant faux-Mex. An accelerated cruise through the appetizer menu at El Vez was probably the most satisfying ride I’ve had in a year or more.

New York Mexican restaurants seem to stick to the same script, and it really gets soporific after the 27th encounter. None of them have the guts to break for the border and just have respectful fun. And that’s what the menu is designed to indulge at El Vez, another extremely shrewd theme park from Stephen Starr, whose restaurants I want to hate but always wind up seduced by because they’re the rare enterprises that deliver on both concept and cuisine.

We had only a little over an hour to try it, between a foray to the Barnes Foundation (three stars in my green guide) and a train ride back to a party in New York, but there was just one weak link among the five little plates four of shared along with respectable margaritas. Best were the portabello tacos, two-bite-size assemblages with a whole plate’s worth of liveliness, and the duck confit flautas, perfectly fried and sauced. The melted Manchego “salsa” (fondue by another name sounds so much more appetizing) was also excellent. Even the three sopes delivered -- if the crab, chicken and plantain toppings were relatively bland and/or misguided, the masa base was probably the best I’ve ever encountered. And when I came back from the hyper-designed bathroom, I wished we had ordered guacamole when I saw the “low-rider” it was prepared on, a bike with a wagon-load of avocados and accoutrements. El Vez also gets points for serving spiced nuts if it’s going to charge for chips and salsa.

In the end, the bill was $81 before tip -- $1 more than the ticket home.

El Vez, 121 South 13th Street, Philadelphia, 215 928 9800.

IN THE FORMER EVIL EMPIRE

Even without the back story, Estonia would be one of the most seductive destinations anywhere in Europe. But starting a visit with someone who grew up under Soviet rule and remembers the days of stringent rationing when a big bar of chocolate would bribe the way into the doctor’s office made it seem even more marvelous, in every sense of the word. Our connection, Maarten Kross, is the son of a renowned writer who was shipped off to Siberia and once saw green coffee beans in a shop there. When he tried to buy them, Maarten said, the owner said no, they were worthless -- she had tried to boil them the day before and after three hours they were still hard. Half an hour after that sad laugh, we were sitting down to huge and excellent lattes in a cafe called Moskva that made Soho seem stuffy.

Two days later we had lunch at Pegasus in the old writers’ union clubhouse but might as well have been in London. The sleek space was designed to the max -- with clever “paintings” done in masking tape on the walls, big windows for seeing and being seen, table decorations of coffee beans nestled with limes, women’s toilets designed for hovering (easily the best idea in plumbing since the foot flusher) -- and the cooking was that rarity, a steady hand on the global throttle (the chef is English with Indian roots).

The three-course budget carte (shades of Restaurant Week) was a little dull aside from the extraordinary plum sorbet, but I was amazed at my choices: asparagus with minted pea cakes and smoked salmon, followed by the most I-dare-you option on the long menu: “Cantonese style roasted duck with vegetable pow -- Chinese dumpling.” 66 should do something so brilliant and so well. Both the breast and the leg were beautifully cooked, and the fat dumpling was better than I have ever eaten in New York (if not Hong Kong).

Our last meal was on the flip side of Estonia, a subterranean, very cosy restaurant called Vanaema Jures (roughly, Grandmother’s), owned by the director of the theater where my consort had presented his photo show, the reason for our flying to a latitude so northern it would be uninhabitable without the Gulf Stream. On sitting down with the boss, we were told everyone ordered what Hillary Clinton did: the traditional Christmas dish of Estonia, roast pork with pickled cabbage and fried potatoes. It was good, but my salmon with “cream-cheese sauce” was pretty great and the director’s cut of beef with pickles and roasted potatoes was the real winner. For dessert, we were lobbied into kama, the one true national dish, if the bear baiters were to be believed. It was either an acquired or a forced taste, a cereal-like blend of grains and ground dried peas with a little jam for sweetness.

But as always in Estonia, the true pleasure of Grandmother’s was the back story. The decor, the owner admitted, was more stage set than vintage authenticity (the photos came from families besides his own, the awards and plaques from estate sales, the sewing machine near the door from who knows where). It was a testament to restaurants as theater -- as he said, they “sell air” as much as food -- but it was topped by his Hillary remembrance. The day she was to come to lunch, he had no idea and arrived at the theater upstairs to find a cluster of men in sport coats and ties with earpieces. One of them asked him if he had heard from the White House, and he assumed it was a rock group. What we all wouldn’t give for the good old days of innocence, before honor and dignity collapsed.

Pegasus, Harju 1, 372 631 4040.
Restaurant Vanaema Juures, 10/12 Rataskaevu, 372 626 9080.

RUNNING ON FUMES

It’s noon on our first day in Italy. Our bags are lost somewhere between Newark and Venice, and the Air France kit with compensatory toiletries complete with condom has not been much of an antidote to the high aroma of our slept-in clothes. We’re only a couple of hours into Wine Day, the lavish taste-and-talk extravaganza at Villa Braida where my consort is to receive a photography award, and we have at least nine hours to go before the big dinner and slide show for all the wine producers working with the sponsor, Vinoteca Balan. Two cappuccini are not helping. Lunch sounds like the better No-Doz.

Our friend Diego Orlando suggests calling one of his friends who will open his restaurant for us, and we’re off in two cars with five strangers and acquaintances. We crawl under half-closed security gates into what could be a bar in a movie: every wall covered with either jazz posters or bottles of beer of every description. Within minutes a guy who looks like a cross between Jackson Browne and Ken Burns is popping open what could be a bottle of Champagne and setting out plates of taralli and homemade pickled vegetables, olives and peperoncini. The bubbles are beer, a special kind called Zahre, and it’s as smooth as Veuve Clicquot.

JB/KB’s clone excuses himself to “bake some bread,” then reappears with two plates piled with steaming focaccia, not much thicker than tortillas and fragrant with oregano. He vanishes again to make the lunch he has dreamed up while painting walls after Diego called: “salsiccia, birra, pecorino” for the sauce, spaghetti alla guitarra for the pasta. We quickly polish off a bottle of great Altis sauvignon from Friuli, and then he brings out big chunks of pecorino di fossa, aged underground in walnut leaves, and insists we drink marsala Terre Arsa with each piece. And then it won’t do unless we try some ice cream with fig marmalade drenched in Calvados. As we all start to make Mr. Creosote motions, he plonks three bottles of 23-year-old booze -- Scotch, Irish whiskey and Venezuelan rum -- on the table and tries to persuade us to taste them all to understand how age matures them to similar perfection. We have many wines still to sample back at the Balan event, though, and so we say our thanks and goodbyes. As we head to the car, our driver shakes his head. “He’s nice,” he says, “but he is without caution.”

A man after my own heedless liver, the bar maestro shows up later in the day to give one last hint of Italy’s high-octane culture. As we’re working our way from table to table sipping our samples, he tells us there’s an Italian term called staffa -- one last drink for a horseman who has his foot in the stirrup. I still had motor skills enough to write it down in my notebook, but I have a feeling it will not be forgotten any sooner than that surreal sojourn in a pub outside Venice.

La Lampada, Largo S. Marco, 4, Magliano, Veneto 39 (0)41 590 5088.

TAKE THE MEAT AND RUN

Usually the nicest thing I can ever say about Florence is that it isn’t Rome. Which is my least favorite city in the world, between the noise, the dirt and the gap-toothed gigolos (not to mention the Vatican). But now I know the secret to enjoying the most overrun Italian city outside Venice: duck in on a Thursday night, go to a friend’s lavish birthday party on Friday night and fly right out. With a stop or two for a Florence-specific meal and not enough sleep in a find of a hotel (the Pitti Palace), it’s just about bearable.

Stop One was Cammillo Trattoria, after the hosts at a weeks-old Manhattanesque restaurant steps from the hotel told us they were fully committed and recommended what looked to my suspicious eye like a tourist trap just steps farther down the same street. I was cranky right up until my quintessential fried zucchini blossoms arrived, and they almost made up for being surrounded by the same kind of people who ruin meals all over the world. (Aggressive English can break the strongest overseas spell.) But the food, the wine, the service were all faultless. Which was no surprise once I later realized Cammillo was where the birthday after-party would be held, as the host’s favorite restaurant in all of Florence.

Stop Two was a restaurant recommended by our aging Gambero Rosso as the best value/quality equation in Florence, a cramped joint called Mario right outside Mercato Pike Place. Again, the line waiting for the few seats was all speaking the wrong language, but the experience was everything you hope for when you’re looking for disorentientation. The menu was oral, the wine list tiny, the tables shared, the toilets of the back-into-the-footsteps-and-aim variety. My consort was hellbent on trying the house specialty, Florentine steak for two, and it was worth whatever our friends wound up paying for a forkful, buttery-tender and full of all-too-rare beefy richness. The potatoes (freedom frites, to be more precise) were also excellent. So was the wine. But the preserved-in-garlic ambience was the best part. It all but pounded the message of eat and run, which is just what you want to hear in Florence.

Cammillo Trattoria, 57r Borgo San Jacopo, 39 (0)55 21 24 27.
Mario, 2r Via Rosina, 39 (0)55 21 8555.

NO EXCESS, PLEASE, WE’RE DANISH

By the sixth day in Copenhagen, it was starting to sink in why suicide is so prevalent in Scandinavia. There are only so many burger-nachos-Caesar salad menus you can face in endless sunlight. And then we met an editor from the hip newish food magazine Spis Med who suggested we try the restaurant her partner just happened to run which just happened to have won its first Michelin star. Our only hesitation was not at the out-of-France rating or even the price -- a set menu at close to $100 was starting to sound like a bargain -- but the five courses involved. We were looking at a wake-up call at 3:30 the next morning, and the last thing either of us wanted was a marathon at the table (or, to put it more bluntly, a protracted exercise in chefly onanism).

From the amuse we knew we were in for a very well-edited ride. It was a tiny bowl of cucumber “soup” that was really juice, with a couple of dribbles of intense olive oil and a single square of red mullet that was equal parts oceanic flavor and taste-extending texture. After a better than decent interval we were presented with a tiny cup of still foaming pea soup accompanied by a few perfectly grilled scallops with first-of-the-season peas, baby carrots and a leaf of wood sorrel. A judicious slab of mullet baked in black olive puree came next, with a tiny terrine of crab and tomato on one side and a hint of garlicky cucumbers in yogurt on the other. Those few bites were followed by a generous slice of foie gras set over pickled white asparagus and under roasted wild mushrooms (three for three). And then we got a spectacular little bit of rabbit with the new potatoes Danes go nuts for in springtime. Our plans to skip dessert vaporized when we saw that it was rhubarb three ways, most dramatically in a chibouste, an idea that makes panna cotta seem as reflexive as creme brulee.

Restraint is not something you would expect in a place called -- seriously -- The Thief, the Cook, His Wife and Her Lover. But we were back in our room by 10:30, in a much lighter mood. Tetsuya could seriously benefit from a trip Up Over.

TyvenKokkenHansKoneOgHendesElsker, 16 Magstraede, 33 16 1292.

CAPITAL DEFENSE

On my latest exile to Washington, I actually tried something new: eating only in “old” places. Turns out it may be the answer in a city that will never have hot restaurants. Lukewarm can be surprisingly satisfying.

15 Ria set the tone. My consort had come home raving about the crab cakes he had had there on Super Bowl Sunday, and of course they were outstanding and would have been even if the chef did not have a sure hand with the breading, frying and saucing (a little cumin was the ideal accent with the celeriac-apple salad alongside). Chefs in Washington simply have access to far superior seafood. The chunks of crab in those cakes were fatter than both my thumbs and tasted only of sweet sea, not a tired shelf. My rockfish entree was exemplary for the same reason; it even stood up to the overwrought balsamic glaze and the dull “risotto” cake underneath. Bob, unfortunately, was seduced by the daily special, which was listed as suckling pig but tasted exactly like steam table turkey. His green salad, the wines by the glass and the service were all faultless, though.

On my own for lunch, and curious about how Mexican is immigrating to the immigration capital of America, I braved Andale in Penn Quarter but wound up walking out in despair over the manana attitude. You should be offered something besides a menu in your first 15 minutes in a half-full restaurant. And so I settled for finally sampling the cooking at Jaleo up the block, where the heavy grease smells from the underventilated kitchen would have driven me out on any other day. The place had run out of the sea urchin special I ordered and so I made a meal of only sauteed wild mushrooms and a Valencia salad (greens with onions, oranges, piquillo peppers and crispy ham bits that were missing one adjective in the menu description: microscopic). The mushrooms were that rarity -- truly wild, not just shiitakes -- but their cabrales sauce was like goat butter (whoever asked rhetorically, “How hard is it to melt cheese?” must not realize it can go two ways: rubber or oil).

Jaleo was the French Laundry in comparison with the Bread Line next day. This place is a shrine to all that’s noble in ingredient sourcing, so I was willing to forgo a waiter and wine to experience it. And I can’t remember when I felt so brutalized by the mere act of ordering and paying for food. The room is total chaos: one line goes to salads, one to sandwiches and soups, and both are moving faster than a speed reader can absorb the board menus. Once you get your trayful of food, and haggle with the cashier for plastic glasses for the special filtered water (run through lemons and limes), you have to jockey for a place to sit while warding off flashbacks to your high school cafeteria. My fried codfish on brioche with garlicky remoulade was excellent, and huge, but I left feeling as if I had just opened a door on another level of hell. Bread Line’s philosophy seems to be pearls for swine.

On the blessedly last night, we passed up a couple of new places I’d heard of because they either sounded deafening or were already booked and headed instead for a relative old-timer, Cashion’s Eat Place in Adams Morgan. Once again, my expectations were beyond low. This is Washington, where bourbon appears to outsell Bordeaux by far. But what a place -- luxurious but with an open kitchen, expensive but relaxed and staffed to the max. I deeply regretted my rental mushrooms at Jaleo when I realized I could only withstand two appetizers. The entrees looked incredible.

My gumbo file was the funkiest I’ve ever had outside Louisiana -- dark and haunting and thick with big chunks of sweet crab and shrimp -- and my little dish of mushroom ragout on a crisp corn cake was even better. We fought over Bob’s appetizer of avocado and grapefruit in a poppy seed dressing and then his main course of codfish, accented by a little wedge of fennel opened like a crocodile’s mouth to hold a ball of perfect steamed spinach. My wine, a white Burgundy whose name I’ve misplaced, was one of the best I’ve ever had by the glass, and it was all of $7.50. The fact that we could walk back to the hotel, in a city where so many people go double-wide from driving, was just another bonus.

15 Ria, 1515 Rhode Island Avenue NW (Washington Terrace Hotel), 202 742 0015
Jaleo, 480 Seventh Street NW, 202 628 7949.
Bread Line, 1751 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, 202 822 8900.
Cashion’s Eat Place, 1819 Columbia Road NW, 202 797 1819.

NORTHERN LIGHTS

Buffalo has always struck me as the Jeanne Moreau of American cities: great bones but ravaged. On our latest excursion there, though, it seemed even more irredeemably sad. I now see it as a metaphor for America: It’s a city that used to make things and never will again, and even tourism can’t save it when the climate is bad and getting worse.

Which makes it all the more astounding that you can always eat extremely well in the city with no illusions, as the T-shirts proclaim it. Aside from one lunch in the bacteria bar at Buffalo General Hospital, we did better than we might have at home, mostly because we retraced our forklifts.

Tsunami is in sliding distance of my consort’s boyhood bedroom, and we started there for a Friday dinner that made so many Manhattan nights out seem like, well, what you think of Buffalo. The appetizer crabcakes were exceptional, tall and crisp and light on filler, but the udon noodles with truffle oil almost put those paragons to shame. We could and should have stopped there, but I persevered with a gargantuan slab of Hawaiian fish in a bacon-tomato sauce and Bob pressed on with Flintstonian tempura prawns. The Alsatian wine was well priced ($26) and well matched, and the after-dinner glass (hey, it was a tough day) of gruner-veltliner much appreciated for $6.50. The night before we had eaten at Ilo for twice the tariff, and it was worth adding in Jet Blue airfare for a better meal.

Next day we were tantalized by the view from Bob’s dad’s bed: Frank and Teressa’s Anchor Bar, birthplace of the most abused snack trend in America. Despite my fear of chicken, it couldn’t be worse than the cafeteria again, and so we headed over at lunchtime for two batches of the famous wings, one mild, one hot. The mother-in-law equivalent seemed more nervous than I was, having heard there were cleaner places to indulge, but even she was eating with gusto once the superb Caesar salad and warm bread landed and especially after the platters of wings arrived. Ours were fat, juicy, perfectly fried and seriously hot-sauced, begging for the faintly blue cheese sauce to dunk in. The waitresses were good, the napkins were copious, and the beef on weck we ordered got raves that night as a takeout sandwich for the Polish patient. As much as I wanted to scorn the place as a Lourdes-level Carnegie Deli, even I had to admit there’s a reason the legend lives on.

Sunday lunch at Le Metro on Elmwood Avenue, the “Village” of Buffalo, was also exemplary. The salad with miso dressing was big and crunchy, the chicken and black bean chili well seasoned and my “personal Palermo” pizza enough for four. Essentially focaccia smothered in portobellos, artichoke hearts and a little cheese, it was better than many places serve in New York. The MILE loved her chicken-salad-with-apricots sandwich, and Bob’s turkey with sage Cheddar was also huge on good housemade bread. Le Metro is a chain but light-years ahead of Subway.

It’s also right down the avenue from a Watson’s shop, where the local chocolate is addictive (a slight edge of salt keeps it from being cloying), and from a store called Thunder Bay that has excellent local crafts. To get to the other Buffalo attraction, Anderson’s, you have to drive a bit, but it’s worth it: Cones are half price when it’s snowing (other outlets cut the price when the temperature gets to Siberia levels). We split an orange creme and chocolate combo while watching a steady stream of patrons place orders and wondering (me, at least) why the Dairy Queen in my hometown in Arizona always closed for the winter.

Without succumbing to any easy jokes about why, I have to reiterate that Buffalo is home to one of the best liquor stores anywhere on the continent. Premier is the size of the airport, with a literally overwhelming selection of booze from 18 corners of the world. The prices are also superb, but you can sign up immediately for a discount card to take 10 percent off the hard stuff. A good-for-Buffalo specialty food shop, where you can buy D’Artagnan products and respectable cheese, is a separate entrance away.

About the only letdown on Lake Erie was Wegmans, the supermarket chain even I’ve praised in print. Both stores we shopped for dinners at home were huge, but each had produce the worst bodega in Manhattan would hesitate to lay out. All the salad greens were rotting under misters set at monsoon intensity, and the overall selection was beyond limited. One store had exactly one variety of squash: nasty acorn. The other had no fresh thyme. When we went looking for crabmeat, though, I could see where Wegmans is heading. The busiest part of both stores is the “meals ready to heat” section. They don’t want you to cook plain old squash; they want you to spring for eight times the price if they do the prep. Don’t ask about the eggs.

Tsunami, 1141 Kenmore Avenue, Buffalo, 716 447 7915.
Frank & Teressa’s Anchor Bar, 1047 Main Street, Buffalo, 716 886 8920.
Le Metro, 520 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, 716 885 1500.
Watson’s, 738 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, 716 884 3216.
Thunder Bay, 734 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, 716 882 8645.
Premier, 3445 Delaware Avenue, Kenmore, 716 873 6688.

MY DINNER WITHOUT CESARE

Actually, it was lunch, and a friend who is friends with the wife was with me. Neither of us could agree what was causing the extra attention and freebies, but it certainly made my second encounter with the place much nicer than the first (I went in the first weeks after it opened with a high-profile friend who had made reservations well in advance and we ate bad food at the worst table in the house . . . but that was a long time ago). On request, we were moved to not the second-worst table in the house (for a 2 o’clock reservation, we were to be seated in the most cramped two-top back in the Guantanamo of section of the dining room), and before long the atonements were flying. They almost made it possible to ignore the fact that the lighting on our side of the room had apparently been installed by Ashcroft’s goons. I was ready to confess to anything.

Just when I was about to go into sticker shock ($30 entrees at lunch, and Daniel Boulud is not involved?), we were presented with a house specialty, octopus salami. It looked much better than it sounded (white pressed round stuff sliced paper thin, rolled around mizuna and dolloped with tapenade topped with pickled shallots), and tasted better than such a human-like seafood ever should. Unfortunately, we followed it with a pasta we chose together: gemelli made with chestnut flour and tossed with “wild” mushrooms. The pasta was gray-brown and gummy, the mushrooms tasted mostly of garlic and at one point my friend lifted a fork tangled with six congealed twists and said disgustedly: “This is how Jeanne makes pasta at home.”

Entrees were better, although my monkfish wrapped in prosciutto with sage was oddly peculiar and her beef short rib could only have been carved off an ox, maybe an elephant. Before we had time to get critical, a huge plate of fries arrived, crisp and crunchy and heavy with herbs.

By dessert, our nervous waiter had vanished and what looked to be a busboy was confidently offering us dessert. We declined, he disappeared and two glasses of moscato materialized, followed shortly by a tableful of gratis desserts. From worst to best: Peanut butter ravioli would, in the words of another friend, bring back Mussolini, particularly if he tried to get a mouthful with the julienned apples and spaghetti-length strands of celery tangled on top. Gingerbread pudding/cake is a bad idea in Washington’s birthplace but scary in a restaurant with Italy-worshipping photos on every wall. A little panna cotta surrounded by excellent citrus and juice, though, was just what you think dessert in Italy might be.

Go for our freebies and you can eat quite well.

Beppe, 45 East 22d Street, 212 982 8422.

OUT WITH THE OLD

I take back whatever I said about the odd coupling of David Burke and Donatella Arpaia. Their new restaurant is Italian in spirit only. Burke has lost none of his American wildness. Instead, he’s taking it to a higher level with this new partner. Dinner from his kitchen in her dining room on New Year’s Eve was one of the brightest spots in a grim year of chewing through Manhattan.

I chose it for two reasons: We could get a reservation days in advance because it was just opening, and the menu was not the usual amateur-night gouge (unlike the Biltmore Room, which demanded $150 a person before wine -- and was still pleading in the Post for reservations on Dec. 31). We had a choice of three courses for $65 or a tasting for $100. Because I reserved in my own name and know both partners, though, I’ll confess we got the best of both menus.

An amuse of pomme souffle with caviar landed as we were still hearing the story of how the staff had only been serving for seven nights. We were reveling in Mumm at $12 a glass when little shotglasses of foie gras mixed with steak tartare arrived. Before we could get to our first courses of blue crab ravioli in minestrone broth and foie gras terrine with tempura-fried grapes we had to plow through comped lobster-Sauternes flan, served in a brown eggshell with a perfect quail breast and beggar’s purse of the leg and shiitakes on the side, and pastrami salmon paired with a sea urchin panna cotta to spread on seaweed-topped toasts. Bigger appetites than ours would have called it quits about then, but we still had to face down the main courses: “filet mignon” of veal with pistachio ravioli, and lobster “steak,” both perfectly humongous. Except for the portion sizes, we could almost have been eating at Pierre Gagnaire’s Sketch in London. The food was as whimsical as Burke can get but still as serious as Escoffier, while the service was that all-too-rare blend of professional and conversational.

Add to that a wine list that Donatella calls an atlas. All wines are grouped by latitudes, which communicates more than the most overwrought descriptions. Even better, the low end was as appealing as the high. We ordered a Peter Lehman semillon from Australia for $31 that was a good bridge between the Champagne before and after dinner.

For dessert, we had fireworks. Along with the two we chose, the kitchen sent out a dark chocolate-praline torte and a super-rich butterscotch pudding in a martini glass plus a huge arrangement of petits fours. All three were richer than the citrus trio I’d picked, but nothing could top Bob’s cheesecake lollipop tree. It literally came with a trunk and branches, each speared with one of Burke’s signature little balls of cheesecake dipped in different coatings. And they packed the leftovers to go.

New Year’s always brings out my superstitious side. I believe whatever you do on the last night of December is a symbol of what you will do or feel in the year to come. And if so, I could be in trouble. Bliss could outweigh bile, and then where would I be?

DavidBurke & Donatella, 133 East 61st Street off Lexington Avenue, 212 813 2121.

THE SPICE ROUTE

Sunday is usually the dreariest day on the road. Life shuts down for the locals, and time drags for anyone passing through. But in Calcutta, hours whizzed by even though we were trapped in traffic for what seemed like half of them. Suffice it to say India has no blue laws.

We started and ended the day at temples, first at Kalighat where one of the first sights was of a black goat's freshly severed head being toted away from a sacrificial area awash in blood and last at Belur Math, a shrine to mall style and yuppiness (my guide Nidhi was locked out when a guard detected the cellphone in her bag). In between we crawled among the overgrown botanical garden with its 250-year-old banyan tree, the airlifted-from-England Victoria Memorial, a straight-out-of-Jersey shopping mall with Pizza Hut, and the swaying Howrah Bridge, a suspended parking lot. Between the cows and the beggars, we were making less than escargot time in all the cacophony, but I shut my mouth when I heard why pedestrians have the right of way. “If you hit one,” my older escort said, “they’ll burn your car.”

For lunch we stopped at Grain of Salt, a sleek-as-London restaurant on the second floor of the mall that’s run by a celebrity chef, Sanjeev Kapoor, and has every trendy touch down to stylish sinks in the bathroom (although with not-so-trendy urinal mothballs in them). I wanted to take a picture, but it would have been like pulling out my camera at Jean Georges. For 400 rupees (about $9), we each loaded our plates three times from a sprawling buffet: first a typical curry-rice-dal meal, then “junk food” (chat) and finally dessert.

Dinner was street food in a clean restaurant called Gangaur’s, at elder escort’s insistence (she grew up eating from curbside vendors to her mother’s annoyance but has clearly reformed). The three of us started with little puffs of hollow dough filled with a spicy potato mixture that you drizzle tamarind juice over before shoving whole into your mouth. Then we ate a big sheet of dosa, torn into bits to dip into chutney and dal, and finished with puri to wrap around chickpeas cooked spicy-brown with black sea salt. As always, the waiters arrived with finger bowls of hot water with slices of lime just before the bill. And the damage? $3. Sunday should come every day.

Not all my best meals were on the ground in India. Jet Airways set out some serious feasts, two on the Calcutta-to-Bangalore flight alone. The airline, someone told me, is the highest-rated private one in the world, and certainly the pilots were in peak form -- landings felt as if they were on foam. Every meal came with a bright cloth napkin, although the flatware was the usual plastic, and with a little container of pickle, the mango or lime hot condiment that puts the kick into curries. On one flight we got malai kofta with yellow rice flecked with peanuts and corn; on another we had paneer with mint chutney, a type of spring roll with cabbage, and a porcupine-like little number made of vermicelli and molto chilies. On a third we seared our mouths with another idli and super-spicy vegetable cutlets. Maybe this is the secret of great airline food. Ask not chicken or beef but veg or non-veg.

I was so enamored of Calcutta with Mother Teresa out of the picture that I was actually almost disappointed by Bangalore. Who wants to fly halfway around the world to land in LA with worse traffic? But a few meals put me in a better mood.

Mavalli Tiffin Rooms was a trip for both breakfast and dinner. We got there as the place was opening one morning so Bob could shoot the staff making and serving its famous sweet spiced coffee, and by the time we sat down we were more than ready to try the masala dosa we had seen being cooked by the half-dozen on a griddle in the spotless kitchen. These were nothing like the effete little things dished up at Hampton Chutney. They were sturdy and ghee-soaked and layered with pungent fresh green chutney. Inside was the spicy potato mixture we’d seen being mashed by fist in a bowl on the floor downstairs. The next night we stopped in for a snack and found only meals on offer. We were shown to a table where steel platters were set down in front of each of us. A parade of waiters in skirt-like lungis then came by carrying big silver buckets from which they ladled potato curry, green beans, coconut chutney, garlic pickle, cucumber raita, sambar, carrot-dal salad and rice with peanuts. Other waiters brought plain rice and multiple breads and potato chips and three sweets and then sweet rice and ice cream and finally paan, those leaves filled with mouth fresheners whose appeal mystifies me. Forget five-a-day. We counted 19 things on each plate. It was all a transporting experience right up there with the wild ride to the restaurant and back in an automated rickshaw.

We also had excellent lunches at Queens Restaurant (quintessential tandoori chicken and lady’s fingers -- okra -- and eggplant two ways and the greatest idea since the tostada: pappadum topped with red onion, tomato, chile and coriander) and at Bheems, where the food was billed as “Andhra at its hottest” and where everything was laid out on a banana leaf. One night we went to the very swank Karavalli to try Kerala cuisine: pomfret fried in a banana leaf, onion curry and rasam, a lentil broth with garlic and flaming chilies, all served with spongy rice-flour bread made in the dining room. Even our tired hotel, the Barton Fink-worthy Le Meridien, put on a good breakfast if you ignored the Japanese and English steam tables and went straight for the green chutney idli and the paratha.

But as always, the most memorable meals were the kind that are almost impossible to find unless you’re traveling with a Geographic photographer. Bob’s guide, the endlessly patient and resourceful Neha, is also a superb cook, and she has a maid who’s a chapati machine. Even better, they made some of the mysterious vegetables we’d seen one morning at the amazing Russell Market (first stop: the stall where, a newspaper clipping boasted, “the chefs shop”) and some of the dals I was curious about (who knew blackeye peas came in two hues?) LA never seemed farther away than when we were sitting at that antique table dipping into Neha’s mom’s two types of mango pickle (sweet and hot) and finishing up with her after-dinner “mints”: black sesame seeds with coconut and salt.

Aside from our Esperanto breakfast, we had two food experiences in Bombay: sublime, and ridiculous. Both were courtesy of the boutique hotel we realized was attached to the stuffy one where we were sleeping. Bob wisely thought the concierge there had to be hipper, so we took his recommendation for lunch and wound up at sleek and modern Samrat, a couple of blocks away. The menu was Gujarati and as always, the thali was the best choice: a huge sampler platter of one dazzling sensation after another: three kinds of bread, three little appetizers, two sauces, a buttermilk drink, 10 savory dishes and two sweets. Dinner could have been on another planet. Realizing there was no way we could top Samrat, we headed for the theme restaurants in the new hotel and chose India Jones over Frangipani (Italian) and the Opium Den (tapas). Once again, we were in Esperanto Land. The menu was a little bit Thai, a tad Japanese, a lot Chinese and a bit Vietnamese with Mongolian thrown in for dramatic effect. And the food all tasted as if it came from the same sad melting pot. The only saving grace was the charred-black grilled corn that at least satisfied our curiosity about the stuff we had seen smoking over coals on the street in Bangalore. It almost made the New Zealand sauvignon blanc easier to swallow. At $10 a glass, it would have bought three thalis at Samrat.

THE SOUND OF FLAVOR

One of my rules for travel is that the less appealing a place sounds, the better it will be. Salzburg was not even in my top 500 destinations when my consort suggested I tag along on a shoot there, but it now ranks pretty high on my list of great cities of the world, especially when it comes to food. There’s a there there. As I’d dreaded, it is a tourist town, but the tourists are not the usual quarter-tonners in shorts scarfing sausages as they waddle behind strollers. This town lives off serious money. Which may not buy taste but does buy consistently great food. Locals we met volunteered that Wienerwald was “the worst restaurant in Salzburg,” but one of them conceded that even there, if you stuck to schnitzel, you could have a decent meal.

From our first eating experience, in a deserted beer cellar recommended by a Local Contact who used to wait tables there, I was certainly impressed. The salad, as it turns out all Salzburg salads are, was more of a soup, with about an inch of dressing in the bottom of the bowl. But the greens, tomatoes and cucumber were all California quality. Spinat nockerl, floating in a cream sauce with just a little ham, were pasta the way the Italians should only have conceived of it. Local fish with lemon sauce and perfect roast potatoes was also exceptional, but then Gruner Veltliner at about 3 euros a deep glass may have clouded my judgment.

Breakfast was always a high point, starting at the legendary Bazar the next morning. The room looked austere but not once the food arrived: croissants with spectacular marmalade and currant jam, cappuccini and a platter of ham, bread and exceptional cheese. People-watching, even at 9 in the morning, was the best show on the river.

Fingerlos Cafe was cool and warm for breakfast two days, the most gorgeous sunlit room with tall trees and flower-splashed curtains and hyper-efficient waitresses. It’s the ground floor of a rich old folks’ home, which made it all the more surprising to see many tables popping Champagne at 9 in the morning. The regular breakfast with meat and cheese was good, especially with crudites and a chive cheese spread, but the scrambled eggs everyone orders are the best.

My appetite for wiener schnitzel was running pretty rabid by lunchtime the first day, about 24 hours since my first encounter with the breaded and fried cutlets at a truck stop suggested by LC (a place worth the visit just for the pay toilet, where e50 cents bought a singular show of a little machine washing the pliable seat by pulling it out from an oval into a round to cover every surface). And so I brushed off a suggestion by Bob’s local assistant Helmut that we just eat sausages at a stall in the street market in the center of town, where the produce displays looked like Paris on steroids, and try the “pub” his friend recommended. Which is how we came to be eating tortelloni in cream sauce and Middle Eastern lamb kebabs and Thai coconut soup at tables under umbrellas and a sprinkling sky while a French waiter brought water bowls for the dogs around us. All the food was good, but not as fascinating as the show late that night when we came back for Bob to shoot and saw local sots being escorted out by bouncers while young tourist-tenders in their dirndls and other local costumes were knocking back beer and wine in the hip bar.

We got our fix of Austrian food that night after stumbling across a century-old beer hall serving Die Weisse, which Helmut later told us was popular with tourists but also with locals. Maybe it was a cliche, but there’s a reason cliches linger. We split a ragout of the chanterelles we had seen at the market (overwhelmed, unfortunately, by a paprika sauce) with a heavy bread dumpling, and a heaping "snack" platter of three hams, two bacons, two cheeses and my first encounter with real Liptauer spead. Bob had the beer on tap, I tried all the wine and we left through what felt like a separate beer hall, a completely renovated and modern half of the restaurant, complete with Warholesque pictures on the wall of the hallway to the sleek bathrooms. The tourist slogan for this town should be “Mozart has left the building.”

Continuing on my mission of “when in Salzburg, eat as the Austrians do,” we took refuge from the brutal rain next afternoon at Stiftskeller St. Peter, owned by the church that hulks over it. Everything about it screamed tourist snare, but we plunged in and were rewarded with a snug little table with equal views of the square and the musicians and Salzburghers at other tables. This was the place to wallow in wiener schnitzel, and I did, with three plate-size cutlets cooked to juicy crustiness. Bob recaptured essence of Polish childhood with an outsized casserole of roast pork with sauerkraut, dumplings and pan juices. I had the salad/soup to start, while he rolled his eyes back in his head over the creamy smoked trout soup with pumpernickel croutons and herb sprigs.

That was a hard act to follow, but the next day LC came through when we insisted on eating traditional food for one of our last meals. She had to make several calls on her “handy” (the perfect name for a cell phone) and consult a number of coworkers, but she did find us Wirt am Gries, a restaurant with an octogenarian (read cranky) waiter, outdoor cafe decorated with kurbis (as they call winter squash) and some dazzling food. The menu, like every other one we encountered, could have been in hieroglyphics, but it turned out that only about half the choices were classics. She ordered an LA-worthy salad topped with strips of chicken schnitzel, and we divvied up the few remaining relics. Kasnocken servietl are the world’s greatest rendition of macaroni and cheese: airy dumplings fried in a black skillet with strong cheese. The pumpkin soup was stellar: very creamy, strongly squashy but with an undertone of curry and a serious garnishing of pumpkin seed oil and toasted seeds. LC insisted we share her favorite dessert, kaysermarron, which amounted to torn fried pancakes to dredge in plum sauce. Tastes like that are why you suffer flying anymore.

Ikarus turned out to be the perfect name for the setting of our last meal, in a glass complex called Hangar 7 built by the founder of Red Bull to showcase his airplane collection. The tiny, over-the-top restaurant took us just a little too close to the sun, for four hours of Michelin-seeking service and silver. Our meal put some of the best cooking in New York to shame, but getting through it was an ordeal, even though we both took the shortest four-course options, one vegetarian, one meat-heavy.

The amuse was brilliant: a gazpacho-like soup made from melon with fried mozzarella sticks on the side. Any chef worth his beef stock could turn out the carnivorous menu: crayfish with baby asparagus, favas, mache and a cucumber sorbet; St. Pierre wrapped in prosciutto set over creamy lentils with two sauces; squab stuffed with foie gras and teamed with roasted porcini. But Bob’s was the test of meatfree brilliance: Parmesan flan layered with eggplant puree made crunchy with pine nuts as well as marinated tomatoes and pesto, then artichokes in barigoule with goat cheese tortellini and mint, all winding up with a wild idea that worked: carpaccio of potato literally cooked on the plate, topped with a mound of roasted porcini and surrounded with an herby green sauce. Desserts were a letdown, but there’s no way they wouldn’t be after that kind of high-wire cooking.

Two tips on Salzburg: Fly into Munich and you’ll save the price of a meal at Ikarus, and definitely avoid the place during any of the myriad festivals, unless you’ve bought your $100 concert tickets already. Our room at the corporate-bleak Sheraton was 367 euros a night until the festival ended, then the rate dropped to 95. For the first price, the least they could leave on the pillow would be the authentic Mozart chocolate, from Furst, not the dime-store one made from cheap chocolate and artificial flavorings wrapped in gold foil that has turned out to be the first ball my cat will actually chase around the kitchen.

Pittir Keller, 6-8 Rainerstrasse, Salzburg

Cafe Bazar, 3 Schwartzstrasse, Salzburg

Cafe Fingerlos, 9 Franz Joseph Street, Salzburg, 0662/ 874213

Republic Cafe/Bar/Club, 2 Anton Neumayr Platz, Salzburg, 0662/841613

Die Weisse, 10 Rupertgasse, 0662/872246

Stiftskeller St. Peter, Salzburg, 0662/841268

Wirt am Gries, St. Gilgen am Wolgangsee, 0662/2386

Ikarus, Hangar 7, 2 Wilhelm Spazierstreet, Salzburg, 0662/2197

HOME OF THE BRAVE

Eating in London never felt more luxurious than it did after Salzburg. A menu mostly in English is truly a thing of beauty after half a week trying to remember which word on which bathroom connotes a skirt.

My one goal was to get to the pioneering new Indian restaurant Benares, but we missed it because we had a surprisingly tough time trying to persuade a Londoner to join us, and we had only two meals alone, and one was on the fly. Luckily, I wasn’t minimally working for a high-profile travel page, so my dereliction of table duty isn’t quite so embarrassing.

Benares, however, could be the Taj Mahal of London cuisine and would still be left in the dust by Sketch, Pierre Gagnaire’s partnership with the mob scenemeister from Madonna hangout Momo. The three-star Paris chef has turned the old Royal Architecture Academy into a gastrodome that makes Terence Conran look like Steve Hanson. The first floor houses a hip, packed cafe with videos on the wall, an intimate bar and, during the day, a tearoom that is as far removed from mustiness as Manhattan is from Baghdad. The bathrooms are the most talked about in town: each stall is a pod, like an eggshell, or maybe like a sterile airplane toilet. But on the second floor, the Lecture Room is a 40-seat pleasure palace, with that over-the-top British design married to total French comfort. Eating there ranked right up with our exercises in overkill at the French Laundry and Charlie Trotter’s, and not just because the appetizers alone were 30-some pounds apiece.

Gagnaire has his finger in the wind of three-star dining, and he knows you need young people downstairs to keep the old-fogey chairs filled upstairs. Arriving at Sketch is like landing at a club, and there’s a good feeling about having the rope to the second floor pulled aside when you give your name. There’s a weird feeling when you set your foot onto what looks like melted chocolate spilled down the stairs, but it’s the right set-up for the whole evening, which is formal but funky and precise but loose. The young staff, once you get used to all the silver tongs and whisking away of Limoges china, seems genuinely interested in guaranteeing a satisfying ride on the roller-coaster of haute cuisine.

For starters, Gagnaire has solved the whole problem of 16 mini-courses and fussiness and flatware changing. He goes for shock and awe with multiple dishes landing at once. The first amuse is a five-parter that arrives on one tray and includes a cuttlefish “tapenade” with red peppers, sauerkraut with salmon caviar, and two little flavored wafers. Before the appetizers, the table is blanketed with little dishes to be sampled clockwise: foie gras mousse topped with raspberry coulis, a miniature cassoulet with Emmenthaler and pork belly, a sardine on toast with Espelette pepper, beef carpaccio on a herring mousse. (Descriptions do not do this food justice.)

My appetizer was “essence of spring,” which I pooh-poohed on the cusp of September but which tasted like a long-lost season. Crab was combined with julienned snowpeas and olive oil ice cream in one dish, sheep’s milk cheese was gelled over a green tomato sorbet in another, a sweet pea soup with lettuce, rye dumplings and Beaufort cheese floated in a third. The guinea fowl for a main course was worth every pence of the 55-pound price: the breast was stuffed with green papaya and set over a zucchini jam with parmesan over a wine sabayon, while the leg was caramelized with onion.

Talk about a party in your mouth. When dessert time came, I insisted we get two (4 pounds apiece -- is Gagnaire a genius, or what?) and I’m never a sweets person. The whole next day we walked around feeling good, not gorged, and almost as if we had been to the theater we never had time to indulge in.

The other revelations of London were Eyre Brothers, where friends took us, and J. Sheekey, where we wedged ourselves into the bar late one night after Bob was finished shooting and we felt as if we’d infiltrated a private club without bribing the doorman.

Eyre Brothers is described in the usually reliable Harden’s guide as “Hispanic,” but something must be lost in the overseas translation. The menu was the liveliest amalgam outside of Peter Gordon’s Sugar Club, where we last ate with those same friends. Bob stunned me by ordering safe: scrambled eggs with chorizo, which were outstanding, and then a superb halibut with capers and lentils. The menu, after all, had Sacha-seeking devices like conger eel steaks and casseroled wild rabbit (a little Old Spot must go a long way). I have to say I picked out a perfect meal, at least until we had eau de vie forced upon us by the house after two bottles of wine. Quail “confit” with garlic, chile and smoked paprika was a stunning starter, and a grilled whole dorade was better than I have ever gotten in Italy. The flesh actually held together long enough to fork off the bone.

J. Sheekey, by contrast, was straightforward seafood: I couldn’t finish a world-class slab of Rye Bay plaice, grilled with tartar on the side, and Bob had to finish the eels in rich green sauce with those Robuchon-style potatoes that turn a vegetable into dairy. We split a big portion of crab “hoummous” that was an idea worth stealing: a faintly spicy mayonnaisy spread of seafood with flatbread. Eating at a real table might have been fun, too, but the place gave off Grand Central vibes: better to indulge at the oyster bar.

Our other meals in London were fine, but it tells you something about the state of the world that Salzburg is worth detailing just in case anyone gets there anytime soon. London will keep on churning, and apparently always for the better.

Sketch, Lecture Room, 9 Conduit Street, London W1, 0870 777 4488

Eyre Brothers, 70 Leonard Street, London EC2, 7613 5346

J Sheekey, 28-32 St.-Martin's Court, London WC2, 7240 2565

CAPE EXPECTATIONS

There’s one good thing about getting a bad meal on the first food stop on a trip: It does lower your expectations.

After a lame and gougey lunch in Providence on the way to Falmouth, on Cape Cod, I was fully prepared to settle for mediocrity for the next day and a half. We were going to be eating dangerously close to Nantucket, after all. And we were also going to be trying to eat late in a part of America where so often the best recommendation is: “There’s a Friendly’s out on the highway.”

The first night was a little scary -- we stopped in at the town’s fancy inn at 9:45 and the waiter told us the kitchen was already closed and nothing nearby might be open except a Chinese place on Main Street. We sped back to our motel, only to find its cooks had also hung up their aprons for the night. It was looking as if we might have to drink our dinner when the desk clerk came through with a suggestion. Ten minutes later we were settled into a booth at the 99, ordering surprisingly respectable Caesar salads (one with super-spicy Buffalo chicken nuggets) and drinkable wines by the glass, in a lively room right off a full bar. It almost made me a convert to chains. Well, local chains at least.

Next morning a different clerk excitedly recommended the Eatery at 146 for breakfast, the kind of tourist-neglected cafe you always hope to find, with big booths, bigger waitresses and lots of local touches. The Portuguese omelet with linguica was tempting, but we each sprang for the $3.50 egg special. The crusty codfish cakes Bob insisted on adding on made the morning: they were more potato than bacalao, but the fish flavor came through even with serious spicing.

Lunch was an expensive waste, on the water at the Flying Bridge, one of the most massive tourist-feeding factories I have ever walked two miles to a table in.

Luckily, the restaurant closest to the fairgrounds where Bob was shooting was a real find, at five minutes till closing. We’ve never ordered so fast: Caesar salad, again, and a special pizza from the wood oven, with portobello mushrooms, spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, red onions and two cheeses, mozzarella and feta. I didn’t want to look like a cheapskate on wine and tried to find something pricier than the $5.50 Rodney Strong sauvignon blanc I wanted, but the most expensive glass was only $6.50. The personable waitress insisted we pack up the last slices of that superb pizza, and even cold they were good enough to keep us out of the bar car on the Acela ride home.

Almost 20 years ago, when we first went eating around Falmouth, we were lucky to find anything but jug wine and fried fish. Now food has advanced so far you can even get lobster ice cream, at the candy shop on Main Street (tastes like frozen lobster).

99, 30 Davis Straits/Route 28, Falmouth, 508 457 9930.
Eatery at 146, 146 Sandwich Road, East Falmouth, 508 495 1757.
Chapoquoit Grill, Route 28A, West Falmouth, 508 540 7794.

THE FLAVOR OF FOG

For six sunny days in San Francisco, my consort and I argued about many things but mostly about one burning issue: Which was our best meal? He fell gut over heels for Chez Panisse at lunchtime, despite the inept service, dispute over corked wine (“slightly corked” is as ridiculous as “a little bit pregnant” -- it is or you are) and brewed-ashtray Mister Espresso. I was put off by the bizarre pairing of peas and corn and superfluous “pounded chervil” with my superb local king salmon baked on a fig leaf. Otherwise, I liked elements of several meals but came home thinking I’d almost rather be eating in Philadelphia.

Open-all-day Grand Cafe in the Hotel Monaco served the most whale-sized chunk of tuna I’ve ever faced down on a superb salade Nicoise, and the omelet with a glass of wine for $11 would do Elizabeth David proud. Roxanne’s, up the hill from Sear’s, turned out world-class road breakfasts, both banana-walnut pancakes and Californian omelets (cheese, guacamole, salsa and sour cream). Piperade on Battery produced a sensational cornmeal flatbread topped with goat cheese, leeks and caramelized onions, with excellent Basque white wine, although the gigantes with anchovies and chives tasted impossibly canned and the piperade with poached egg and Serrano ham was so rich it was like spooning up pan drippings.

We both liked Jeanty at Jack’s in the financial center, where my money-man brother treated us, and Chez Papa on Potrero Hill, where the buyer at the food shop Yum sent us, but with reservations. Goat cheese vanquished the duck in my rillettes at Jeanty, and Bob wondered if the beets in his salad had detoured through Del Monte. Overall, though, the meal was close to Paris bistro quality even if the wine cellar was gap-shelved. And at the very lively Chez Papa, we finally tasted the first gutsy Western food of the whole trip -- good French fries with aioli; artichoke hearts stuffed with peppers and topped with anchovies; a borderline brilliant salad of potatoes, artichokes, asparagus and bacon in a super-mustardy dressing -- but Bob’s roast chicken was either old or very tired.

In the end, we both wondered most about Suriya. The Thai beef with curried pumpkin, the tofu, the crepes and the satays were beyond savory as takeout shared with friends at their house in the Mission. How good would this food look in its own environment?

The answer would be reason enough to suffer another Continental flight in seats so cramped they make you envy hogs going to slaughter in relatively commodious conditions. But there’s a better enticement: the food shopping in San Francisco.

A frame store put us on to Yum, a highly designed market at 1750 Market Street where I found African bird peppers, a small-batch almond extract from Massachusetts and a rosemary oil that was like herbal perfume. The genius of the shop is that it spreads out its cornucopia, rather than cramming all the salsas and oils and vinegars into tight shelves as so many Dean & Deluca wannabes do. We could actually walk around and see what was for sale, and what was unique about it. Even better, every product is open for tasting -- if you ask. No germ-breeding sample jars there. (Most telling, the three food magazines for sale are not Food & Wine, Gourmet and Bon Appetit.)

Yum’s buyer then steered us to the “gourmet gulch” at 18th and Guerrero, where Bi-Rite “since 1940” is steps from an aromatic bakery called Tartine (interesting savory bread with leeks, olives and Gruyere) and a highly rated restaurant called Delfina, which we bypassed because Italian food is always such a letdown so soon after Italy. Bi-Rite is the kind of market even Manhattanites would kill for, with fish, wine, beer, condiments, cheese, produce and takeout all in a movie-set setting.

Then there’s Trader Joe’s. Ironically, my teetotaling brother was our guide to the one nearest his home in the East Bay, which looked like a perfectly valid food store. But all we wanted was Two-Buck Chuck, the Charles Shaw wine even the snootiest critics have been frothing over. I picked the sauvignon blanc, for $1.99 plus tax, and schlepped it all the way home as if it were a rare Chardonnay. Much as I hate to agree with paid noses, I’ve had far worse for $11.99. Faced with shiver wine at $5 a pop, I would have killed for a corkscrew on Continental. Or at least the arm room to wield it.

DEVILS AND INSECTS

The best food show in Washington recently was in the Smithsonian’s Art and Industries Building, where a corner was netted and double-doored off so that humans could mingle with “Nature’s Jewels,” butterflies and the orchids they pollinate. As we waited to get in, we got a fast lesson in a few steps of the food chain: orange butterflies will make a predator puke; all the protein is in the butterfly’s midsection, so one type has an owl-like eye on its wings to fool predators into going for the nonessential ingredients.

The next best show is probably at Oceanaire, a 2 1/2-year-old “steakhouse for people who prefer fish.” It was packed when we walked through for a look-see around 5 and still packed when we crawled back begging for a table after abandoning our first choice for dinner. We were there past Shrubya’s bedtime, but the staff assured us it would keep turning tables once we left and many, many more at the daily power lunches (Sunday included).

On a suspiciously huge menu, the kitchen claimed to have everything on ice from Columbia River walleye to Carolina black grouper. I would go back, though, not for any of those grilled but for the crab cakes, two huge ones with crab lumps the size of my thumb in them and just enough spicy breading to prevent death by cholesterol alone. At $26.95, they’re also the best deal, especially compared with the Copper River salmon: $38.95 with nothing but sauce bearnaise. Don’t ask about the surf and turf (well, do, for a laugh -- it’s $75.95). Outside the free museums, this may be the best place to see your tax dollars at work.

The new Dupont Grille is relatively grounded by comparison. The chef reportedly comes from Emeril’s, but don’t hold it against him -- his okra-pheasant gumbo may be weak, but his spirit is willing. Pan-roasted grouper on beluga lentils with spicy oven-dried tomatoes and lemon caper sauce was exceptional. Whatever Hawaiian “waluu” is (the waiter only spoke English) was almost as good, especially with snow peas, ginger, daikon and rock shrimp. A salad of haricots verts with new potatoes and truffle vinaigrette also hung together well. The room is very hotely, but the prices were better than fair ($21 for grouper, $8 for the salad) and the wine list has organic choices that our waiter promised would evoke ladybugs. And ours -- Lolonis fume blanc -- did.

Oceanaire, 1201 F Street NW, Washington, 202 347 BASS.

Dupont Grille, 1500 New Hampshire Avenue, Washington, 202 939 9596.

BETTER ALONE

Eating alone in public is never easy, even though I have been training myself to do it for 30 years, ever since I decided to drop out of college in Tucson and move to Nebraska. The first thing I did then was go to a Woolworth’s in the town I knew, sit at the counter and order a meal, just to be sure I could in a strange city. What I have since learned is that it’s so much less stressful in alien surroundings. I just tell myself: “You’ll never see these people again,” and I can get through eight courses and sometimes more.

Palermo, however, was a challenge, not least because my consort was busy teaching a photo workshop and eating in bars and pizzerias and I was aiming a little higher. My first meal alone was on a holiday afternoon when the small, surprisingly formal restaurant I had chosen was crowded with rich extended families out celebrating. My last was in a small, casual restaurant where the only people on the premises were me, the waiter and the chef. I don’t know which was more awkward: seeing all eyes in the room averted from my pathetic table, or having all eyes on me with every bite I took.

Both lunches more than made up for any weirdness, though, not least because a bottle of white wine -- good white wine -- costs as little as 6 euros in Sicilian restaurants.

Lo Scudiero, my first stop, would be worth any discomfort for the bread spread alone: it was a little piped mound of Gorgonzola blended with bechamel and butter. I was spreading it daintily until I noticed all the other tables just dragging grissini through it to scoop major mouthfuls. I could have stopped with that and the free prosecco.

But I was soon presented with a plate of linguine with tuna and squash blossoms that seemed rather ordinary until I kept swirling more forkfuls. Unlike pasta in America, which goes from dull to boring as you eat, this one somehow seemed to be working like wine: allowed to breathe, it got deeper and headier. The whole grilled orata with roasted potatoes was just as straightforward but nuanced, especially after the waiter anointed it with five or six passes from a decanter of seriously good olive oil. For once, I was happy not to have anyone to share with.

La Scudiera was far more different than just a change of vowels (the translation is “the stable;” no one could tell me what “scudiero” meant). Instead of a big fancy printed menu accompanied by a rolling cart of seafood, it had a single handwritten sheet in a plastic sleeve, with dishes I had never heard of. I picked two at random -- a “tortino” and something the waiter haltingly described as salumi rolled in meat -- and sat back with my wine and my lonesome. Immediately the waiter was back with an array of dishes stacked up his arm: a platter of caponata and the best grilled eggplant with garlic I have ever tasted anywhere; a small bowl of tart green olives; a saucer of seawater-fresh anchovies; a saucer of semolina-sesame bread, and a little bowlful of ragusano cheese and house-made salami, one simply spicy, one pepper-red and spicy. I tried them all before the watchful waiter came back to persuade me to try the pork cubes in gelatine. They were definitely of the “don’t ask” school of cooking, but they did taste light-years away from a hot dog.

My tortino was not cake or pie but a bowlful of little round pasta links that looked like Cheerios, sauced with ground meat and fresh peas, bits of each caught in the center of every round. I ate as much as I could as the chef peered on from across the room (no pressure, of course). The secondo was two little rolls of veal stuffed with ground and chunked mortadella and salami and other cured meats, along with pine nuts and bread crumbs and what tasted almost like cinnamon, all in a saffon-scented pea sauce. You won’t try that at home.

To keep the chef’s spirits up as the room still sat empty at 2:20, I ordered the cassata al forno, which was worlds apart from the usual hypersweet Sicilian dessert you see but never want to taste in New York. It was like a warm cheesecake with a few flecks of chocolate in a light crust. And my only regret was having but one stomach to give to it.

Lo Scudiero, via Filippo Turati 7, Palermo, 091 58 1628. Lunch with wine, water and espresso macchiato, 33 euros.

Trattoria de “La Scudiera,” via Castrofilippo 10/12, Palermo, 091 617 7152. Lunch with wine and water, 28 euros.

PROVING THE RULE

Until I ate at rm, I was actually starting to wonder if the problem with New York restaurants wasn’t just me. Maybe I expect too much. Maybe I eat out too much. Maybe I’m just impossible to please.

But my faith in my crankiness has been completely restored. Really great places are really, really rare. And when you find one, the scarcity is all the more obvious.

Everything about rm was right, from the warmth at the door to the staff’s savvy to the room itself, an odd space transformed into a rather luxurious little stateroom, like Oceana but without the stuffiness and weirdness.

Almost no one in New York does fish better than Rick Moonen, and he’s seriously on with this menu. I actually ordered the halibut because it sounded so dull -- steamed, and in a nage (once fish leaves water it should stay out; I hate brodos and nages and every other variation on flavored liquid). But this was extraordinary: perfect fish almost floating on a powerful mushroom-scented foam so substantial I could eat it with a fork. Cod was also sensational, a crisp cake of brandade topped off with roasted fillet in a truffle vinaigrette, and the sturgeon got the right lift from a wild take on sauce gribiche, with a poached egg.

Appetizers were just as dramatic. The duck confit was more like a slab of rillettes, all the meat pressed into a cake, with the bits of crunchy skin to one side and a little mound of fruit to the other, to cut the richness but not murk up the taste. The roasted garlic veloute was obscene, even before the strip of bacon mounded with cod flakes was crumbled in. And while I’m not much on raw fish, the yellowtail crudo was a jazzy rendition, with grapefruit, fennel and black olives.

Even desserts held up. The chocolate marjolaine was not quite the equal of the world-class one I had in Lyon, at Bocuse progeny’s patisserie, but that’s not a diss. And black pepper and Meyer lemon actually talked to each other in a citrus extravaganza with cake, ice cream, confit and blood orange syrup.

What’s mystifying is that we pretty much had the place to ourselves. It’s not as if restaurants like this are on every corner these days.

33 East 60th Street, 212 319 3800.

Lunch entrees are $20 to $24, appetizers $10 to $15.

WHIZZES OF OZ

Three reasons why Sydney is the first city outside New York where I could see living: Flat white. White wine. Fat breakfast.

Most places I’ve been in the world, I’ve gagged down the local coffee because good tea is so hard to find -- or else it’s such an absurd production that my consort is either finished with his eggs or on to the petits fours before the hot water has turned taupe in my pretentious pot. But in Sydney (and in Melbourne), I actually ordered coffee for pleasure, not just because I would otherwise have to resort to Coke to get my caffeine fix. What they make down in the land of wonder is coffee four steps above a good capuccino. They whip it up with one part espresso to three parts hot milk and call it flat white, which is like describing Champagne as fizzy wine. My vocabulary fails at anything sharper than “hot coffee shake,” and I would fly six days to have another.

As for the wine, California could fall off into the ocean and it would be no loss if Australia were exporting only a third of the stuff it produces. Everywhere we went there were amazing glasses being poured, and for as little as $5 Australian in even the best restaurants (if that sounds like a deal, it bottom-lines even better: the Australian dollar equals 60 cents U.S.) By the second week, I was actually ordering Chardonnays voluntarily -- they were nothing like the cheap corn syrup I’ve come to associate with DOC Australia. (Unoaked is the adjective that makes the difference.) But the Scorpo pinot gris, the Brokenwood semillon and the O’Leary Walker riesling were just a few of the standouts. With food or without.

Breakfast improved significantly once we fled the Four Seasons, where the caviar-priced morning buffet was built around scrambled eggs that could have been cottage cheese dyed yellow and the “crispy” bacon should have been labeled “slimy” and the service consisted of waiters grabbing checks to be sure they’d been paid and gratuity had been added. At the Adelphi hotel in Melbourne, we started every day with perfection on a plate -- the Continental came with the room. Once we moved to the Kirketon back in Sydney, we alternated between Le Petit Creme, right across the street, and Bills, the high temple of morning food just a few blocks away.

The former had low prices, heaping plates of eggs with brioche, funky atmosphere and snappy waiters (asked what’s for breakfast, one said: “You can eat the blackboard -- just add salt and pepper”). The latter was the sort of place New Yorkers dream of, cleanly designed, aggressively priced and devoted to getting every order right. It’s most famous for its ricotta hotcakes, with bananas underneath and honeycomb butter on top, but the scrambled eggs were like creme brulee without the sugar and the crackle and the corn “fritters” were full-bore pancakes sandwiching spinach, tomatoes and bacon. Any breakfast joint that allots a third of a cup of heavy cream to two eggs and half a stick of butter to two slabs of toast cannot be underestimated in my travels. If I’m going to be squished into an airplane seat next to a fast food junkie, I want to be able to butt back.

Le Petit Creme, 116-118 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst.
Bills, 433 Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst.

TWO CITIES IN ELEVEN BITES

Tastes tend to blur over 20-some lunches and dinners, but these were a few great moments in Oz eating:

Crisp pressed duck at Quay in Sydney -- imagine a solid brick of confit with the thinnest, crunchiest skin around it, lying on spinach and potato-garlic puree. Imagine being transported beyond Paris.

A softly poached quail egg coated with celery salt and brown sugar at Salt in Darlinghurst/Sydney -- an amuse but the high point of a very imaginative dinner.

Duck with a prawn crust at Red Emperor in Melbourne -- as wild as it sounds: the shellfish substituted for the usual fat on the rich meat.

Deep-fried lychees alongside a green tea parfait topped with mango sauce at MG Garage in Surry Hills/Sydney -- it’s true: everything tastes better deep-fried, and sugar-dusted.

Roasted scallops in the shell with apple, almonds and kale at Grossi Florentino in Melbourne -- you won’t get that in Milan.

Turkish “pizza” with pumpkin, chile, feta and pomegranate jam at Mecca Bah, on the water in Melbourne -- a shopping list that actually added up to a dish.

Fried squid and asparagus with spicy salt and lemon for dipping at Flower Drum in Melbourne -- a combination as exquisite as Chinese can get.

Mud crab with ginger and scallions at Golden Century in Sydney, where seafood is live in tanks until you order it and they cook it -- the first place I’ve been where the check came not with prices but with weight tags and bar codes.

John Dory on sauce gribiche under the tiniest whitefish bound together with Parmesan in a crisp cake at Catalina Rose Bay right on the water in Sydney -- the most sophisticated restaurant ever frequented by large and well-fed pelicans.

Bolognese sauce made with duck at Blakes Cafeteria in Melbourne -- and other food stylish enough to make a fashion show on the street outside look dull.

Preserved artichokes on lentils with watercress and a poached egg at Bistro Moncur in Woollahra/Sydney -- so smart and good we (almost) didn’t notice the diverted-from-Nantucket diners all around us.

AMTRAK’S MARRAKESH EXPRESS

Mediocre mezze in Washington should have put me off Mediterranean food at least until the Rapture. But somehow they had the opposite effect. A week later I was at Molyvos in New York, happily reinforcing my impression that Greek appetizers should be done with vibrancy and imagination and real care, as if they were part of a cuisine, not just a marketing scam. And three weekends later I was at Tangerine in Philadelphia, reeling at what a difference proximity to New York makes.

Admittedly, Tangerine was not my first choice for dinner on a Saturday night, but every other restaurant was booked, except at 10:30 or 4:30. (If I were a chef, I would definitely rather be in Philadelphia right now.) And so we let the PR woman at the Ritz-Carlton, where my consort was shooting, pull strings to get us in.

The restaurant was true to Stephen Starr form, designed to the max with a whole wall of votive candles and hanging lamps casting casbahesque light. The waiters were total pros (despite the napkin thrown over each one’s right shoulder that looked like the red badge of silliness). And the menu had almost too many tempting choices.

Calamari -- spiced with ras al hanout (the curry powder of Morocco) and drizzled with creamy charmoula dressing -- was fried to a crisp but still tender enough to gum. Grilled octopus was combined with green olives, potatoes and haricots verts in a salad good enough to blank out my usual visions of tentacles attached to a brain. The fist-sized crabcake didn’t need either its brik pastry or its lobster sauce. But the real winner was the pistachio-crusted duck breast with foie gras and port-poached pear (say that real fast). It was seasoned right and cooked perfectly, but the real wonder was the meat itself. It made me think, yet again, about how many geriatric birds I’ve been served in this country.

Too bad we ate so much and so fast, because this is one place where I would have liked to have tried dessert. With the food, service and room polished to a high dazzle, the odds were good that a real pastry chef was on the premises. 232 Market Street, 215 627 5116.

PASSAGE TO CUBA

After 20 years of eating for a living, I like to think I can tell good from bad even when both are showered upon me with no prospect of a check. And so I can safely say that Zafra in Hoboken is, as Michelin would put it, vaut le voyage.

Maricel Presilla and her partner knew friends of the house were in the house and clearly pulled out every stop on the pan-Latin express. When we sat down there were perfect freshly fried plantain chips waiting with a bright chunky salsa and aggressively spiced green olives. We made fast work of three kinds of excellent tamales, two variations of Peruvian potatoes (both better than any Peruvian restaurant in Manhattan has ever produced), chorizo simmered with olives, a decent shrimp seviche, an outstanding mushroom quesadilla and empanadillas stuffed with picadillo.

And then we hit the down side of a free lunch: There’s no stopping it. Maricel insisted on sending out platters of “sushi size” entrees: well-spiced roast pork with crackling skin; ropa vieja Cuban style, and shrimp in a fabulous cheese sauce. She insisted we combine the rice with three types of beans (Cuban, Dominican and Peruvian), and she wouldn’t give up until we had all faced down natilla, crepes filled with dulce de leche and big cups of steaming hot chocolate.

Zafra has no liquor license, but Maricel managed to produce super-minty mojitos that were the best I’ve had since the Hotel Nacional in Havana. The room itself was a little corner of Cuba on a cold afternoon, all deep tropical colors and plants and florid mood.

The trip there and back involved almost four hours in a car, but I still have to say: I would go back. And pay any price.

Zafra, 301 Willow Avenue, Hoboken, 201 610 9801

ABOVE THE GRAY

Lacroix gives you hope that there will always be a Philadelphia, even as avaricious developers are tearing out whole chunks of Chestnut and Walnut and destroying any shot the city might have at glory beyond the gridiron. The restaurant, overlooking the leafless trees in Rittenhouse Square, exudes the sense of power and possibility so many places did 25 years ago, when Center City was the place to live and cooking was the art that pushed the envelope.

The chef, Jean-Marie Lacroix, famously retired from the Fountain at the Four Seasons and has been getting good press ever since the shock of his treachery in commandeering a new kitchen wore off. Several critics have actually praised him for making his soups with spring water. I prefer stock, but that’s just my bourgeois sensibility. I do give him credit for concocting easily the biggest crabcake I have ever been served anywhere. It was all jumbo lump crab, set on a pool of lentils in vermouth cream, and if it got a little dull after the first 16 heaping forkfuls, it’s hard to blame the chef. I could have stopped at 10.

My intrepid tablemate suggested splitting the “petite menu -- petite price” (a k a three courses for $17) as an appetizer, which was rather restrained: beets and quail eggs; braised skate with pea shoots; lasagne with spinach, lamb and goat cheese, and a little mound of candied walnuts, obviously thrown on to round out the square tray they came on. A pear-hazelnut tart from the dessert cart was as good as the value on the $38 Baron Phillippe viognier, one of the few bargains on the list (we were in the land of the state store, after all).

On the down side, the same tape played over and over for the hour and a half we sat there. One round of “Summertime” would have been plenty in a city with such un-Charlestonian scorn for its streetscape right now. Worse, we were plopped into a cramped table near the restrooms, even though it was 1:30 and the treetop views were open. They moved us when I asked, but still. I left $20 on a $106 tab and walked out wondering, as always: Which comes first with women -- the dismissive service, or the bad tip?

Lacroix, 210 West Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, 215 790 2533

PORT (OR BURGUNDY) IN A STORM

It was our last night in Buffalo. We’d made it through the long haul of the holiday: an orgy of excess at Sinatra’s Trilogy (caponata, soup, salad, pasta with every entree), a Polish feast on Christmas Eve (mushroom soup to pierogis), a goose fiasco for which we could only blame ourselves and finally a prime rib bellybuster, all at the consort’s home base. What we needed was something to wash it all down, or away. And there was Bacchus, just a block and a half from the hotel (downtown Buffalo’s best, in my hard-won experience: the Radisson Suites).

Even for the less-than-desperate, this new wine bar would be a find: huge list, by the glass and the bottle, great prices, super-friendly host, talkative but not loquacious bartenders and a design so sleek you could almost imagine you were in a serious city. Macon-Villages never tasted more like Puligny-Montrachet.

Bacchus, 56 West Chippewa, Buffalo, 716 854 9463

TAPAS: A GLASS HALF FULL

Tapas may be one of the original fusion foods: they suit both tourists and locals. And that’s why I had no qualms about patronizing some of the better-known taperias in Madrid. We were treated well first at La Casa del Abuelo (excellent gambas a la plancha), then at Alhambra (chorizo, followed by aged Manchego) on our first night on the prowl, in a cold rain, near the Plaza de Santa Ana. For round two, Casa Antonio off the Plaza de Puerta Cerrada was a fine stop: cecina with pimentos on toast; pisto (the Spanish stab at ratatouille), and mushrooms with Cabrales.

But it didn’t take long to decide tapas are no fun when you’re drinking from cups seemingly sized for urine testing. The hell with the local customs. We wanted a real glass.

And that’s how we happened upon La Otra, a jazzy little hallway nearby with great music, a very mixed crowd and serious pours, at tapas prices: 1.80 euros for a full glass of Penedes white, for starters.

La Otra calls itself a wine bar, but it was also the only place where we didn’t have to buy food. Each round of drinks came with tidbits, whether Manchego or marinated mushrooms. A blackboard around the bar suggested real tapas to go with the wines, including cecina made from horsemeat.

The bartender was one of those lacy-bra women with six eyes and 12 hands who can empty ashtrays, take cash, greet customers, refill glasses, change CD’s and slice up salt cod to marinate with olive oil, all at the same time. And if her domain had none of the nicotine-choked atmosphere of the older places we tried, the open-door policy was the same. The Brits ordering Bailey’s got no more scorn than the Madrilenos with their fino. Or even the New Yorkers who knew there were wines in Spain that they could never taste back in the land of the French and the Californian.

La Otra, Cuchilleros 14, Madrid

SALVATION, MILANO STYLE

No self-inflating gastropod ever wants to admit it, but sometimes you have to rely on the guidance of concierges. This summer we landed in Milan, bedraggled and disoriented after an overnight flight wedged upright in steerage, only to find the trains had been shut down by a countrywide strike. All my careful research on eating in Turin, the city of our final destination, was useless here, in the least hospitable city in Italy in bleakest August.

And so we left the recommendation to the professional nice guy at the front desk in our emergency shelter, and we braced for mediocrity at an Armani price.

Of course that reservation was the key that turned on the charm. Known to be guests of the Hotel Cavour, we were ushered to a great table in a crowded, cheery dining room and presented with flutes of prosecco and a plate of bruschetta with tomatoes and basil. Marked as Americans, we felt compelled to overorder: huge platters of pasta with rich ragu and with amazing fresh porcini; a whole branzino, roasted in salt, and a plate-size slab of swordfish with capers and olives plus those fabulous Italian potatoes that must be bred solely to soak up garlicky oil.

The Brad Pitt lookalike with the waiter's pad took all this down between sneaked peeks at his reflection in the mirror behind the table and suggested: "White wine? Eighteen to twenty euros okay?" The food was just what we were looking for, the service what we fantasize about in New York. By the time we were halfway through the bottle of crisp Fioanodi Avelleni, the two businessmen at the next table were leaning over and making jokes in English about California Chardonnay.

And Milan was looking like a place where we might want to be stranded for supper.

Il Coriandolo, Via Dell'Orso, 1, Milano (39 02 869 3273). Near the duomo and La Scala. Lunch for two about $90.

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