Five meals I will never forget (and a new tour!)

I love the anticipation of a great restaurant meal, when you’re going somewhere special and you just know it’s going to be memorable. It’s almost as good as the eating and drinking itself.

Next week Jess and I are booked into Chauncy, one of our favourite restaurants in Australia, a French-leaning fine-diner in Heathcote, Victoria. I love a journey for a meal, I love making a full day or even a weekend of it. And it doesn’t hurt that we know that the Chauncy owners, Louis and Tess, are such nice people, talented and hospitable and kind.

The anticipation of that experience has come at a time when I have memorable meals on my mind already, having just launched a new food tour of Peru with World Expeditions, which you can read more about below. Until then, enjoy the stories of the five restaurant meals I will never forget.

Random snake restaurant, Hanoi, 2004

I said I would never forget these meals – I didn’t say they were good. My first meal is one that I will remember for many, many reasons, though the quality of the food is not one of them.

It was 2004, and I had only been in Asia for about three hours. That’s not three hours on this trip – that’s the grand total of my experience travelling in Asia. This was my first visit to the continent, and I had flown straight into Hanoi on my own, with no contacts on the ground, and no idea what I was doing.

The reason I was there was Anthony Bourdain. His descriptions of eating pho in the book A Cook’s Tour had inspired me: I had to see this place. I had to eat that food.

First morning in Hanoi, I sat down at Hoan Kiem Lake and let the world flow past me, enjoying the discombobulation, waiting to plan my next move. But then my next move approached me and introduced himself: a local guy about my age called Son, who wanted to chat, wanted to make friends, wanted to see if maybe I could join him for a traditional lunch?

What luck. What crazy, unbelievable luck. So I jumped on the back of a scooter with Son and roared out of the centre of the city and across the Red River into an area entirely unfamiliar to me. We stopped outside a restaurant and Son led me in, sat me down, explained that this was a snake restaurant, and did I want to see the snakes?

Uh… I guess?

So the owners began bringing in live snakes, letting them hiss and snap on the tiled restaurant floor. Just choose, Son said.

Like, a whole snake? I don’t need a whole snake. Right? I talked them down to just a plate of snake spring rolls from the freezer and a couple of beers. Son and I sat on the rooftop while it was being prepared, dipping slices of green mango in salt and chilli and listening to the honk of traffic in the thick Vietnamese air.

It was a scam, obviously. It cost me 120 US dollars for spring rolls and beer. That was essentially my food budget for two whole weeks in Vietnam. But the spring rolls were good, and I have never forgotten them.

Arzak, San Sebastian, 2009

The guy at the hostel was not a fan of ours. My then-partner Penny and I had come in late the night before, probably very noisily after our first night in the San Sebastian Old Town, eating all the food and drinking all the drinks.

Still, we got chatting to the owner the next morning. What are you going to do while you’re here, he asked, clearly bored with this necessary conversation starter.

A few things, I said. We’re going to Arzak tomorrow night.

And just like that, his entire demeanour changed. Arzak? You guys are going to Arzak? We nodded. His face split into a smile. How do you know about Arzak? How did you get a booking? What are you going to eat?

The hostel was costing us about 40 euros a night. Dinner at the iconic, three-Michelin-starred Arzak would cost about 400 euros.

I had never been to a fine-dining restaurant in my life. I was a 28-year-old chump, a kid with questionable dress sense for the world of Michelin, but a growing desire to eat all the things and understand them. Arzak was an incredible splash-out for someone who didn’t even have a full-time job.

I still remember some of the dishes we had – the classic egg dish, lightly poached and then deep-fried; the chocolate volcano for dessert – and the bottle of Rioja we drank, almost 20 years later. I remember the feeling of walking into the dining room, its hushed tones and tuxedoed wait staff and being worried, like I would be found out soon enough.

I still haven’t been.

Uoshin izakaya, Tokyo, 2016

You have probably figured by now that I have shared many, many great meals with my partner, Jess. Some at restaurants, though many at home (almost all cooked by her).

Even our first date went from casual drinks to a full meal, at the now defunct Surry Hills Jamaican restaurant Jonkanoo. That one, obviously, sticks in my mind. But it wasn’t as fun as Uoshin.

This was my third trip to Japan, but Jess’s first. I knew about the food culture, I knew how good it was, how blown away Jess was going to be, but she only had an inkling.

I’d planned plenty of food experiences for that trip, thanks to extensive research and working a few contacts, but the first meal was a simple one, at an izakaya near our Airbnb in Ebisu, an easy place to call into after a long flight when we would probably be ready to just go to bed.

But Tokyo doesn’t do you like that. Tokyo gives you energy. It gets you hyped. All the bright lights and people and possibilities. We were pumped.

Uoshin is a chain of casual, seafood-focused izakaya – there are nine spread across Tokyo now – that offer set-menu meals and all-you-can-drink sake. My kind of place. So Jess and I settled in at their basement bar in Ebisu, ordered sake and prepared for the first course.

It was a simple one: nigiri sushi, horse mackerel with ginger atop seasoned rice. A nice, seasonal bite to get things going.

For Jess though, that bite was revelatory. Otherworldly. Incredible. That rice: you can taste every single grain, distinct and yet part of a whole, perfectly seasoned, amazingly tasty. This place isn’t even a sushi specialist, but rice in Japan is something else, and this was Jess’s first experience.

That whole meal was a blast, all the sake, all the food, all the chatter with strangers and the thrill of being somewhere exciting with a person you love. Food-wise it wasn’t even close to the best I’ve had in Japan, but for pure experience I will never forget it.

Asador Etxebarri, Atxondo, 2019

There are those meals that stick with you for the people you were with and the time of your life it represents. There are those meals that stick with you for the pure perfection of the food that has been created for you. And then there are meals like Asador Etxebarri in the Basque Country, 2019, in which all those factors came together to create one of the most amazing dining experiences possible.

Asador Etxebarri is a legendary grill restaurant set in the Basque hills, in a tiny village called Axpe. It’s run by Victor Arguinzoniz, a singular character who has influenced an entire generation of chefs and home cooks to experiment with hot coals and fire.

Jess and I had been here a few times before, but this time we got to go with family and friends, a group of six of us. We ordered incredible wine. We ate the most perfectly cooked high-end produce: caviar gentled smoked; squid grilled and served with a sauce of its ink; buffalo burrata with a kiss of fire.

We shared it all in this old Basque farmhouse, a lunch that went on for four or five hours, every dish better than the last, the shared understanding among us that this is it, this is the pinnacle, it may never get better.

Mil Centro, 2023

“If I hadn’t been there by myself,” I said to Jess when I returned home from Peru, “it would have been one of the best meals of my life.”

But then I thought about it. Why not just let the experience be? Why not recognise that you can have an incredible meal on your own?

In the past I’ve been convinced that good company is essential to a perfect dining experience, and so maybe this lunch at Mil Centro wasn’t perfect – but damn, it was amazing. It was memorable. Who cares if I had no one to share it with?

This restaurant is truly unique, like nothing I have experienced before or since. It’s run by Virgilio Martinez, the star Peruvian chef whose flagship fine-diner Central has been named best restaurant in the world by The World’s 50 Best. It’s set high in the Andes about a 1.5-hour drive from Cusco, right above Moray, an Incan ruin of concentric circular terraces sunk deep into the plateau.

Archaeologists believe the Incas used this site to experiment with growing crops, and here Martinez and his team continue that history, experimenting with native Andean ingredients, creating dishes that bear no relation to anything you have ever eaten in your life.

The setting is spectacular, a traditional hut in the middle of nowhere, with small windows providing brief tableaux of Andean splendour. The food is incredible, imaginative and beautiful and just goddamn delicious. The company? Well, I get on pretty well with myself.

There’s nothing else like Mil Centro in the world, and if you like the sounds of it, I have good news. I’m going to take you there…

LET’S GO TO PERU!

Great news for those keen to share a few equally memorable meals: I’ve just launched a new food tour, in collaboration with World Expeditions, “The Ancient Flavours of Peru”. Next July we are heading to South America for an experience that will open your eyes to what I think is the most underrated gastronomic destination on the planet.

Over 11 days we will be diving deep into everything that makes Peru memorable, from market visits and farm stays to dining at beachside cevicherias to sampling fine-dining at the likes of Kjolle in Lima (currently rated No.9 in the world) and Mil Centro outside Cusco. We will also take time to explore Lima neighbourhoods like Miraflores and Barranco, check out the historic sites of Cusco, and – why not – spend a day visiting Machu Picchu.

This is such an exciting tour of a destination I am super-passionate about, and I can’t wait to share it with you. Places will sell out, so if you’re keen, check out the details here, and register your interest. And… Vamos a Peru!

WHAT I’VE BEEN LOVING THIS WEEK

• Victorian country towns are the best and it doesn’t really seem fair.
• Great to see Armenian-Lebanese eatery Zareh honoured as Restaurant of the Year in the recent Gourmet Traveller Awards. Food doesn’t have to be fancy to be good.
• In Sydney, I recently dined at Wai’s Omakase, a tiny Japanese restaurant run by Malaysian-born chef Ha Chuen Wai. This is sushi with no rules, unbound by tradition, and it’s executed with impressive skill. Shame it’s only open two nights a week.

WHAT I HAVE NOT BEEN LOVING

• All the chatter around Jetstar’s new baggage rules has been a bit overblown, and played right into Jetstar’s hands. If anything, I think this new rule will create more space in the overhead bins for those who haven’t paid for it and are taking the risk after boarding last.
• Australia is inching – iiiiiiinching – towards committing to high-speed rail, but the plan for Newcastle to Sydney still seems likely to just be unceremoniously dumped at any point in the next decade or so.