At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to far-flung destinations, and sometimes into our own backyards, documenting the whole thing as we go. For November, we hit the beaches of Hawaii and New York, eating everything from pho to apple pie. Here are all the ways SAVEUR editors ate the world this month.

I worked in restaurants for years and rarely was able to get away over the holidays. This year, for the first time in over a decade, I went home to Rhode Island for Thanksgiving.

I did miss hosting a late-night orphan Thanksgiving for my food service family—a quick-roasted spiral-cut ham and Champagne out of paper cups have their own charm—but it was good to be back at my parents’ dining table. I flaunted my knife skills by breaking down the bird while I listened to my dad’s latest theories about the Kennedy assassination. We scarfed down the giblet stuffing and pecan pie (our oldest family recipes) and my mom’s magical, never-dry turkey, before nodding off in front of the fireplace with the cat. We put up the Christmas tree, put whiskey in our cider, and watched Alien on an enormous suburban television. I guess it’s nice to go home sometimes. — Kat Craddock, test kitchen associate

Boothbay Harbor, Maine

One of my favorite places to spend a weekend in November is Maine, specifically Boothbay Harbor. It’s the time of year when all the tourists have gone home for the season, and the true local culture shines in all its rugged, weathered glory. A few weeks ago I drove along the winding, coastal roads, went for a short hike on Barters Island, and after, I warmed up at Oxbow Brewery in Newcastle. In their barn-turned-brewery, we shared a flight and a bottle of Bobasa, a barrel-aged smoked farmhouse ale before heading back into town for dinner. Although the restaurant selection is minimal this time of year, you can always find the local gems open year round with warm bowls of clam chowder and lobster that’s just as good as any summer day. —Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

Houston, Texas

I never realized how much I’d taken crawfish for granted till I moved to New York seven years ago. In my hometown of Houston, Vietnamese Cajun crawfish joints do it best and on a recent visit home, I went straight from the airport to a local mainstay called Crawfish & Noodles, which, as you may have guessed, serves both crawfish and an array of Vietnamese noodle dishes. I mean, where else in America can you get a heaping platter of mouth-searing mudbugs and a bowl of pho and the famous cua rang muoi, or Vietnamese stir-fried soft shell crab? — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

Long Island, New York

The north shore of Long Island isn’t a very popular destination in November. The beaches are barren, there are more clouds than there is sun, and the sea is grey and inhospitable. So naturally, it’s the perfect time for a fall getaway. We took a trip to Greenport for my partner’s birthday, renting a little beach cottage nestled on a hill along the rocky shore. We didn’t have much planned: some long strolls for gathering peculiar stones and shells, a hike through the nature preserve. When we weren’t eating plump, briny oysters at any of Greenport’s excellent dives, we were cozied up at home, drinking a bottle of Jo Landron’s impeccable French sparkling wine, Atmospheres, which rivals the best champagne for depth of flavor, and clocks in at a cool $20 a bottle most places. We haven’t stopped drinking it since. —Alex Testere, associate editor

For most of my life, the only pie I had ever eaten came from my great aunt Susie in West Virginia. I remember watching her cut apples for what felt like hours, always meticulous but never on a cutting board (paring knife into the thumb, a method I still use whenever I cut up an apple). But now, in my SAVEUR life, pie is a little easier to come by. This one was probably my favorite of the year: apple, with a perfectly crispy crust and some beautiful end-of-the-day light. —Katherine Whittaker, associate digital editor

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Every time I head back home, the first thing I ask for when I step off the plane is a chicken biscuit. It’s the meal I miss most since moving to New York, and the one that’s impossible to recreate. I used to be a Bojangle’s kind of girl, but Rise Biscuits and Donuts quickly changed that. I ate a chicken biscuit with white cheddar cheese from there twice during my five-day vacation, because yes, they’re that good. I remember when they opened. My family and I piled in the car to try the “best dang biscuits and donuts” shop that had opened down the street. We began our biscuit expedition unsure what we were in for, because proper southern biscuits are hard to beat and sometimes newcomers are welcomed with a “bless your heart” instead of a smile. We ordered a half-dozen homemade donuts and two biscuits to split between my five-person family. Within two minutes we had ordered three more biscuits so each person could have their own, and it’s now my family’s go-to on Saturday mornings. As my brother said when he greeted me with a flaky chicken biscuit wrapped in orange paper the morning before my flight took off, “You just can’t beat a Rise biscuit.” And at this point, I’m really not sure anyone can. —Madison Roberts, digital editorial intern

Oaxaca, Mexico

I started November in Oaxaca City for Día De Los Muretos, or Day of the Dead, and even though that’s a great time to be in Mexico, the best parts of Oaxaca exist year-round. There are endless taco and fruit sands on every corner, but the real fun is in the Mercado 20 de Noviembre. It’s a giant and slightly overwhelming food hall that consists of aisles and aisles of food vendors selling beautiful breads and cuts of meat and produce. On one side you’ll find restaurants, but through a narrow and crowed arched entry you’ll find the very best part of the market: A giant meat hall. Narrow kiosks line each side selling almost identical cuts of meat. You pick how much meat you want and what kind, then it’s passed to a grill person (it seemed the best ones were older women). They grill it for you over open flame. Next, take your plate of meat and find the tortilla lady, and finally, pick what toppings and sides you want from a different vendor. It was a hectic and fun meal. —Matt Taylor-Gross, photographer

North Shore, Kauai

It’s hard to believe a place like Kauai exists until you visit. And even once you do, it’s hard to express how magical it is. Nicknamed The Garden Island, it’s magnificently lush and jungly, a true rainforest and quite literally one of the wettest, most fertile spots on earth. We split our time between jungle and beach, travelling across the north shore in a friend’s pleasantly beat up car from the 80s that screamed local surfer. In and around our neighborhood of Hanalei Bay, we rode gearless cruiser bikes between the house and the sandy shores where our paddleboards awaited, along the way passing palm trees and brightly colored flowers as well as wild chickens and roosters (a growing “problem” on the island). Because of the abundant fresh coconuts, papayas, and all kinds of tropical citrus growing in the backyard, each morning we hacked away at the fruits to make fresh juice before breakfast. But one of my favorite mornings was spent visiting local farmers’ market, understanding just how different parts of this amazing planet can be from one another. —Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

The post Where SAVEUR’s Editors Traveled in November, 2017 appeared first on Saveur.

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to far-flung destinations, and sometimes into our own backyards, documenting the whole thing as we go. Come October, we seek out fall feasts and comfort fare to warm us for the coming cold weather. From Johnnycakes in Rhode Island to biscuits in Charleston (and California and Brooklyn), here are all the ways SAVEUR editors ate the world this month.

West Kingston, Rhode Island

This month, I went back north to visit my folks in Rhode Island. We passed the time, as yankees do, scarfing down fish n’ chips and slurping local oysters by the shore. Scarf season was kicking in, but it was warm enough to enjoy a margarita outside, overlooking Narragansett Bay.

One morning, we piled into Mom’s convertible for a joyride through the postcard October foliage and we ended up at Kenyon’s Grist Mill in West Kingston. Kenyon’s has been stone-milling whole grains since 1696 and the brand is known throughout the state for their fine white cornmeal – the preferred brand for making crispy, unleavened, corn flatbreads known as Rhode Island Johnnycakes. We stopped off at the mill’s gift shop to load up my overnight bag with cornmeal and a enough hearty oat flour pancake mix for whole winter’s worth of weekend brunch. — Kat Craddock, test kitchen associate

Brooklyn, New York

On a sunny Saturday, we hit the Smorgasburg, an open-air food market by the East River waterfront in Brooklyn, to try Ghost & Grits from chef Sonar Saikia. Back in 2011, my husband helped Sonar enroll in culinary school, but he came with cooking chops first learned from his mother on the family farm in the tea- and ghost pepper–growing Assam region of India. When he married a woman from South Carolina and moved to Tennessee, he fell hard for Southern food, barbecue in particular.

With Ghost & Grits, he melds these influences into an enthralling, addictive fusion of flavors and techniques. The tasty Bengal Biscuit (shown) sandwiches blue corn–crusted eggplant, creamy saffron, and wild mushrooms in a fluffy biscuit. His grits are creamy goodness with the sweet heat of ghost pepper jam dabbed on top. But what blew me away was his smoked pork shoulder sandwich with ghost pepper aioli, purple cabbage raita, and preserved lemon on brioche. The lemon teased, the aioli tingled, the pork was meltingly tender, and it all came together in a mouthwatering way. —Donna L. Ng, copy chief

East Lansing, Michigan

I love pizza, and I mean all pizza. I love a $1 New York City slice, I love the fancy hand tossed stuff, I love Chicago deep dish, and I even love Bagel Bites. I think it’s hereditary since my dad always said, “he’s never met a pizza he didn’t like.”

My girlfriend grew up and went to college at Michigan State. She would always talk about this place that makes Detroit-style pizza that she and her friends would get delivered to their tailgates and other “hungover situations.” It wasn’t until I started going to Michigan with her that I discovered how amazing the style actually is.

There is no slice like a square from Jet’s Pizza. Jet’s makes their pizza in rectangle, well-seasoned, black deep dish pans. The cheese cascades all the way to the edges of these pans, melting into the dough, forming an ultra-crisp, lacy crust. The dough to sauce to cheese ratio is also perfectly engineered, yielding a pizza that is somewhere in between focaccia and Sicilian style pizza—all baked to perfection.

The best part is, each slice is a corner, so if you are a fan of those crispy brown bits of crust, you get to enjoy double the amount of them. And you always eat the entire square, never wasting this prized crust, similar to the socarrat of paella. We order the 8- corner pepperoni pizza with a squeeze bottle of the best tasting ranch I’ve ever had (no joke, I love the stuff… #puremichigan). But, if the ranch thing seems too far-fetched, keep an open mind, it will change your life for the better. Although this place originated in Michigan, luckily they’ve expanded to 19 other states so you can get this corner pie in other parts of the country. —Dave Kaplan, test kitchen intern

San Francisco, California

I was out in San Francisco for our upcoming cover shoot and decided to make a slight detour north on the way back east to spend a weekend hiking in Banff National Park. With a little help from some knowledgeable locals, the tea house at Lake Agnes would be my Sunday morning destination. Waking up before sunrise, I drove the meandering mountain backroads up to Lake Louise through the most cotton candy-pink painted sky one could imagine. Followed by the most vibrant turquoise glacier waters, and from there it was all up hill.

After a few kilometers, just as I was craving breakfast, a small cabin came in site, along with crowds comparable to West Village during prime brunch time. Greeted by the most delightful, hardworking crew of women that run this off-grid tea house that’s been in operation since 1905, I had their homemade biscuits with tea and mountains bars with peanut butter, graham cracker, coconut, chocolate chips, raisins, and nuts. Also popular with the crowd was their hot chocolate with marshmallows as hikers could sit on the deck enjoying the breathtaking views. Fueled up enough for the return back down, I already started planning my return visit which would kick-off with a breakfast at the other nearby tea house at Plain of Six Glaciers. There was too much snow to make it in this trip. —Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

Brooklyn, New York

New York is currently experiencing a weird summer-to-fall-and-back-to-summer transition. Mid-October has given us several days of temperatures in the mid-70s, and apparently we aren’t done yet – my weather app has just informed me that Friday’s gonna be back up in the 70s. And I know that some people really can’t wait for cooler weather to go with their colorful foliage and pumpkin decor. But I am not one of those people. In fact, I will hold desperately onto the last vestiges of summer by doing things like going to a raw bar happy hour in mid-October and stubbornly insist on eating it outside. This plate of shellfish from the Kittery in Brooklyn might be my last summer meal (but I’ll stretch it out if I can). —Katie Whittaker, associate digital editor

Charleston, South Carolina

It had been almost a year since I’d had a proper cheddar biscuit. So when I saw that a biscuit bar was on the docket for the SAVEUR Blog Awards in Charleston, I knew I’d be in for a treat. And boy, did Callie’s Charleston Biscuits deliver on the dream of flaky, hot, soft biscuits. First, there were the cheddar biscuits, which I filled with salted-just-right country ham; then, the plain biscuits which I of course smeared with the house pimento cheese. And, even though I’m not a huge fan of the sweet biscuits, the cinnamon variety were perfect with a dollop of jam. Later in the month, when Carrie of Callie’s Charleston Biscuits (Callie is her mother) stopped by our office to make some for the SAVEUR team, I was the first in line for another plate. —Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

The post Where SAVEUR’s Editors Traveled in October appeared first on Saveur.

In August, we savor the last moments of summer by going out and exploring. Whether that’s going halfway around the world or getting to know our own backyard a little better, we try to make the most of the fleeting sunny season. This month, SAVEUR editors ate their way through New England, the US Virgin Islands, and Newfoundland. Here are the best bites.

Every August, my boyfriend’s family spends two weeks at a big house on Lake Winnipesaukee, and all of the cousins take turns cooking. This year, Ian and I were first, and we prepared a giant feast of pasta cooked with bacon and sungold tomatoes and sweet peppers and fresh summer corn, with a big peach-cherry crumble for dessert. All 18 of us were comfortably satisfied. By the end of the long weekend, I was sad to leave them all behind, but I had to get back to the office. Ian drove me to the airport in Boston, but on the way down, we took a detour off the interstate to hop across the border into Kittery, Maine. Ian’s aunt had recommended Bob’s Clam Hut, and we were not disappointed. We got a lobster roll, some fried oysters, and two orders of fries, and were back on the road to Boston in a half an hour, though I was glad to have had one last view of the sea. — Alex Testere, associate editor

The western U.S. was hit with a blistering heat wave, and Hurricane Harvey slammed the Gulf Coast, but New York City fared well this month, weatherwise. The temperature only broke the 90-degree mark once. So being stuck here this summer hasn’t been a bad thing. Chili may not come to mind in August, but football season is around the corner, and I had black bear loin from British Columbia in my freezer, a gift from Colin Kearns, the editor-in-chief at Field & Stream (where I work in addition to SAVEUR). And F&S had just the recipe to tempt me: a dark, earthy bear chili made with wild blueberries and black beans. A big mugful of black and blue chili with a dollop of sour cream brought the forest to my table. I’d wager that it would be delicious made with beef or venison, if you don’t happen to have a supply of bear meat. — Donna Ng, copy chief

The afternoon everyone traveled south to catch a glimpse of the total eclipse, I found myself far north catching a glimpse of a pretty incredible post-dinner sunset in the quaint village of Twillingate, Newfoundland, famous for its icebergs, charming locals, and fresh fish. I was on a week-long roadtrip exploring the island’s recent discovery of craft beer (they’re quite a few years behind the rest of North America) and eating as much fish as I could in between.

A local woman, Crystal, and I were walking along the beach in quite substantial winds, but it was too beautiful not to have dinner outside. The tide rose higher than anticipated, we hugged the edge of rock in an attempt to not get soaked by the incoming waves, and once we successfully crossed the narrow passage, found a lovely patch of beach where the fire was started. Dinner consisted of smoked mackerel, fried cod tongues, and a hearty cod soup with carrots and potatoes. All favorite family dishes Crystal ate growing up in the neighborhood. As the sun set, we grabbed some of Split Rock Brewing’s new IPA, a brewery that opened just the night prior, and hiked up the nearby hill to take in the view. — Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

Come nice weather, a certain tea friend of mine gets antsy and starts spending more and more of his time at his cabin in the woods of Connecticut. If all this sounds a little vague, it’s because I’ve been sworn to secrecy on revealing the friend’s name or exact location. Tea people are weird like that. But when you get there—hours after leaving home, then riding a Jeep up the mile of woodlands path, crashing through streams—it’s paradise. A cabin overlooking a little pond, tall trees stretching over picturesque bluffs, lush moss on the ground so you can walk barefoot forever, and little gathering nooks scattered everywhere you look.

Here we are at one at hour 3 of drinking in the sun. The tea is good. The view is better. The company is a bunch of friendly weirdos. Keep your beach days; I’m home. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

When my family plans a vacation, I always choose the beach. This year, we visited the US Virgin Islands (Saint John and Saint Thomas) to relax, unwind, and soak up some sun. After a hike through the gorgeous Reef Bay Island, we re-fueled at Ocean Grill inside the Mongoose Junction shopping-and-dining complex, which also houses the standout taproom for St. John Brewers.

The highlight? Cocktails at The Longboard, an open-air gastropub with goes-down-easy frozen drinks and a strong selection of rum-forward classics (mai tais, Hemingway daiquiris). — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

The post Where SAVEUR Editors Traveled in August 2017 appeared first on Saveur.

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. This month, we ate our way through the suburbs of Melbourne, down the alleys of Hanoi, and across the beaches of New York. See all our field notes below.

Melbourne, Australia

On a recent trip Down Under, I made the hour-long trek out of Melbourne to the suburb of Geelong, where IGNI, one of the most lauded new openings of the last year in Australia, sits in a nondescript suburban strip mall space that was a showroom for electronics in its former life.

Chef Aaron Turner and his team have a short conversation with each customer about their preferences before arranging a tailor-made menu of fermented, cured, fired, smoked, and nitrogen-assisted dishes. My 13-course lunch started off with a bang and these starters: salt and vinegar fried saltbush, grilled zucchini flowers, grissini wrapped in charcuterie, an oyster emulsion sandwiched by lettuce, and a chicken skin cup with roe. — Andrew Richdale, deputy editor

Chicago, Illinois

“Meat-free since 1983” is the slogan at The Chicago Diner. That was a radical move for a diner back in those days in a neighborhood of Chicago, a move that not many believed in. But they were proved wrong. The Chicago Diner charms with the classic interior, friendly staff and shamelessly rich, but fresh vegan and vegetarian dishes, which make you wish you could dine for two. Despite the accolades and Michelin Guide recommendations, the restaurant has succeeded in keeping things cosy. The standout sandwich, The Radical Reuben, was a juicy and hefty combination of sauerkraut, corned beef seitan, grilled onions, vegan thousand island and melty cheese—all on a marbled rye. — Pauliina Siniauer, editorial intern

Hanoi, Vietnam

A day in Hanoi requires at least one afternoon in the Old Quarter, a bustling tourist-friendly destination steeped in history. Hundreds of years of Vietnamese culture mingling with Chinese and French colonialism can still be seen in the architecture, where crumbling structures set the stage for street markets and boutique hotels. Yet, despite groups of backpackers and sightseers, the Old Quarter has preserved it’s unique old world charm, with back alleys and hidden stairways offering rewards—say, maybe, the city’s best pho?—for whoever may venture through them. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

It was the third of July, a Monday with a holiday feel, and having returned to New York after two days in the Poconos, we decided to go to Far Rockaway, a mere two trains plus a bus ride away from the stiflingly hot Upper East Side. My husband had seen a listing for free music at Riis Park Beach Bazaar at 8 p.m. The band, Nikhil P. Yerawadekar & Low Mentality, sounded fresh on YouTube: bluesy, funky Afrobeat dance rock with international flavors.

The boardwalk bazaar’s selection of food vendors ranges from all-American BBQ to Detroit-style coney dogs to Middle Eastern to Bolivian. The late-afternoon sun and sand put us in the mood for seafood, so we hit the Rockaway Clam Bar for a tender fried clam basket with Rock-a-Bay tater tots, a lobster roll, and crispy Brussels sprouts tossed with Old Bay–spiked caramel. Everything was delicious, but there was one problem: no musicians to be seen. The teen clearing picnic tables told us the music had started at noon; the website had the time wrong. Alas, we’d missed it. But at least we still had Low Mentality’s clever YouTube videos, and those clams, to console us. — Donna L. Ng, copy chief

Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania

I have never thought of fruit picking as “fun.” As someone who grew up with lots of fruit trees, I cringe when I hear my friends ask if I want to go pay money to drive to someone else’s field and pull some kind of fruit off a tree. When I was a kid, apple picking or strawberry picking or pretty much anything picking was a punishment right up there with picking up rocks in the garden. But when I went to my parents’ house over the 4th of July, I went straight for the blueberry bushes. I missed the taste of good blueberries, huge and sweet and a little warm from the summer sun, so I pulled them off by the fistful, filling buckets and bags and bowls with my favorite summer berry. I still don’t love berry picking, but it may be the best thing I did that weekend. — Katie Whittaker, assistant digital editor

Staten Island, New York

Staten Island gets a bad rap. It has been referred to as “the armpit of the universe” (a bit harsh, in my opinion), it’s the only New York borough not accessible by subway (though there is a free ferry and an intra-island railway), and a first glance at the island in Google Maps reveals such geographic gems as “Fresh Kills Park” (formerly a giant landfill) and a neighborhood named “New Dorp.”

So when my boyfriend informed me he’d booked a night in a tiny house on a beach in Staten Island, I had my share of concerns. But we took a cab from our apartment in Brooklyn across the Verrazano-Narrows bridge and had our driver drop us off in the Gateway National Recreation Area at the base of the bridge. We settled in at our little cabin before spending the afternoon hanging on the beach and exploring the defunct Fort Wadsworth before we returned to fix up dinner. On the portable two-burner stove we sauteéd some tinned clams in their juices with garlic and pancetta before tossing it with linguine and smothering it all with fresh parsley and Parmigiano. We walked our plates and some cups of wine the 20 steps to the beach and ate while the sun set over the ocean and the lights came up on the bridge. In the morning, we took a 20-minute cab back home to Brooklyn and our weird 24-hour adventure was over. Had any of it really happened or was it all just a dream? I might have to make a return trip just to be sure. — Alex Testere, associate editor

Oakland, California

I spent a weekend in July in the Bay Area and like a good New Yorker I spent the entire trip obsessing over the question of whether I would ever live out there. The answer ended up being no, for all the usual reasons—dysfunctional public transit, 50-degree evenings in the middle of summer, billboards advertising stuff like “full-stack cloud optimization.” But the closest I came to reserving a U-Haul was after a night at Ordinaire, a wine bar in Oakland. Its selection leans natural, with bottles ranging from Beaujolais OGs like Jean Foillard to up and comers like Brendan Tracey, a guy from Jersey who’s now making wine in the Loire.

I’m a wine geek, as you may have surmised by now, but sky-high markups mean I usually dislike drinking wine out—something about seeing a wine listed for triple what I would pay in a store rubs me the wrong way. Ordinare does things much more civilly: they’re also a retail operation, and for $10 corkage they’ll open anything in the shop for on-premises consumption. I met up with a big group of friends and we worked our way through four bottles of funky, boozy goodness. It was pretty great. But still not enough to make me want to carry a fleece around all summer. — Chris Cohen, senior editor

The post Where SAVEUR’s Editors Traveled in July 2017 appeared first on Saveur.

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. This month, we went everywhere from Germany’s wine country to the tiny American towns of the midwest. See all our field notes below.

Mosel, Germany

Probably no wine has a more polarized reputation than German riesling. Sommeliers and other wine dorks love it for its versatility with food, potential to age for years, and ability to thrill in a huge range of styles from chalky and dry to honey-sweet. But most drinkers still stay away, I guess through some mixture of an aversion to sweetness and horrifying reminiscences of Blue Nun.

A few days spent driving around meeting winemakers and touring cellars in Germany’s Mosel region forever cemented my place in the first camp. It also left me with a newfound respect for the work that goes into each bottle: I’ve always known that riesling grows best on steep slopes, but it wasn’t until I huffed and puffed up the Enkircher Ellergrub vineyard, pictured, that I really appreciated how much really goes into it. — Chris Cohen, senior editor

Provincetown, Massachusetts

I love lobster. I love pulling it apart, all the satisfying crunches and snaps, and I even love all the whooshes of weird liquid that come out when you’re tearing into the good stuff. I didn’t even hesitate to order it when I saw it was on the list of options at a friend’s Provincetown wedding, and I was excited for one of the fringe benefits of ordering lobster: figuring out which of the other attendees was a “lobster person.”

Lobster people, in my experience, are awesome. They’re adventurous, they’re willing to work for their food, and they don’t mind being photographed with a goofy plastic bib around their neck. And there’s something particularly telling about people who are willing to do that in suits or cute dresses.

My friends didn’t disappoint. They dug in without worrying about the mess. Special shoutout to my friend Jack, who one-upped everyone at the party by immediately going for two lobsters. —Katherine Whittaker, assistant digital editor

Flushing, New York City

I just love the 7 train.

Besides the fact you can actually see something from the windows, it’s the most culinary route I’ve found from New York, during these 10 months I’ve lived here. Cuisines from all around the world—Greek, Indian, Irish—welcome you to endless food adventures.

Not to mention the last stop: the bustling Chinatown of Flushing. During my last visit, I had two lunches (both dumplings) and one between-the-lunches snack (Japanese rice cakes, motchis) and I wished I could have eaten more. The beauty of the dumplings in Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao charmed me. People seem to have mixed feelings about this place, but I was taken by the looks, chewy dough, the rich, fresh vegetarian filling and the price: $5.99 for the generous portion that is served with green tea. —Pauliina Sinauer, editorial intern

Central Park and the Upper East Side, New York City

After work on a sunny Friday, I headed to the Central Park reservoir, binoculars in hand, hoping to spy a horned grebe that had been reported in the area. My husband, Jock, and I met up and strolled the 1½-mile path, sidestepping joggers and tourists. We never saw the grebe but did spot a female Baltimore oriole, a wood duck, and a black-crowned night heron along with the many gulls, geese, and mallards.

Bird-watching worked up an appetite. We wanted to try Little Frog (littlefrognyc.com), a newish French bistro. Every time we’d been by, the place was full, but the nice thing about summer Fridays in the city is that many residents decamp for weekend getaways, leaving tables free even at the hottest restaurants. We chose a quiet table next to the bar over the noisy main room.

The bartender, with severely styled black hair and a waxed mustache, could have stepped out of an Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec poster. My Mezcal Mule in a bright copper mug was a smoky twist on a Moscow Mule. Jock had his usual Manhattan. The mustardy steak tartare, with capers and mâche, came with sweet potato chips for scooping. Two delicious softshell crabs were piled on a soft corn cake with peas and a white wine sauce. Little Frog, we decided, was a welcome addition to the neighborhood. — Donna L. Ng, copy chief

I recently took a short vacation to Italy, which is to say I ate many, many meals of pasta, pizza, and panini, followed up more often than not by a scoop or two of gelato. In one case, dinner was preceded and succeeded by the dense and magical Italian treat.

The stuff at Milan’s Gelateria Borsieri was that delicious. The lemon sorbetto was perfectly tart and the Sicilian pistachio full of rich flavors. But the one that really won me over was the gothy fondente—a 90% cacao chocolate that was so jet-black and slick it looked lacquered. —Andrew Richdale, deputy editor

Blawenburg, New Jersey

Moving day: The day I had to say goodbye to my childhood home in Montgomery, New Jersey forever. My parents finally decided to downsize and rent a 900 square-foot townhouse that barely fit their furniture, let alone two cats. While I packed the remaining memories left in the old house, I planned to be filled with nostalgia, longing for the days when I played kickball in the backyard with my neighbors. The only thing I could think about was how loudly my stomach was growling. The fridge had already been cleaned out… I was stumped.

My mom was also on the verge of a hunger-crisis, so we took a break from packing to head to the closest place with food, Blawenburg Café. I hadn’t been there in years and it was almost unrecognizable. It now resembled a modern space, but the café kept its small-town country feel through decorations, which I was grateful for. Families with children and dogs filled the outdoor seating. My mom and I laughed at ourselves, covered in dust and dirt from the day while everyone else was neatly dressed. It didn’t matter, though. We were finding happiness from a melancholy day that began more stressful than fun. I ordered a grilled vegetable sandwich on whole grain bread and was pleasantly surprised with how simple, yet satisfying, it was. No ingredient overpowered another, although I may be saying this only because I ate the sandwich so quickly. I’m glad the service was speedy; I’m not sure how much longer I would have lasted without a meal. Allie Mannheimer, social media intern

Tiny Town, Ohio

I’m a Midwesterner, a congenital condition that I didn’t embrace until recently. Specifically, I’m from Ohio. When I tell people this, they inevitably ask, “Which part of Ohio?” to which I reply, “You’ve never heard of it.” And truly, no one has ever contradicted me when I name the tiny Northwestern town.

I’ve been home a lot, recently. An uncle passed away, and then my little brother graduated from college, and then my little sister from high school. Each time I go back, I’m reintroduced to something beautiful that I never took notice of growing up because it was just woven into the fabric of my reality—dilapidated barns, wheat fields at sunset, cheap-as-hell bars.

On my most recent trip, I was reintroduced to another beautiful thing: bratwurst in beer. No, not bratwurst and beer (though, that is always acceptable). Bratwurst in beer. There’s a big German contingent where I’m from and they love their kraut and sausage. Even more, they love their sausage cooked in Budweiser. It’s an intuitive move, really. Toss a bunch of fresh bratwursts into a pot, dump in four Budweisers, and poach until nearly cooked. Then throw them on the grill, serve with more Budweiser, a pile of tangy cabbage, and a squirt of coarse-grain mustard. Voilá: Ohio, on a bun. —Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

The post Where SAVEUR’s Editors Traveled in June 2017 appeared first on Saveur.

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. This month, we went everywhere from the fields of Wisconsin to the English countryside, and ate everything from Danish porridge to crisp stuffed masa in Oaxaca.

Oaxaca, Mexico

There’s a word I learned my recent trip to Oaxaca: gordibuena. Roughly: Beautiful curvy girl. I learned it in the context of diving face-first into one of these beauties above, a gordita (less affectionately “little fat girl”) from the Gordita Lady in a market just outside Oaxaca City.

Gorditas are one of masa’s many miracles: disk-shaped lumps of masa, studded with nubs of pork skin and meat, fried until crisp, then cracked open, stuffed with meat, veggies, and salsa, and eaten piping hot. They’re more of a northern Mexico thing, but here, under an orange tarp in the morning sun, this Oaxacan masa master and her all-female crew expertly feed a never-ending stream of market-goers.

That crispy crust has its obvious pleasures, but it’s really the custardy interior of a gordita—moist but not mushy, utterly light in ways tamales rarely are—that won me over. It fused with ridiculously tender chicken tinga and offered just enough lettuce and pickled onion for crunch. It’s a beautiful foodstuff, distinct from a taco or a tamal or an empanada, despite the similar ingredients and preparations, and it underscores just how many forms and instances of joy masa can take.

It also gives me a greater appreciation for the term gordibuena. Just as we can respect and appreciate masa in all shapes and sizes, so it should be with people, si?

Chicago, Illinois

This month, my boyfriend and I took a trip to Chicago for a friend’s wedding. There was dancing and drinking and sneaking outside with our wine glasses to lie in the cool grass in the evening, but the best part was brunch the following morning. Another friend of mine lives in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, which puts her right at the heart of some of the city’s best restaurants. Lula Café is our usual go-to, with an ever-changing farm-to-table menu from their self-taught chefs, but with just one meal to go before our plane trip back to the city, we decided on something a little more … boozy.

At Parson’s Chicken & Fish, the wait for a table that Sunday afternoon was an hour and a half long, which sounds ludicrous until you remember you can spend that entire 90 minutes sipping a frozen negroni in a sunbeam on their back patio. And then you can sip one of the frozen dark and stormies. And then a frozen “purple drink” made with red wine, port, and orange blossom water. By the time you get officially seated, and you’ve ordered your fried chicken sandwich and your cream cheese and ham hock–stuffed hushpuppies, it’s like no time has passed at all—but then how did I end up with this sunburn?? —Alex Testere, associate editor

Reykjavík, Iceland

Food in Iceland is expensive. But the fish is super fresh, pulled from the North Atlantic’s waters; the lamb, from animals that range free on the highlands. Everything is small-scale, pristine, and organic. My husband and I put 1,000 miles on the odometer circling the Ring Road in 10 days. We’d scrimp on lunch with cold cuts (smoked lamb) or pylsur (snappy lamb hot dogs), then splurge on dinner.

Options were limited in remote areas, especially since we were traveling before the high season, but we had memorable fish soups, peat-smoked Arctic char, and earthy bread that was buried for 24 hours to bake by the heat of the hot springs. I tried guillemot, a seabird that brought to mind dark and minerally venison.

On our final night in Reykjavík, we dined at chef Ylfa Helgadóttir’s Kopar (Copper). Small plates to start included velvety rock crab soup with shrimp, spinach, and an unexpected touch of bean sprouts; blueberry-cured beef tenderloin with a Parmigiano crisp and caramelized walnuts; and fried cod tongues with a sherry-garlic cream cheese and a zingy lemon dip. My husband had a langoustine-crab risotto bathed with shellfish sauce and topped with a fennel salad to cut the richness. For me it was the catch of the day, roasted Atlantic catfish—aka wolffish—with bread crumbs and tartar sauce, accompanied by bok choy, carrots, and pickled red onion. As we walked out of the restaurant and into the city’s old harbor, close to midnight, a fiery sunset lit up the sky, beckoning us to return to the Land of Fire and Ice. —Donna L. Ng, copy chief

Edenton, North Carolina

My mom really loves Campari. Both of my parents do, but my mom has particularly strong feelings for it, and I think that has something to do with how much she loved Italy. She managed to finagle a bottle out of a friend’s recent trip to France and brought it with her on vacation in North Carolina. Cocktail hour involved a hefty glass of Campari and orange, perfect next to a sea breeze and the sound of waves. —Katherine Whittaker, assistant digital editor

The Middle of Nowhere, Taiwan

Two years ago, I found myself in the mountains of Taiwan. I wandered around with my delicate tea ware in my backpack knocking on wood with every step. Each breath felt new, crisp, and so clean my chest expanded to catch every bit of mountain air it could hold. My stomach did the same, trying to fit as many mountain vegetables as humanly possible. In between sips of freshly roasted soymilk and my tired breaths as a traveler, I found the time to slowly exhale: “wow.”

On my third trip to Taiwan, I said “wow” once again. But this time, it was at squirrels fighting me for my soymilk. I don’t blame them. The soymilk there is so good, I’d fight for it too. It’s comforting to have food taste homey while traveling. Even more when the people open their homes and world to a distant traveler. As the edges of the mountains were blurred by mist, and the creek sang with the fish swimming upriver, I took another breath and the mountains stole it back again. —Nissan Haque, digital production assistant

All Over Wisconsin

In May, our photographer Matt and I took a food and farm tour of south-central and western Wisconsin. We foraged for morels in Madison with Chef Jonny Hunter and the Wisconsin Mycological Society and stopped in on the Muscoda Morel Festival. We visited artisan cheesemakers in Dodgeville and Clear Lake, cider-makers in Maiden Rock and distillers in New Richmond, and we met with a few of the folks behind Wisconsin’s summer pizza farm trend. We consumed our weight in pork products, cheese curds, and frozen custard as we made our way up the staggeringly beautiful Great River Road and enjoyed a sunset cruise on Lake Pepin, one of the widest and calmest points along the Mississippi. —Kat Craddock, test kitchen assistant

Providence, Rhode Island

I went to Providence, Rhode Island for my college reunion, and had planned to spend the weekend eating like an undergrad: breakfast burritos, late night calzones, and only-kind-of-cold Narragansett. But I couldn’t resist an impulse trip to check out Oberlin, which opened downtown a year ago, long after I graduated. Providence has always punched above its weight as a restaurant town, thanks to Italian and Portuguese influences and abundant local seafood. Oberlin has updated all of that for one of the most compelling meals out I’ve had in any city recently: heaping portions of raw fish and smoked mussels, whole wheat penne made in-house from local grains, and an orange wine from Philippe Tessier in the Loire that was just the right amount of weird. —Chris Cohen, senior editor

Boston, Massachusetts

Right off of Davis Square is Redbones, a down-home-style Southern barbecue restaurant with a history. After walking through Boston Commons and taking a trip to Quincy Market, I followed a few Boston natives on over to Somerville for what they called “the best barbecue in Boston.” And they weren’t wrong. After plates of delicious fried okra, fried pickles, and corn fritters, we devoured a rack of their fall-off-the-bone Baby Back Ribs with potato salad and slaw. After one slice of the pecan pie we ordered for dessert, Redbones took the top spot on my list of favorite restaurants in Boston. Disclaimer: Come with an appetite—I had to be rolled all the way to Fenway Park. Who knew Boston had such good barbecue?

Complete with a downstairs bar that serves a mighty 29 different types of fresh beers on tap, Redbones is a must-go for those who want to add a little local flair to a Boston trip. Black and white photographs of blues and jazz musicians that used to frequent the famous BBQ joint cover the walls, and the slow blues of Muddy Waters and BB King somehow makes the ribs taste a whole lot better. Wicked good “bah-b-que.” —Ian Burke, digital intern

I’ve always had fantasies of driving the English countryside: winding flower-lined roads, stops at old inns that had been there for ages, the thrill of driving on the wrong side of the road. The way I envisioned it, it’d be more about the journey than the destination, since of course sheep and cows would wander onto the road from nearby farms, blocking us from getting anywhere fast anyway. A trip to England in early May made my dreams come true.

It was the perfect time of year to go—right when the rains and mists had begun to dry up (however temporarily) and the wild bluebells had recently bloomed. My husband and I lost our cool more than once, our exclamations over the sheer beauty giving us away as nothing more than ogling tourists. We stayed at The Pig at Combe, where we ate lunch from the wood-fired oven between long walks through the neighboring villages, greeted by, yes, cows and sheep everywhere we went, but also pleasant country dwellers who made us remember that seeing the untouched places—where green is a religion and there’s still one schoolhouse and neighbors who know each other’s names—can be the best way to travel. —Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

All Over Wisconsin—Again

I got to spend the middle of May road tripping around western Wisconsin with test kitchen assistant Kat Craddock (which, side note, is real fun if you ever get the opportunity) And I have to say the state is magical. We met so many kind warm happy people who took us in and showed us a great time, the land was lush and vibrant green and there seemed to be rivers everywhere. Every meal was tasty. And antiques are CHEAP as hell.

But my favorite place was Lake Pepin. Lake Pepin is the Mississippi river, just farther north of where the river turns into an industrial channel. The river banks are large bluffs covered in trees and bald eagles dive into the waters for fish. The whole experience was so lovely and beautiful I looked at buildings for sale and wondered what business the town needed and how I could make it work. —Matt Taylor-Gross, staff photographer

Copenhagen, Denmark

Recently, while in Copenhagen for an upcoming story in our August/September issue, I watched, day after day, as cool kids lined up for brunch at Møller. One morning, I finally walked in and ordered a bowl of parsley smashed potatoes and something called øllebrød. This is how sacred the nation’s precious and nutritious rye bread is: the leftover crumbs are preserved and combined with beer to make a tangy, chocolatey porridge.

Usually it is topped with fruits like orange but Møller’s was finished off with sea buckthorn berries. It was delicious so I Instagrammed it, eager to spread the word about my new Scandinavian revelation. Hours later, a local asked me what traditional foods I had consumed during my journey. “Open-faced sandwiches, local perch, Øllebrød,” I bragged. Øllebrød?! He laughed. That’s what your mom gives you when you’re a kid and she doesn’t know what else to make. One man’s trash porridge… —Andrew Richdale, deputy editor

Franciacorta, Italy

I spent a few days exploring the Franciacorta region of Italy. Visiting wineries and restaurants, talking to chefs and producers, and eating and drinking more than anyone needs (it was basically heaven). My favorite part, though, was poking around the garden at the Corte Bianca vineyard and finding all the produce they were growing. I plucked peas and cherries and some lettuce leaves (to my gracious hosts: I’m sorry!). Then one of the owners told me they had white mulberry trees, and let me pick them to my heart’s content. I’ve only ever had dried white mulberries, and eating them fresh from the tree was pure joy. I collected a few to take with me, they lasted about 5 minutes. —Kristy Mucci, test kitchen associate

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Visiting Boston, Massachusetts for the Boston Calling Music Festival, I decided to make a stop at Little Donkey, the new(ish) globe-trotting Cambridge charmer helmed by James Beard-awarded chef Jamie Bissonnette. With a menu diverse in formats and influences, it’s the perfect restaurant to please all of your friends who “can, like, never decide where to eat.”

A friend visiting from France, on a mission to try the “best American burgers” was delighted by the house version, with dry-aged beef, Buffalo pickles, onion-soup mayo and, yes, foie gras. Meanwhile, another in the mood for Asian food tried the wok-fried chow fun, a riff on black bean-rice noodle classic with asparagus, ramps, and Calabrian chili. For my part: the Jamaican jerk chicken wings, whispered with habanero and charred pineapple, really hit the spot.

But perhaps the highlights of the meal were the ‘gram-worthy and excellent cocktails—get the mezcal number served in a hollowed-out grapefruit—and a safe-to-eat, pasteurized-egg–based cookie dough dessert, flecked with cocoa nibs and served still on the beater. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

The post Where SAVEUR’s Editors Traveled in May appeared first on Saveur.

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. This month, we traveled to New York for cheese, Alaska for halibut, and Greece for raki with every meal.

If you live in New York City, you probably know at least one person who is debating whether or not they should move to Beacon, an artist’s hamlet and Hudson Valley hot spot just 60 miles north. There’s Dia, the contemporary art museum, and Storm King, the contemporary sculpture center that covers 500 acres in the mountains.

But there are also ample breweries, taprooms, and distilleries nearby, like Hudson Valley, which might be under construction but they’ve still got the taps flowing and tables set up for hanging out with a pint of their “Kinds of Light,” a sour ale fermented with local chardonnay grape skins. Stock Up has a pop-up here, as well as a brick-and-mortar location around the corner, where, while accompanying a friend up north to hunt for an apartment, we bought freshly sliced bacon to cook for breakfast, and a few sandwiches and a growler of beer to take to Storm King for the afternoon. We’re hoping she finds an apartment soon, if only so we have another excuse to take the train up for the weekend. — Alex Testere, associate editor

San Francisco, California

It’s not every day you launch a new cookbook. That’s why, in mid April, I headed out to San Francisco to celebrate the publication day of Nopalito, an authentic Mexican cookbook I co-authored with chef Gonzalo Guzmán of Nopalito restaurants. Of course, I ate my bodyweight in ceviche, tamales, and carnitas. But in between visits to the restaurant I found time to eat at some of my other favorites in town.

At the famous Ferry Building, home of San Francisco’s biggest and best farmers’ market, I swigged cappuccino from Blue Bottle Coffee and a grilled cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, then perused the shrooms at Far West Funghi. At Cotogna, a cozy wood-fired Italian spot, the chefs fed me tortellini with artichokes and guanciale (cured pork jowl) that had me speechless. And at the new-ish Tartine Manufactury, I ended the week on a last lunch of perfectly moist, greasy porchetta sandwiched with sharp arugula, and complemented with a glass of Sonoma rosé. Hey, it was a celebration. —Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

New Orleans, Louisana

Oh New Orleans, what a wonderful city in which to become nocturnal for a week, because the music’s best at night and Morning Call is open 24 hours a day. You likely know about Cafe du Monde, the tourist-spot-that’s-actually-great beignet palace in the French Quarter, but the Metarie-based (and that’s Met-uh-ree, or Met-tree, to you) coffee and beignet shop is a terrific local alternative with marble tops everywhere, surly bow-tied servers, and perfectly milky coffee in a bucolic corner of City Park. They may even do better beignets, even at 5 a.m., when I stumbled in for a nightcap doughnut after a hungover breakfast there 8 a.m. the day before. Surrounded by greenery matched only by the actual Louisiana woods, with a pile of light-as-air, gently chewy beignets in front of me, and as much cafe au lait as I could drink—yeah, I could see living here. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

Sitka, Alaska

It was 8:30 on a Friday evening in Sitka, Alaska. I was out on the water with a local writer working on an upcoming assignment. The sun was setting over snow covered Mount Edgecumbe, and the harbor breeze was cold but refreshing, and helped keep our Denali Brewing IPAs chilled to perfection. The boat dramatically swayed back and forth as we pulled two 50 pound halibut out of the water. It didn’t take long for me to get into the routine of things up in this remote, northern part of the country. There are a lot more options for dinner if you just go out and catch it yourself. A few hours later, back at the writer’s home, candles were lit, the halibut cooked, and the wine was poured for the perfect Friday night dinner. — Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

Berkeley, California

In my mind, Berkeley has always been a village on a hill bursting at its borders with heirloom tomatoes, watercolored apricots, and lettuces so delicate, they could be stitched into silky shirts and headscarves. I’m not sure how or when this idea implanted itself, but I think it must have something to do with Chez Panisse. Because, in the topography of my imagination, Chez Panisse sits at the pinnacle of the village hill, windows glowing warm, baking pie smells wafting through them and out into the wild California air. (Begrudgingly, I am a romantic.)

Earlier this month, on the way to Napa, I stopped through Berkeley for the first time in order to fulfill a decade-long desire to sit in Chez Panisse’s treehouse-of-a-café and order those whispery lettuces. And because I’d wanted to eat there for so long, I was anxious that it might not be as good as I’d dreamed up. As we departed the San Francisco airport, I picked a fight with my boyfriend over which route to take. I fussed over my hair, parting and re-parting it in some trance of cosmetological magical thinking. I even changed my shirt in the car rental parking garage, because in my mind’s eye, I knew what one should wear to Chez Panisse.

It wasn’t necessary to have worried. There’s a reason Chez Panisse remains beloved. After all these years of food evolution and revolution, it’s still the platonic ideal of an American restaurant. Simple and elemental, it’s still the best version of America’s food culture. There was crisp, peachy Bandol rosé and those whispery lettuces dipped in buttermilk. There were roasted beets and a guinea hen with swiss chard that tasted like Christmas, all cloves and oranges. There was a slice of pillowy ginger cake and a crumbly wedge of a rhubarb tart. And it lived up to ten years of anticipation.

Feeling buoyed by the dewy East Bay air and a second glass of Bandol and the sun coming through the boughs of an araucaria tree, I was very happy to see that some places and people and things (and lettuces) can live up to all of one’s expectations. — Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

Tarrytown, New York

With Friday-night tickets to see the Jayhawks at Tarrytown Music Hall, a jewel box of a theater (built in 1885 by a chocolate maker), my husband and I took a train from Grand Central Station in Manhattan for the 50-minute ride north up the Hudson River. We weighed our dinner options—build-your-own-burgers, BBQ, tacos, even Korean—before deciding to treat ourselves to the Twisted Oak, a New American bistro some Google reviewers compared to Dan Barber’s Blue Hill.

We settled in at the cozy bar and started off with excellent cocktails: smoky-spicy mezcal, grapefruit, serrano chile, agave, and Luxardo maraschino liqueur for me; bourbon for him. We started with chef-owner Michael Cutney’s perfectly tender octopus complemented by spicy nduja tater tots, preserved lemon, and salsa verde. I followed up with duck lasagna with braised wild greens and bechamel, topped with a fried egg, an appetizer portion but plenty satisfying and rich. My husband loved the new-to-the-menu allium risotto, with ramps, spring onion blossoms, and Sprout Creek Bogart, a raw cow’s-milk cheese. As a grace note, everything was served on lovely pottery. — Donna L. Ng, copy chief

Crete, Greece

Before I left for Crete, I got the same warning from everyone: Prepare to drink lots of tsikoudia. Also known as raki, this drink is everywhere on the island, and it often popped up unexpectedly. One farmer poured homemade raki into shot glasses on the hood of his truck, right in the middle of his field. Another cheesemaker served us raki with plate after plate of cheese (it was 10 in the morning). And one night, I watched a group of Cretan men make it in a big copper pot as we ate. There was a lot of discussion and arguing about how much water to add, because the initial concoction is 80% alcohol. They placed the vat of alcohol in the middle of the table and served it out of a smaller saucepan, continuing to argue about what should be changed to make it taste better, but it didn’t stop them from filling glasses and passing them around—because you can’t leave until all the raki is gone. — Katherine Whittaker, assistant digital editor

Cochran Farm, New York

I don’t get out of the city as often as I’d like, but when Gwen and Patrick Apfel invited a handful of us Saveur-ites to their historic Upstate New York farm for a tour of their cheesemaking facilities early last month, I jumped at the offer. Cochran Farm was originally the home of Surgeon General John Cochran, who served under George Washington during the American Revolutionary War, purportedly saving the life of The Marquis de Lafayette—twice.

The Franco-American alliance lives on at the General’s former residence; Patrick and Gwen met in business school and worked in tech all over the U.S. and abroad, before, while on assignment in Patrick’s native France, they decided to shift gears and enrolled in a cheesemaking course at a technical school in Burgundy. Today, they produce some of the best French-style chèvre around, using Alpine goat milk from a local Amish farm. As Gwen walked us through her cheesemaking facility—a pristine laboratory tucked discreetly inside an 18th century barn—Patrick prepared a perfect country lunch of green salad, crusty bread, mineraly Loire wine, and the prettiest rippled white tomme any of us had ever seen. — Kat Craddock, test kitchen assistant

Los Angeles, California

I don’t brunch. I don’t like brunch, I don’t see it, and I don’t respond to it. Doesn’t it make more sense to just sleep in? However, when I travel, I prefer to do as the locals to. So, when I visited Los Angeles this month, I decided to drag myself out bright and early at 1pm to indulge in that mid-afternoon tradition of booze and eggs. Luckily, the brunch standards at Wolf in LA were well-worth the effort: crispy potatoes sitting on an aji amarillo aoili, perfectly cooked steak and eggs, pancakes nestling bananas and topped with strawberries, and just for fun, these eggs Benedict upgraded with tender chunks of lobster. It’s no surprise: the chef-owner at Wolf is Marcel Vigneron, of Top Chef fame, who opened Wolf last year. The best part? The restaurant is 100% zero food-waste, and that’s the kind of business I can get behind at any hour of the day. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

The post Where SAVEUR’s Editors Traveled in April appeared first on Saveur.

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. From chilaquiles in Sayulita, Mexico to jaggery in Kerala, India, here are all the ways SAVEUR editors ate the world in March.

Stockton, New Jersey

Curiosity Doughnuts is the brainchild of H. Alexander Talbot, one half of the Ideas in Food team that’s been pushing the boundaries of culinary curiosity since 2005. (Props alone for continually running a 12-year-old blog and keeping the new stuff just as zany and interesting; see smoked cream cheese for a nova-free bagel sandwich.) And it’s worth a trip to his stall at the Stockton Market even if you only pick up this lovely alien thing: a vanilla doughnut studded with slices of hot dogs that’s fried and served with a piquant mayo.

Is it sweet or savory? Yes. Why does it exist? “Because I just love hot dogs,” Talbot explains. Does it fulfill my dreams of finally eating a three-dimensional representation of the mines from Minesweeper? Absolutely. Go get it, then walk across to the other end of the market and pick up a bottle of peppery Tunisian olive oil from Mediterranean Delicacy, and then hop in your car and drive north along the Delaware until you hit Easton and Phillipsburg for some more of the best hot dogs you’ll ever eat. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

Charleston, South Carolina

I recently traveled to Charleston for the Charleston Wine + Food Festival, where, for four days, I stuffed myself full of crawfish, barbecue, and more. One of the surprising food highlights, however, was my room-service breakfast at the Belmond Charleston Place on the last morning before we headed back to NYC. Craving something saucy, I ordered the huevos rancheros from the hotel’s Palmetto Cafe. It turned out to be fantastic: a classic version with poached eggs, chorizo, and country ham in zesty ranchero sauce, and sliced avocados—all over black bean quesadillas. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

Kerala, India

On assignment, photo editor Michelle Heimerman and I packed our bags for Kerala, South India, a region that has always been culturally distinct from the rest of the country. As a valuable port and a region rich with spices, it was at the crossroads of trade routes for thousands of years and experienced the arrival of the Egyptians, Romans, Dutch, Portuguese, British and Chinese among others.

Over the centuries, it’s absorbed all of those influences via architecture, literature, art, and politics while remaining distinct in language, dress, and, or course, food. Coconut, cardamom, cinnamon, and turmeric abound (even though much of the region’s agriculture has moved to the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu)—even in the coffee, sourced from nearby and always soft, almost wine-like.

Most mornings, we’d spend an hour drinking a pot outdoors, listening to the birds in the banyan trees and sweating beneath the climbing sun. Our favorite variation was a cardamom and cinnamon infused coffee with fresh coconut milk, and dark, rich jaggery, a raw palm sugar that tastes of molasses and chocolate. —Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

Montreal, Canada

It’s the beginning of maple syruping season in the Quebec countryside, which is where I found myself one weekend in late March to learn how “sugaring”—the harvest and refinement processes—are done. Between jaunts to sugar shacks old and new, I spent as much time as I could exploring the food scene in nearby Montreal.

After a decadent but delicious meal at Joe Beef and downing crispy Montreal-style bagels at St. Viateur, I was in dire need of a produce fix. Jean-Talon market made my dreams come true. One of the oldest markets in Montreal, it’s an indoor-outdoor complex of diverse produce vendors, food stands, maple shops, florists, butchers and beyond that’s been around since 1933. The rainbow colored apples splayed out across this fruit vendor’s pretty stand stole my heart, and I loved learning the names of some unfamiliar varietals, like Spartans and Lobos—two McIntosh-like styles from Canada. —Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

I got to spend a few days in Sayulita, a small surfer village north of Puerto Vallarta, for a friend’s birthday, and it was almost impossible to get on the plane back home. Mexico is such a beautiful, magical place, and I can’t express how much I love it. But I especially love the food of Mexico, particularly the breakfast food.

A proper Mexican breakfast is the perfect way to recover from a night of fun. For example, this plate of chilaquiles is a life saver if you maybe spent too many hours at the artisanal tequila bar the night before. Or maybe you went to the pharmacy and got “pain killers,” not realizing how strong they are. It doesn’t matter what it is. Chilaquiles will help. —Matt Taylor-Gross, staff photographer

New York, New York

On Tuesday, March 14, a monster winter storm was predicted to hit the Northeast, and I prepared to work from home and hibernate in my Manhattan apartment. It turned out to be kind of a dud, dumping a slushy mess into the streets rather than the feared 20 inches of snow. Still, I wasn’t about to venture outdoors. When I realized that it happened to be 3.14, aka Pi Day in celebration of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, I decided it was the perfect day to bake a pie.

I had a jar of sour cherries in the pantry, not quite enough for a pie…hmmm, some frozen berries would fill out the fruit quotient nicely. I pulled out my trusty Jim Dodge ultra-flaky all-butter crust recipe. A Pi Day pie must be decorated accordingly, so I cut out the letter π with a knife, and some circles with a Linzer tart cookie cutter. I served it with some cream I whipped by hand, which balanced out the tart flavors. Who cares about a blizzard when you can eat pie? —Donna L. Ng, copy chief

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

I recently took a short trip up to Williamsburg, Brooklyn to one of my favorite wine stores, UVA, which excels at oddball bottles. I was in the mood for a brawny and tart white Jura, which they happened to be out of. The closest alternative was actually not from France at all.

Mondo Antico, a biodynamic producer in northern Italy’s Lombardo region, makes a bright, unoaked “Perpolio” chardonnay that’s nearly indistinguishable. Like many whites from Jura, Perpolio is aged under a flor, or collection of yeasts, which exposes it to more oxygen and gives it that distinctive love-it-or-hate-it funk. Unlike many whites from Jura, the bottle was under $20. —Andrew Richdale, deputy editor

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I took a quick trip to Philly a few weeks ago and made sure to go to Zahav, which was exactly as good as everyone told me it would be. I also stopped by Rooster Soup Company, the newest addition to Michael Solomonov’s restaurant group. It’s a diner that serves really good soups, sandwiches, salads, and coconut cream pie. The food is great and all, but that’s only half the story here.

The restaurant is on a seriously admirable mission. First, they use up 500 pounds of spare chicken parts from Federal Doughnuts to make the broth for their soups every week—reducing food waste is always a good thing. The most admirable part of the business is that 100% of their profits goes to a local charity that provides meals, medical care, and social services for people in need. If you’re ever in Philly, go there. —Kristy Mucci, test kitchen associate

New York, New York

Ali Baba is the perfect traditional Turkish cuisine! Whether Turkey is home or a favored vacation destination, Ali Baba makes you feel like you’re in the heart of Istanbul! The staff is more than accommodating, most of the waiters speak perfect Turkish and English. The upstairs rooftop seating view is an ideal place to look out at the midtown area of NYC while also enjoying the Turkish vibes. The dishes are not only about the savory spicy taste, but the presentation and portion size. The dishes are fresh and easy to share with the table. Ali Baba offers private events and catering, as well as accommodating services form the generous owners. My favorite dish is hard to pick, my top three are the Lentil soup, the Gyro Kebab, and the Stuffed Trout. To finish it off, a Turkish coffee, it tradition to have tea and coffee time with dessert, as well as flipping the coffee cup upside down to wait for fortune results from the residue of the strong, dark coffee. —Emma Goodnough, Intern

The post Where Our Editors Traveled in March appeared first on Saveur.

Our editors are always going somewhere: to learn, to eat, and to bring that knowledge back to our test kitchen in New York City. From burritos in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico to Greek-inspired Southern in Birmingham, Alabama, here are all the ways we ate the world in February.

This weekend, I was in Birmingham, Alabama for the Southern Foodways Alliance southern media conference. A sleepy city that seems to be waking up after decades of urban hibernation, Birmingham is home to a large Greek population that journalist Eric Velasco documented for SFA. Since the 1940s, Greeks have been running food businesses, including hot dog stands and meat-and-threes, weaving together Southern classics with threads of Mediterranean flavors and techniques. One afternoon at lunch, we were treated to keftedes with grit cakes, cornbread, greens with chickpeas, and yogurt from Johnny’s, a local, Greek-owned stronghold that’s equally American as it is old-school Hellenic. — Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

It was summer in Philadelphia…. in February. I enjoyed the 3-day stretch of terrifying and delightful balmy winter weather in down in Philly, balancing a frenzied excitement to drink outside in the sun with February’s still-lingering desire for savory, satisfying food. If you’re picturing cheesesteaks, think again. Try sexy Izakayas with warm, fried takoyaki (a dish of the recent James Beard nominee Jesse Ito); the modern Jewish comfort food of Abe Fischer; and steaming bowls of Pho soup in a strip mall in South Philly. I love the city for its ability to balance the contemporary with the down-to-earth. Corner gyro shops nestle easily nearby French bistros. Refined aperol spritzes in the sun could very well be followed by divey strip clubs and pounders of Miller High Life. The weekend embodied a city’s warm embrace of contradiction, diversity, and charm. — Allie Wist, associate art director

Masaville in the Test Kitchen, New York

Snow, sleet, and schizophrenic New York weather be damned, I’ve been in southern Mexico in my mind this month. In anticipation of the launch of Nopalito—a Mexican cookbook I recently authored with Mexico-born chef Gonzalo Guzmán from San Francisco—I’ve been introducing the SAVEUR staff to the art of homemade masa, the foundation of much of Mexico’s cuisine, especially in the south. A full tutorial is coming in our April/May issue, but the the gist is this: To make masa, you boil dried corn in a solution of culinary lime, then let it soak overnight. Afterwards, you grind it in a handheld grinder called a molino de mano, which is a sturdy, satisfying machine with a hand crank that functions similarly to a pasta maker. (Purists also use a stone grinder for a finer consistency.) The result is so much more flavorful—and pride promoting—than buying sad store-bought tortillas, and the range of corn colors to choose from is overwhelmingly beautiful. It’s a way to connect with the food culture of Mexico, all too important in these strange times in our political landscape. — Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

Culebra, Puerto Rico

Every winter by the time February rolls around, I find myself desperately missing the beach. Staying cozy and warm inside is fun and all (to a point), but I basically spend the entire season plotting ways to make my way back into the sunshine. So my boyfriend and best friend and I took a trip to Culebra, a tiny island off the east coast of Puerto Rico where the entire perimeter is scalloped with breathtakingly beautiful beaches. After taking a plane to an hour-long taxi to a two-hour-long ferry ride, we arrived at our little beach house, outfitted with a view of the bay and a full kitchen, where could fix our own meals each day. Our first night we cooked black beans with grilled peppers and steak kebabs marinated in lime and garlic, which served as a perfect breakfast the next morning with eggs, and then as a salad with fresh greens for lunch. But the best part of the house was the blender, which meant daily smoothies made with the local tropical fruits, and strawberry-mint margaritas we could enjoy from the comfort of our own little porch. — Alex Testere, associate editor

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

There’s something that Philadelphia cuisine has that New York cuisine doesn’t. It might be that hometown element for me, or it might be the fact that it’s deliberately unassuming—sometimes, New York food feels like it’s all about the spotlight. While Philadelphia cooking isn’t traditionally viewed as “down home,” that’s exactly how I think of it. This cream cheese, banana stuffed French toast from Sabrina’s Café is the perfect example of that. It’s not posed or styled, or made to fit the food trends of Instagram. It’s just two thick cut slices of Challah bread, doused in sugary syrup and stuffed with creamy cheese. With a side of fresh black coffee and accompanied by my gossipy Italian grandmother, I couldn’t imagine a better brunch. — Alex Tringali, photo intern

Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Having lived in Manhattan for seven years (yes, I’m spoiled), I rarely leave the comfort of Chinatown (but not too spoiled), what with all its cheap markets and budget-friendly Vietnamese food. When I do venture to Brooklyn, it’s usually Bushwick for the bars and warehouse parties. So getting me to “travel” to Greenpoint for dinner is no small feat. That being said, I’d venture out here any day for Sauvage, the French gastropub charmer from the acclaimed Maison Premiere team. Beyond the seriously on-point decor and beverage selection by Will Elliott, the approachable French small plates menu by chef-partner Damon Wise makes the restaurant worth a stop on its own. The standouts? Veal sweetbreads nestling chestnuts and maitake mushrooms, a butternut squash agnolotti flecked with duck ‘prosciutto,’ and rabbit, presented in a most approachable manner, with roasted turnip, mustard seed, and honey broth. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

Beacon, New York

Whenever I’m craving a city escape I tend to hop on Metro North to visit friends in Beacon. A quick and easy commute from our midtown office, it’s completely doable for a little weeknight trivia at one of my favorite local breweries, 2 Way Brewing Company. They’re known for their Confusion beer which is similar to a Belgian pale, and produced with a proprietary yeast isolated from Hudson Valley black raspberries. By morning I grabbed a scrumptious cinnamon bun from Ella’s Bella’s and a latte from Bank Square Coffee House before hopping the train back to city life. — Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

Marfa, Texas

I was in west Texas last week for the magazine. My fellow SAVEUR staffer Katie Whittaker and I spent the week eating and drinking our way around west Texas and the border. We got some sun and discovered the origins of burritos (from Juarez) and I (a native Texan) got to teach Katie about mountain lions and scorpions. It was a real hoot. But my favorite part of the trip was a lunch we had at The Capri in Marfa, Texas. We ate a lot of good things but the thing that stuck with me was the epazote-infused gin martini. Epazote is a traditional herb used in Mexican cooking, I would never think of throwing it in with some gin! Rocky, the chef at the Capri, had just started the infusion process, but the epazote had already added an earthy, mustardy, mild minty flavor to the cocktail that mixed with the warm Texas sun and dry desert air was real. — Matt Taylor-Gross, staff photographer

New York, New York

When my friend from Florida was visiting, what began as a search for ice cream resulted in a trek around the streets of SoHo and the discovery of…rice pudding at Rice to Riches. Having never tried it, we didn’t know if we would like it. As it turns out, we’re both a little obsessed now, specifically with the cookies and cream flavor. The texture is so weird and different, but strangely addicting. Now, every time she comes to visit, we make sure to stop at Rice to Riches. — Emma Goodnough, social media intern

Chapel Hill, North Carolina (by way of the James Beard House)

Dinner at the James Beard House brings the food of top chefs from around the U.S. right here to New York City. In this case, I got to go on an Italian olive oil road trip curated by chef Teddy Diggs of Il Palio in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, without needing to hop on a plane. Chef Diggs featured extra-virgin olive oils from Italy’s top five producing regions in thoughtful dishes accompanied by wines from those regions.

The standout hors d’oeuvre for me was a crisp fried artichoke with anchovy mayonnaise, but my favorite course was the simplest of all: sweetly hay-smoked crushed potatoes made with Ligurian taggiasca olive oil, topped with an extravagant scoop of Calvisius sturgeon caviar beside a dab of whipped crème fraîche, paired with La Valle Primum Franciacorta Brut sparkling wine. We were also treated to Il Palio’s amazing smoked sea salt and rosemary focaccia, pillowy and smoky and herbaceous and in no need of dipping oil, as the chef already incorporates 2.5 liters of his own house blend of olive oil in each loaf. On second thought, I would absolutely fly to Chapel Hill just to have that bread again. — Donna L. Ng, copy chief

Juárez, Mexico

My most recent trip to Texas and Mexico has me obsessed with a good tortilla. I ate more tacos and burritos than I can count, and while the fillings were always different (and often quite spicy), the tortilla was what hit me in the face the hardest. In Juarez, I watched a food truck of women roll them out on tiny counters, and in Marfa, I ate hand-ground masa tortillas plain, or sometimes with a swoop of mole. Even the chain Burrito Crisostomo‘s tortillas were made in-house and totally amazing. Now that I’m back home, I’m thinking it’s time to make everything into a burrito. — Katie Whittaker, assistant digital editor

New York, New York

Stacy and I have been working with Marie C., of My Life in Sourdough, to put together a pop-up fundraiser at Haven’s Kitchen benefitting the ACLU. An amazing group of ladies in food media joined us and contributed baked goods, art, ceramics, and so many other items! These stamped RESIST & PERSIST cookies—and the idea behind them—by Maggie Ruggiero were a favorite. — Kristy Mucci, test kitchen associate

The post Where We Traveled in February appeared first on Saveur.

January was a weird month. The weather wasn’t particularly wintery, but a cold descended over most of our heads and hearts, and team SAVEUR decided to start looking for love in a hopeless place (of course, love here means good food). From Paris to Brooklyn, here is where we went and what we ate in January.

Arthur Avenue, The Bronx

New Year’s Eve gets all the attention, but it’s New Year’s Day that I most love to celebrate. We often throw a party at our house or get together at a friends or neighbors for an over-the-top DIY brunch. Usually we crack open a bunch of oysters and crab and drink Champagne, but this year I made an inspired last-minute run up to Arthur Avenue—the center Little Italy in NYC’s Bronx borough—and the brunch took on an Italian theme.

At Morrone Pastry Shop, I snatched up a huge wheel of bread with a paper-thin, ultra-crispy crust and a center so soft and doughy I thought it might be raw on first squeeze. (It wasn’t, and it reheated perfectly in the oven the next morning without drying out.) At Teitel Brothers, a small corner store lined with towers of imported canned goods, a helper packed me a hefty sack each of green Castelvetrano olives and spicy giardiniera—a classic pickled condiment of assorted vegetables, great on sandwiches and cheese boards, that makes the back corners of my mouth pucker and salivate just from thinking about it. But the best stop of all was at Calabria Pork Store, where a literal curtain of homemade salamis hangs overhead, and you can’t possibly walk away without at least a handful of varieties of cured pork product (I got hot capicola, sweet salami, and prosciutto). At the end of the day, we stopped for lunch at Mike’s Deli inside a small indoor retail market on the Avenue, where I had a cute old man with a New York Italian accent assemble me a sandwich the size of my arm with all of the foods I’d been eyeing all day. Because the first taste is always the best, and I couldn’t wait for mine. —Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

Mr. Panzerotto, The West Village

My family first discovered the panzerotto—a deep-fried turnover, classically stuffed with tomato sauce and mozzarella—one long-ago summer from a boardwalk vendor at the beach in Wildwood, N.J. It became the treat I would ask my mother to prepare every year on my birthday. Several summers ago, I enjoyed one as I strolled down a charming street in Otranto in Italy’s Puglia region, the birthplace of the panzerotto, where it is a favorite street snack. Now, these crispy, chewy pockets of goodness have arrived in my hometown of New York City, in the West Village, at Mr. Panzerotto. And it just happened to be my birthday when I heard about the shop. Naturally, my husband and I went there posthaste.

The panzerotti are made to order with several fillings, savory and sweet. We chose the classic tomato and mozzarella, as well as one with sausage, broccoli rabe, and scamorza. As we waited in the tiny, tile-walled shop, two men came in, ordered, and sat there chatting in Italian. The fried hand pies were every bit as good as I remembered: piping hot, yeasty, chewy, oozing with melted cheese and bright with tomato sauce or meaty with sausage. Best of all, now I don’t have to wait for my birthday to have another. —Donna L. Ng, copy chief

Vail, CO

It was one of those knee-deep-in-fresh-powder kind of days in the back bowls at Vail Ski Resort in Colorado. The kind of day that make your knees weak, exhausts you entirely, and builds up a larger than life appetite. While Vail’s food scene is fairly decent, there’s nothing better than home cooking at the cabin with the warmth of the fireplace in the background. We decided it was a perfect night for my friend’s traditional Ukrainian borscht. A nice hearty mixture of beets, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, onions, and garlic, something his family from the Carpathian Mountains made to survive the harshest of winters. By the end of dinner all that exhaustion had diminished, giving us just the fuel needed to hit the slopes yet again the following morning. —Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

Somewhere in Brooklyn

January was not a particularly travel-filled month for me, but I did make some pho that took about as much time as a trip around the world. —Katherine Whittaker, assistant digital editor

Taiwan

When the New Year arrived, I took off on a plane headed to Taiwan. It felt like returning home. I arrived in the early morning and immediately stopped at the first cart hawking buns and a bowl of sweet roasted soy milk. And at the same corner a man roasted sweet potatoes in a fire pit. Taiwan is a country where walking and eating will take you further than scouting out the latest restaurants, but the few times I sat down for a meal were just for stinky tofu. Every vendor there guards their brine like a palace secret. Temples dedicated for the fermented bean curds line the markets all over Taiwan. It’s a smell that ribbons around you, beckoning you to seek it out.

A wince always accompanies the first time. But once you bite into the deep-fried tofu skin slicked with spicy chile oil, and the brine bursts out of the gooey interior, you’ll be hooked. And there’s a good chance that the plane ride back will have you seeking for it even in your memories. —Nissan Haque, digital production assistant

Long Island

I rang in the new year at a beach house on Long Island. While admittedly not the ideal time for a beach house excursion, we spent the long weekend alternating blustery beach walks and cozy card games inside. And wine. Lots of wine. We had a loose menu set in advance: a couple chickens, armfuls of vegetables and greens to roast, and eggs galore for breakfast frittatas. But the showstopper for New Year’s Eve was a 10-pound, 60-day-dry-aged beef rib roast, pierced and stuffed with rosemary and garlic cloves and paired with no fewer than six bottles of meticulously selected wine that I was too smitten by the beef to remember their names. Sometime, later that night there was also a chilly plunge into the Atlantic, but champagne details are fuzzy, you know? —Alex Testere, associate editor

Paris, France

Ten years ago, I lived in an attic apartment in Paris without heat, internet, a phone, or a real shower. I was poor as hell and ate jambon-beurre or peanut butter and jam most days, saving enough euros to buy cheap wine at Chez George on Saturday nights. I was a living, breathing foreign exchange student stereotype. But with a last name like ‘Pariseau,’ it felt predestined, so even though I was always hungry—huddled in front of a space heater and stealing internet from the Galeries Lafayette—looking back, it sounds almost romantic.

This January, I returned after a four-year hiatus, with the sole purpose of walking, eating, drinking, and showing my Italian-American boyfriend the quintessential French city I’d slummed around in as a 20-year-old. After a night of drinking an enormous amount of champagne, wine, and late night cocktails to the tune of French piano ballads, we were extremely hungover. Slogging through a day of requisite museum-going and pastry-eating (the chocolate-pistachio escargot and floppy, sweet croissants at Du Pain et des Idées helped temporarily), we dragged ourselves to Rue de Martyrs just as night fell. Occasionally, when I had a few extra bucks, I’d walk a few blocks from my apartment to this sloping street lined with old school cheese, wine, and roast chicken vendors, and treat myself to a thick disk of fresh goat cheese and a jar of creamy, whipped farm yogurt. —Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

Pittsburgh, PA

Going to the Ace Hotel is like being everywhere and nowhere all at once. It’s laid back approach to sophistication is, in fact, rather luxurious. As my partner and I zipped around PA and Ohio for the holidays, we took an evening for ourselves at the new Ace hotel in Pittsburgh. It’s hidden inside an old renovated YMCA, off in the east end of the city, on a magic little block of culinary opportunity. We had delicious negronis and French 75s at The Livermore, a classy, but unpolished bar glowing yellow just around the corner. And down the block sits the restaurant Spoon, now helmed by chef Jamilka Borges. We got to try her unbelievable mushroom soup and cumin crepe. Ace Hotel itself provided perhaps the most satisfying of all—breakfast in bed, focaccia and croissants from their in-house pastry chef. We succeeded in suspending time, in allowing for indulgence. —Allie Wist, associate art director

New Orleans, LA

I left the bustle and bluster of New York City winter behind and headed south to Lousiana cow country. Five days of shuffling heifers and bulls from pasture to pasture on Kent Farms’ cattle ranch were punctuated by pit stops at some seriously authentic Cajun eateries, antiquing for food styling props, and one spectacular whole animal butcher shop that would have fit right in up here in Brooklyn.

At the end of the week, I eased my way back to city life by spending 3 days in the foodie mecca that is New Orleans, where I was lucky enough to meet the culinary and civil rights legend, Leah Chase. Mrs. Chase, 94, still runs Dookie Chase, a 5th Ward Creole restaurant that she and her late husband took over in the 1950s. The restaurant became an important meeting and organizing place for people of color during the 1960s and the walls are adorned today with a staggering collection of African-American artwork. Mrs. Chase’s warmth, encouragement, and fantastic food were exactly the sustenance I needed before heading out to the NOLA Women’s March on the 21st. While smaller than some of the coastal sister marches, New Orleans showed up with a party like only that city can: with brass bands, dancers, costumes and beverages to keep everyone smiling through the drizzly day. —Kat Craddock, test kitchen assistant

Austin, TX

I’m usually in Austin for two reasons: to visit grandma or to party. That said, Austin is a great town to be hungover in: we’ve got breakfast tacos, warm cheesy kolaches, and even some killer ramen to bring you back to life. This time around, for the first time ever, I decided to eat Italian food—yeah, I missed New York City—at ELM Group’s Italic. The rustic, casual spot offers just as much comfort as any Southern food. As proof, here is the main event pizza (accompanied by pork belly bucatini and penne rigate bolognese) that I would eat sober, drunk, or hungover. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

Queens, NYC

Trying times call for overflowing ice cream sundaes, and no one does it better than Eddie’s Sweet Shop, the hundred-or-so-year-old soda fountain and ice cream parlor in my home town of Forest Hills, where everything is homemade from the ice cream to the excellent hot fudge sauce to the unapologetically thick whipped cream, which my grandmother would call schlag and is rich enough to support a spoon stabbed in on its end. Little has changed at Eddie’s since it opened—the name a couple times—but the tile floor, marble counter, and antique wood fixtures are as timeless as ever. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

The post Where SAVEUR’s Editors Traveled in January appeared first on Saveur.

At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. From soba in Tokyo to barbecue tacos in Austin, here are all the ways SAVEUR editors ate the world in December.

Tokyo, Japan

It’s still a sore spot for many of New York’s Japanophiles that Honmura-An quit the city in 2007—a sore spot for me especially, as the storied soba restaurant’s exit preceded my arrival by a few months. The restaurant reopened a year later…in Tokyo. I found myself there last month, so naturally I went. My friend and I ducked into their Roppongi location for lunch on an afternoon that was cold enough I lost all feeling in my fingers while google-mapping. That’s to say I settled with the warm stuff, a bowl topped with three tempura-fried curry oysters that were so satisfying I went back the next day by myself.

The second time, I sat in the back. The great thing about the back is that you have a clear shot not only of one of the cooks, who is rolling out dough in a glass room, but of the other tables when that cook starts chopping so loudly the patrons jump and hushed conversations pause. I enjoyed that view with what was my best meal of the trip (maybe of the year?): a giant bowl of cold soba topped with a pile of uni slices, a dollop of fresh wasabi, and some strips of dried seaweed. Kind of like one bite of perfect sushi that lasts a whole meal. — Andrew Richdale, deputy editor

Northern Michigan, USA

Last year, my parents moved from their comfortable townhouse in the D.C. suburbs to a remote log cabin in the northern Michigan woods. At least 30 minutes from the nearest town (“town” is used here generously), and a good three and a half hours north of the Detroit airport, my trips home have been far less frequent. So the hopes were high for a Christmas up north, and with my parents having all year to prepare, there was no shortage of rich, buttery, gut-sticking food: Christmas dinner was both lobster and steak pie, and breakfast the day before was a mountain of crisp and buttery buttermilk waffles, drowned in Michigan’s finest maple syrup and a dusting of powdered sugar, almost as thick as the snow outside. — Alex Testere, associate editor

Frosinone, Italy

You know how sometimes you tell people you love a food so much you could eat it every day for the rest of your life? And how you always kind of laugh when they say that, thinking, “Yeah, ok, that’s disgusting”? I feel that way about pasta. Seriously. I ate it every night for 3 months and never once thought, “Yeah, ok, I feel disgusting about this.” So when my friend Ilaria told me she was returning to her hometown, Frosinone, outside of Rome in Italy, I right away knew I had to go. I had to get some good pasta. I spent about 4 days with her and her family, testing out my less-than-perfect Italian, downing espressos (and inhaling Pocket Coffee in between actual coffees), and eating everything. We ate a lot. One particularly memorable meal included 15 appetizers followed by two enormous, cheese-covered, pear-stuffed gnocchi and two desserts shared with Ilaria. But probably the best thing I ate was this carbonara, made by Ilaria’s mother. It wasn’t too creamy, it had just the right amount of pancetta, egg, and cheese, the pasta was cooked to perfection – I could go on and on, but I think you get how much I loved it. I think I know what I want to eat every day for the next month… — Katherine Whittaker, assistant digital editor

Austin, Texas

You know that feeling that something just isn’t right, like you’re forgetting something, like you’re missing something? And you can’t figure it out and then one night you wake up in a panic saying “TACOS!” and you fly to Austin immediately and start a taco tour to calm yourself down. Same. I was in Austin over the holidays and spent a good chunk of my time eating as many tacos as possible. I went to all my old favorites but this trip I got to go to a new, to me, place called Valentina’s Tex-Mex BBQ. It’s a food truck in a gas station parking lot that serves some of the best tacos I’ve ever had! I had the smoked brisket taco and smoked carnitas taco and a side of their charro beans and a topo chico and I was in heaven. Valentina’s somes all of their meats in-house and word on the street is it’s Aaron Franklin’s favorite bbq in Austin (other than his). My future Austin taco tours will start and end with a stop at Valentina’s. — Matt Taylor-Gross, staff photographer

Princeton, New Jersey

The day after Christmas (as if the holidays weren’t indulgence enough) I always stop by Conte’s Pizza in Princeton with my in-laws. There’s nothing fancy about this long, high-ceilinged bar hall. Started in the 1930s as the Witherspoon Bar by Italian immigrant Sebastiano Conte, the barebones operation eventually began serving pizza in the 1950s. The delightfully dated décor hasn’t changed since; amid carpet-covered pillars, a multi-colored glass brick bar, and burnished gold walls, pies as wide as tires and as greasy as a fry cook’s apron are served to loyal Princetonians. And it’s in no particular style—just a tons of perfectly browned cheese over a pool of salty tomato sauce all studded with thick pepperoni rounds filled with golden sausage grease. This is not beauty queen pie, but it’s deeply satisfying (and wildly calorific) in a messy Italian-American, red-sauce-and-cheese kind of way. — Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

New York, New York

Where did I go in December? Nowhere! Because one of the best things about being from New York and continuing to live here is not having to leave town during the most hectic travel season of the year. True, it’s also the busiest tourist season of the year, but if you know which neighborhoods to avoid (Herald Square, Soho, all of Greater Metastasized Williamsburg), you can get into pretty much any Good But Normally Mobbed Restaurant you want, because all the people who normally eat there are tossing and turning in their childhood twin beds back in their sad hometowns. So I ate a lot of fish at the Russ and Daughters Cafe, at dinner, thank you very much, when it was so peaceful in the dining room you could almost imagine the place in whatever hamlet you’re from.

That said, the best best thing about living here isn’t the December restaurant availability. It’s now, in these early days of January, when the tourists are finally leaving and the locals are still in a New Year’s haze. That gentle hum you hear in the air? It’s the city getting a particularly noxious infection, with days of good health back on the horizon. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

Houston, Texas

Although I was born and raised in Houston, I’d never had an opportunity to sit down at one of the city’s most famous restaurants, Underbelly. After hearing rave reviews for years, my family finally decided to check it out this past Christmas. The highlight of the menu was definitely these goat dumplings, an Underbelly signature, which nods to both the Southern-style take on dumplings and the spice-forward goat stews of Korea. Laced with a red, gochujang-like sauce and topped with crispy sesame seeds, the dish is masterclass on blending two culinary cultures to create a better dish, rather than a misshapen mashup. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

Dingle, Ireland

My New Years resolution each year is to wake up the following morning in the furthest place possible from the massive crowds and glamorous parties that fill the city of New York. On the eve of December 31st, I found myself cozied up in a pub in Dingle, Ireland, a picturesque town situated on the most western peninsula of the country. On assignment shooting an upcoming story, this town that praises itself on local cuisine is equally talented in preserving its past. You walk into a pub like Curran’s and you’re instantly brought back to the 1800’s. The smell of the old wood floor beams pairs perfectly with the Guinness being poured, and whiskey shares the shelves with wellies, both waiting to be sold. Live music is played often, and if you show up more than once, you have a good chance they’ll be pouring your favorite pint before you even ask. — Michelle Heimerman, photo editor

The post Where We Traveled in December appeared first on Saveur.