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"FacebookPinterest\n\nA great restaurant is always happy to see you, never making you sorry you stepped through the front door.\n\nThat's one of my definitions of greatness. You might think the menu has to be in French or the chef has to be on television. That's not important to me.\n\nA great restaurant must be great for at least a decade. Less, and it's merely dishing up tasty food. You might think a great restaurant is one that challenges you. I think the eating should be easy.\n\nI know this: Greatness is never effortless. When I asked Ferran Adri\u00E0 of Spain's El Bulli if he'd dreamed he might one day be considered the world's best chef, he replied, \"Absolutely not. I never looked for this. It was not in the script. It wasn't logical for a Spanish cook to think this.\"\n\nI embarked on a pilgrimage, traveling 27,000 miles to the world's greatest restaurants. I was on the road for two weeks. I averaged 4,500 miles between meals. For a trip that was supposed to consist of endless eating, I was hungry a lot more than you might expect.\n\nIt's hard to say how much I ate. At six of the seven restaurants, I had six to nine courses. That was in America, France, Monte Carlo, Italy (two stops), and Australia. At El Bulli, I had forty-one. You've heard about El Bulli, I'm sure, mostly about nonstop foams. It's a myth. If I had eaten just foam, I wouldn't have been so full when I left at 3 a.m.\n\nWhat did I eat on this trip? Here's a taste:\n\nA sweet, salty caviar-and-smoked-salmon croque-monsieur at Le Bernardin in New York. A presentation, museum-quality in appearance, of gray-hued mackerel in a pinkish red-onion gel\u00E9e at Maison Troisgros in France. An assortment of vegetables, many from the farmers' market in Nice, presented in a small Murano glass under a soaring Versailles-like ceiling at Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo. Pork cheeks accompanied by handmade, hand-cut saffron tagliatelle at Hosteria Giusti in Modena. At dal Pescatore, pumpkin tortelli of such complexity and subtlety that I realized after a lifetime of pumpkin filling identical in flavor to Thanksgiving pie, I had finally found it done right, not that I expect to find dal Pescatore again, so deep in the Lombardy countryside is it concealed. Linguine with hot chilies scoured of spiciness, surely the greatest pasta dish not to be invented in Italy, at Sean's Panaroma, overlooking Australia's Bondi Beach.\n\nI haven't mentioned what I ate at El Bulli. The answer: Everything. Most of it was unimaginable, a majority of it was great, and one item reminded me of my childhood\u2014candy-avored paper with embedded candy flowers, not so different from the tiny candy dots on strips of paper I bought for a penny or two and took to the movies.\n\n(Should you wonder, as I did, what the waitstaff at El Bulli eats, my waitress told me the grim news: \"Pasta and hamburgers. Sometimes my favorite, chicken with potatoes. I'm happy that day.\")\n\nI flew more than around the world\u2014twice I doubled back. My longest leg was Barcelona to Australia by way of London and Singapore. I had more meals on airlines than I did in restaurants, which erases a small measure of splendor from my journey.\n\nI drove a thousand miles, took one train and one bus. I wasn't planning on busing anywhere, but buses are remarkably convenient when an airline has lost your bags and you have nothing to lug. (I would like to express my thanks to Emilie and Veronique of Troisgros, who tracked down my bags\u2014yet another example of greatness.)\n\nBefore I set off, I hosted a dinner at Le Bernardin, one of only two stops on this trip where I ate with friends. Let me add a postscript to my definition of greatness. It's making sure a customer doesn't feel alone.\n\n\n\nLE BERNARDIN\n\n New York City\n\nBetter my mother never had to hear this: No kitchen has influenced my love of food more than Le Bernardin's.\n\nEven to me it sounds implausible. The dining room is corporate, albeit with nice wood accents. The service is formal, although thankfully in English. The food is fish, plain and simple.\n\nMore than twenty years ago, when Le Bernardin opened, I didn't care much for fish. I wasn't sure why, until I ate my first meal there and realized that I'd never had fresh fish before. My mother, who made me love food, didn't make me love fish. We had flounder on Friday nights, the same day as the Catholics, broiled and drenched in butter.\n\nAfter that first meal at Le Bernardin\u2014I had the monkfish\u2014I was unable to order fish elsewhere. Two years passed before other American restaurants understood freshness and started catching up. Co-owners Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze, brother and sister, introduced me to everything from salmon cooked rare to sea urchin cooked not at all.\n\nToday, under Maguy Le Coze and co-owner Eric Ripert, Le Bernardin remains the most influential seafood restaurant in America, and its hold on me has deepened. Le Bernardin continues to excel, and Ripert is unquestionably the finest seafood chef in the world.\n\nI know a little about fish now. Enough that I can say to Ripert, \"I know where to find fish that is fresher than your fish.\" He will argue that he gets the top fish in Manhattan, which he does, and then he'll admit that I am correct. If you want the freshest striped bass or shad (and I don't), you've come to the right city, but otherwise a Michelin-starred spot in Brittany, a roadside trattoria in Liguria, or a beachfront shack in Southeast Asia can offer a far more compelling local catch.\n\n\"I admit if you pick up your fish on the dock, grill it right there, it will be fresher than ours,\" he concedes, \"but no one is more dedicated to seafood.\"\n\nGilbert Le Coze, the original chef, didn't just redefine freshness: He changed the way Americans eat fish. Before him, raw fish outside of Japanese restaurants was virtually unknown. Ripert, who worked for such icons as Jean-Louis Palladin (who in my estimation cooked French food in America better than any other chef) and Jo\u00EBl Robuchon (who in the opinion of almost everyone cooked French food better than any other person in France), does with fish what no other man has.\n\nHe succeeds in making fish, potentially the most pedestrian of proteins, infinitely fascinating. He does it by treating each variety as though it has a distinct taste, impossible for most of us to detect. He cooks each one as though it has different needs, which of course it does. And then he adds sauces and salsas and vinegars and spices and broths and, if it is the season, black truffles.\n\nSomething miraculous happens to fish at Le Bernardin. The secret, Ripert says, is his philosophy: \"At Le Bernardin, fish is the star of the plate. We elevate it. We do not cook with fish. We cook for the fish. A lot of chefs integrate fish into their dishes, but they are not thinking about the fish. They are thinking presentation; they are thinking garnish. They are saying, &#145;Maybe I will put a salmon with that.' \"\n\nI asked Ripert to begin our meal with one of the late Gilbert Le Coze's most famous preparations, and he picked tuna carpaccio\u2014thin slices, raw, topped with a lime-ginger mayonnaise. The genius of Le Coze was not in cooking fish but in selecting fish, and he believed in minimal embellishments, such as this spicy, creamy, tart, exquisitely balanced mayonnaise.\n\nIn Ripert's pot-au-feu of wild salmon, the fish was very soft and the truffle-enhanced, porcini-scented mushroom broth sweet and deep. The baked custard of sea urchin seemed to be mostly heavy cream but actually had none at all, merely milk. Sea urchin, perhaps the most sumptuous of ocean creatures, added richness naturally, resulting in what friends dining with me declared a \"deathbed dish,\" their highest compliment.\n\nI asked Ripert if he was most proud of what he has learned to do with fish, and he said that he was most proud of what he has learned to do with sauces, because Robuchon, his revered teacher, once said to him, \"You'll never be a good saucier.\"\n\nAt least nobody said he wasn't a gifted fish cook.\n\n\"Oh yes,\" he said, smiling. \"Robuchon said that, too.\"\n\n\n\nMAISON TROISGROS\n\n Roanne, France\n\nThe train from Lyon to Roanne is a journey into the past. The tracks meander through towns that no travel guide deems worthy of a special trip\u2014St-Romain-de-Popey, St-Germain au Mont d'Or\u2014past meadows of wildflowers, past homes with lace curtains, past tiny farms with terra-cotta roofs.\n\nAcross from the Roanne train station is Troisgros, an institution as well as a restaurant. Troisgros was first traditional, then nouvelle, and now it is unlike any other restaurant in France. The chef is Michel Troisgros, son of one of the icons of French culinary history, Pierre Troisgros. The father is 79 and continues to cook, although only in his own home. \"I see him cooking for my mother. He is always thinking, How can I make it different?\" Michel says.\n\nMichel is fortunate to have such a father, such a family, such a tradition. He has not let history down. To me, he is the finest chef in the world. Greatness has never been so perfectly passed along.\n\nThe restaurant Troisgros does not exactly struggle, but life these days as a three-star chef in a fading city is problematic, for the world has bypassed Roanne. The TGV, the fast train, came along to link Paris and Lyon without stopping there. A new superhighway skipped the city\u2014the old N7 is indispensable no more. On or near that road can be found Troisgros, La C\u00F4te d'Or in Saulieu, Pic in Valence, La Pyramide in Vienne, and Oustau de Baumani\u00E8re in Les Baux-de-Provence, establishments that once riveted France.\n\nThe great restaurants of Europe have long been defined by the Michelin guide as \"worth a special journey.\" Troisgros alone meets that standard for me. The dining room, a study in beige and white with a few soothing paintings, is not especially notable. Nor is the impeccable service, so discreet as to be nearly unseen. I will concede that the wine list is a lure, but I am not the type to indulge in pricey bottles. I always ask for the same 1992 German Riesling, most likely lingering on the list because nobody orders it but me. The butter is also a favorite of mine, a sweet butter of extraordinary richness laced with coarse salt.\n\nBefore dinner, I like to read the menu in the small book-lined room a few steps up from the front desk. I am invariably alone because other guests prefer the bar, which long ago held basketball and tennis trophies but now stocks thirty-year-old Glenddich and forty-year-old Bas Armagnac, as is commonplace in restaurants of this stature. A waiter will bring my Riesling and a few amuse-bouches that I do not munch on absentmindedly, as others would, particularly when crackers are involved. Regardless of what tops them\u2014watermelon, truffles, bottarga\u2014I'm in ecstasy, because Michel Troisgros is the cracker king.\n\nThe menu is somewhat daunting, linguistically. Mid in with the French basics are elements of Japanese cuisine (Pierre was among the first French chefs to establish a presence in Japan), Italian (his mother's legacy), and South American (brother Claude is a celebrity chef in Brazil). Yet haute cuisine has rarely made so much sense, come so precisely to the point.\n\nYou might have eaten chicken Kiev and asked yourself why anyone would make a fuss over a bird with melted butter. The Kiev of Troisgros is the ultimate fried food, a thin shell stuffed with pigeon, black truffle, foie gras, and spinach. I promise that if you come for two meals, you will order it twice.\n\nI always eat my vegetables when I am there, specifically Michel's asparagus made three ways\u2014with mayonnaise and black truffles, with red-pepper sauce and bits of red pepper, with fresh mint and a mint-leaf garnish. When asked what preparation he most loves, he mentioned gel\u00E9es, which are cool extracts of pure flavor.\n\nWhen I appeared interested, he sent out razor clams in a green-apple gel\u00E9e, then the mackerel in a Vin Santo gel\u00E9e\u2014the strong fish was calmed by the bracing acidity of red onions and tart-sweet wine. His father became famous for his salmon with sorrel sauce, which tingled with acidity. When I hear people speak of food that dances on the tongue, I think the expression must have originated here.\n\nMy favorite dining moments usually come when I am dazzled, mystified, and awed, and they occur more with the food of Michel Troisgros than with anyone else's. He makes food I've never tried taste like food I can't believe I've done without.\n\n\n\nLE LOUIS XV\u2014\n\n ALAIN DUCASSE\n\n Monte Carlo\n\nNow I understand why everyone I know is envious of this trip. I am standing on the balcony of a parquet-floored suite at the H\u00F4tel de Paris, a regal sanctuary in Monte Carlo. The restaurant Le Louis XV is a few floors down.\n\nI have made it here by automobile, powered by a buffet breakfast at Troisgros that included a sweet called \"lost brioche\" that is much like English bread-and-butter pudding. I looked around the little breakfast room, happily saw no other diners, and emptied the entire serving bowl onto my plate. This was precisely the kind of fuel a traveler needs to drive nearly 400 miles under the influence of jet lag.\n\nMy suite is number 513\u2014514, should you wish a recommendation for a nice room when you're next in Monte Carlo. As I stand there looking over the harbor and waving at tourists passing below, I can't help but wonder if they believe the Maybach parked importantly outside the front door of the hotel is mine. Or perhaps they believe the entire principality is mine. This balcony might give that impression.\n\nDinnertime arrives. I tighten the knot in my tie, descend by elevator, and cross the lobby to the restaurant.\n\nI try not to appear awestruck. It is my belief that a man need not visit the great tourist shrines along the banks of the Seine if he can get a reservation here, and I have been here often enough that I consider the nymphs and angels frolicking on the ceiling to be my close friends, notwithstanding that they are thirty feet above me. I am also an admirer of the waiters, each of them a young man of exceeding sociability and impeccable manners. I am charmed when wealthy tourists come to Le Louis XV to dine, spend $1,000 per couple for food and wine, hand their waiter a $12 disposable camera, and ask for a snapshot. They are accommodated with grace.\n\nThe chef, officially, is Alain Ducasse, but he has an empire to attend to and is not often here. Franck Cerutti, going on 48 but preternaturally young looking, not a gray hair to be seen, is the chef de cuisine. He is overseer of the kitchen and seemingly at peace. \"Alain Ducasse has the worries, so he has the white hair,\" Cerutti says.\n\nWhen I ask him why so many of his waiters are young, he tells me that this restaurant is the training ground for all of Ducasse's establishments, and that after a few years, they are sent off to new positions. \"This is a bit like a nursery school.\" He prefers unspoiled waiters, and he makes his point by mimicking the sour face of an old Parisian waiter, the kind that has tormented Americans\u2014and for that matter, Frenchmen\u2014since the dawn of haute cuisine.\n\nTo me, Le Louis XV is the greatest restaurant in the world, when food, service, and ambience are taken into consideration. It is flawless. Even though the room is Napoleonic and the waiters are so poised they could be flag bearers in the horse artillery, the food is simple. It is Mediterranean cuisine of the type found nowhere but on the Mediterranean. It could not be. The products are nowhere else.\n\nIf the cooking is essentially local, the elegance that Cerutti brings to it is world-class. He recalls that when Ducasse took over the restaurant twenty years ago, critics complained that such cuisine was not for Le Louis XV. \"We were first to do regional, paysan cuisine that was really for the home,\" he says. \"Everybody thought we were crazy.\"\n\nIn winter he has truffles, game, and root vegetables. In the summer, the food is more recognizable to an American guest, more of what we think of as Mediterranean. \"For me, using products from around the world would not be possible,\" Cerutti says. \"A tomato grown in Hong Kong is not the same as a tomato grown here.\"\n\nI have a bouillon made from white beans, little more than a creamy conveyance for the snails and the shoulder of rabbit floating atop it; followed by the large shrimp called gamberoni; two sheets of homemade pappardelle, one of them white and the other black from cuttlefish ink; cannelloni with an intense puree (here called a marmalade) of tomatoes; rouget with tapenade; and finally, lamb of exquisite tenderness with zucchini flowers. With everything comes fresh vegetables: tomatoes and artichokes and zucchini from the market in Nice where Cerutti goes regularly to kiss the cheeks of the women who sell them, or from purveyors who have learned over the years that he does not kiss if he finds slipups.\n\n\"My main preoccupation,\" he says, \"is to source the best, to the point where if one day they deliver produce I don't want, I go mad. But they don't do it anymore.\"\n\nThe people come to the restaurant, Cerutti concedes, not for his cuisine but for that of Ducasse, but he says that Ducasse is now too busy to cook. In most ways, Cerutti's Mediterranean food is no different from Ducasse's Mediterranean food, since the chefs have a similar sensibility, but Cerutti realizes that he is now the man in charge. \"It is my cuisine now,\" he says, giggling impishly. \"I have killed the father.\"\n\n\n\nHOSTERIA GIUSTI\n\n Modena, Italy\n\nI am strolling down the Vicolo Squallore, an alley bare of everything, even illegally parked cars, seemingly an impossibility in an Italian city. Nothing moves. No sounds. It would be creepy, but thankfully it is midday. Now I understand why Hosteria Giusti opens only for lunch.\n\nI have been to this most inaccessible of restaurants once before, but it was a dozen years back. I seem to recall the entrance as being on a main street of Modena, under a grand covered sidewalk with a vaulted ceiling, much like those found in nearby Bologna.\n\nAt the end of the alley, I come upon a tiny courtyard with a big umbrella, some patio furniture, and a sign with a message that might as well be permanent: HOSTERIA AL COMPLETO. Translation: You aren't getting in.\n\nHosteria Giusti is a shrine to home cooking. The sole hint that it might be different from other tiny trattorias\u2014if it's large enough to be called that\u2014is the few empty wine bottles on the windowsills. Krug. Gaja. Dom P\u00E9rignon Ros\u00E9. Fancy stuff. Not what you'd expect in a region where the house wine is invariably Lambrusco, a fizzy red.\n\nI walk in, confirm my hard-won reservation, make sure the Morandi family knows the struggle I have endured to come here. First, the begging for a table. \"Yes, very difficult,\" Cecilia Morandi admits. Then finding my way from the autoroute to the nearly unmarked city center. \"Yes, yes, difficult,\" she agrees, and adds soothingly, \"and always they change the traffic pattern.\" Finally, chancing upon my hotel and a parking spot, which meant driving through a pedestrian zone and making a U-turn in the courtyard of the cathedral where Virginia d\u00E9 Medici is buried and maybe leaving tire marks on her grave, a sin that surely deserves a place in hell, or at the very least a traffic ticket, except that in Italy drivers who observe such niceties as pedestrian zones and no-parking signs are thought of as cowards.\n\nNow that I am safely at my table, I recall that the restaurant is located behind the family-run salumeria\u2014an Italian delicatessen\u2014that is indeed on a street with a sidewalk under a vaulted ceiling. You may enter either via the alley or by ducking through a small doorway in the shop. From there you negotiate a winding passage to the dining area, passing by a kitchen that smells of bubbling balsamic vinegar.\n\nThe room has four tables with white cloths, a hutch holding about 150 glasses, a long table with more than fifty different digestifs, and a small table with a few random magazines and a cookbook by Mario Batali. (Wherever you happen to go in Italy, he will already have been there.) Dining is informal. Matteo Morandi waits tables, serving the food of his mother, Laura. On the day I visited, he wore orange pants and blue running shoes.\n\nHosteria Giusti a dozen years ago was random bliss. No menu, no wine list. The late Nano Morandi, father of Cecilia and Matteo, was a wonderfully amusing and forceful man who brought out his wife's food faster than you could eat it, which was troublesome because everything he brought out was something you desperately wanted to finish. Today, Hosteria Giusti is quieter, more measured, with a wine list and a menu. The focus of the wine list is champagne, not that locals order much of it. \"Lunch is Lambrusco, Lambrusco, Lambrusco,\" Matteo says.\n\nAt my lunch, there are seven customers at the other three tables, and all have Lambrusco. I order a 1998 Dal Forno Romano Valpolicella Superiore, a monster of a wine, the definition of melted tar. It is hardly a luncheon wine, but it sells for about half what it would in the States. I cannot resist a bargain.\n\nI eat simply. There is no other choice. I begin with bread puffs, a specialty of the Emilia-Romagna region, so light they verge on nothingness, offered with three toppings: culatello, which is the heart of the prosciutto; salumi, in this case similar to American salami; and lard that I like better than the culatello, more of a compliment than you might imagine. Pure white lard from Tuscany is practically butter, but it is rarely multidimensional. This one has a pleasing hint of porkiness, a tang.\n\nI insist on two orders of pasta, simply because it is ridiculous to come this far for one. At Giusti, the pasta is superior because it is untouched by mechanical devices: \"It takes two or three hours to make four portions of tagliatelle,\" Cecilia points out. First, pappardelle with duck. Second, those pork cheeks with saffron-laced pasta, a combination that reminds me of osso buco with saffron risotto. To finish, a thigh of baby pig, majestic and much like a cool confit. For a moment, I deceive myself. I think it is light.\n\nHosteria Giusti is a reference point for Italian food. To eat here is to imagine you are dining in the Italian home you wish you had. \"We think our kitchen is very simple,\" says Cecilia. \"It is strange that we became famous, for this is what we eat every day. For us, it is normal. For our clients, it is not.\"\n\n\n\nDAL PESCATORE\n\n Canneto sull'Oglio, Italy\n\nThe pan is very hot. In goes much butter. Out goes most of it, the pan wiped almost clean. In goes grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, made from raw cow's milk, three years old, surely the world's most essential cheese.\n\nI am watching the preparation of the savory, crunchy, cheesy tidbit I ate the moment I sat down at dal Pescatore. I have labeled it a tuile\u2014a cookie\u2014because of its shape, but it is not that. Nor is it a cracker, although it has the thinness of one. If it is a cracker, it is one of unprecedented cheesiness.\n\nObviously, I am in the kitchen, where I do not belong. If I am violating protocol, everybody is too polite to rebuke me. I am sorry to inform those of you who regularly drink Giacomo Conterno Barolo Riserva Monfortino or have the revenue to request showers of white truffles that this is a better experience. Wandering freely is as much fun as a man can have in a great restaurant.\n\nThe cheese melts into a puddle of goo. The goo is scooped out, curled over a long rod. It quickly hardens. Voil\u00E0, or whatever they say in Italy. My tuile. Nothing could be simpler. I reach over, grab one, bite. The crunch nearly echoes. My astounding tuile is nothing more than melted, hardened, concentrated Parmesan cheese. You could do this at home, but chances are it won't be as exquisite as dal Pescatore's. That's because most of what is fabulous about Italian cuisine is products and traditions. They don't travel well.\n\nIn the small kitchen of the restaurant, the mother, Nadia Santini, cooks across the counter from her son Giovanni and his grandmother Bruna, who work together. \"My grandmother,\" says Giovanni, \"is making sure that everybody does everything the right way. She was born in 1929, and she has spent fifty-five years in this kitchen.\"\n\nNow elegant, dal Pescatore has been enormously upgraded from its opening-day ambience in 1926, when it was called Vino e Pesce (Wine and Fish) and the menu consisted of fish fried for people passing by on bicycles. Today it boasts a helicopter landing pad a half-minute walk from an eighteenth-century farmhouse being renovated as a home for Giovanni.\n\nThe star of the kitchen is clearly Nadia, although everyone, herself included, denies it to demonstrate familial solidarity. She happened to answer the phone when I called from America. I did not at first realize it was her, although she sounded oddly upbeat for a person relegated to the task of taking phone calls from strangers looking for directions. Dal Pescatore is near Canneto sull'Oglio, a town that is not on my map of Lombardy.\n\nI said apologetically that I would be dining alone, and she replied, \"Oh, that's fine, my husband loves to go to a restaurant alone so he can talk to everybody, all the waiters, everybody who will talk to him.\" I got suspicious: \"You would not be the famous chef, would you?\" She answered, \"No, I am not famous. I am the only one here who is working. Everywhere you go, there are horses and there are donkeys. I am the donkey.\"\n\nDal Pescatore is no longer simple. The waiters wear tudos. The music is soothing. The chairs are noble. The dining room has doors that open onto an expansive garden. Fancy it may be, but it remains the most typical Italian restaurant I know.\n\nItalians believe that when you get off the plane in Italy, the air smells Italian. When you go to the seaside in Italy, the air smells Italian, even if it is blowing in from France. Tomatoes to them taste Italian. Americans like me have no chance of understanding what this means without going to a restaurant like dal Pescatore and eating food that is not significantly different from what has been on the menu for the past three-quarters of a century. Until 1995, I was told, the menu included horsemeat. That's because farmworkers in this part of Italy, when faced with famine, ate their horses.\n\nHere I had grilled eel, one of the river fish that Giovanni's great-grandfather prepared at the start of the twentieth century, not that others hadn't been cooking it pretty much the same way for at least 500 years. At first bite, I thought it was too\u2026well\u2026local. A little strong. A little weird. By the end of the plate, I was insane for it. The crisp skin reminded me of Peking duck. The marinated meat, moist and savory, started tasting like soft, sweet beef.\n\nThe French could learn much from the frogs' legs that are made here. They're no more than a nugget of meat, a little like sole on a stick. Here also the menu includes culatello, and I wondered if these frogs' legs could be called culatello of frog.\n\nAlmost nothing changes at dal Pescatore. The father, who oversees the dining room, is named Antonio. Someday he will have a grandson named Antonio. For that matter, Giovanni someday expects to have a grandson named Giovanni. \"It's easy to remember,\" he says. The food changes slowly, not because the family cooks are incapable of being inventive but because they realize the consequences of being too creative.\n\n\"The food we prepare must be with an Italian heart,\" says Giovanni. \"If we do something strange, similar to what others are doing in their kitchens, and we continue in that way, in ten years the new generation will eat exactly similar to the rest of the world. But we are not similar. We are Italian.\"\n\n\n\nEL BULLI\n\n Roses, Spain\n\nThere are two roads to El Bulli. From Roses\u2014Spain's answer to a New Jersey beach town\u2014you can take the tortuous, dangerous, hellish, no-guardrail, pray-we-don't-meet-a-truck-oh-Christ-here-comes-one back road over the mountain, or you can go the hard way. The alternative route takes you over a rugged old military trail where you pass through gnarled, barren, and feral land\u2014think An American Werewolf in London. As soon as the ultimate road primeval ends, you arrive at the ultimate restaurant urbane. El Bulli is located above Cala Montjoi, a remote beach a mountain or two removed from the town where Salvador Dal\u00ED lived.\n\nMy guest\u2014also accepting the role of plucky driver\u2014was a Spanish journalist named Xavier Agullo, who picked me up wearing a Lacoste shirt not tucked into his jeans, and no socks. \"El Bulli is rock 'n' roll,\" he explained while insisting that I not wear the suit I had brought for the occasion. \"Since 1985, I am going to El Bulli, back then maybe nine or ten times a year, and back in those days people came up from the beach to eat and washed away the sand with a hose on the terrace.\"\n\nHe's the one who valiantly suggested we get there via the Cap de Creus route, which is by no means wide enough for two cars\u2014fortunately, we met none. We arrived at El Bulli in daylight, which I would recommend simply for the beauty of the locale. The restaurant sits on a ledge above a cove frequented by bathers who I imagine have no idea that the restaurant looming over them is the most important on earth. It's elegant without being fancy, surrounded by pine trees that are occasionally the source of ingredients.\n\nThe room has a beamed ceiling and considerable white stucco. The few pieces of art, which range in style from medieval to modern, are easily ignored. The floor is tile. There is no music. It is nearly impossible to look at anything but the food, in part because it is so captivating and in part because it comes so quickly\u2014for us, approximately one course every six minutes. Even if you are a confident enough gourmet to believe you can decipher the cuisine, you will not have sufficient time to do so. Nobody thinks that fast.\n\nThe \"welcoming cocktail,\" described as a Cosmopolitan, comes in a cockeyed bowl and is eaten with a spoon. Tiny marshmallows vanish as though they weren't there. A joke? A subtle dissertation on the disturbing yet transitory implications of intoxication? Before I am close to figuring it out, the cocktail is gone and out comes Adri\u00E0's now legendary olives that aren't olives. I am face-to-face with spherification, a technique that appears to magically transform solids into liquids, encasing them in a membrane. How does he do it? With calcium chloride and sodium alginate, of course. Easy to understand if you read up beforehand. Or if you were a chemistry major.\n\nThe non-olive looks exactly like a green olive. It tastes like a green olive. However, it's liquid. If you should foolishly bite into it instead of popping it whole into your mouth, you will understand why you should not wear your finest garments to this restaurant. A later course consists of spherified ham-and-beans\u2014in this case Iberian ham and white beans. At least I think they were spherified. I was a very poor chemistry student.\n\nSometimes you are required to follow orders from the chef, because this is his world, his new order. He is abnormally concerned with the number of bites you are to take, or what end of a food item to sink your teeth into first. Sometimes\u2014forgive me, master\u2014I am tempted to defy him. I never do.\n\nTake his razor clams with seaweed salad and lemon foam. But first a word about foams. In the field of molecular gastronomy, foams have faded away, and Adri\u00E0 is about as happy to hear them considered his signature dish as Sinatra was to learn that \"My Way\" was thought of as his signature song. Unlike most foams, this one is tasty, much like pure lemon. But back to the razor-clam crisis. These are not small mollusks, and we are instructed to eat the whole four inches of the beast at one time. That's a lot of clam. I could have chewed all night.\n\nCourse number twenty-nine is one of my favorites. Mostly, it's gravy. Hare gravy, although it might be civet. (I wasn't so good at fifth-grade Spanish, either.) Also a few dots of black-truffle puree and a little apple-and-black-currant jelly. I fool myself into thinking that this is easy to understand, a Ferran Adri\u00E0 creation with training wheels. My analysis: a wonderful treat for an imaginary winter, a winter hologram. No meat, because all a hungry man really enjoys is the gravy.\n\nAfter the meal, Adri\u00E0 asks me what I think of the gravy. Luckily, I am well prepared, which I would not have been had he asked me about twenty or thirty of his other preparations. I give him my no-damn-meat-needed theory. Right! He says, \"The meat has no taste.\" He then asks me to explain the purpose of the jelly. \"Well,\" I reply, cocky now, \"it is a traditional condiment, and\u2014\"\n\nWrong!\n\nHe says, \"Some people say, &#145;Why not a piece of bread to dunk in the gravy?' The jelly takes the place of the bread!\"\n\nI nod dumbly.\n\nAnd then I am forgiven.\n\n\"I do not want to condition people,\" Adri\u00E0 says. \"Freedom is most important here, and in life. Everybody has a right to think what they want here, as they do in a theater or a museum or a movie. This is why I never like to talk about dishes. Everybody has to find his own way.\"\n\nI had plates that were plates, plates that were mesh, and plates that were gold. I had food hidden in a black box and food wrapped in edible paper. Oils from the roots of plants. Fruit as a powder. Oil as a spiral. Yogurt somewhere between foam and air. The marrow of tuna, fried. The muscle of an oyster. A miniature sea cucumber (yuck). Transcendent gnocchi. So many sweets I wondered if Adri\u00E0 had ever outgrown his adolescence. So much thoughtfulness I wondered if he had matured into a philosopher.\n\nI was about to tell him I wouldn't forget this meal, but it seemed a superfluous comment. I'm certain that nobody does.\n\n\n\nSEAN'S PANAROMA\n\n Bondi Beach, Australia\n\nBetter than being a customer at Sean's Panaroma (pan-aroma, get it?) is being a waiter.\n\nThis storefront restaurant on Australia's Bondi Beach is open for seven meals a week\u2014only five in winter. It's an unstrenuous way to earn a living. To be fair, it hasn't always been that way. When chef Sean Moran first opened for business in 1993, the workweek consisted of twenty-one meals. \"We used to be breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days\u2014we were chockablock with meals,\" he says. \"It was purely panic. We didn't know what we should be. Would people come only for breakfast? Cooking breakfast is masochistic, really. So we made it a weekend brunch. And then we said fuck it.\"\n\nOf particular importance, Sunday dinner is no longer on the schedule. After lunch that day, the roses that decorate the room are no longer of use.\n\nThe waiters stroll across the street. They walk past the North Bondi Surf Life Saving Club (est. 1906). A few strides and they're at the north end of the beach, where the beautiful people come to sun. The surfers are at the south end, the tourists in the middle. The fact that the venerable lifesaving club has its headquarters up at the north end tells me they have certain priorities when deciding which people should be saved.\n\nAmong the beautiful people are girls, and the waiters say to them, \"We work over there,\" pointing toward the little restaurant. \"Come over for a flower.\" The girls can't resist. Getting into Sean's Panaroma is nearly impossible any other time.\n\nTo Moran, his restaurant is heaven. To Gabrielle, one of the waitresses, the job brings \"an inner joy.\" To me, it is the perfect bistro. Everything there is so alluring, I didn't hesitate to fly from Barcelona to Sydney to have one dinner. Imagine a restaurant in St-Tropez where the staff is nurturing, the chef brilliant, the clientele fashionable, and the beach a few steps away. It exists, but not in France, to my knowledge; it is a half-hour taxi ride from downtown Sydney.\n\nElegant it is not. Here and there I see a bit of corrosion caused by salt blowing in from the bay. The dining room isn't beautiful\u2014I'm really not fond of the Peg-Board wall. Still, it has grown on me. The bathroom is inside, but you must walk outside to reach it. Amenities include peppermint soap and an orchid, but not hot water.\n\nThe back of the restaurant is a warren of tiny storage areas plus a larger room where Moran's malt scrolls and cracked-wheat logs with sesame crusts are baked daily\u2014not a viable economic proposition for a restaurant of this size. \"I'm not a baker,\" says Moran. \"The team does it. Everyone has a go.\" When there was too great a demand in Australia for organic butter and he couldn't get any, he found organic cream, and now the butter is made on the premises, too.\n\nHis cuisine is part home cooking, part Italian, and part gastropub\u2014sturdy food enhanced with pan drippings and plenty of lemon. Plate arrangements are not elaborate; the food arrives looking au naturel. What makes it unparalleled are his products, for Australia takes the concept of organic seriously. It is not a marketing tool, as in America, but a guarantee of superior quality. He and his partner, Michael Robertson, live partly in the Blue Mountains, a hundred kilometers away and a thousand meters above sea level, where they have, as Moran describes it, \"a shack, a veggie patch, and fruit trees.\"\n\nI ate alone, but not for long. Seated next to me were three Australian women who had ordered exactly the same food so as not to suffer \"dish envy.\" They yanked my wooden table closer to theirs\u2014strong Aussie stock, they were\u2014and proceeded to nibble everything that came my way: firm Coffin Bay oysters that hadn't spawned; chunky prawn-and-cauliflower dumplings, much like coarse quenelles, in a prawn broth; slivers of black truffles, cultivated on Australian soil, with hand-rolled noodles; and skin-on panfried harpuka, a game fish, with sorrel gnocchi, each course accompanied by a local wine, the term somewhat loosely defined. My favorite was an '06 Saint Clair Reserve Pinot Grigio from New Zealand.\n\nShould you visit, you might notice a pair of field glasses on the shelf in the back of the restaurant. Feel free to use them. They're for watching the whales that occasionally swim by.\n\n\n\nEverywhere I went, I asked about greatness. Learning its meaning was as much my obsession as eating at restaurants that demonstrably possessed it. I worry now and then that I have a rather narrow viewpoint, one limited to my sense of taste, although I know I am occasionally able to expand my parameters to include beauty, kindness, and history.\n\nMichel Troisgros told me that to find greatness in the modern world, \"You have to love the work, love the people, and love the life. That is the same for all professions, but for a chef it is a big responsibility because you take from the planet what it gives you naturally. I think that is the new thing in cooking today. It is not like thirty years ago, when our customers were eating for the sake of eating. People do not want to eat a lot. They want the experience of eating. The chef is the artist and the artisan. He has to interpret what nature gives him.\"\n\nFor Franck Cerutti of Le Louis XV, the cost of greatness is not sleeping at night, of continually asking himself how he might make his kitchen better. He says, \"Here at Le Louis XV, we are very organized to being sick about organization. Sometimes I am afraid we lose the instinctiveness from so much of it. I taste every day, every minute, always questioning myself: &#145;Is this the way it should be?' So much doubt!\" Nadia Santini says that on the day after she married her husband and became part of the dal Pescatore family, her husband's grandmother Teresa said to her, \"We eat well today because we worked very well yesterday, and if we want to eat well tomorrow, we must work very well today. For thirty-three years, when I arrive in the kitchen, I think what it is to work very well.\"\n\nFor Moran of Sean's Panaroma, \"It's all in the attitude, the vibe, that comes out of the kitchen. If it's there, you can feel it when you walk into a restaurant.\" Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin adds, \"To make a restaurant great, you cannot compromise standards. If I serve truffles, I could certainly fake them with fake truffles and truffle oil and 99 percent of my clientele would not see the difference. We don't do that.\"\n\nAdri\u00E0 has the most straightforward explanation of all: \"People who are able to make something magic and you can't explain it\u2014that is great.\"\n\nI expected greatness from these seven restaurants. I encountered no disappointments. I ate much more than I expected I would, but perhaps that is the best definition of greatness. In its presence, a fork is impossible to put down."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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