Cobs stacked like firewood outside my greengrocer. Corn ribs on every third menu. A bowl of buttered kernels at somebody’s garden lunch, demolished before the wine had gone round. I keep stopping in front of it, the way you stop when you think you have heard your name in another room.

It is not only the sight of it. It is the smell of something charring on a grill, which reroutes me before I have decided anything. It is the word appearing on a menu, which settles my order before I have read the rest of it. It is the sound of the first kernel going off under a pan lid, which I would know anywhere on earth, in the dark, at any age.

And every time, the same small internal lurch. Recognition, or something very close to it, arriving several seconds ahead of any explanation for it.

Which is ridiculous. It is a crop. A grain, or a grass, or a vegetable (depending who you ask) with ambitions. There are a hundred foods I have loved more consciously and more precisely, dishes I have crossed continents for, and not one of them does this to me. Corn does not even have the humility to be rare.

So this summer I finally started asking why. Why this, out of everything I have eaten?

The answer was not the warm one I expected.

The Woman on the Corner

It begins in Calcutta, as most of my nostalgia-laden appetites do.

My mother would need something from the block market. A length of ribbon, coloured chart paper, one of those errands that takes eleven minutes and then shapes you for life. I went along, ostensibly to help. In truth I went as a scout. Before we had properly arrived I would be scanning the corners for her: the woman squatting on the pavement beside a small coal grill, one hand turning the cobs, the other working a fan, the coals flaring orange each time she waved it. The corn crackled and spat, and the smoke settled into my hair and collar and the back of my throat and stayed there for hours, like a delicious imprint.

“Extra salt and lemon, please.” She would load half a lemon with salt and red chilli, rub it hard along the charred kernels, and hand the cob over wrapped in its own husk, which was offered as protection and never once worked. Too hot to hold. Held anyway. I burned the roof of my mouth every single time and asked for more lemon before I was halfway down.

Here is what I did not recognise until much later, and what turns out to matter more than anything else in this story. That corn was not sweet. It was starchy and chewy and faintly grassy, and it needed the salt and the acid and the fire in order to feel awake. The lemon was not a garnish. It was indispensable to its flavour.

The Dish My Mother Made

Then there was the other corn. Indoor corn. Corn as evidence of affection.

My mother made a baked dish of corn and potato with green chillies and onions and a quantity of Amul cheese I would describe, generously, as structural. Nothing about it was sophisticated. That was its genius. It existed because someone had studied me closely enough to know exactly what I would want, and then made it for years without ever being asked.

The corn in it held its shape against the potato. You could feel each kernel give and burst under the weight of the cheese, the green chilli arriving a second later.

The street taught me corn could be a thrill. This taught me it could be a language, and that somebody in my house was fluent in it.

The Pudding from Claridges

The third corn arrived on a gold board and was a lie from beginning to end.

In New Delhi, my grandparents ordered the corn pudding from Claridges for birthdays. They also ordered it for occasions that were not birthdays and had, if we are being forensic, been invented that morning. They held the view that a calendar is a suggestion. If anyone could plausibly be celebrated, or had recently arrived, or had done something moderately commendable at school, the phone call was made.

It came shaped like an ear of corn, looking absurdly pleased with itself, and yet it was not corn at all. Soft sponge cake and custard cream sheathed in green marzipan, each dainty kernel piped by hand, with a whisper of corn folded into the custard so the joke had a punchline.

That pudding taught me corn could be an occasion. That a crop sold for pennies on a pavement could also be rendered in marzipan and used, quite deliberately, to make an ordinary Thursday worth remembering for the rest of my life.

The Corn That Came in a Bucket

And then popcorn, which belonged to two people and two entirely different philosophies.

My uncle made his version for me after school. Kernels into a pan, lid on, the pan shoved back and forth assertively across the flame until the first hesitant pop, then the barrage. He dressed it while it was too hot to touch: salt, red chilli, whatever else the afternoon called for. I ate it standing at the counter with red fingertips, in the specific bliss of a child being fed something a parent would certainly have rationed.

My grandmother took hers more seriously. She went to the cinema alone. Not for want of company, but because she wanted the largest tub available and had no intention of sharing it with anybody. She would settle into the dark with it on her lap and give three hours to a film she was barely interested in. It was the most sophisticated act of self-care I witnessed in my entire childhood.

Both my uncle and grandma are gone now. I still make it in a pan with a lid. I still put chilli on it. I still buy the largest tub they sell and share it with nobody at all. I have been told this is not charming. I am aware. I am keeping something alive.

It has taken me decades to notice how much of grief is just continuing someone else’s habits on their behalf.

Back then, I didn’t know that popcorn is not sweetcorn behaving absurdly. It is its own maize, Zea mays everta, hulled tough enough to hold pressure until the starch inside turns to steam and blows the kernel inside out. Some of the oldest maize cobs ever recovered, dug out of the Peruvian coast and dated to roughly 6,700 years ago, are popcorn. People were eating it before they had pottery.

So before I turned ten I had four corns, and not one resembled the others. Smoke and lemon on a pavement. Cheese and chilli at my mother’s table. Marzipan and ceremony in Delhi. Butter in the dark, twice over. Nobody sat me down and taught me to love this crop. It was built into me in layers, by people who had no idea they were building anything at all.

Oh, Hello. There You Are.

I left India as a teenager for the American South, where corn turned up in disguise. Somebody in Atlanta put a wedge of jalapeño cornbread in front of me: hot, crumbling, griddled at the crust, the heat arriving a beat after the butter. I had never eaten corn in bread form in my life. One bite and I thought, with something close to relief, oh. Hello.

There you are.

It had crossed an ocean and changed shape entirely and I still knew it on contact, the way you recognise a voice through a wall before you can make out the words.

A Civilisation Built on a Grass

Years later I went to Mexico thinking I was fond of corn, and left understanding I had only been dabbling.

There, corn is not an ingredient but a founding covenant. In the Maya creation account, the gods try making people from mud, then wood, and only produce a version worth keeping when they use maize dough. Maize itself was domesticated in Mesoamerica thousands of years ago from teosinte, a wild grass that looks almost comically unlike the fat, generous cobs we know today. Generation after generation of farmers selected seeds for altitude, drought, flavour, texture, colour, ceremony. Corn and humans made each other.

In Oaxaca, I found a man selling elote from a cart.

He stood behind a metal tray crowded with steaming cobs, turning each one in his hands as though he had done it a thousand times, which perhaps he had. “¿Todo?” he asked, already reaching for the mayonnaise before I answered. Everything, I told him, and meant it. He rolled the cob through crumbly cheese, shook over chilli and finished it with lime. The first bite was hot, creamy, sour, salty and smoky, the kernels resisting slightly beneath my teeth.

Salt. Chilli. Acid. Fire.

I asked for more lime before I had got halfway down the cob, and only then did I hear it: an old reflex, arriving from a different country and twenty years off.

I stood on the pavement eating it and something in my chest went completely still. I had eaten this before. Six thousand miles away, from a woman with a coal grill and a paper fan. Neither of them had the faintest idea they were making the same thing.

In Mexico City I found a cart under an orange tarpaulin, three women working a black comal the size of a door, a painted clay jug of agua fresca sweating at one end and a sign behind them promising quesadillas of huitlacoche and squash flower, gorditas, sopes, tlacoyos. Everything the women were pressing came out of the same bowl of masa, and the masa was blue.

Not the tidy blue of a restaurant menu, but a bruised grey-violet, the colour of a fading twilight sky.

Mine came on a yellow plate on a sheet of paper, an oval the length of my hand, blistered and freckled from the comal, buried under shredded lettuce, green salsa, slivers of red onion and a snowfall of cotija cheese. The masa underneath was faintly sweet and faintly of earth, coarse beneath my fingers, sturdy enough to hold everything piled on top.

“¿Por qué azul?” I asked the woman working the griddle. Why blue. I had barely seen it anywhere else.

“Mi familia todavía lo siembra,” she said. My family still grows it. A few other vendors still used it. There were fewer every year.

Viri told me the flavour ran deeper, more mineral, and that the texture held together differently under the hand. When I asked what the blue corn meant to the place she came from, she answered in a register my Spanish could not properly follow and did not need to.

Then she said that when she was a girl there were dozens more. “Antes había muchas.” There used to be so many. She had gone somewhere else while she said it. Her eyes went past me and past the cart entirely, lit up and focused on nothing.

I looked it up afterwards. Mexico is a centre of origin for maize, the place it comes from. Fifty-nine native maize races have been documented there, each one shaped by farmers selecting seed for a particular soil, a particular altitude, a particular ceremony. Generations of that, stacked one on top of another.

After NAFTA opened the border in 1994, subsidised American corn poured south and the price paid to Mexican farmers collapsed. Growing native maize became, for millions of smallholders, stubbornness rather than economics, and landraces survive only as long as somebody keeps planting them. When Mexico tried to keep genetically modified corn out of its tortillas, a trade panel ruled it could not. In 2025 the country amended its constitution instead, banning GM cultivation outright and naming itself, in law, the origin of maize. Sin maíz no hay país. Without corn there is no country.

And standing there with a tlacoyo going cold in my hand, I thought about Calcutta. About the pale, chewy, savoury corn on those coal grills, and the fact that I had not seen it in years, and that it had never once occurred to me to ask where it had gone.

Viri was not explaining a heritage crop to me. She was explaining why lunch tasted the way it did. It took me years to understand that those are the same conversation.

Then I Went Home

On a trip back to Calcutta, my mother made the corn and potato bake, as is customary on every visit, but it tasted wrong.

Not badly made. Not memory embroidering the past, which is the first thing you suspect and the easiest thing to accuse yourself of. The dish was identical: the chillies, the onions, the indefensible cheese, everything she had done my whole life. What had changed was the corn. It came apart into sweetness where it used to hold its shape and push back. It dissolved into the potato instead of arguing with it. The version that had lived in my mouth for thirty years was simply not available any more.

I started looking into why.

Modern sweetcorn varieties have been deliberately bred for higher sugar content and better shelf life, with so-called supersweet varieties emerging in the United States in the twentieth century. Some of this traces to a laboratory in Illinois in the 1950s, where a geneticist chewing a mutant kernel found it held a fraction of the starch and many times the sugar of anything then being planted. The commercial advantages are obvious: they retain sweetness after harvest, travel well and give consumers the flavour they have come to expect from fresh corn.

The problem, for me at least, is that they taste like a boiled sweet that took a wrong turn.

The bhutta of my childhood had been starchy, chewy and faintly grassy. It needed salt. It needed acid. It needed smoke.

Somewhere along the way, my childhood corn had become a memory with no obvious supermarket equivalent.

Which is when I understood what I had been circling all summer. A recipe is only half a dish. The other half is the crop. And a crop can disappear from a kitchen without anybody changing the recipe.

My mother still makes that bake exactly as she always has. The recipe survived intact. The corn did not.

That is a stranger loss than the ones we have language for. Nobody died and nothing was thrown away. A variety stopped being planted because other varieties made more economic sense, and thirty years of a specific Tuesday afternoon went with it.

Still Hunting, in London

Which brings me back to my greengrocer, where there is one kind of corn, and it is yellow, and it is sweet, and it is exceptionally good at being shipped. The alternatives were outcompeted by something more convenient, and convenience has always been the most efficient weapon we own.

I buy it anyway. I boil it and slather it in more butter and salt than any doctor would sanction, and it is nice, but it is not the thing. If corn appears on a menu I order it on principle. Polenta in Milan, arepas at a food market, corn ribs in a Hackney gastropub, cornbread wherever somebody is baking it properly. At home I smuggle it into everything: folded through salads, tucked into puff pastry, layered onto toast where it was frankly not invited.

Which is how I found myself in Soho a few months ago, at Donia, eating a corn tart. A Filipino kitchen, a wedge of sweetcorn custard the colour of a traffic light set into short pastry. It arrived and I laughed, because here, four thousand miles and thirty years from a hotel bakery in New Delhi, was corn pretending to be pudding all over again.

What I am really doing, each time, is looking for a woman with a coal grill and a paper fan, salt and chilli and fire, and a lemon she was never precious about giving away. I am working through every corn this city can offer in the hope one of them tastes like a cob eaten on a pavement in Calcutta in 1996. None of them will. I am going to keep ordering them regardless.

—

Not all those who wander are lost... some of us are just looking for the corn from childhood.

Ankita

—

It came to me behind a door in Galdakao I doubt I could find again. Green, or whatever deep colour green becomes after decades of battering by Atlantic weather, set into an ordinary street in an industrial town outside Bilbao, in the Basque Country, the kind of place no guidebook has ever bothered to romanticise. The man who gave it to me never said a word I understood, and neither of us knew, across that long day of cooking, that anything was changing hands. The important lessons arrive like that: unlabelled, disguised as lunch.

I was brought there by someone I was dating at the time, back to his hometown, for a day built around a single plan: we would cook and eat, in a kitchen that belonged to nobody and to a few dozen families at once.

First, the Hills

Every proper Basque meal begins somewhere else. Ours began the evening before, in the hills behind his family home, where the town gives way abruptly to oak and chestnut and the air turns green and damp. We climbed with a basket and a pocketknife as the light went long and gold, hunting perretxikos, the pale spring mushrooms Basques speak of in the reverent tones other cultures reserve for truffles. He had foraged these slopes since childhood and moved through them the way you move through a childhood bedroom in the dark, reaching for things before he could possibly have seen them. He taught me to cut rather than pull, so the ground gives again next year. Each one came free releasing its strange perfume of rain and forest floor. We carried the basket down in the last of the light, and it sat on the windowsill overnight like a promise.

The market came next morning. He moved through the stalls with the easy authority of home soil, greeting vendors who had known him as a boy, interrogating the fishmonger about the octopus with the seriousness other men reserve for football: where it was caught, when, whether it had been frozen once, which, counterintuitively, is exactly what you want. Each prawn was chosen meticulously, glossy and translucent, its long whiskers intact, smelling of nothing but cold sea. The white asparagus, fat as candles and pale as ivory, spring’s brief aristocracy, was wrapped with the care usually shown to glassware. He shopped without a list and without hurry, letting the menu assemble itself from whatever looked most alive that morning, the only menu the Basques fully trust. By the time we walked out, laden and already debating garlic quantities, the cooking was hours old and no stove had been lit.

A Society of Cooks

A txoko, if you have never encountered one, is a private gastronomic society, and the Basque Country holds them the way other regions hold churches. The word means something like a cosy corner. Members hold keys instead of reservations. Behind the door is a professional-grade kitchen: burners that could power a restaurant, ovens deep enough for a whole lamb, a walk-in larder, steel surfaces polished by generations of use.

Beyond the kitchen, a dining room. Long wooden tables scarred by decades of elbows and dominoes, walls hung with photographs of members’ feasts going back half a century, the collective memory of a town told entirely in meals.

The economics are almost defiantly uncommercial. Wine from the cellar costs a fraction of what any bar would charge, recorded in a ledger on trust: you note what you drank, you settle up later, nobody checks. Oil, salt, flour, cider vinegar, the unseen infrastructure of cooking, free to whoever needs them. There is no staff. You cook, you eat, you wash up, you leave the kitchen as you found it. The txoko asks only one thing of its members, and it is the thing money cannot buy anywhere else: that you show up and cook for the people you love.

His family had held their membership for longer than anyone could precisely remember. And this is the thing to understand about txokos: they are not for us. You can eat magnificently across the Basque Country as a visitor, graze the pintxo bars of Bilbao and San Sebastián, book the famed asadors months ahead, and still never pass through a door like that green one. Txokos sit behind the tourist economy entirely, guarded not by secrecy but by their very nature. They cannot be booked, reviewed, or found on a map. You are either brought there, or you are not.

Walking in with him, flanked by our shopping bags, I understood exactly what was being handed to me, and I carried the weight of it all day like something warm against my chest. The Basques guard their language, their recipes, their societies, everything that centuries of borders shifting around them could not take, and here was a family opening one of those held things to a woman visiting from New York who could not speak a single Basque word. Gratitude is too thin a word for it. It felt closer to being entrusted with something. What I could not have told you then is that being welcomed like that changes what you believe a table is for, and that the change is permanent.

The Grammar of a Wooden Spoon

His father was already there when we arrived, an apron stretched over his round belly, unpacking peppers from his neighbour’s garden onto the counter as though laying out jewels.

I had met him twice before, at family lunches where he sat at the head of the table saying almost nothing, a large, benign presence letting conversation flow around him the way a rock lets a river. I had assumed this was simply who he was. Then he stepped into that kitchen and a different man emerged, the way wine, given air, doesn’t become something else but finally shows you what was bottled in it all along.

He spoke only Basque. I spoke English and a Spanish held together with string. On paper we had no language at all, and it mattered not one bit. A wooden spoon would appear at my elbow, cradling a sauce still trembling from the pan. “Proba, proba,” he’d insist, watching my face with the intensity of a man awaiting a verdict. Taste it, taste it. When my eyes widened, and they kept widening all afternoon, he would erupt into a grin that rearranged his whole face and shuffle back to his pots, satisfied, as though my pleasure had been the recipe’s final ingredient.

A sliver of blistered guindilla laid across my palm like a secret. The first prawn out of the pan, too hot to hold, which he watched me juggle with open delight. “Ona?” he asked each time. Good? Ona, I learned to answer. “Oso ona.” Very good. Ten words between us, and by evening we had said everything. A man of few words was saying the largest things he knew, and the kitchen was how he said them.

I absorbed it the way children absorb language: by being spoken to, over and over, without a single grammar lesson.

The Long Afternoon

We claimed our corner of the kitchen and settled into the sacred, unglamorous work of prepping. A bottle of white was open before noon, because wine in a txoko rewards the work as it happens rather than after it ends. The octopus went into its rolling bath, dipped three times before it was allowed to fall, an old superstition his father performed with liturgical seriousness, so the tentacles curl instead of seizing. I peeled the prawns and was corrected, tenderly and firmly, by two generations at once.

The perretxikos he claimed for himself, brushing each one clean with the soft side of a knife and folding them into eggs over the lowest possible flame. The revuelto barely held together, pale gold and loose as silk, still tasting of the hillside from the night before. He served me the first spoonful directly from the pan, standing over me while I ate it, and I understood that I was being fed the forest behind his house, the walk in the gold light, the whole geography of their neighbourhood, one soft mouthful at a time.

Time behaved differently in that kitchen, with no service to beat and no reservation breathing down its neck. A task would finish and we would refill our glasses and simply stand there, talking, tasting, arguing pleasantly about salt, while the windows fogged with steam and the room filled with the smell of garlic turning gold.

Halfway through the afternoon the door opened and another family arrived, three generations of them, calling greetings across the kitchen in Basque. They claimed their burners a few metres away and set to work on salt cod, and within minutes their pil pil, that trembling emulsion Basques treat as both dish and dare, began conducting diplomatic relations with our octopus. Their grandfather appeared at my elbow with a spoonful of it, offered without ceremony, watched with frank interest.

I was, clearly, the outsider in that kitchen, a fact nobody thought worth remarking on. They pulled up a chair for me in their private world and fed me things they must have known I was tasting for the very first time, generosity offered with no more ceremony than passing the wine. The txoko’s one rule, it turned out, carried a silent second clause: whoever is in the kitchen counts.

Plates began migrating. Our prawns travelled to their table, still sizzling in their terracotta dish, drunk on garlic. Their croquetas landed on ours, molten at the centre. Someone’s uncle fetched a few bottles of red from the cellar and poured for both families without asking, because asking would have implied there was a version of the evening in which we did not drink together.

Two meals became, by unspoken agreement, one long one. The octopus emerged blushing mahogany, dusted with smoked paprika and coarse salt, and fed fourteen people from a single board. The asparagus vanished to a chorus of approval in a language I couldn’t speak but understood perfectly. Nobody hosted, because everybody did. Well past dark, watching his father laugh with their grandfather, I lost track of where our dinner ended and theirs began.

The singing started without any instrument at all, just voices and palms slapping the table for rhythm, patxaran disappearing faster than anyone could pour it. His father sang loudest of anyone, flushed and radiant, merrier on his own triumph than on the wine, delighted to discover that he had spent an afternoon turning a stranger into someone who liked octopus.

Something in my chest had been rearranging itself all day without me realising it. That evening I learned what it is to be cherished by people who did not know my name, and the strangest part is that it did not feel strange at all. I remember thinking I would carry the recipes home. It took me years to notice what I had actually packed: a way of making a stranger feel as though she’d belonged there all along.

Nine Courses Later

The relationship ended, as some do, gently and completely. The green door closed behind me for good. You cannot revisit a txoko once you’ve lost the person who brought you; that key was never yours. For a long time I filed the day away as a beautiful thing that had happened to a previous version of me.

Then, last weekend, in my London home, I hosted my first supper club. Nine courses, all Basque, cooked with the anxious devotion of someone writing a love letter to a place that will never read it. Strangers came, which was the point. I agonised over the table setting the way the father had agonised over the octopus. I sent the first course out on a platter and made people pass it hand to hand, because a plate that travels down a table performs an alchemy a plated portion never will.

At some point, deep in the choreography of nine courses, I caught myself holding a spoon out to my friend, my sous chef for the night, watching his face while he tasted, waiting for his eyes to widen. His verdict mattered less than the ritual of asking for it. It was the gesture of a round-bellied man at a steel counter in Galdakao, arriving through my arm twelve years and a thousand miles later.

And when the last dessert was finished and every instinct of a tidy host said clear, wipe, restore order, I sat back down instead, let the table stay ruined and beautiful, and topped up glasses long past any culinary justification.

One of the guests picked up my old guitar from the corner and began to sing, and I smiled to myself. For a moment I was nowhere in particular, suspended somewhere between my own candlelit living room and that txoko twelve years ago, near enough to feel the warmth of the candles, far enough that the conversation around me blurred into the music. I remember none of what anyone said just then. I remember only the satisfaction of watching what had once passed from his father’s hands into mine now passing, stranger to stranger, around my own table. The circle had closed without my noticing: I was the one feeding people the things I loved, in a home of my own.

It was only after everyone had gone home, as I stood at the sink wiping the last wine glass dry, that the whole day walked back into my kitchen. The mushroom basket on the windowsill. The ledger and the trust it implied. The plates crossing between tables like small envoys. A round-bellied man holding a spoon to my lips and waiting, with his whole heart in his face. I stood there with the glass in one hand and the tea towel in the other, undone by all of it at once, alone at one in the morning: the door I will never open again, and everything it had opened in me.

Somewhere in Galdakao tonight, I hope the green door is open, and someone new is being handed a spoon.

—

Not all those who wander are lost... some of us are just setting longer tables.

Ankita

—

Taste of London arrives each June in Regent’s Park, transforming a corner of manicured London into something that smells considerably more interesting than manicured London usually does. For five days, the park fills with the country’s best restaurants and food producers, chefs cooking live over open flames, manufacturers luring you toward them with samples and smiles, and crowds that will stand in either light drizzle or sweltering heat for forty minutes if the thing being cooked looks compelling enough.

I had booked six barbecue masterclasses across five days with the methodical confidence of someone who expects to master things: a colour-coded schedule, a fresh notebook already bristling with notes, and a mild hubris for what I did not yet know. I had read and strategised. Temperatures. Cooking times. The correct way to light charcoal. The difference between direct and indirect heat. The behaviour of fat over coals. The Maillard reaction and why it mattered. The sort of knowledge that could be folded neatly into recipes and repeated the following weekend in my garden.

The first masterclass started without ceremony. We lit the charcoal, and what I had prepared myself for stopped being relevant almost immediately.

I was making flatbread. The dough went onto the griddle with confidence. What came off had a scorched underbelly and a pale, raw-looking top, tasting predominantly of char rather than anything resembling bread. The chicken that followed was, in places, considerably more optimistic than cooked. The chef moved on with the patient kindness of someone who has seen this expression before.

I put the notebook away, moderately delighted. I had walked into something harder than I had thought. There was considerably more to learn here than I had anticipated. Perfect.

That afternoon, the live demonstrations had begun drawing their crowds. I made my way to one at the far end of the park, following the smell from twenty metres away.

The chef was carefully placing oysters directly onto a bed of glowing embers, nestling each shell between charcoal dusted white with ash. Before they went on, I caught a glimpse of them raw: wide and deep-cupped, their flesh pale and trembling, smelling of cold Atlantic water and nothing else, the kind of oyster that makes a strong case for being left alone. Then she spooned chilli butter into each one, a rich molten pool pale gold with flecks of red, and set them among the coals.

Then she stepped back, and watched.

Around me, something else began to happen. People moving with the purposeful drift of festival-goers slowed, then stopped altogether. A woman carrying tacos lowered her hand halfway to her mouth. A man in a linen shirt stood with his beer loose at his side, eyes fixed on the fire pit. A child pressed between two adults for a better view. Nobody spoke.

The butter began to hiss, garlic and chilli lifting into the air above the shells, folding into the smoke before either had finished transforming. Tiny bubbles appeared around the rim of each shell and vanished. One ember brightened unexpectedly as another shifted, the centre of the fire deepening to something closer to molten before settling again.

I realised I had been holding my breath.

The oyster, when it reached me, was still sizzling. The flesh had tightened just enough to hold together, the butter and brine and smoke arriving simultaneously, the sea and the fire arresting all my tastebuds. It tasted like something that could not have been achieved any other way, as though smoke were not an accent here but a necessary third element, something the oyster had been waiting for all along and was only now being introduced to.

One minute longer, and it would have been rubber. The thing I had just eaten lived precisely in the gap before that minute.

I stood there holding an empty shell for longer than was strictly necessary, and understood that I had been asking the wrong questions.

Smoke behaves unlike any other ingredient we know.

Salt waits patiently on the table until we ask for it. Lemon announces itself the moment it is squeezed. Herbs arrive only when they are rubbed or chopped.

Smoke begins much earlier.

You smell it before you know what is cooking. You follow it before you have decided what you want for lunch. It accompanies every mouthful, every inhale, then refuses to leave when the meal is over, settling into hair and skin and fabric, travelling home with you regardless.

No other flavour asks to be experienced in quite so many ways.

Perhaps that is why it has survived every technological advance we have thrown at cooking. Our kitchens have largely become bastions of certainty: ovens and fryers that maintain temperatures to the degree, induction hobs that respond before you have finished adjusting, thermometers that remove the guesswork from roasting, sous vide that all but guarantees perfection. And yet some of the finest food in the world is still cooked over wood and charcoal, where no two fires behave alike, where the wind changes the heat without warning, and where every meal begins with the understanding that the outcome will belong, in part, to something other than you.

I returned to the masterclasses the following morning with slightly less certainty and considerably more attention.

The second class was lamb kebabs. I had decided to stop managing the fire and start listening to it, which sounds straightforward and is not. My first instinct, when charcoal shifted or a flare started, was still to intervene immediately, adjusting and correcting with the anxiety of someone who does not yet understand that most adjustments are premature.

But something was beginning. Not skill. The beginning of a vocabulary.

A grill running too hot in one spot will tell you before the food does, if you watch the smoke rather than the surface. The edges of a kebab tightening on one side mean the heat has moved. The fire does not keep still, and I was learning, slowly, that neither should I; but neither should I chase it constantly. The quality required was not responsiveness so much as discernment: knowing which signals meant act now, and which meant wait.

The lamb came off better. Still far from perfect, but something had shifted between the fire and me, some small acknowledgement of terms.

On the third afternoon, I made my way to Jake Norman’s demonstration. He is someone whose name appears in any serious conversation about British cooking, and being near people who have given years to mastering it was, by then, exactly what I had arranged my Thursdays for.

Bearded, tattooed, a dark apron and the unhurried posture of someone who has long since stopped being intimidated by fire, he was working at a long iron rack over coals that had been burning since morning, spent grey at the edges and fiercely orange at the heart. Above the rack, dried orange slices hung on chains, slowly curing in the warmth, releasing something faintly sweet and resinous into the air beneath all that smoke. The lamb was coffee-rubbed, the crust deep and almost black, the fat rendering slowly into the coals below with a sound like something settling contentedly into its purpose.

What fascinated me was not what Jake was watching. It was what he was leaving alone.

The lamb spent long stretches entirely unattended. While it rested over the coals, Jake crouched beside the fire itself, nudging one glowing ember toward another with the end of a steel poker. A small adjustment. A pause. He watched the centre of the fire brighten incrementally, then gave the faintest nod to himself. Only then did he turn the meat.

I had been thinking about this wrong. We say cooking over charcoal as though the fire is simply infrastructure, something the food rests above while the real work happens on the grill surface. Watching Jake, that framing dissolved completely. He was not cooking the lamb over the fire. He was cooking it with the fire. The meat and the flame were working in concert, and his job was to keep the conversation going. Every few minutes the fire shifted: a flare, a cooling, a gust that changed the heat entirely. Jake answered each one with economy and without drama. He had been listening to fires long enough to know what each one was about to say.

He assembled the dish with the same deliberateness. Thick sourdough, charred and glistening with olive oil. The lamb sliced with assurance through the coffee crust, laid across the bread in generous pieces. Then the kiwi and citrus salsa alongside it, raw and vivid, scattered in loose handfuls over the meat, herbs and red chilli over everything, the whole plate brilliant acid green against the blush pink of the lamb and the char, served on a splattered ceramic plate still warm from sitting near the fire.

I took a piece and ate standing, with both hands.

The sourdough cracked at the char before giving way to something soft and oil-slicked beneath. The coffee crust arrived first: dark, faintly bitter at the very edge, carrying something almost floral underneath. Then the lamb itself, pink and yielding, with the mineral warmth of good meat that has been handled with patience. The salsa arrived like a change of weather, kiwi and citrus, raw and sharp and necessary, cutting through the richness with deliberate precision. The chilli settled in after, building slowly, present long after the plate was empty.

Everything on that plate lived at the edge. The sourdough was a minute from carbon. The coffee rub was a degree from acrid. The lamb sat precisely between blush and perfect. The salsa was sharp enough to cut the fat without erasing everything beneath it. Not one element had a margin to spare, and that was entirely the point.

That is the flavour of almost: born from the risk of going too far, navigated with just enough skill and attention to land short of it.

Lately, I have been thinking a great deal about the difference between reckless and just enough. The people who watch from the edges tend to call it bravado. The ones who do it know it as something more painstaking: months of reading the conditions before you move, learning what you are dealing with before you decide to get close. There is a kind of understanding that only develops through proximity to the thing that might go wrong. Jake had that skill in his hands. I was beginning to understand that I had been trying to build it in mine, though not only here, and not only about fire.

On my final morning, I smoked trout.

Cedar planks went onto the grill first, and as the wood began to catch the air around me changed. The coal-and-ash smell gave way to something earthy and sweet, the cedar releasing itself into the air before anything was yet cooking on top of it. Then the trout went on, skin side down, and within minutes the oils began to move, tiny beads of fat surfacing before the whole skin started to blister and release, a slow golden drip falling onto the plank below and rising back up as smoke, flavouring the very fish it had come from.

I watched the fire. The trout could look after itself for a moment.

When a section of coal darkened and the heat beneath the plank shifted, I moved it. When the cedar started to smoulder more intensely on one side, I pulled it back slightly. Halfway through, a bed of hay went down onto the plank, a single piece of coal placed on top of it, and the trout was returned above, finishing in a second column of smoke, lower and grassier than the cedar, both layers working through the flesh from different directions.

I was no longer following a recipe. I was participating in something that had its own rhythm, making the small continuous adjustments required to stay inside it.

The trout came off perfectly. Through something closer to calibration than control: enough of the fire’s language to respond at the right moments and hold still at the others. I had spent four days learning to hear the difference between those two things, and a great deal longer than that finding it everywhere else.

Every great dish lives at the edge of destruction.

The creme brulee cook holds her torch at precisely the right distance, reading the colour of burning sugar in real time, watching for the moment caramel shifts from amber to black, which takes less than a second and cannot be undone. A beurre noisette is butter taken to the precise point before bitterness; take your eyes away and it is gone. At a wood-fired pizzeria, the pizzaiolo watches the leoparding on the crust, adjusting the angle of his peel against a floor at six hundred degrees, aware that the same heat creating the char can ruin the dough in thirty seconds.

What fire develops in a cook, over time, is judgement: knowing when the coal needs moving, when the crust needs two more minutes, when to pull back and when to hold. The fire shifts constantly. This is the literacy it asks for: reading something that does not speak, and answering it correctly.

I walked out of Regent’s Park on the last evening carrying the smoke in my hair, on my fingers, in my dress. By the time I reached my front door, it had become part of me. I found it again when I opened my wardrobe two days later: just smoke, faint but legible, having settled into the lining and decided to stay.

The notebook is still mostly blank. But I go back to my grill differently now, and I find I go back to other things differently too. I wait longer before I intervene, listening for the question before I answer it. And the more I learn about fire, the more I recognise its logic elsewhere: that careful study of the thing before you commit to it, that astuteness of learning its language before you decide how close to get.

Smoke arrives before the food. It stays long after.

And somewhere between those two moments, in that narrow flickering space where everything might still go wrong, it creates a flavour no amount of certainty has ever managed to improve upon.

—

Not all those who wander are lost… some of us are in conversation with the fire.

Ankita

—

Every time my life changed shape, I found myself answering the same way: a single bag, a ticket somewhere unfamiliar, a table set for one. The first time was not intentional. Maybe none of them were. But the pattern, looked at from sufficient distance, is as clear as a recipe: add uncertainty, remove familiar company, apply new flavours. See what remains.

What remained, always, was the food. And eventually, the woman eating it.

Now What

Budapest, summer 2011. I was nearing the end of my semester abroad in France, days from going back to the US to start my first real job at Deloitte, and I had decided that what the moment called for was a 12 hour train journey for a solo trip to a city I knew nothing about. The decision had the internal coherence of most things I did at that age: absolute certainty, no rational evidence.

I stood awkwardly on the pavement outside the Budapest Keleti train station, twenty-two years old, one small backpack, a dead phone, and a single folded piece of paper bearing the name of a hostel. The city stretching out indifferently before me. The question forming before I could stop it.

Now what?

I asked a stranger for directions. Then another. I walked, recalibrated, followed hand gestures through streets whose language I didn’t speak. When I finally shouldered through the hostel door, something had shifted almost imperceptibly. I had done a thing I wasn’t entirely sure I could do. By every objective measure, it was extremely ordinary. The gap between those two facts is where this whole story lives.

The Grandio Party Hostel was lively in the way only budget accommodation can be: all ages, all nations, all strangers briefly sharing the same latitude and agreeing by some unspoken compact to be cheerful about it. I had friends within the hour. That evening, I ate lángos in the hostel cafeteria. Deep-fried dough, golden and blistered, edges still crackling with hot oil, slathered with sour cream and grated cheese, dense enough to anchor you to a city. I have no photograph, only the memory, burnished soft by years, of something that tasted like relief. Like Budapest extending a hand.

Those new friends brought me to the thermal baths the following morning. Budapest’s bathhouses have absorbed centuries of the city’s conversation, their pools fed by springs far beneath the stone, their tiled walls warm and worn with use. Floating alongside Budapestians going about their midweek routine as though this were the most ordinary thing in the world, I felt the private pleasure of being briefly admitted into someone else’s ordinary.

But hostel friends disperse, as hostel friends do, and on the last evening I found myself at a table with nobody beside me. Töltött Káposzta: stuffed cabbage leaves wound around seasoned mince meat and rice, simmered in a paprika-dark broth, crowned with a generous ladle of sour cream. The food of long winters and unhurried kitchens, served by a hostel cafeteria in the middle of July. I had a paperback open beside my plate that I wasn’t reading. It was a prop, something to do with my eyes. The self-consciousness of eating without company in a room full of conversation felt, at that moment, almost visceral.

The man at the next table was perhaps sixty, German, eating with the ease of someone who had long made peace with his own company. He caught my eye. “Travelling alone?” Not unkind. Just curious. I nodded slowly, bracing for what sometimes follows: the gentle concern, the well meaning suggestion that it must be lonely, the offer of company framed as charity. Instead he glanced at my bowl and nodded approvingly. “Good choice,” he said, meaning the cabbage rolls. Then went back to his own meal.

I lowered the paperback and did not pick it up again.

I left Budapest not quite knowing what to make of it. Something had shifted in me, though I couldn’t have named it then. The city had fed me, given me company, let me float in its ancient warmth, and underneath all of it had run something I didn’t yet have a word for: the slightly vertiginous knowledge that I had turned up alone, improvised entirely, stumbled into discomfort and found my way out of it through a bowl of paprika-dark broth and a stranger’s approving nod. I wouldn’t have called it courage. It was closer to proof. A first, small piece of evidence that I could be dropped somewhere entirely foreign and find my footing.

I went home, started the job, and put solo travel on a shelf where it sat, not forgotten, for eight years. But I carried that evidence with me.

The Language of Pointing

By 2019 I had accumulated two more countries, an MBA, and a new life in London waiting in the wings. Before any of that, I gave myself China. Shanghai, Beijing, Zhangjiajie: three cities, two weeks, entirely alone, with a Mandarin vocabulary that extended, generously, to xie xie (thank you) and la jiao (chilli pepper).

The la jiao proved considerably more useful.

I checked into my Shanghai hotel and felt it return almost immediately: that old unsteadying flutter. Now what? But this time I recognised it. I changed my shoes and walked out into the bustling neon-lit street below.

What the language barrier taught me, surprisingly quickly, was that its absence was a kind of gift. Without words, everything became intuition. I pointed at things I didn’t recognise and ate them. I held up fingers for quantity, gave enthusiastic thumbs up, shook my head at offers of less spice that were largely, gratefully, ignored. Every meal was a small act of improvised navigation. The figuring-out was half the pleasure.

In Shanghai, I found the scallion pork noodles I still think about. Hand-pulled wheat noodles in a broth so clear yet deep it seemed to have been cooking since before I arrived, topped with crispy fried pork and a tangle of caramelised scallions, the steam rising in slow coils. I ate them sitting alone at a small table, in a nearly empty restaurant, slurping without apology.

This, I began to understand, was one of the singular pleasures of eating alone: total sovereignty over your own hunger. No negotiating, no consulting, no concessions to someone else’s preferences narrowing the field. When something extraordinary appeared across the street, I crossed the street. When I wanted two breakfasts, I had them both: the first at a street stall before the city had properly woken, jian bing assembled to order, egg cracked onto batter, chilli sauce, fermented bean paste, a slab of fried wonton folded into a crispy-soft parcel and handed over still steaming, eaten walking; the second, a fried dough stick (youtiao) dipped in a bowl of hot soy milk, sitting down at a table I chose for myself, from a menu consulted at leisure. The pleasure of this is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it: the clarifying freedom of being the only person whose appetite you are required to satisfy.

I hoarded candied hawthorn berries from street stalls and ate them walking, the sweet-tart lacquer cracking between my teeth. I bought the pillowy sponge cakes and ate them in bed late at night, watching Mandarin television I couldn’t follow with the satisfied air of someone who had nowhere better to be. In Beijing, malatang: a deeply personal hotpot, your ingredients bobbing in a fiercely spiced Sichuan broth, the peppercorns leaving a pleasant tingling numbness across the tongue that somehow amplified the craving rather than answering it. In Zhangjiajie, deep fried eggplant with bits of ground pork, glistening in a silky oyster sauce with freshly steamed rice.

I sat at low tables and plastic stools and bar counters across the weeks, and somewhere in there, something clarified. The absence of company, rather than diminishing the experience, was intensifying it. Without the social performance of a shared meal, without the obligation to hold eye contact and appear engaged, attention migrated naturally toward the food itself. The temperature of things. The texture beneath texture. The precise moment a flavour peaked and began to soften. Eating alone is, I came to believe, simply better eating.

China was where I stopped tolerating solitude and began to prefer it.

What the Road Kept Teaching Me

Taiwan and Thailand, 2025. Another of life’s hinge moments: a stretch of time when the familiar scaffolding had loosened and I found myself back at first principles, asking the questions that don’t have easy answers. Who am I, when no one is watching? What does my own company feel like when I’ve had enough of it to stop being afraid of it?

I have learned, over the years, that my answers live somewhere on the road. At a counter, in a market, on a street where nobody knows my name and the food is extraordinary.

Taiwan gave me Taipei’s night markets at their best. Gua bao from a stall near the entrance: soft, cloud-like bao folded around braised pork belly, peanut powder, pickled mustard greens, fresh coriander. Each component doing a different job, richness offset by acid, softness by crunch. I ate three across two evenings without keeping score. Hojicha soft serve in a cone, roasted and faintly smoky. Fresh lychees from a market, skin torn back with my nails, the fruit cold and luminous inside. Pork pepper buns from a bakery near Raohe Night Market, baked in a cylindrical clay oven until the dough was something close to architectural, the pork inside spiced with black pepper and scallion. I burned the roof of my mouth and felt not regret but a kind of pride.

I flew home from Taipei in July already knowing I wasn’t finished. The year had been turbulent in the ways certain years insist upon being, personally and professionally, the kind that makes you reach for things that hold you steady. Taiwan had reminded me of something I needed to stay close to: the version of myself that exists only in solitude. By December, I had a ticket to Thailand.

Bangkok delivered its own education. Street food tours where I ate dishes I couldn’t have named forty-eight hours earlier. Betel leaf bites, each one a flawless composition: toasted coconut, lime, ginger, dried shrimp, peanuts, a drizzle of sweet-sour, all held in a single leaf. Boat noodles in small dark bowls, complex with blood and five-spice, the richness cut by bean sprouts and fried garlic. Mango sticky rice from a market stall, the mango so ripe it asked nothing of you. Pandan cakes as green and fragrant as a greenhouse after rain.

On Koh Samui, I traded Bangkok’s frenetic generosity for a yoga retreat and a different order of pleasure entirely. Meals arrived like still life: fresh papaya drizzled with lime, steamed jasmine rice beside broths cloudy with lemongrass, sliced dragon fruit whose skin glowed almost neon pink against white flesh. Each morning, a whole coconut was set beside my yoga mat, already opened, cool and faintly sweet, tasting less like a drink and more like an instruction to slow down. There is a particular satisfaction in eating food that has nothing to prove: no technique to admire, no richness performing for the room. After days of glorious, deliberate excess, that restraint felt like its own form of indulgence. The body, it turns out, is as grateful for simplicity as it is for abundance. You just have to give it both, in the right order.

I walked the streets of Thailand at night, alone and largely unbothered, and somewhere between the lit-up canal and the next market stall, I tried to locate the exact moment trepidation had converted into something more meditative. The Budapest pavement. The Shanghai noodle counter. The Taipei market at ten o’clock in the evening. Across all of those kilometres and all of those meals, the fear had become fluency. I hadn’t noticed when it happened. That, I think, is how it always works.

The Easiest Table for One

Back in London, I was beginning a different kind of solo journey. A long relationship had ended, and the city I had lived in for years revealed itself, suddenly, as somewhere I had never quite explored on my own terms. I started to. On foot, alone, through its restaurants and markets and side streets I had always meant to visit, one meal at a time. It turns out there is no better way to learn a city than to move through it at your own pace, beholden to no one’s appetite but your own.

A few weeks ago, on an ordinary Tuesday evening in London, I walked up to One Club Row in Shoreditch and asked for a seat at the bar. I didn’t pause on the pavement before going in. I didn’t compose myself. The fact of being alone didn’t register as a consideration at all.

The woman behind the bar was a New Zealander, warm in the way that certain New Zealanders are warm: immediate, genuine, with none of the performative distance you occasionally encounter at smart London restaurants. She took one look at me settling onto the stool with my coat still half-on and decided, wordlessly, to take good care of me. Starting with an immaculate olive oil martini on the house. That kind of attentiveness is its own art form: not hovering, not asking every two minutes if everything is all right, just present in exactly the right measure.

Scallops arrived first in a pool of garlic butter, their edges properly caramelised, the centre melting soft. I was still eating them, already slightly euphoric, when I noticed the plate being set down in front of the man two seats along: a burger, medium-rare, with a sauce so dark and glossy it could only be poivre. I flagged her down. “I’ll have what he’s having.” She smiled, as if this were exactly the correct answer. It was. The burger arrived with the settled confidence of something that knows precisely what it is. The meat pink and yielding, the poivre sauce building a slow, unhurried heat that stayed with me.

The woman beside me was eating alone too, with the self-possession of someone who has long since stopped considering it remarkable. We fell into conversation the way you do at bar counters: without preamble, without the usual choreography of social introduction. We disagreed about something almost immediately and liked each other for it. At some point, a plate of fries appeared between us, ordered in the easy shorthand of two strangers who have decided, without saying so, to extend the evening a little. We talked about cities and food and the empowering freedom of being exactly where you are, and the fries disappeared, and the bar carried on warmly around us, and neither of us moved to leave.

Eventually, dark chocolate cake arrived alongside crème fraîche, olive oil, and sea salt - the kind that arrives and immediately closes the chapter on the evening, dense and serious and demanding your full attention. The bar was nearly empty by the time I stepped out into the Shoreditch night.

Somewhere between the martini and the fries, I had thought about the German man in the Budapest hostel who had nodded at my bowl and gone back to his own meal. About Shanghai where I had two breakfasts because I could. About all the tables, all the plates, all the cities where I had pulled out a chair for one and found, eventually, that the company was rather good.

What I was looking for, across all those years and cities, was never quite what I thought it was. Not belonging. Not proof of somewhere to land. Something more grounding than that: the knowledge that I could be dropped anywhere, in a city whose language I didn’t speak, with no familiar face for a thousand miles, and I would find the right street, the right bowl, and eventually, the right version of myself.

The first time you eat alone in a foreign city, you don’t know where to look. You reach for your phone, your book, the middle distance. The meal cannot pass quickly enough.

By the last time, you are looking at everything. The plate in front of you. The stranger beside you. The city through the window. And somewhere in all of it, yourself.

—

Not all those who wander are lost…some of us are looking forward to the next table for one.

Ankita

—

Recipes that behave. Systems that hold. Outcomes that can be anticipated, if not quite guaranteed. I like knowing, before I begin, where I am going. I am the person who reads the whole recipe three times, who measures twice, who sets a timer not out of forgetfulness but because it feels like insurance against chaos. If I follow closely enough, I will arrive at the same place every time.

I have spent a good portion of my adult life discovering how many places in the world find this outlook quietly baffling.

The meals that have stayed with me are rarely the most elaborate. They are the ones that unsettled something. Where I understood, through the act of eating, how someone had learned to live inside uncertainty. Where the cooking itself held a philosophy I hadn’t been looking for and couldn’t quite put down.

Most of these realisations arrived through an onion.

THE REFUSAL: OAXACA

The first thing you notice is the resistance.

Not the char. Not the smoke. The resistance.

I am in a cooking class outside Oaxaca, in a courtyard where the kitchen opens to the sky and the smoke lifts and disperses as it pleases. Our instructor is Mimi. She is somewhere in her sixties, small, with the posture of someone who has long since stopped needing to prove anything. She has been making mole negro since she was eight years old. Her grandmother taught her. Her grandmother’s grandmother taught her grandmother. The motion has outlived all of them.

Before the chillies go on the comal to be charred to the edge of ash, Mimi places a whole white onion directly onto the open flame. No oil. No pan. Just the naked onion on the fire, turning slowly, the outer layers going black and papery, the air filling with something that smells almost sweet beneath the scorch. It will stay there until it is burnt on the outside and entirely soft within. Then it will be folded into the mole. Not as a background note. As architecture.

This is the first thing that unnerves me.

The deliberate destruction of something. The trust that what survives the burning will be better for it.

When Mimi works the metate, the paste moves for her. When I try, it resists. Thick, caught under the heel of my hands, stopping at the edges as though it might simply decline altogether. Mole negro takes three days. Dried chillies, charred tortillas, tomatillos, chocolate, cumin, cloves, plantain, raisins, sesame, almonds, garlic, stale bread, pumpkin seeds, that scorched onion, tomatoes blistered directly over flame: each ingredient coaxed to its own edge of transformation before being folded back into the whole. Nothing added casually. Nothing removed without consequence.

Standing there, arms already aching, I keep thinking what every efficiency-driven person inevitably thinks: surely some of this could be simplified?

I am constitutionally suspicious of excess.

And yet the longer I stay, the more I understand that the excess is not indulgence. It is insistence.

The Spanish came and banned indigenous ritual. They burned codices. They renamed the gods. They imposed a new language, a new religion, a new ruling class. And still, in the kitchens, behind closed doors, over clay pots, the sauce survived. Not in spite of the complexity but because of it. You cannot shortcut a thing into invisibility.

When we finally eat, at a long table in that open courtyard, the flavour does not present itself cleanly. It unfolds. Smoke first, then bitterness, then a sweetness that lingers past all expectation. You try, briefly, to separate it into its parts. You give up. You finish the plate.

I catch Mimi watching me from across the table. She has the expression of someone who has seen this particular realisation arrive on a foreigner’s face many times before, and finds it neither remarkable nor tiresome. Just inevitable.

She refills my glass without asking. Which is, I think, her version of a verdict.

ASK THE HAND: DELHI

In Delhi, the discomfort deepens.

When I lived there briefly, I hired a cook. Pooja arrived every morning at seven sharp, let herself into the kitchen with the authority of someone who knows exactly whose domain they have entered and that it is theirs, and proceeded to cook without once consulting anything. No recipe. No timer. No measuring spoon held level. I asked her, in the first week, to write things down for me.

She looked at me with a patience that was almost maternal. “How to write?” she said. “Ask the hand.”

Oil warming in a shallow pan, a simmering stillness before anything touched it. Then mustard seeds, snapping sharply, cumin following close behind. A pinch. A pause. A taste taken absentmindedly, the whole thing in perpetual conversation with itself, corrected in a continuous loop.

The order in which spices enter a pan is load-bearing here: mustard seeds before cumin, cumin before onion, onion gone dark and sweet before the ginger and garlic, before the tomatoes that must dissolve entirely before the ground spices follow. Each step creates the conditions for the next. And yet within that architecture there is a latitude that would bewilder a classically trained European cook, the proportion adjusted by instinct, by season, by the particular mood of the tomatoes that morning.

The flavour of the dish depends largely on how the onions are cooked. Always. They went into a shallow pan already warm with oil, and then began the long, negotiated process of becoming something else entirely. Pooja moved them around, then left them, seemingly forgot about them: pale to translucent, translucent to golden, golden to something darker and more complicated, edges catching and caramelising past the point where any cookbook I had ever owned would have pulled them. I would start to move toward the hob. She would stop me with a look.

They were not ready. She always knew when they were ready. I never did.

One afternoon, there was kadhi. Yoghurt already sour, on the edge of turning, whisked back with gram flour into something usable. Pakoras added early or late, depending on mood, on memory. I asked which version was correct. She looked at me, amused but not unkind, and went back to the pan. The answer was not disagreement. It was indifference to the question itself.

Over months, I came to understand what she was doing. The structure is there, deeply so, but the outcome is allowed to move within it. She intervenes constantly but lightly, adjusting rather than directing. It is not the absence of control. It is control that refuses to declare its destination in advance.

The people who cook like this tend to move through the world in much the same way. Systems layered on systems, rules that bend without quite breaking, contradictions not resolved so much as lived with, absorbed into the rhythm of the daily. A national genius for finding the path through complexity rather than around it.

Watching Pooja, I found it extraordinary. I also found it, honestly, exhausting. Which told me more about myself than I particularly wanted to know.

THE RELIEF: CHAMPAGNE

In France, something in me loosens.

My friend Cédric grew up in a village near Châlons-en-Champagne and has the French person’s complete absence of anxiety around cooking, which is to say he produces extraordinary food in the manner of someone performing a perfectly ordinary task. I had come to visit for a long weekend and found myself installed at his father’s kitchen table on the first afternoon, glass of something cold in hand, watching him make a beurre blanc with the attention of someone watching an old master work: barely breathing, afraid that noise might break the spell.

He begins with a single shallot.

Not an onion. A shallot: smaller, more refined, more particular in what it offers. It goes into the pan with white wine and white wine vinegar and is sweated with an exactitude that borders on ceremony. Not caramelised, not browned, but precisely translucent. The difference between translucent and browned is perhaps four minutes and the entirety of the dish. Cédric watches the pan the way the French watch things: as though looking away would be a small betrayal. The wine and vinegar reduce to almost nothing, a concentrated syrup that will carry everything. Then butter, cold, in pieces, whisked constantly, the heat managed with a steadiness that looks like ease and clearly isn’t, until the emulsion forms: simultaneously rich and bright, coating without cloaking.

I asked if I could help.

He considered the pan, then me. “Oui,” he said pleasantly, and pointed at my wine glass.

And I felt, almost immediately, relief.

Here, nothing is being negotiated in real time. The decisions have already been made. Marie-Antoine Carême first classified the French mother sauces in the early nineteenth century; Escoffier codified them a century later, and the French have treated that codification as something close to constitutional ever since. You do not arrive at the sauce. You build toward it, through stages that cannot be rushed, through technique that exists not to compete with the ingredient but to clarify it. French cuisine is built on the conviction that restraint is a form of intelligence. That the role of the cook is not to add, but to reveal.

This is the same sensibility that produced Descartes and Sartre. The same instinct that sharpens an argument, that insists on clarity, that refuses approximation. The cuisine and the philosophy are not separate projects. They are the same project, conducted in different rooms.

You begin to sense how a cuisine like this might shape the people who grow up eating it. A heightened sensitivity to the gap between how things are and how they ought to be. A tendency to notice, to refine, to correct.

Cédric’s father came in from the garden at some point, poured himself a glass without ceremony, and offered one opinion on the sauce: a small, approving tilt of the head. Then he left again.

Sitting in that kitchen that evening, eating fish in beurre blanc, I felt a comforting assurance. To trust that if the technique was right, the result would follow. To stop translating everything mid-flight. I understood, briefly, the appeal.

It can feel exacting. It can also feel like coming home.

SUBTRACTION: JAPAN

I have not yet been to Japan.

I say this plainly because I think it matters. Everything I understand of its food arrives to me secondhand: from Japanese restaurants in other cities, from conversations with people who have given serious time to the country, from the particular longing one develops for a place they keep intending to reach and somehow haven’t managed to.

What I keep returning to is this: dashi, the foundational Japanese broth, contains no onion. No shallot. No aromatic base of any kind. Kombu and dried bonito flakes, steeped and strained. A broth that is built from the sea and the air, that tastes of neither and somehow of both. Every other cuisine I have encountered treats the allium as its bedrock, the thing you begin with, the layer beneath all other layers. Japanese cooking removes it entirely. Not because it lacks flavour, but because it refuses to be indebted to anything it does not need.

This is the philosophy of subtraction at its most radical. Not layering, not adjusting, not negotiating. Removing. Taking away everything that is not essential until what remains could not be otherwise.

Shokunin: a word often translated as craftsman, which strips it of nearly everything that matters. A life given to one thing, entirely, without remainder. The ramen cook building his broth from the same base, adjusted incrementally, for thirty years. The tofu maker who rises before the city because there is a window of temperature in the early morning that no other hour can replicate. This is not dedication in the way we usually use the word. It is a different relationship with time itself. With the question of what it means to do something well enough that it no longer needs defending.

A culture that built this philosophy into its food also built a social architecture in which restraint is respect, silence is communication, and the unsaid carries as much weight as the spoken. They trust the ingredients the way they trust each other: without requiring constant demonstration.

I don’t know yet what it will feel like to sit at that counter. Whether it will taste like control, or like the place you arrive when you have stopped needing to assert it.

I am going to find out.

WHAT I KNOW NOW

Last month, in my kitchen in London, I made shakshouka.

I didn’t consult anything. No recipe propped against the kettle, no phone balanced on the counter. I started with onions, and I let them cook past the point where they looked ready, then past the point where I was comfortable, standing there as they deepened into something I had watched many times but never quite trusted myself to reach.

Then cumin, tomatoes, spices from memory, adjusted by smell rather than measure. No map. Just the sound of the pan, and the slow, accumulating sense that my hands were beginning to understand something my head had spent years trying to control.

I ate it standing at the counter, aware of a small, unfamiliar shift. Not pride, exactly. Not certainty either. Perhaps something closer to permission.

I have spent most of my adult life in other people’s kitchens, convinced I was learning to cook. Instead, I was learning to trust something I couldn’t fully see.

The mole negro is still being made in Oaxaca, taking three days, refusing to simplify itself. Pooja’s onions are still going dark past the point of comfort in a kitchen I no longer sit in. A shallot, somewhere in Champagne, is being watched with the devoted attention of someone who has understood that looking away would be a form of carelessness. And Japanese dashi continues to ask for nothing it does not absolutely need, drawing its depth from restraint rather than accumulation.

Each of these kitchens holds a different answer to the same quiet question. Not just how to cook. But how to proceed when the outcome is not entirely yours to control.

Some hold the result firmly from the beginning, shaping it carefully, narrowing the margin for deviation until the dish arrives exactly where it was intended to. Others allow it to move, to shift and correct itself in motion, trusting that attention, rather than precision, will carry it through.

And once you begin to see that, it is difficult to keep it contained within the kitchen.

It follows you. Into the small decisions you make without noticing. Into the moments where you reach, instinctively, for certainty before you know if it will satisfy you. Into the quiet tension between what can be shaped, and what asks to be allowed.

I still reach for the measuring spoon first. I probably always will.

But I wait a little longer now before I use it, letting the onions deepen just a shade further than feels safe, staying there a moment longer than I used to - long enough, sometimes, for something else to emerge.

--

Not all those who wander are lost - some of us are still learning how much to hold, and how much to let unfold.

Ankita

--

Someone drops the box on the kitchen counter and the lid flies open and suddenly there are eight people crowding a small room that smells of oregano and grease and the particular happiness of a good decision made late at night. Nobody is plating this. Nobody is discussing it. Someone folds theirs in half with the practiced authority of a person who has done this since childhood, grease tracking along the fold and onto their wrist, completely unbothered. Someone else shakes chilli flakes from a jar like a ritual, which tells you everything about the kind of person they are. The conversation does not stop. The laughter does not stop. The pizza is simply there, the way it always is: at the centre of things.

Three hours earlier and roughly two miles across the city, a very different kind of pizza was being served.

The chef paused tableside to explain that the dough had been fermenting for 72 hours, that the hydration was sitting at 78 percent, that the San Marzano tomatoes had been sourced from a specific farm in Campania and shipped over weekly. The pizza arrived on a slate board, charred and gorgeous, its cornicione blistered in exactly the right way. The couple at the table nodded with the solemnity of people receiving important news. They photographed it before they touched it. When they finally ate, they agreed it was extraordinary.

They were both right. The midnight kitchen and the pizzaiolo’s vision and the forty other iterations happening in forty other cities at this precise moment are all, somehow, the same food. That is the trick. That is the entire magnificent trick of pizza.

No food has travelled as far, been remade as freely, or landed as completely as pizza has. It did not migrate the way other dishes do, carried carefully and reproduced faithfully, guarded against corruption. It moved the way the best people do when they leave home: taking what was essential, releasing the rest, becoming fluent in wherever it arrived. It slipped into cities without demanding to be understood first. It found its place without explaining itself. And in every single one of those places, it became local. Not an approximation of local. Actually local. Claimed by cities that had nothing to do with its origin, loved with the fierceness people reserve for things they believe belong to them.

Which makes it, without serious competition, the greatest culinary migrant in history.

Watch how people eat it and you learn something true about them.

In New York, the fold is non-negotiable, a city-wide reflex so ingrained it borders on ceremony. The slice is large enough to demand it, and the fold is efficient, architectural, correct. Nobody taught anyone to do it this way. It simply is. In Naples, where the whole enterprise began, you eat with a knife and fork, the pizza arriving soft and yielding at the centre, the kind of thing that would not survive being picked up, and you take your time, because in Naples the point has never been speed.

In India, ketchup arrives at the table alongside pizza without irony, a condiment applied with genuine conviction by people who have decided this is how it is done and are not interested in being corrected. In Japan, mayonnaise is not a compromise or a curiosity. It is an ingredient, treated with the same seriousness brought to everything in Japanese food culture. In South Korea, the crust is stuffed with sweet potato or cream cheese and nobody finds this unusual because it has been this way long enough to feel like tradition. In countless homes across the world, pizza eaten cold from the refrigerator the morning after is not a concession. It is, for many people, the preferred experience.

These are not corruptions of something original. They are the original, written in other languages.

But to understand what pizza became, you have to start with what it was.

Naples, end of the eighteenth century; not a particularly romantic story. This was food for people without time or money, sold at street stalls, eaten standing up between shifts, made with whatever was available. Dough, tomato, a scrape of cheese. The kind of food that keeps a city alive without asking to be celebrated. What Naples built from that simplicity, over generations, is extraordinary.

Pizza Napoletana is now formally recognised by UNESCO, and the rules governing it are specific to the point of theology. The tomatoes must be San Marzano, grown in the volcanic plains beneath Vesuvius, where centuries of ash have produced soil of unusual mineral richness. The mozzarella must be fior di latte or bufala from designated Campanian producers. The dough is shaped by hand, never rolled, fermented for no fewer than eight hours. Into a wood-fired oven at 485 degrees Celsius, out in 60 to 90 seconds, the cornicione leopard-spotted with char, the centre soft to near-collapse. There is a governing body, the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, with certified members and official inspectors. It is, in effect, a legal document written in dough.

Eat this pizza in Naples and you understand why people revere it. It is a food of place in the most elemental sense, tasting of its specific soil and water and altitude, carrying the confidence of something that has been made the same way long enough to have stopped questioning itself.

And then Rome looked at all that yielding softness and decided to start again.

Pizza Romana, scrocchiarella to those who love it, is thin where Naples is soft, crisp where Naples yields. It snaps under the bite. A Roman will tell you this is the point. A Neapolitan will tell you a Roman cannot be trusted around dough. The argument between them has been running for centuries and benefits neither side, which is probably why it continues. Further through Rome, pizza al taglio arrives in vast trays, sold by the kilogram, cut with scissors, handed over in paper: lunch, not theatre. Sicily stretches the word to cover sfincione, thick and focaccia-rich, slow-cooked with onions and anchovies and breadcrumbs, heavier, more patient, a different food entirely wearing the same name.

More than six distinct styles within a single country. Within their own cities, they coexist without incident. Nobody demands a tribunal. The argument begins, every time, the moment pizza crosses a border.

And it crossed borders spectacularly.

Italian immigrants carried it to New York in the late nineteenth century and the city took it apart and rebuilt it for its own rhythm. The New York slice is built for movement, large and foldable, crisp-edged and chewy at the centre. You eat it walking. Chicago pressed dough into deep pans and buried the toppings under sauce, something architectural and entirely its own. Detroit discovered that cheese caramelised along the edges of blue steel industrial pans produced a crust of almost reckless deliciousness. And then New Haven, working with coal-fired ovens and days of patient fermentation, produced apizza: intensely charred, fiercely specific, so defended by its devotees that it has its own local name and its own mythology. Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana has been making the famous white clam pie, littleneck clams and garlic and olive oil and not a trace of tomato, since 1925.

Beyond America, the reinventions became wilder and more wonderful. In Argentina, Italian immigrants produced fugazza: thick, cloud-soft, loaded with caramelised onions, no tomato, simultaneously nostalgic and entirely new. Sweden gave the world kebab pizza, layered with meat and garlic sauce and eaten with great confidence. Japan applied its native precision: corn and mayonnaise and teriyaki chicken, each element considered, the result belonging completely to where it was made. In India, naan went into the tandoor with paneer or butter chicken on top, and the result was honest and delicious precisely because it stopped trying to be something else. In Finland, reindeer and chanterelle mushrooms ended up on a pizza named after Berlusconi, which suggests the Finns have a sense of humour worth knowing better.

Pizza Hut and Domino’s, meanwhile, did more for pizza’s global migration than any governing body ever could, through the straightforward strategy of changing everything while keeping the name. Sweet potato in South Korea. Corn in Japan. They studied what people wanted and gave it to them. And in doing so, they demonstrated the essential truth about pizza’s success as a migrant food: it does not survive by faithfulness. It thrives through surrender.

Which is precisely what makes the authenticity argument so strange. And so revealing.

“The traditional dishes were one day avant-garde,” Massimo Bottura has said, from the particular authority of someone who spent years being accused of disrespecting Italian culinary tradition before being celebrated as one of its greatest living practitioners. The rules arrived after the fact, drawn around something that was already moving. What we protect as sacred was once, before the protection existed, someone’s experiment.

Tejal Rao, one of the sharpest food writers working today, has put the central problem with characteristic precision: “Food writing can be really obsessed with the idea of authenticity, of one true version, of one true way, but that makes me so uncomfortable, and I always wonder who gets to decide what that one way is. Dishes change as people change, as time passes. They change because someone has to improvise, to make do, because their resources change, because their influences broaden. And I think that expanding definitions can be really exciting.”

So who gets to decide? Because the history of food certification is also a history of power, of who was positioned to write the rules and who arrived after the ink had dried. The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana preserves something genuinely worth preserving. But it was founded in 1984, by which point pizza had already been remade on four continents by people who had not been consulted. It describes one version of authenticity and designates it the version, and everything else must either seek legitimacy within that frame or exist outside it.

This is where London’s burgeoning pizza scene becomes instructive. Over the past several years, several New Haven-style pizzerias have arrived in the city, coal-fired ovens installed at considerable expense, fermentation schedules explained on menus, prices calibrated to signal seriousness. The pie is often genuinely excellent. But the conversation that followed is telling: is it authentic New Haven pizza, made here with British water and air by chefs who trained in someone else’s tradition? And here is the question that framing refuses to answer: within New Haven, nobody agonises over which interpretation is most legitimate.

Within New York, no panel convenes over the slice joints. Within Italy, Naples and Rome maintain their feud but nobody suggests the other has forfeited the right to exist. The scrutiny arrives at the border. Authenticity becomes urgent in direct proportion to distance from the source. And so the argument, which presents itself as being about dough, is actually about something else entirely: about who gets to travel with a dish, who gets to carry it forward, and who gets to decide when adaptation tips into something that must be condemned.

Padma Lakshmi, whose work has long examined what it means to carry a food culture across borders, has spoken about how immigrant communities are asked to defend the legitimacy of their own culinary traditions against standards they had no hand in setting, while others adopt those same traditions and are celebrated for their creativity. Writing in her introduction to The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024, she describes food and travel as natural companions from whose pairing comes “the possibility of seeing anew, of examining how we make and assign meaning.”

The people who carried pizza across oceans did not carry it carefully, as precious cargo requiring preservation. They carried it the way you carry something that has kept you alive: urgently, practically, adapting it to whatever was available. The rules arrived afterwards, once the thing had become valuable enough that ownership suddenly mattered.

Back at the midnight kitchen, the box is almost empty.

The last slice sits in the corner, slightly cooled, the cheese set, the crust softened where it touched the cardboard. Someone takes it. The room dissolves back into itself, louder now, as though the pizza had been holding something together.

Nobody has discussed the provenance of the tomatoes or the hydration of the crust. Nobody has weighed in on whether what they just ate counts as authentic or merely approximate, whether it honours its origins or merely exploits them.

And yet all of it is there, folded into the thing itself.

The origin. The divergence. The migration. The adaptation. The argument. The people who carried it across oceans and the people who carried it down the street and the people who changed it completely and the people who kept it as close to the source as humanly possible.

All of it in a slice of pizza, still warm, still changing, still absolutely refusing to stay still. The most successful migrant in culinary history.

--

Not all those who wander are lost - some of us are just looking for the perfect slice in the wrong city, on purpose.

Ankita

--

And then, perhaps fifty metres from someone’s makeshift kitchen, there sits Celele. Electric blue walls. A wooden bench beneath plaques announcing its many accolades. World’s 50 Best. Latin America’s 50 Best. One of Colombia’s most celebrated restaurants.

I walk in already half-convinced.

The Burden of Awe

The naturally lit dining room is buzzy with anticipation and edged with something approaching reverence. Around ten tables, the midday light pooling on wood and ceramic, waiters moving with hushed voices, diners listening with rapt attention. My companions and I slide into our seats, already deep in the rhythm of a ten-day tour across Colombia: Alma and Celele in Cartagena, Carmen in Medellín tomorrow, then Salvo Patria in Bogotá. Four of Colombia’s best tables, back-to-back, each one built on long periods of fieldwork, a monument to ingredients rescued from the edge of oblivion.

The server arrives, her voice gentle but deliberate — almost liturgical — weighted with rehearsal. Around ninety per cent of the ingredients, she explains, come from the Caribbean region. Seventy per cent are wild harvested. The chef spent years travelling this coast, sitting with indigenous communities, documenting recipes. A research project called Proyecto Caribe Lab. The menu is its result.

I am moved. The ambition is undeniable.

The courses begin arriving, each plated with the rigour of a museum piece. Orejero seeds turned into sweet paste, glossy and dark. Guaimaro, the so-called Maya nut, prepared in ways I have never encountered. Pomarrosa that tastes faintly of rosewater, delicate and strange. Jumbalee, a wild fruit with a name that feels like it should be sung.

Caribbean crab arrives in its own orange shell, sitting in a woven basket, topped with what look like perfect egg white pearls and a golden sauce that gleams under the light. Gorgeous. Exacting. Although the crab itself is barely perceptible, the result is delicate and restrained.

The confit local hen follows in a wooden bowl: sour guava glaze, roasted bananas glistening with coconut oil, long green beans, fried banana peels for texture, all swimming in smoked hen broth. Simple. Subtle. The hen cooked perfectly. I eat slowly, listening to the server explain the provenance of each element. The altitude. The community. The history.

I am learning. I am engaged. Everything feels deliberate.

And then comes the lobster.

The Moment of Clarity

It is the day’s special, presented in a shallow wooden bowl. The lobster tail sits sliced and glistening, surrounded by what looks like puffed rice, with tiny yellow flowers scattered like punctuation. And over it all, a bright golden sauce, thick and vivid, pooling in the curves of the bowl.

“The sauce,” the server says, leaning in slightly, “has a curry flavour.”

Two words. Said lightly, as though they were neutral, as though they meant something.

I look down at the dish. My Colombian companions nod appreciatively. My American friends pick up their forks. No one bats an eye. But I, Indian, feel something tighten in my chest.

I eat a forkful. The lobster is sweet and tender, as lobster should be. But the sauce tastes exactly like the curry powder easily available in any Western supermarket. A little chalky. Almost dusty. Raw, undercooked, announcing itself jarringly and then lingering without complexity. A single note played at full volume. The delicate puffed rice, which should provide textural contrast, instead becomes claggy under the weight of the sauce. The combination does not make sense.

In a restaurant that can tell me the river bend where a seed was found, the name of the community who harvests wild fruits, the decade a particular ingredient nearly disappeared. In a restaurant built on the premise of recovering what was almost lost, of naming what had been forgotten. Curry flavour. A British colonial invention, a convenient fiction, standing in for the specificity this entire meal has been arguing for.

Some ingredients receive the full story. Some cultures receive a category.

I set down my fork.

And suddenly, sitting in that buzzy room with its hushed reverence and its beautiful plates, I understand something I have been feeling for a long time, eating my way across dozens of venerated fine-dining spots around the world. This is not about this restaurant. It could be anywhere. I have eaten in the best rooms in San Francisco, London, Mexico City, New Delhi, Sydney, Dubai, and beyond. Michelin stars, waiting lists, hushed dining rooms where the choreography is as polished as the silverware. I have walked out of those rooms impressed, yet unsatisfied.

Something I could not quite name until this lobster, this sauce that tastes like empire packaged for export.

It is a feeling not unlike sitting in a very beautiful lecture hall: engaged and grateful to be here. And yet faintly, persistently, hungry in a way that has nothing to do with portion sizes. It is that the performance is so elaborate, so carefully constructed, I am compelled to believe the taste matches the theatre. Too often, it doesn’t.

The Colonial Aftertaste

Let me be precise here, because precision is what this entire essay is about.

The word curry comes from the Tamil kari, meaning sauce or relish for rice. This makes sense. Sauce is a real thing. You can taste it, cook it, argue over whether it needs more salt or heat or time.

The Caribbean itself is the most compelling argument for what happens when ingredients, people and histories collide with force. When someone in Trinidad or Jamaica says “goat curry,” they are talking about something that exists: a specific preparation shaped by Indian indentured labourers who arrived in the Caribbean between 1838 and 1917, who brought cumin and coriander and turmeric and adapted them to Scotch bonnet chillies, coconut milk, allspice. Curry goat became, in Trinidad, a symbol of national identity. This is curry as lived tradition.

Curry flavour, on the other hand, is an invention without origin.

There is no such thing as curry flavour. It does not exist. It never has. What exists instead are thousands of distinct dishes across South Asia, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, the Caribbean diaspora and beyond, each shaped by a specific place, a specific set of ingredients, a specific history.

In a Kerala fish kari preparation, mustard seeds are tempered in coconut oil until they begin to pop. In a Kashmiri rogan josh, dried kashmiri chillies give deep colour without ferocious heat. In a Thai gaeng phed (red curry), dried red chillies are pounded with lemongrass, galangal and shrimp paste into a fragrant paste that blooms in coconut cream. In a Cape Malay curry, sweet spices like cinnamon and cardamom meet dried fruit and coconut, a tradition born from the spice knowledge of enslaved Malay and Indonesian people. In Jamaican curried chicken, pimento (allspice) and Scotch bonnet transform the spice blend into something sharp and bright and entirely its own. In a Trinidadian curry goat, shadow beni (chadon beni) replaces the fresh coriander unavailable on the island. These are not variations on a single theme. They are distinct culinary languages.

Curry powder emerged from British colonial convenience. The first commercially available curry powder in England was advertised by Sorlie’s Perfumery Warehouse on Piccadilly in 1784. A perfumery. Selling a spice blend named “East India Curry Powder” to British officers who had developed a taste for complex Indian cooking but could not replicate it without their Indian cooks.

By the late eighteenth century, brands like Crosse & Blackwell and Sharwood’s were selling shelf-stable curry powder across Britain. The blend homogenised, as food historian Lizzie Collingham documents in Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, somewhere between twenty and thirty distinct dishes into a single “curry cuisine,” a category that had never existed in the places it supposedly described.

And from curry powder emerged curry flavour. Not a description of any actual dish. But a vague, ambient idea. A shorthand. A signal that something has been spiced in a way that gestures indistinctly toward South Asia without committing to any actual tradition within it.

Chef Madhur Jaffrey, who spent her career trying to explain to Western audiences that Indian cooking is not one thing, described the word as “as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ‘chop suey’ was to China’s.”

Curry flavour survived not because it conveys cultural range, but because it is convenient.

And convenience, in this international dialect, has become currency.

The Global Kitchen and the Flattening of Everything

Fine dining in the 2020s exists within a borderless circuit. Chefs train in the same kitchens, stage at the same Michelin decorated institutions, read the same books, follow the same feeds, cook in what has become, effectively, one interconnected lingua franca.

This can produce brilliance. Cross-pollination, when it is honest and accountable, is one of food’s greatest strengths.

But it also creates sameness. Certain words circulate widely across continents, until they lose meaning, their original contours dissolved.

Curry is one of those words.

This proxy word shows up everywhere now: Michelin kitchens, tasting menus, food festivals, cookbook titles, luxury packaged foods, airline meals, wellness bowls, “modern” fusion dining across Latin America, Europe, Australia. It is vacuous, so deploying it as exotic marker is not exploration.

When a restaurant already has its own vast biodiversity, its own layered history, its own Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean foundations, what does curry add? Is it dialogue? Is it homage? Is it laziness? Is it simply habit? Or is it the gravitational pull of the global kitchen, where certain words circulate so freely they feel inevitable?

Ruby Tandoh, whose writing regularly pushes against the complacency of food culture, explores this in her 2025 book All Consuming. What fascinates her most is how these simplified narratives reshape our relationship with food itself, pulling us further from substance into spectacle. How food culture merges into shared but often inaccurate compressions. How perception hardens until we stop tasting what is on the plate.

We taste the narrative instead.

What Fine Dining Is, and Is Not, For

I finally have the courage to be honest about something I have sensed for years in these rooms, something that took Colombia to clarify: I am cautiously sceptical of fine dining, bordering on aversion. Because of what fine dining increasingly asks of me as a diner.

Contemporary fine dining has acquired a social obligation. The tasting menu is no longer just a meal. It is an argument: for biodiversity, for indigenous knowledge, for sustainable sourcing, for land rights, for cultural preservation; for every moral weight a contemporary plate is now expected to bear.

What is food for? Status? Education? Cultural preservation? Appetite? Community? Sustainability?

Fine dining answers: all of it.

And there, I think, lies my problem.

There is a species of fine dining that has begun to confuse the argument with the food. Where I am invited to feel transformed by the concept before I have tasted a thing. Where the moral architecture of the menu is so deliberately framed that I am expected to arrive already carrying the gravity of significance. Where leaving less than transformed feels, somehow, like a failure of conscience on my part rather than a failure of the cooking.

This is what I have been feeling without being able to name it. I walk out educated. Informed. Impressed.

What I do not feel is satisfied in the place where food is supposed to land. Not my stomach. Not my taste buds. Not somewhere deeper.

The curried lobster is not the disease. It is the symptom. The disease is the gap between pleasure and pageantry. The space between the narrative and the bite.

The Promise We Lost

In 1971, Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. As Alicia Kennedy notes in her The Yale Review essay “Who Was the Foodie?”, Waters demonstrated how counterculture could come to the table through local, seasonal ingredients. The idea was radical in its simplicity: pleasure and politics were inseparable. You could not celebrate a dish without understanding the system that produced it.

That was the promise. That eating well and eating ethically need not be at odds. That values could live inside flavour, not hover above it.

Fifty years later, something has shifted.

On one side, Kennedy describes what philosopher Lisa Heldke called “food adventuring” — the hunger to consume the best, whether in a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant or a three-Michelin-star dining room under a chef trained in Lyon. On the other, we have the theatre of ethics: menus that arrive preloaded with moral architecture, plates framed as manifestos.

The best restaurants still make pleasure and politics indistinguishable. The weaker ones invert the equation. The politics are staged. The narrative is foregrounded. And the food is expected to carry the weight of meaning rather than the weight of desire.

Waters understood that you should not need a lecture to feel conviction. You should taste it.

That is the gap I keep encountering — not between ethics and appetite, but between performance and pleasure.

What I Am Still Chasing

I leave Celele moved by some of what I ate.

I also leave thinking about what I cannot remember. Most of the dishes have already blurred in memory. The explanations were longer than the bites. The provenance more vivid than the food itself.

I want innovation that is truly delicious. Not innovation that is merely morally impressive. Not a plate that exists primarily to teach me something or signal global fluency or curate ethical sourcing. I want obsession translated onto the plate, not research translated into a menu.

I want food that knows why it was made. Food that tastes like necessity. Food that feeds the soul before it feeds the intellect. Food whose voice is not borrowed vocabulary but grounded truth.

What I am chasing, what I leave hungry for every time, is simpler than all of that.

I want a dish that tastes better than its story.

—

Not all those who wander are lost — some of us have an appetite for real flavour.

Ankita

—

You are always too early or already late. Always slightly exhausted. Always carrying something you do not need. The light is jarring, the air is recycled, and nothing tastes the way it should. Appetite does not disappear here. It hovers, restless and unresolved.

In 2025, a year loosened by a sabbatical from work, I spent more time waiting in airports than almost anywhere else. Laptop out. Then back in. Boarding passes creased soft from handling. Italy three times. Australia. Taiwan. India twice. Greece. New York. Thailand. And the in-between places that blur into one long corridor of transit gates and moving walkways.

I accumulated passport stamps and airport meals in equal measure, becoming an unwilling scholar of terminal dining.

Airports are stripped-back places. No neighbourhood context. No ritual. Peel away the branding, the architectural flourishes, the duty-free seductions, and you begin to see a nation’s baseline relationship with hospitality. Some airports feed you as if hunger is an inconvenience to be managed. Others feed you as if it is something to be taken seriously, even here.

In Bangkok, at Suvarnabhumi Airport, a woman sold fresh lychee with the same rhythm and care she would bring to a street cart in Chinatown. The fruit was ripe. The price fair. The exchange human. I peeled lychees at the gate, juice running down my wrist, sticky fingers restored to something like joy after an eleven-hour flight. No branding. No cleverness. Just an acknowledgement that a long-haul traveller might want something clean and fresh before sitting straight-backed again.

In Bangalore, someone cooked proper eggplant curry with depth and tamarind tang, served alongside flaky paratha that shattered into ghee-smacked layers. This was not an airport approximation of the dish. It was simply what it should be, existing honestly in a space that happened to have departure gates.

At Singapore’s Changi Terminal 3 hawker centre, I watched a cook tend to char siu with the same attention you would find in any neighbourhood stall across the city. The pork glistened, its taut surface catching fluorescent light. You tiao cheung fun arrived silky and generous, rice noodles barely holding together around fried dough that remained faintly crisp at the centre. Scallion oil noodles followed, each strand slicked with fragrant oil carrying the sharp bite of green onion tempered by something deeper, almost nutty.

Nobody made excuses for being in an airport. Nobody inflated prices simply because they could. The food was good because that was the standard. Whether you were a local commuter or a traveller in transit did not matter. I remember the weight of the tray in my hands, warm and steady, the smell slowing me down. I was technically nowhere, yet I was being fed like someone expected to see me again.

Elsewhere, the experience shifted.

London’s Heathrow, where sandwiches cost as much as a museum ticket and deliver roughly the same taste as the cardboard they come wrapped in. New York’s LaGuardia and Kennedy, gateways to a city obsessed with bagels and pizza, serving versions of both that would not pass muster in a suburban petrol station. Italy, where food is treated as secular religion, where even motorway rest stops can surprise you with a decent panino and espresso, yet somehow Florence and Palermo offer tired tramezzini and dispiriting pasta with the resigned air of institutional catering.

What struck me most was not that poor airport food existed in some places and not others. It was that it appeared even in cities that, outside the terminal, care deeply about food. Cities where eating well is a source of pride, identity, even economy. And yet, inside the airport, that care seemed to thin out.

We like to say we travel for food. We queue for restaurants. We research obsessively. We cross oceans for coveted reservations. And then we sit at airport gates and accept mediocrity as inevitable, as if this part of the journey exists outside judgement altogether. As if what we expect here does not matter.

When this conversation comes up, there are always explanations. Airport rents are punishing. Staffing is complicated by security clearances and background checks. Deliveries are restricted, delayed, filtered through layers of regulation. Everything costs more, takes longer, involves compromise.

All of this is true. Yet none of it is irrelevant. Because those same constraints exist everywhere. In Bangkok. In Bangalore. In Singapore. High rents. Security bottlenecks. Restricted supply chains. And yet, care survives.

Industry research supports this pattern. Analysis from The Moodie Davitt Report points to a higher concentration of what it calls gourmet casual dining across many Asian airports. Proper meals cooked to order. Seating that invites you to pause. These airports are not padding out terminals with anonymous sandwich counters. They are curating food that resembles what you would eat outside the airport, food with continuity and intent.

Even Anthony Bourdain noticed this. He singled out Singapore’s Changi and Tokyo’s Narita as airports where he was genuinely happy to eat. Not because the food was luxurious, but because it was done properly. Thoughtfully.

Airports in the western part of the world often operate on a different set of assumptions. Hunger becomes something to be managed within tight margins, shaped by limited movement and time. The food is not poor by accident so much as by outcome. You are here, you are hungry, your options are limited, and the plane will leave with or without you.

This does not mean airports in America or Europe are incapable of feeding people well. Zurich and Munich, for instance, regularly score highly, reminders that care can survive even within Europe’s regulatory and commercial thicket. But taken together, the pattern still holds.

Across much of Asia, feeding people properly is non-negotiable. Hospitality is not a premium experience unlocked through wealth or insider access, but a baseline courtesy extended to guests and strangers alike. In many languages, the word for hospitality carries the weight of duty. In Japanese, omotenashi suggests care that anticipates hunger before it is voiced. In parts of South and Southeast Asia, to offer food without care, even to someone you will never see again, creates a kind of karmic imbalance.

And so, the hawker does not stop being a hawker because her stall is airside. Standards do not shift because the audience is captive.

This may be the true test of a food culture. Not the Michelin-starred restaurants or the grandmother’s kitchen or the street vendor who has perfected one dish over decades. Those are the easy victories, the willing performances. How you feed strangers in transit, people you’ll never see again, people with no recourse and no choice. That’s character. That’s where the mask slips.

Airports are thresholds. They sit between anticipation and fatigue, arrival and departure. Where first impressions are formed. Where the last taste of a trip lingers longer than expected.

--

Not all those who wander are lost…some of us are just trying to hold onto the last taste of a place before boarding.

Ankita

--

I arrived alone, jet-lagged and slightly unhinged in that specific way red-eye flights produce, the kind of state where appetite overrides logic and the body makes all decisions. This would be my first real encounter with Thai street food. Not the careful translations served in London’s sleeker Thai restaurants, places I had trusted to teach me something true. But the original language itself, spoken fast and without subtitles.

I came because I sensed a gap in my understanding. Because I’ve lived in enough cities to know when I’m missing something fundamental. Because London’s Som Saa, Kolae, and Speedboat Bar, brilliant as they are, suddenly felt like echoes of a conversation happening elsewhere.

My first night in Bangkok, I ate in Chinatown and felt electrified. Woks flared. Sauces clung. The food arrived with force and clarity. I went to bed convinced I had cracked something open. What I did not yet understand was that I had barely scratched the surface. Chinatown was volume and bravado. Old Siam, where I was headed the following morning, would be something else entirely. The older Bangkok, the one that still wakes before dawn, cooks for neighbours rather than cameras, and couldn’t care less whether the world is watching.

The First Correction

I joined A Chef’s Tour with the vague expectation of discovery. What I received through the rest of the afternoon instead, was recalibration. Our guide, Johnny, moved with something between reverence and pride. He spoke about ingredients the way others speak about family members, with memory and protectiveness and an almost fierce joy. He explained not merely what we’d eat, but why it existed, where techniques travelled from, how flavours should register on the tongue. This would be a lesson in belonging rather than tourism.

The first bowl arrived before we could settle ourselves on the rickety metal stools. Guay tiew tom yum moo grob, tom yum noodle soup with crispy pork dumplings. But not as I had ever known it. The fried dumplings bobbed in the broth, crisp-edged and substantial, crowned with crushed peanuts, spring onions sliced fine, fried garlic scattering gold across the surface. The soup itself hit with force, lemongrass and lime leaves cutting through heat, galangal adding depth I hadn’t anticipated. The broth tasted alive, sharp and round simultaneously, each spoonful resetting my understanding of what balance in flavour and texture meant. The heat moved through my chest quickly, warming rather than punishing. Something clicked into place. Thai food, I realised with sudden clarity, works with physiology rather than against it.

A few streets later, we stumbled across a vendor selling khao tom mat, sticky rice wrapped tightly in banana leaf, the parcel still warm. Peeling back the leaf released coconut milk fragrance, sweet taro softened into the grains, coconut palm sugar bringing depth rather than simple sweetness. I’d eaten these components before, separately and together. Yet here they arrived composed, measured, purposeful in ways I hadn’t encountered elsewhere. The rice held the coconut milk without becoming sodden, each grain distinct yet unified.

Along the Khlongs

Then we took to the water.

The boat taxi skimmed along the khlongs, the ancient canal arteries where Siam first organised itself around trade. Water slapped against the hull. Houses pressed so close I could see laundry swaying, a child watching us pass with curiosity, a woman rinsing rice at the waterline. From this angle, Bangkok felt unguarded, domestic. Kitchen smells drifted from doorways I would never find again.

Bangkok grew around these waterways. Ingredients arrived along these routes. Techniques followed, adapting to humidity, heat, the particular challenges of keeping food safe in a tropical climate. Thai street food evolved not despite these conditions but because of them. The spicing makes sense when you understand that chillies encourage sweat, that sweat cools the body, that cooling matters when the temperature never drops below comfortable.

Chinese migration brought wok techniques, roasting methods, the alchemy of balancing five flavours. Indian trade routes carried curry pastes and spice blends. Portuguese merchants introduced chillies centuries ago, and Thailand absorbed them so completely that imagining Thai cuisine without heat feels absurd now.

Yet nothing here tastes borrowed. Everything feels settled, naturalised, utterly itself.

Back on land, the city tightened around us again.

Between Markets and Memory

We started walking through a neighbourhood so peaceful, so determinedly local, that encountering another traveller felt genuinely surprising. The food market we entered had been feeding lunches to locals since 1899. Over a century of muscle memory, technique refined through repetition, recipes surviving because they worked.

Hoi tod arrived next, crispy mussel pancake, the edges caramelised into lace. Made from rice flour and corn flour bound with egg, fish sauce, soy sauce, and studded with fresh mussels that yielded easily. Spring onions scattered across the top cut through the richness. Rice flour behaves differently in humidity, staying light and resilient where wheat would turn leaden.

As we walked, and stumbled in and out of old institutions, lunch assembled itself in small bites.

Khai luk khoe arrived on small plates, sweet and sour boiled eggs crowned with fried shallots. The eggs had stewed until the whites turned brown, slicked with tamarind and coconut palm sugar, taking on the sauce completely. Sweet, sour, savoury, all in alignment.

Moo pad khem followed, salted dry stir-fried pork, spiced with precision, the burn arresting your senses before you could overthink it.

Gaeng phed moo appeared, pork red curry, deep and steady, built on dried chillies and time. The colour sang, russet and confident. Gaeng kiew wan neua followed immediately after, beef green curry, sharper, greener, lifting the air around it with fresh chillies and Thai basil. Similar foundations. Completely different expressions.

As we stumbled out into the main street, a tuk tuk rattled into sight, all chrome and bravado, buzzing with the confidence of machinery that’s survived decades without modification. We climbed in. Metallic, shameless, it wove through traffic like it had something to prove. Neon glanced off metal. The air tasted of petrol and frying oil and possibility.

What Ancient Shophouses Remember

It deposited us at a shophouse that hadn’t changed in generations. Ped yang, roasted duck, arrived on pink plates worn smooth by decades of service, alongside moo grob, crispy pork belly. The duck wore bronze skin, fat rendered beneath crackling that shattered audibly. The pork belly yielded easily under chopsticks, fat sweet and giving. Chinese technique absorbed so completely into local rhythm that nothing felt borrowed anymore. Everything had settled. The sauce pooled beneath, soy-based and subtly sweet.

A few humid blocks later, the most surprising bite of the day awaited us.

Khanom buang yuan, Vietnamese-style mung bean and rice flour crepe, shattered under the gentlest nudge. The crepe itself stood tall, lace-like and architectural, golden and improbable. Inside sat tofu, radish, bean sprouts, peanuts, coriander, shredded coconut, finished with coconut palm sugar and pineapple vinegar. The vinegar cut through everything, bright and necessary. Sweet and sour held in perfect tension. Crispy meeting soft meeting chewy.

Then came khanom buang yuan sai kai, the version with egg, equally revelatory. The egg added richness, binding the filling differently, making it more substantial without weighing it down. The addition changed everything while changing almost nothing.

Inside a Betel Leaf

Next, we boarded a local bus that lurched and sighed through afternoon heat, windows flung open to exhaust and incense and the thick, living smell of the city breathing. Bodies close. No air conditioning. This wasn’t transport designed for tourists. It simply carried us, efficiently and without ceremony, exactly where we needed to go. The road knocked steadily beneath us.

We entered another local food market and snaked our way through the narrow lanes to our next pitstop. Miang kham arrived folded into neat betel leaf parcels, secured with toothpicks, green and glossy. I popped the whole thing into my mouth, and the flavours exploded. Inside sat toasted coconut, peanuts, shallots, lime, dried shrimp, all bound with sweet tamarind sauce.

One bite and my palate reset completely. Sweet from the tamarind and coconut, pungent from the shrimp, sharp from lime and shallot, herbal from the betel leaf itself which added a peppery bite. The textures played against each other, crunchy and soft, chewy and crisp. Here was the ingenuity I’d been sensing all afternoon, made suddenly visible: ingredients I’d encountered separately a dozen times, assembled into something I couldn’t have predicted. Each element essential, nothing excessive.

A warm satisfying bowl followed, guay tiew yuan, Vietnamese-influenced noodle soup. Sticky rice noodles floated in pale pork broth, alongside pork meatballs, chicken sausage, fried shallots scattered across the surface. The chilli powder (which came with a sombre warning from the guide) smacked me into submission, Vietnamese influence filtering through Thai sensibility. White pepper, five-spice, something else I couldn’t name. The soup appeared almost aggressive in its simplicity, no pretence at elegance.

Khanom jeep arrived next, dumplings tinted blue with butterfly pea flower, the colour startling and beautiful. Rice flour skin folded around shallot, coriander root, garlic, pickled radish, peanuts, mushrooms, white pepper, topped with more peanuts for texture. Coriander root anchored everything with warmth, that particular flavour that tastes like Thailand itself.

Sweetness at Dusk

By mid-afternoon, the sun pressed harder, the city slowing slightly in the heat. Nam takrai, a lemongrass drink, cold and clean, botanical, pale and refreshing was exactly the soothing we needed.

Dessert unfolded not as the end, but as a whole new chapter.

Khanom krok, coconut milk rice flour pancake balls skewered with toothpicks, warm, the tops crisp and the insides custardy.

Saku piak bai toey appeared next, pandan-scented tapioca, jewel-green and bright. And khanom mo kaeng tua kiew, mung bean coconut custard cake, dense and grounding, brown and nonchalant.

Khao tom, sticky rice folded with coconut milk and palm sugar, steamed in banana leaf, its sweetness slowly surrendering under heat.

Khanom tuay steamed in small ceramic cups, the surface smooth and milky with coconut cream, giving way to rice flour below, soaked in palm sugar; the darker bottom tasting almost toasted, caramel-tinged.

Mangkhut (mangosteen) appeared last, pressed open easily, the white segments cool and floral, sweet and tart. The perfect punctuation.

By the end, my earlier confidence lay dismantled, gently and thoroughly.

What Old Siam clarified wasn’t simply the breadth of Thai food, though the variety is staggering. It sharpened my awareness of the cuisine’s resourcefulness. The same ingredients reappeared constantly, rearranged with calibration and restraint, each time forming something distinct. Innovation lived in the interplay of ingredients, and the smallest adjustments, the ones that carry the most weight.

Somewhere between walking, water, wheels and relentless heat, my understanding of Thai food reset entirely. This was Bangkok without choreography. A city feeding itself, generously allowing you to watch, and if you are lucky, to eat.

That felt like the correct beginning.

—

Not all those who wander are lost – some of us are following a cuisine back to its source.

Ankita

—

But cities are like disloyal lovers. They feel oddly familiar, and yet they have moved on. They evolve without you, growing new obsessions, new accents, new rituals that make you realise just how long you’ve been gone. Returning to New York after ten long years, I walked through it suspended; moving in the present while sensing the echo of the girl who used to rush down these same streets.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer number of omakase counters. They had sprung up like wildflowers after rain, tucked into storefronts that once housed dry cleaners and nail salons. When I lived here, omakase belonged to expense accounts and dates engineered to intimidate. Now it felt democratic, almost casual. Between 2015 and 2025, New York’s omakase landscape expanded by nearly 300 percent. A decade ago, the US imported just under $110 million of fresh Japanese seafood; last year, the number surpassed $350 million. Near-daily flights from Tokyo’s Toyosu Market, Osaka, Fukuoka, and Hokkaido now land at JFK’s perishable terminal, boxes stamped with bluefin arriving within twenty-four hours of auction. Hokkaido uni lands three times weekly instead of monthly. Supply chains once incapable of such precision have been reforged, and New York - that insatiable devourer of excellence - has embraced the transformation.

Which is how I found myself at Sushi Ouji on a Tuesday night with a friend I hadn’t seen in six years. The restaurant was the size of a railway carriage, loud and buzzy with that unmistakable New York soundtrack, where everyone talks over everyone else and it somehow forms its own kind of music. We slid onto two of the ten counter seats, already deep in the kind of catching up that requires looping back, animated gestures, and frequent interruptions. Six years is a lifetime when you’ve built separate histories, collected separate heartbreaks, become versions of yourselves neither could have predicted.

Behind the cypress counter, Chef Ben worked with the calm of someone operating in another atmosphere entirely. His badge read “BEN.C” in that minimalist, understated way that suggested he needed nothing more. Around him, the restaurant throbbed: conversations colliding mid-air, laughter ricocheting off the walls, glasses chiming. My friend and I were adding to it, trading stories about our newfound fitness routines, career detours, and the small indignities of adulthood. But Ben existed in a different dimension entirely. His hands moved with metronomic precision, shaping rice, slicing fish, composing each nigiri as though the chaos beyond him didn’t exist.

There is something almost ecclesiastical about watching an itamae work. The economy of movement. The reverence for ingredient. Presence distilled into judicious motion. Ben’s focus felt like a sermon delivered without words.

The meal began gently. Hojicha tea arrived in a ceramic cup - roasted, earthy, and nutty - refreshed throughout the meal without my asking. A small constant in the rising crescendo of courses.

The first dish, the Sumo Katsuo appetiser, arrived deceptively simple: a cube of ginger jelly, transparent and dissolving sweet-sharp on the tongue; a pinprick of fresh wasabi, vivid green; a shiso leaf carrying a faint anise perfume. Cradled against them were fillets of sawara (Japanese Spanish mackerel) smoked over cherry wood until the flesh gleamed like pearls, finished with onion sauce, seaweed, and green onions.

Then came the chawanmushi. Barely set custard in a delicate ceramic cup, topped with prawns and snow peas, wobbling with the slightest movement. Buried within were scallops so sweet they couldn’t possibly have come from a salty sea.

Then came my favourite dish of the night. The porcelain cup was placed before me with particular care: its contents arranged like a stunning sunset you would chase across continents. At the base lay slices of salmon, translucent and coral orange, their edges glowing. Over this, a crown of ikura, glistening salmon roe orbs the colour of amber and fire, each one perfectly intact, catching the light. Then uni, soft like custard and impossibly delicate. Japanese shiso flowers scattered like tiny purple stars; and finally, Ossetra caviar, dark as midnight, punctuation to all that radiance. Comfort and luxury intertwined, the kind of dish that makes you close your eyes without meaning to.

I picked up the tiny wooden spoon, then hesitated, wanting to hold the image whole for a moment longer. When I finally ate, I experienced the flavours in waves. The roe burst in little shocks of sweetness and brine. The uni melted like butter, coating everything with its characteristic richness. The caviar added earthiness, depth, decadence. The shiso flowers brought something faintly minty, cutting through the richness with botanical aromas. It was abundance without obscenity, Harmony without crowding.

At some point during that cup, I realised I had stopped speaking mid-sentence.

Then the nigiri procession began; and with it, the lesson.

Ben set the first piece before me. “Enjoy.”

Madai (sea bream), pale as moonlight, clean and almost sweet. I picked it up with my fingers, the way you’re meant to, feeling the warmth of the rice, the tenderness of the fish. The rice held together only just, seasoned with enough vinegar to brighten the bite. One motion, one breath, and it was gone. This piece existed in perfect form for perhaps thirty seconds. Had I been talking, I would have missed it entirely.

“Enjoy,” he said again, placing the next nigiri in front of me. Buri (mature yellowtail), rich with fat, striped like marble, dissolving instantly and leaving behind only a whisper of iron and ocean.

Then shima aji (striped jack), silvery, firm, sharper in flavour.
“Enjoy,” again - and I realised the word was becoming a meditation. Just that one word. It felt like more than instruction. It was permission. An invitation to stop, to meet the moment exactly as it arrived.

Zuke akami followed; soy-cured tuna singing with umami, savouriness lingering long after. My friend paused her story; we exchanged a look that said: something special is happening here.

I had spent the entire evening trying to hold two conversations: the one with my friend, and the one Ben was delivering silently in the form of fish and rice. The room demanded my energy; the counter asked for stillness.

Then came the otoro. The sacred belly cut of bluefin, marbled like Carrara, so fatty it almost trembled. Topped with Ossetra caviar. Ben placed it before me with a quiet finality.

“Enjoy.”

This time the word landed differently and I felt the full weight of the word. For the next thirty seconds, the world narrowed entirely: the fat coating my mouth, the delicate pop of caviar, the fragrance of warm rice rising like emotion. Everything else - the chatter, the noise, the stories - dissolved.

How often do we miss the subtle flavours of our own days because we’re elsewhere in our minds?

The procession continued:
Sawara brushed with a faint glaze, skin lightly charred.
Kuruma ebi (Japanese tiger shrimp), springy and bright.
Hotate (fresh scallop), perfectly scored, dissolving like cold butter into sweetness.

Each piece a small sermon.
“Enjoy.”
“Enjoy.”
“Enjoy.”

Then the Hokkaido uni (sea urchin) arrived, and I understood why people make pilgrimages for this.

It sat on the rice like golden petals, creamy yellow-orange, surface glistening. I picked it up carefully, afraid it might collapse. When it touched my tongue, it transformed. Unlike any uni I had tasted before, there was no bitterness, no iodine bite; only layers. First cream, then ocean, then something that tasted like tide pools warmed by sun, seaweed and salt air, and finally something ineffable I can only, reluctantly, describe as the ‘essence of the sea itself’. The texture was impossibly smooth, custard-like, lingering long after, an aftertaste that asked for silence.

Ben was watching me with a mischievous glint. “Enjoy,” he had said, as though he already knew what it would do to me.

A tuna roll followed, crowned with salmon roe and pickled vegetables, the nori crisp. Ben handed it to me directly.

“Eat quickly.” Not a suggestion, a command. The nori holds its crispness for barely a few moments. Two bites: warm nori, cool rice, bursting roe, sharp pickles. Perfect. Gone.

Some experiences exist only in that singular moment, ephemeral and complete. Try to hold onto them for too long and they dissolve.

Seafood miso soup arrived near the end, deeply savoury, ribboned with seaweed. Then matcha mousse with yuzu cream and strawberry, a gentle conclusion to something that had felt almost spiritual.

Leaving Ouji and stepping into the crisp November air, my first impulse had been the predictable one: I can’t wait to get to Japan. To sit at the counters where this craft was born, where itamae spend fifty years perfecting the pressure of rice. Always chasing the next thing, the more authentic experience.

I turned a corner and began making my way toward TriBeCa, letting the cold settle my thoughts. When I looked up, I saw One World Trade Center rising into the sky. A street I had walked hundreds of times in my twenties, usually sprinting for the 1 train on Canal Street, always late, always believing the next thing mattered more than the present.

New York has a habit of hoarding fragments of who I was in its corners. I can live elsewhere for years, build entire worlds, become someone unrecognisable; but round one familiar bend and I collide with my younger self. The city returns what I left behind, piece by piece. That night, walking streets I once knew by heart, I felt oddly complete, as though I had retrieved something I hadn’t realised was missing.

And suddenly the lesson from Ben’s counter surfaced. Walking those familiar streets, something gentler settled within me. The uni still lingering on my tongue. Ben’s single word still echoing. The reminder that some moments ask to be held with both hands. Being in New York, in that very moment, had been perfect.

The pilgrimage to Japan will come, or it won’t. But that Tuesday night, learning to pause and taste what is fleeting, to tune out the noise, to savour what is delicate and real and right in front of me? That was its own kind of presence.

I turned another corner, rushing to meet a friend for post-dinner drinks. And just like the perfect nigiri, the pause lasted only a moment.

But what a moment it was.

—

Not all those who wander are lost – some of us are learning to savour the fleeting moment.

Ankita

—

The first fire I ever knew was disguised as comfort. My grandfather’s dal was only yellow in name, because it shone the colour of red hot warning. The oil from the spicy temper (tadka) floated crimson on top, a bowl of molten defiance that sat trembling with the promise of heat. Each time I leaned close, the smell hit first - garlic fried to the edge of bitterness, cumin roasted to its aromatic threshold, chillies releasing their smoke into the kitchen air. He ate in perfect calm, spoon after spoon, while the rest of us reached for water and bravado. I would sit beside him, eyes watering, asking him for a small bite to taste, and pretending to be fine. This dal was somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), though we didn’t speak in those terms then. We just knew it made the other grown-ups reach for more yoghurt whilst he sat there, serene and unruffled. It wasn’t just the pain that was compelling - it was the mystery of why he seemed to relish it despite the pain.

The thing about growing up watching someone treat extreme heat as casual fare is that it warps your understanding of what’s possible. I developed a particular neurosis early: if someone was eating it, I needed to eat it. Not wanted. Needed. It became less about flavour and more about membership, about proving I belonged at tables where the food challenged you.

My uncle understood this about me without ever saying it aloud. Every couple of months, he took me for street-side puchka (Calcutta’s moniker for pani puri - India’s favourite street food), those crisp hollow spheres of fried dough filled with spiced potato and tamarind water that explode in your mouth like edible fireworks. The vendor had a row of different waters and potato fillings, each progressively more vicious. My uncle caught my eye, grinned, and told the vendor to add extra green chilli to mine.

That innocent bite-sized snack probably registered around 30,000 to 40,000 SHU, fiery serrano pepper territory, but served with the casual cruelty of someone testing your mettle. The first bite wrenched open my senses. The second drew tears. By the fifth, I couldn’t feel my lips, and that was the point. Head buzzing, ears ringing, absolutely refusing to concede, I kept pace with my uncle. Pride, I learned that afternoon, is its own kind of flavour enhancer.

This was my inheritance. Not recipes or cooking techniques, but aspiration written in fire.

The American Interlude (Or: How I Lost My Edge)

When I moved to the United States in my teens, something peculiar happened. My carefully cultivated tolerance evaporated. Maybe it was the prevalence of dining hall food that thought black pepper was adventurous, or maybe capsaicin receptors need regular maintenance like any other skill. Even my first grocery-store hot sauce felt too loud, its burn more chemical than flavour. My college campus’s proudest offering was a sandwich chain called Firehouse Subs, where the counter displayed a wall of hot sauces arranged like trophies. I would stand before them in awe, reaching for the mildest bottle, wondering where my inner pyromaniac had gone.

The decline continued through the years of jalapeño margaritas (only ~2000 SHU), my greatest claim to spice. I used to joke that I had lost my citizenship to chillies. But beneath the humour was embarrassment. Somewhere between continents, I had become prosaic.

I blamed the food around me, but the truth was more nuanced. I had lost more than heat tolerance. I had lost the cultural context that made spice meaningful. In India, that red dal wasn’t just lunch. It was my grandfather’s afternoon ritual, his daily rebellion to prove that age hadn’t softened him. The puchka wasn’t just street food. It was theatre, community, a bite-sized dare. Without that framework, chilli was just pain without purpose or context.

Barcelona and the Sichuan Revelation

It took Barcelona to shake me awake.

The city has an inexplicable saturation of Sichuan hotpot restaurants. I still don’t entirely understand the demographic miracle that placed so much authentic Chengdu cuisine in Catalonia, but I’ve learned not to question geographic grace. My first Sichuan hotpot arrived at the table bubbling like a witch’s cauldron, that distinctive málà oil shimmering red on the surface, with chillies, garlic, and Sichuan peppercorns swirling in beef tallow. The numbing tingle of Sichuan peppercorns dancing with chilli oil, probably hovering around 70,000 to 90,000 SHU but with a complexity that pure heat measurements can’t capture.

I dropped in a thin slice of lamb, counted to ten, and fished it out. The first bite was a shock of heat followed by a spreading tingling numbness that felt almost euphoric. It burned, it buzzed, flooding the lips and tongue with static. Sichuan cooks say má là means “numbing and spicy,” but it’s also a philosophy - pleasure and pain, perfectly balanced. The Chinese knew this centuries before neuroscientists confirmed that chilli triggers endorphins, the body’s own painkillers. Maybe that’s why spice feels addictive: it blurs the line between hurt and happiness.

Mexico: A Masterclass in Pain

Then I travelled to Mexico. And suddenly everything before felt like rehearsal.

I travelled through Oaxaca, Mexico City, the Yucatán, eating my way through a culture that treats chillies not as a dare but as a fundamental ingredient, as essential to cooking as salt or time. From the smoky whisper of chipotle (2,500 to 8,000 SHU, dried and smoked jalapeños) to the bright, fruity violence of habanero (100,000 to 350,000 SHU), each variety carried its own personality, its own story.

At a street stall in Oaxaca, I ate tacos that defied modesty. I ladled salsa from a clay bowl until a woman beside me murmured a warning: poco, poco. I smiled, ignored her, and paid the price. The first bite started warm, then bloomed into something floral, the habanero heat bright but fleeting. The habanero’s burn was seductive, creeping up suddenly with a hot strike. Around me, locals drizzled the same sauce without flinching, their calm a quiet kind of superiority.

The picante of Mexico isn’t about how much you can handle; it’s about how far you’re willing to go for flavour. In a market in Oaxaca, a woman selling mole explained that her recipe used seven different chillies. Not for heat, but for layers. The ancho for sweetness, the pasilla for earthiness, the guajillo for colour, the chipotle for smoke. Heat was only one part of a much larger composition, a symphony of smoke and sun and time.

And then there were the everyday encounters with spice; the way it infiltrates everything. Micheladas: a heady concoction of beer mixed with lime juice, clamato, Worcestershire, Maggi seasoning, hot sauce, and a dash of chilli salt that burn your lips and cool your throat all at once. Street vendors sell mango slices dusted with Tajín, and strips of chewy tamarindo candy lacquered in chilli powder that leave a red stain on your fingers. Even sweetness comes with warning labels.

Mexico, after all, is chilli’s ancestral and spiritual home. Here, heat is identity. It’s history. It’s the pulse of the land itself.

The Chilli Belt and the Accidents of Geography

Here’s the thing about chillies: they’re native to exactly one region - Mesoamerica, the area that covers parts of Mexico and Guatemala, where people began cultivating Capsicum at least 6000 years ago. Every chilli you’ve ever eaten - from Chinese bird’s eye through Thai bird’s eye to Indian ghost pepper and Carolina reaper - traces its lineage back to this region. Before Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, most of the world’s cuisines had never tasted capsaicin. In Europe, spices were limited to black pepper, long pepper, grains of paradise, saffron and mace. In Asia, it was largely ginger, turmeric, mustard seed and Szechuan pepper. In India, black pepper grown on the hills of Kerala featured prominently before chilli arrived.

Then came the Columbian Exchange, when Spanish and Portuguese traders carried chilli seeds across oceans, and something remarkable happened. Cultures that had never encountered capsaicin before embraced it with the fervour of religious converts. Today, thanks to centuries of selection, migration and hybridisation, experts estimate there may be 30,000 to 50,000 distinct chilli cultivars worldwide. But not everywhere, and not with equal intensity.

The cultures that truly absorbed chillies into their culinary DNA share certain commonalities. First, climate. Hot, humid regions where food spoils quickly discovered that capsaicin has antimicrobial properties. Adding chillies to food was about preservation, and making ingredients last another day in brutal heat. This is why you find the spiciest cuisines concentrated along tropical and subtropical zones. Thailand, southern India, parts of China, Mexico’s coastal regions.

Then there’s the cold calculus of poverty and accessibility. Chillies are astonishingly easy to grow. They thrive in marginal soil, require little water once established, produce abundantly. For communities where expensive spices like saffron or vanilla were impossible luxuries, chillies offered a way to transform bland staples into something exciting. It’s no accident that the spiciest dishes often come from working-class and street food traditions. Chillies democratised flavour.

India’s love affair with chillies makes perfect sense through this lens. Historians say chilli travelled to India through Portuguese traders in Goa in the 16th century, making it a relative newcomer in a cuisine older than many empires. Chillies grew like weeds, fruiting prolifically in India’s climate. Within generations, they had been woven so completely into regional cuisines that dishes like vindaloo (itself a Portuguese hybrid) became synonymous with Indian food.

China’s Sichuan and Hunan provinces tell a similar story. The regions’ humid, mountainous climate made chillies thrive whilst also demanding preservation techniques for food. But there’s also something more interesting at play: the medicinal aspects. Traditional Chinese medicine believes certain foods generate internal heat, whilst others cool the body. In Sichuan’s damp climate, consuming “heating” foods like chillies was thought to balance the body’s energy. Whether the science holds up or not, the cultural logic created generations of people who viewed spicy food not as punishment but as wellness.

Mexico, though, had the home advantage. Chillies weren’t an import but an inheritance. Mesoamerican cultures had been cultivating and breeding chillies for millennia before Europeans arrived. The result is a dizzying diversity: over 200 varieties grown commercially in Mexico alone, each with specific culinary applications. Poblanos for stuffing, jalapeños for pickling, chipotles for smoking, habaneros for salsas that make you reconsider your life choices. The depth of Mexico’s chilli culture is what happens when you have six thousand years to perfect something.

Meanwhile, much of Europe received the same chillies and collectively shrugged. The climate was wrong. The culinary traditions had already calcified around other flavour profiles. Social factors played their part too; expensive black pepper from the spice trade carried status in ways that easily grown chillies never could.

When I proudly declare that Chinese, Mexican, and Indian street food are my favourite cuisines, I’m not just talking about personal preference. I’m talking about gravitating towards the cuisines that understood what to do with capsaicin, that had the climate, the history, the economic necessity, and the culinary imagination to transform a South American fruit into something transcendent. The cuisines that saw potential where others saw peasant food.

Why We Enjoy the Burn

Now, in my London kitchen, I cook with my spoils like a chef with a well-curated spice collection. Which, I suppose, is exactly what they are. Kashmiri chilli powder and green chilli pickles from India sit beside packets of dried chillies - smoky árbol from Puebla and pequín, guajillo, ancho, morita and pasilla - each a different shade of heat, a different mood of Mexico. Five tiny Indian ghost peppers (bhoot jholokia) gifted by a friend. There’s salsa macha studded with sesame, a trio of bottled salsas that range from citrusy to cruel, and a habanero sauce fierce enough to taste like sunlight. The hot sauce shelf holds its own swagger: Sriracha, Frank’s Hot, Valentina, Carolina Reaper and a menacing bottle labelled Pain is Good.

From China, a small empire of spice: ten kinds of chilli oils and crisps, some with fish sauce, some with fried shallots that crunch like secrets, and a tin of Sichuan peppercorns that hum rather than burn. A pouch of Calabrian peperoncino from an Italian farmers’ market leans against a souvenir tin of Hungarian smoked and sweet paprika, while Urfa biber from a Turkish bazaar adds its dark, raisiny smoke to the mix.

Every time I toast or fry or spoon from one of them, the air thickens with ghosts of places I’ve loved. The fruity burn of Kashmiri red. The earthy sweetness of ancho. The numbing thrill of Sichuan. Each one a geography of memory, a place I can revisit through controlled burning. Each one part of a 6,000-year journey from Mesoamerican farms to my cutting board. Each chilli in my kitchen a small testament to the accidents of trade, the logic of climate, and the wild, human genius that once bit into fire and decided that it belonged in food.

Scientists will tell you that capsaicin triggers the same pain receptors as actual heat, that eating chillies is essentially benign masochism. Your brain, convinced you’re in danger, floods your system with endorphins to save you. It’s manufactured crisis, a controlled near-death experience you can order at restaurants. There’s even a phenomenon called “hedonic reversal” where the brain learns to interpret pain signals as pleasure, rewiring itself through repetition.

But that’s not why I do it. Not really.

I eat spicy food because it demands presence in a way few other things do. You cannot scroll through your phone whilst consuming something fiery. You cannot think about your mortgage or your career trajectory or whether you remembered to reply to that email. You can only exist, intensely, in that moment, fully inhabiting your body as it screams and dances in equal measure.

And maybe because of my grandfather and uncle, teaching me without words that building tolerance isn’t about numbing yourself. It’s about expanding your capacity to feel. That some of life’s best experiences live right on the edge of what you think you can handle, waiting for you to be brave enough to reach for them.

I still can’t eat dal as red as his; I’m not sure anyone can! That particular shade of crimson exists in memory, exaggerated by time and childhood reverence. But every time I toast dried chillies in a pan, watch them bloom and darken in hot oil, breathe in that first sharp, throat-catching hit of capsaicin, I’m chasing that same transcendent calm he embodied. That sense that pain is just information, and what you do with that information defines you.

The Scoville scale can’t measure what heat means. The way it connects you to memories and ritual. The way it marks every city you’ve loved, every market you’ve wandered through, every meal that made you feel briefly, intensely alive: Calcutta’s street-side courage, Barcelona’s revelation, Mexico’s melody, London’s longing. The map glows red in my mind. Somewhere in the middle of it all, between curiosity and craving, lies the truth of why I keep coming back to the flame.

—

Not all those who wander are lost – some of us are just looking for the perfect burn.

Ankita

—

I had chosen to be here. Booked flights. Told people I was attending a food writing workshop in Sicily, as if saying it aloud would make it real. As if the act of travelling to the edge of an island would somehow transform me into the thing I was too hesitant to claim: a writer.

The truth is, I was terrified. Not of Sicily, not of the workshop itself, but of what it meant to finally commit to this path. To stop treating food writing as something I did on the side, between the “real work” of strategy consulting. To admit that the words mattered more to me than the PowerPoints ever had.

One by one, the others arrived. Laptops, notebooks, sun hats, shy smiles. We were a motley bunch. We came from different countries, different ages, different detours that somehow led us here. Some had always carried writing in their hearts, fitting words between meetings and family meals. Some had spent decades cooking, or taking beautiful pictures of food, and were now learning to translate plating and pixels into paragraphs. Others had stumbled into it from unexpected paths: chefs and caterers, editors, entrepreneurs and business owners, consultants and corporate escapees.Yet beneath all our differences hummed the same question: Can I actually do this?

That first afternoon, a dozen of us sat around a wooden table with notebooks open, with salt air prickling our faces, trying to form the first words that would introduce us. It felt precarious, squinting in the strong Sicilian sunlight, putting pen to paper in front of strangers, revealing ourselves not by jobs or geography but through our writing. It is a peculiar thing to write in public - the intimacy of thought suddenly exposed. But here we were, under the guidance of and Demet Güzey, asked to do just that repeatedly: to write, to read aloud, to be seen.

Sicily has always been a crossroads. Invaded by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spanish, each leaving their imprint on the island’s architecture, language, and food. The island absorbed them all and recast them into something uniquely Sicilian. Writing on that terrace, I realised we were doing the same thing. We were taking the scattered parts of our lives - our professions, migrations, heartbreaks, and hungers - and trying to recast them into stories that might mean something to someone else.

The workshop settled into a simple rhythm. Mornings were spent finding inspiration - either by exploring the island or in conversation that stretched between technique and memory, craft and confession. Afternoons, we gathered on the terrace, reading drafts into the wind. Some pieces were polished, evidently written by people who had been honing their craft for years. Others were raw, barely formed yet vulnerable. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the courage it took to speak them into existence. Listening to others speak stripped away my own caution. I learned just as much by listening to others frame their lives as by working on my own pages.

Halfway through the workshop, we abandoned the terrace and drove inland to , owned and run by the lovely Fabio and Annarella. The landscape changed dramatically: coastal drama giving way to agricultural practicality, olive groves, and carob and almond and pistachio trees stretching toward a sun-bleached sky.

Lunch was set on a long table in a glass walled room annexed to a large kitchen, looking out to the fields rolling outward in every direction. The table was set without ceremony: local wine, small plates, and the soft scrape of chairs on terracotta tile. The food mirrored the honesty of the workshop itself: dishes stripped of any pretence, built from what the farm could offer that morning.

The first plates to arrive were of homemade bread, grilled just long enough for the crust to char slightly and the centres to remain chewy. Olive oil, green and peppery, was poured with abandon that only comes from owning the trees yourself. Fresh pecorino sat in a shallow pool of more oil and herbs, soft and elastic. A bowl of salami, unassuming but surprisingly spicy, rounded out the first course.

Then came fresh vegetables from the farm, cooked simply and only long enough to coax the flavours that the soil and earth that already accomplished. Roasted red peppers, sweet and melting. Thinly sliced zucchini, grilled, with shaved aged pecorino. Eggplant, grilled then soaked in a perfectly balanced sherry vinegar. Potatoes and Sicilian cucuzza (gourd) stewed until their edges softened into one another. Pumpkin on a bed of fresh ricotta. Riso al forno (baked rice) in a light tomato sauce, finished with ricotta salata and parsley oil.

And finally, grainy Modica chocolate set alongside strips of dried lemon rind, the bitterness and citrus playing off each other in an argument that ends in grudging respect. The final flourish, small glasses of limoncello, yellow and almost medicinal, burning and sweet in equal measure.

The flavours were simple but reflected depth, each plate carrying the memory of the soil it came from. But what I tasted wasn’t just flavour - it was permission. Permission to take up space at the table. To claim a place in the lineage of people who have always understood that food is never just food. To believe that my story, too, could belong.

We passed dishes back and forth, refilled wine for one another, and drifted in and out of conversations. The meal became a kind of communion. An acknowledgement that we were no longer strangers circling each other warily, but something closer to a tribe. By the time the chocolate arrived, we were laughing easily, the edges between us blurred. I looked around and thought: this is what it feels like to belong, even briefly, to a group of people who understand the shape of your hunger.

Food writing can be a lonely pursuit. You spend hours interrogating a single sentence, wondering if your metaphors are too precious, if your memories matter to anyone but you. Sitting at that long table, I understood that the antidote to that solitary journey isn’t validation. It’s being witnessed. Being seen in your fumbling attempts to capture something ephemeral and true. The simple relief of having someone hear your words and say, “I know exactly what you mean.”

When I think back to that week, I fondly remember the terrace and the farm table. More than that though, I remember the people and their voices. Tentative at first, then surer and stronger. The silence after someone read something true. The easy laughter that followed. How quickly we recognised ourselves in each other’s stories.

What surprised me was how quickly the layers fell away. Perhaps it was Sicily, with its endless capacity to hold history and reinvention side by side. Perhaps it was the simple fact that everyone who had travelled here was on the cusp of something. Everyone was in motion - starting again, recalibrating, or searching for momentum. That shared vulnerability made us braver with each other. I found myself sharing my truth more openly in four days than I sometimes do with friends I’ve known for years.

We arrived as strangers, each carrying our own uncertainty, and left with something sturdier. Not certainty; that’s too much to ask. But proof that even in a craft that demands solitude, community can take root.

Sicily didn’t erase doubt. It just gave it company. Voices, sunlight, salt, and the knowledge that new beginnings don’t have to happen alone.

—
Not all those who wander are lost – some of us are just looking for the perfect table to write around.

Ankita

—

By the time I moved to Barcelona, I was nearly thirty, had lived in four countries, and could pack my life into two suitcases in under an hour. India, the United States, France, and now Spain. I knew how to say goodbye in six languages, how to adapt just enough to blend in without ever truly arriving. I was used to starting over, to the ritual of reinvention.

What I didn’t know was how to stay.

When you’ve lived in too many cities, you start wondering if you’ll ever feel truly claimed by one. Something in me had begun to ache for rootedness. For belonging that doesn’t come with an expiration date stamped on a visa.

In my Barcelona flat, I had a balcony with just enough space for two chairs and a view that stretched to the silhouette of Tibidabo, sitting proudly atop the city. This balcony gave me a front-row seat to a ritual that repeated itself every evening. Just across the street, around six o’clock, locals would line up outside a Basque pintxo bar. Always the same crowd. Older men in pressed trousers, elegant women with lacquered hair and determination. The occasional solitary regular, familiar and unhurried.

For months, I watched from my balcony, never crossing the street. Eventually, curiosity won. I crossed the street, stepped inside, and instantly regretted waiting that long.

The Theatre of the Bar

There is something beautifully defiant about finding a Basque establishment thriving in the heart of Catalonia. Two cultures united in their fierce independence and culinary reverence, each proudly distinct yet somehow harmonious in their shared appreciation for life’s sensory pleasures.

Hidden in plain sight, it sat nondescript and almost indifferent to its own presence. Inside, it was wood-panelled warmth, sharp edges softened by time. The dining room was where families celebrated milestones. The bar counter was where life happened.

I walked in tentatively and took the second barstool from the end. The bar stretched before me, lined with cold pintxos glistening under soft light. Gildas skewered with olives and pickled peppers. Anchovies draped over bread like silver ribbons. Thin slices of marbled jamón ibérico. Marinated red peppers, glossy and sweet.

The bar, however, offers far more than merely a casual dining option. It presents theatre in its purest form. You perch on stools, side by side with strangers who, after sharing in the collective gasp whenever a fresh plate of hot pintxos emerges from the kitchen, quickly become accomplices in your culinary adventure. Heads turn. Hands reach. The ritual begins.

My first morcilla arrived dark, almost charcoal black, crisped at the edges where it had kissed the plancha. I bit through the crackling skin into something earthy and spiced, rice-studded and rich with paprika. It left a faint metallic sweetness on my palate, the kind that makes you close your eyes and reach for your wine. This was more than blood sausage. This was tradition, geography, identity compressed into a single bite.

Then the chistorra. Bright red, smoky, glistening with its own paprika-spiked oil. I watched it emerge from the kitchen, still spitting fat, and felt a Pavlovian thrill. The first bite released a flood of spice and garlic, the casing snapping cleanly, the interior soft and almost molten. I asked for another, right away.

But it was the tigres that stopped me cold. Fried mussels, golden and glistening, their shells refilled with thick, savoury béchamel. Sweet onions, chopped mussels, smoky paprika, all breaded and fried until the crumb shattered between your teeth. Crunch, then cream, then the briny sweetness of mussel. A classic pintxo from Bilbao, labour-intensive and increasingly rare. The bartender explained in halting Spanish that few places made them anymore. Too much work for too little profit. They were disappearing.

He then poured my txakoli from high above the glass in the way only Basques know how, in a long, arcing stream, bubbles breaking against glass like applause.

I went back to the bar the following week. Then again.

The Slow Architecture of Belonging

Over months, something shifted. I learned the rhythm. Which pintxos emerged at 7:30PM. The exact moment to ask for foie gras so it arrived caramelised and golden. I watched how regulars never asked for menus. They just raised a brow, pointed with their chin. The entire transaction was about trust.

There was Miguel, who claimed the corner stool every evening at seven sharp. Jamón ibérico, membrillo, three glasses of Rioja. Always. He spoke to the bartender about football with the easy familiarity of decades. When he noticed me listening, he would gleefully translate the particularly colourful commentary about Real Madrid’s latest disaster, grinning at my attempts to follow along. Once, he slid a piece of jamón onto my plate without a word. “Pata Negra from Jabugo. Taste.” It dissolved on my tongue, nutty and sweet, nothing like the jamón I’d had before. He nodded, satisfied with my reaction.

Carmen appeared on Thursdays, silver-haired and imperious, carrying herself like minor royalty. She would perch delicately on the stool beside me, order a single glass of cava and two croquetas, then proceed to offer unsolicited advice about everything from my lipstick choice to Catalonia’s economic policies. Her English was impeccable, her opinions unfiltered. “You eat too much foie,” she announced one evening. “It’s not good for digestion.” Then she would order another round for both of us.

The bartender was part mystery, part legend. Unsmiling, unhurried, unbothered. He worked with the grace of someone who has done this long enough to do it in silence. He started greeting me with a nod. Then half a smile. He poured my txakoli before I ordered it. Raised an eyebrow when I veered from my usual pintxos. Once, when I brought a friend, he added an extra plate without a word. It wasn’t friendliness. It was something more valuable: familiarity, recognition. And in a place where I still conjugated verbs slowly, it felt like grace.

I never told the bartender my name. He never asked. But when I slid onto that second stool from the end, I was known. As the person who timed her arrival for the first wave of tigres. Who ate chistorra with her hands when it was too hot to wait. Who had stopped apologising for her Spanish.

One evening, I gathered courage to say thank you in Basque. “Eskerrik asko.”

He stopped mid-pour. Met my eye properly for the first time. “Ondo,” he said softly. Good. Then added, “Etorri berriz.” Come back again.

It was the simplest thing. An instruction I had heard a thousand times in a hundred restaurants across a dozen countries. But sitting there with a dozen spent pintxo sticks piled on my plate, I felt something crack open in my chest. He wasn’t being polite. He meant it. He had noticed I might not come back.

Belonging, I came to understand, reveals itself not in grand gestures but in the smallest acknowledgements. Briefly, unexpectedly, across a marble counter, handed to you in the shape of a bubbling glass. A bartender’s nod that can feel like citizenship when you’ve been stateless for too long. Being expected. Being missed when you don’t show up.

The Return

The bartender had no idea he was offering me something I hadn’t realised I was desperately seeking. In a life built on departure dates and visa renewals, he gave me the gift of routine.

How it lingered long after I left Barcelona, moved to another country, learned another set of greetings.

Two years later, while living in London, I visited Barcelona again. Walking the same streets with the particular nostalgia reserved for places that once held you, I stepped into the bar. The bartender looked up from polishing glasses. “¡Cuánto tiempo!” Not a question. A statement tinged with something that sounded almost like reproach, as if I’d been late to dinner, not absent for two years.

He poured my txakoli without asking. The same long arc, the same satisfying break of bubbles against glass. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. I heard rapid Basque, urgentand low. He emerged moments later with a plate of tigres, still crackling from the fryer, golden and perfect.

“For you,” he said in careful English. “We still make them.”

I sat on the second stool from the end, and the tears I had been holding since I walked through the door finally came. For a moment, in a city I no longer lived in, speaking a language I still hadn’t mastered, I felt completely at home.

--

Not all those who wander are lost – some of us are simply searching for a home that holds both our stories and our selves.

Ankita

--

The air here carries stories, born of a landscape thick with flora and fauna found nowhere else. Some mornings it smells of wild mint and fresh figs. Others it is eucalyptus, seaweed, and the thick sweetness of mangoes splitting on the tree.

In Funchal’s giant fruit market I moved from stall to stall with sticky fingers and greedy eyes, the tiles damp under our feet, the air bright with chatter and scraping knives. Pyramids of custard apples, dragon fruit freckled like stars, physalis peering from papery lanterns, pink guava like blushing pink sunsets. The tiniest bananas looked like toys until the first bite flooded our tastebuds with caramel sugar. And then the delicioso, a fruit disguised as a green cob of corn, each hexagonal scale peeling back to reveal pale, custard-like flesh. The taste was curious and compelling, banana’s creaminess colliding with pineapple’s bright acidity, leaving a lingering perfume of both.

I tasted a flight of passion fruits as if working through a wine list: maracuja roxa with a tart purple burst; the yellow kind dripping with honeyed warmth; small orange beads that tasted like punchy citrus; banana maracuja finishing soft and perfumed. The vendor cracked them in half with a practiced twist, the seeds glinting and popping under our teeth. Every bite tasted like the island was letting us in on its secret, a little further each time.

Our hotel was perched on the edge of this oceanic theatre, its back to the town and its face turned fully towards the horizon. Every evening, we walked the promenade that curved gently along the cliff, watching the sky melt into the Atlantic in colours that felt too lush to put into words. It was during one of these aimless wanderings that we stumbled upon something extraordinary.

Sitting on the edge of a cliff was a restaurant that jutted audaciously into the ocean. The terrace stretched across three sides of the promontory, completely surrounded by churning Atlantic waters. Each table offered a different perspective of the ocean, but my favourite became the one where I could watch waves crash against the rocks below with primal fury. Sometimes the crash sent a fine mist arcing over the balustrade, cool droplets landing on my skin as if the sea insisted on joining the meal. It left salt on my lips before the food even arrived.

The seafood was as fresh as it possibly could be, caught that morning, barely an hour out of the water before it reached our plates. Mussels arrived first, giant and briny, swimming in garlicky golden broth, the kind you want to chase with hunks of bread until the bowl is wiped clean of every last drop.

This was followed by black scabbard fish (Madeira’s famous and most menacing looking fish) with grilled bananas, that odd marriage of sweet and savoury that only makes sense once you taste it.

But the crab was the moment. I was transfixed. A platter dressed in citrus and tomato, claws piled high, the shell filled with a careful mix of white and golden meat. It looked like abundance. Cracking into the claws released a breath of fresh sea air and lemon carried up in the steam. The meat was still warm, and there was a faint iodine sweetness in the air, as if the Atlantic had been reduced to perfume.

Learning to deconstruct a whole crab is part determination, part skill. Shell fragments scatter across the table like pottery shards as you excavate sweet, delicate meat from hidden chambers. Your hands become tools, your fingers archaeologists uncovering treasure. The juices end up everywhere, baptising your clothes, your hands, your arms in the essence of the ocean. There's no dignity in eating crab properly, only surrender to the messy, glorious process.

The white meat was clean and delicate tasting. Sweet in the way only fresh shellfish can be, with just a hint of brine that sharpened its edges. It tasted bright, citrus-kissed. Then the darker treasure, scooped from the centre. The brown meat was nothing like its pale counterpart. Dense, unctuous, almost custard-like in texture, it carried the weight of minerals and time. Deeply savoury, with a faint tang, it spread across the palate like ocean butter, leaving behind a richness that felt both primal and luxurious.

Then there’s the poncha. Madeira's legendary cocktail that masquerades as innocent refreshment whilst silently plotting your downfall. Aguardente de cana (fermented sugarcane liquor), fresh lemon juice, and honey, whipped together with a wooden spoon called a caralhinho. One could also add passion fruit, until the concoction becomes something transcendent. The first poncha tastes like sunshine in liquid form. The second makes you believe you could conquer mountains. By the third, you've forgotten why you ever planned to leave this island.

We found ourselves back on that clifftop terrace three times in a single week. Three times we gave in to poncha’s seductive burn, three times we cracked into crab as the sun dissolved into the Atlantic. It was the sort of place that loosened the grip of ordinary life. One minute you’re licking salt from your fingers, the next you’re convinced you should move here forever, trade deadlines for tides. Epiphanies arrive unannounced with the sea spray, and for an hour or two you believe yourself a philosopher.

Was it the poncha or the setting that intoxicated us? The drink's deceptive sweetness or the hypnotic crash of waves against stone? Perhaps it was the combination, a perfect storm of sensory overload and liquid courage that made rational thought dissolve like sugar in rum.

On our final visit, somewhere between the second and third round of poncha, we made a decision that would have horrified our sensible London selves. We postponed our flight. Extended our stay by another week.

We said it was for the weather. Or the ocean. Or that we hadn’t explored the mountains yet.

But really, it was for that crab. That terrace. That salt on our skin. That poncha-fuelled delirium. The way Madeira had slowly, stealthily pulled us into its rhythm.

That spontaneous extra week became the stuff of legend, but that's a story for another sunset, another moment when the world spins just slowly enough to let magic slip in.

—

Not all those who wander are lost – some of us are forever missing flights for one more crab by the Atlantic.

Ankita

—

But what happens when your memories are built on borrowed land, and the flavours that feel most like home don’t come from the place you were born? What if the dishes that soothe you, that anchor you, that spark hunger at the most inconvenient hour, speak not your mother tongue but a borrowed one?

For the first eighteen years of my life, I was an “eggetarian” - vegetarian with a loophole for eggs, because how else does one grow up without french toast and masala omelettes? I didn’t grow up with brisket or bacon, or jamón ibérico or braised beef, but they’ve since become part of my culinary DNA, tucked into the folds of my daily vocabulary alongside anchovies in olive oil and pork belly and lamb shoulder. I learned to eat southern fried chicken before I ever tasted a Bengali daab chingri (coconut prawns) curry. I’ve sat at counters in Barcelona and Brooklyn, slowly absorbing the grammar of other people’s comfort food until it felt like it belonged to me too. And in a way, each dish I’ve learned to love has written a little more of me.

And maybe that’s the thing. I’ve moved so much, so often, that I never felt obligated to define my identity by where I was born. Or even by where I was living at any given moment. I learned early on that identity isn’t a fixed point. It shifts. It evolves. It learns things. And so, too, do our tastebuds. Each bite a choice, a transformation, a small act of becoming.

Cultural Fluency, One Bite at a Time

It started with chicken. I was eighteen and far from Calcutta, awkwardly navigating freshman year in the American South, holding my tray with the kind of stage fright that only a dining hall full of strangers can induce. I remember staring at my first piece of Southern fried chicken – unsure if I was going to like it, but certain that I needed to try it. Taste, in those years, wasn’t instinctive. It was strategic. I was building cultural fluency, one bite at a time.

But slowly, it shifted. Curiosity took over. And what began as adaptation grew into affection.

By my second year, I was ordering chicken wings with the casual confidence of someone who belonged at sports bars. I learned the difference between Texas and Carolina barbecue, developed strong opinions about proper burger construction, could navigate a deli counter without panic. My Indian friends back home teased me about "turning American," but they misunderstood the alchemy occurring.

Indian food didn’t capture the full range of who I was becoming - and I did not want to be perceived as only that. Just an Indian girl with a masala-scented backstory, when inside I felt layered, ambiguous, and wildly elsewhere. I’ve always carried pieces of the places I’ve lived and visited, and maybe even a few I haven’t yet reached. And I wanted to be seen in full colour, not reduced to a single line of heritage.

Food, I discovered, is the most honest form of assimilation. You can fake an accent, memorise cultural references, even adopt new mannerisms, but your palate doesn't lie. It remembers every flavour that ever mattered to you, carries them like ancestral memory. Yet it can also be startlingly adaptable, willing to expand its vocabulary with each new taste, each small act of culinary courage.

Becoming by Eating

When I moved to Spain, I taught myself to eat seafood beyond shellfish. Not out of necessity, but out of desire. I wanted to understand the food I saw revered around me. I started with calamari, graduated to anchovies, followed by whole fish whose eyes no longer accusingly met mine. I also grew fond of morcilla, of txistorra, of sitting at the bar and letting the pintxos arrive hot from the kitchen while my glass of txakoli fizzed on the counter. Food became not just a way of participating, but a way of belonging.

Each new taste was a small border crossing, a passport stamp on my palate. I wasn't trying to become Spanish; I was becoming someone whose hunger could be satisfied by what the place had to offer.

London and the Language of Longing

Now, in London, my kitchen tells its own story. I don’t cook Indian food often. Not because I’ve left it behind, but because it no longer rises to the surface unprompted. I don’t instinctively reach for mustard seeds or cumin or kasuri methi. My hands go instead to other spices and condiments - sumac, gochugaru, Aleppo chilli, black vinegar, achiote.

My pantry is a small atlas of heat and memory: a dozen hot sauces from Mexico, another dozen chilli oils from China, India, Thailand. Japanese miso and yuzu kosho. Homemade Indian lemon pickles and tamarind pulp in a recycled jam jar. Mustards from Dijon, England, and Bengal. Korean gochujang. Buffalo hot sauce. It is chaotic. It is multilingual. It is entirely me.

And London does something strange to memory. It fogs it, fractures it, demands that you curate it consciously. Here, your identity is a collage of where you’ve been, edited through accent, postcode, and Waitrose orders. And food - glorious, generous, multi-everything London food - becomes the language you use to translate yourself.

Appetite as Identity

My cravings don't respect borders or culinary traditions. I wake up desperate for tlacoyos from that Mexico City street cart I visited once - thick, earthy, filled with beans and pressed flat over a comal, crisp-edged and comforting. I feel genuine longing for a proper American biscuit, buttery and flaking, drowning in silken sausage gravy. I also dream about my grandmother's perfectly spiced samosas occasionally.

None of these cravings come from one place. And that, perhaps, is the point. This is when I realised my palate had become something entirely my own. No longer was I consciously trying to fit in through food choices. Instead, I was creating a personal cuisine that reflected every place I'd ever called home, every flavour that had ever mattered. What began as a quiet attempt to belong has transformed into something far richer.

Identity, for me, is not geography. It's not even history. It's appetite. And my identity, like my palate, is a mosaic - built from colourful pieces collected over time. Bits of memory and accident, of deliberate effort and serendipitous discovery. I’ve never felt tethered to one cuisine or one language. My sense of self has always been porous, shaped more by the people I’ve met and the tables I’ve sat at than by any singular origin. And over time, the food that comforts me has stopped matching up with the food I was raised on.

My friends often ask about my "comfort food," expecting me to name something definitively Indian, something that connects me to childhood and tradition. But comfort, for me, is more complex. It's the perfect crisp-bottomed sheng jian bao from a Shanghai basement restaurant, the way the soup bursts hot and rich on your tongue. It's a medium-rare beef burger at a neighbourhood dive bar in Manhattan at 2 AM, juice running down your wrists. It’s a plate of chilaquiles in salsa verde, the chips just crispy enough, tangled with crema and queso, eaten in a local market.

I used to feel the need to explain it all. To connect the dots. To make a case for why someone like me - born in India, shaped in the US, tempered in Spain, now based in London - might feel completely at home cooking chicken tostadas one day and pork kra pau the next.

But I don’t need to justify it anymore. Because this is what it means to belong everywhere and nowhere. To collect flavours like souvenirs, only to realise they’ve become part of you. To crave not out of nostalgia, but out of recognition. To be able to taste something and know, instinctively, that it’s yours - even if it never was before.

—

Not all those who wander are lost - some of us are just piecing together who we are, one dish at a time.

Ankita

--

For weeks before my arrival in Taipei, I had consumed a steady digital diet of glistening beef noodle soup portraits, towering xiaolongbao steam shots, and that particular brand of night market chaos that makes for perfect content. Social media had promised me a greatest hits compilation of Taiwanese cuisine: bubble tea on every corner, stinky tofu adventures, and oyster omelettes that walk the fine line between delicacy and dare. These were the dishes designed to dazzle, to be posted, to be checked off a bucket list.

But Paula, with the kind of generous smile that dissolves cultural boundaries instantly, had entirely different plans.

"Come," she offered, "eat with my family. We will take you to a place that’s very popular with locals, don’t worry."

I didn’t ask questions. I arrived hungry.

The Flavour of Unscripted Hospitality

The seafood restaurant Paula chose bore no resemblance to the viral hotspots cluttering my Instagram feed. No menu. No narrative. No queue of tourists rehearsing their pronunciation of lu rou fan. It was a neighbourhood institution where her family had been gathering for years, the kind of place that exists purely for the pleasure of those who understand its particular language.

Small porcelain tea cups were already being poured by the time I slipped into my seat. She and her husband did the ordering, of course. In a rhythm too fast for me to follow, they rattled off dishes to the server, the list deliciously long – just long enough to be slightly alarming for a table of four.

Paula was a friend of a friend of a friend. I’d never met her, or her family, before that night. But here I was, a traveller freshly scrubbed from the city’s humidity, being folded into a family dinner in the heart of Taipei like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The first plate hit the table before the greetings had finished.

It was a plate of century eggs with slivered pickled ginger, looking deceptively modest. The jellied whites were glowing like amber, similar to the colour of black tea left to steep a while. The yolks had that funky grey-green colour particular to foods Western media once called “challenging” before learning better. They were silken, faintly pungent, and surprisingly lush. These eggs had fascinated me ever since I read how century eggs were traditionally cured in clay and ash, not aged for a hundred years as the name suggests – but they had always intimidated me, just enough to have kept me from ever trying them.

Slightly hesitant, I took my first bite. The flavour was savoury, gently funky, tamed by the clean snap of ginger. It was a palate-starter, a wink of welcome before the real feast began. "I wasn’t expecting this at all," I exclaimed, as Paula watched me savour the silky texture. "I thought this would be strange, but it tastes very earthy. Almost subtle!"

The Gospel of Gentle Flavours

This wasn’t a meal of dishes arriving in order. It was a constellation. Plates appeared in waves, overlapping each other. You learned to reach, then retreat. To pass, then pause. There was a sequence, but it wasn’t linear. It was intuitive.

The first plate, lobster still in its shell, sang in its simplicity. Not whole and dramatic as one might expect, but cleaved into pieces. The large chunks of the “just out of the water tank” lobster were bathed in a buttery, glossy, golden-yellow sauce that pooled like liquid silk, covering a tangle of noodles underneath. The dish was shockingly restrained. Each bite melted in the mouth like sweet ocean-scented butter, the kind of minimalism that reminds you why great cooks often do less, not more.

The roast chicken appeared next, golden and glistening, the tender meat falling apart with a nudge of chopsticks. It was cooked with the kind of attention that transforms the mundane into the sublime. A small saucer of pink salt and white pepper sat beside it, untouched. It needed nothing.

But it was the youtiao that truly ambushed my expectations. Stuffed with prawns and scallions, the youtiao arrived golden and defiant, a far cry from the breakfast version I had met at street stalls. These little parcels were crisp on the outside, soft and gently seafood-rich on the inside. They arrived next to a shallow bowl of soy-vinegar dipping sauce with dancing slices of red chillies and scallions. Together, they were addictively savoury.

The Art of the Understated

The procession continued with a slice of steamed radish rice cake in a pool of umami-rich fish sauce, topped with scallions and fragrant sesame oil. It looked plain. It was anything but. The rice was soft but held shape, the radish giving it bite and personality, the sauce anchoring it in umami.

There were prawns too - grilled, unflashy, but deeply seasoned - and at some point, peanuts and pickled things arrived. I stopped keeping track.

Then came my favourite: sweet and sticky crispy pork glazed in plum sauce that managed to be both familiar and completely foreign, each piece lacquered to perfection, balancing sweet and savoury in a way that made me understand why Paula's eyes had lit up when ordering it. I had seconds. Maybe thirds.

I grew up believing “flavour” meant big. Heat, acid, crunch. Here, it meant balance. Slightly sweet, barely sour, and an undertone of umami. The nuanced texture between crackle and chew. The interval between a crisp batter and what it reveals inside.

The dessert course caught me entirely off guard. It wasn’t the finale I had anticipated, or one I even knew existed! Plain youtiao served with a large bowl of creamy dessert soup made of walnut, peanut, and coconut milk. Warm, nutty, and gently sweet - it was the kind of thing you eat with your fingers and forget you’re at a restaurant. Just you, and a piece of fried dough, disappearing into a warmth of nostalgia you didn’t know was waiting.

Between Worlds

Later, perhaps to test my own convictions or simply to satisfy some lingering doubt, I wandered alone through a night market that suddenly felt obligatorily touristy after such intimacy. There was comfort in surrendering to the familiar script: the one where travellers dutifully tick boxes and photograph bowls for the folks back home.

I found myself queuing for taro balls like everyone else, following the social media breadcrumbs that had led me to Taiwan in the first place. There's something oddly soothing about conforming to travel's greatest hits, about ordering what the internet tells you to order. It removes the burden of choice, the weight of discovery. You simply point, pay, and consume what everyone else has deemed worthy of consumption.

The dessert arrived as advertised: tapioca pearls and silky tofu pudding crowned with chewy taro balls, all swimming in a lime-brightened bath that was mildly sweet, bright and citrusy, and utterly refreshing in the balmy 32C evening. The textures played against each other like a well-rehearsed circus, each bite bringing in a new act - slippery soft tofu, bouncy tapioca, and taro bringing in the flourish.

But sitting there in the night market's neon glow, I felt the strange hollowness that comes from eating something because you're supposed to rather than because you crave it. The dessert was lovely, genuinely delicious, and everything the reviews had claimed. Yet it existed in an entirely different emotional universe from the meal I had just shared, separated not by quality but by context, by the presence or absence of human connection threading through each bite.

The Other Side of Beloved

I understood something crucial about culture and cuisine that perhaps I hadn’t seen so clearly before. It wasn't that the beef noodle soup and xiao long bao flooding my social feeds were tourist traps or cultural fabrications. They're genuinely adored here, woven into the fabric of daily life, utterly authentic and rightfully celebrated.

I had eaten them all during my stay: the soul-warming lu rou fan with its glossy braised pork belly clinging to rice, the precise architecture of the gua bao with the pork belly and toppings, the complex broths of beef noodle soup that take days to build their depth. Each dish was a masterpiece, beloved for excellent reason.

But here's what the internet's greatest hits compilation misses: these dishes represent just one register of Taiwanese eating. They're the fortissimo moments in a cuisine that speaks fluent pianissimo as well. The seafood restaurant Paula chose operates in an entirely different emotional key, one that prizes subtlety over spectacle.

The internet amplifies what translates easily across cultures: the dramatic, the recognisable, the dishes that need no cultural context to understand their appeal. But Paula's family dinner existed in the spaces between the famous dishes, in the sophisticated restraint that lets perfect ingredients sing without amplification.

This is the paradox of food tourism in the social media age: we are simultaneously getting closer to authentic cuisine and further from it. Closer because these viral dishes genuinely matter to locals. Further because the attention they receive crowds out equally authentic experiences that simply don't photograph as well or translate as easily into content.

The taro balls dissolving on my tongue weren't better than the sweet lobster I had devoured earlier. They were different, operating in a parallel universe of Taiwanese taste where gentle pleasures hold equal weight to dramatic ones.

Both are authentic. Both matter. But only one gets the spotlight, leaving travellers such as myself accidentally stumbling into the other half of the story, the part that exists not despite the famous dishes, but alongside them, creating a cuisine far richer and more nuanced than any viral video could contain.

—

Not all those who wander are lost – some of us are just chasing the dishes that never go viral.

Ankita

—

We're living through a curious moment in travel history. Cities from Barcelona to Bali are groaning under the weight of tourism, locals protesting in the streets, authentic experiences commodified beyond recognition. The Instagram-driven food pilgrimage has reduced entire culinary cultures to hashtag-worthy moments. I've been wrestling with this paradox for months: how do we explore without exploiting? How do we travel without becoming part of the problem?

That’s what brought me to this table, to this conversation. I was invited to share a meal with Jaume Mora Pedros. Jaume is a renowned economist, a data strategist, and now a silently determined force reshaping how food, culture, and socioeconomic stewardship intersect. He’s the kind of person who sees opportunity where others see obscurity - a champion for undervalued ingredients, overlooked producers, and food systems that put fairness before flair.

That afternoon’s meal showcased the magic of carob, or algarroba, a legume pod that for centuries has been relegated to animal feed or forgotten altogether in favour of its sexier cousin, cacao.

Ovidi had cooked chicken covered in a black garlic and carob sauce so deep and complex it called to mind mole negro - a rich, layered mix of earthiness, roasted warmth, and something both familiar and new. As I ate, I couldn’t help but reflect on how quickly we, as diners and travellers, dismiss ingredients, and by extension, the people and places behind them, based on old prejudices or trends. Carob, it seems, is a microcosm of how we treat so much of the food world: we chase the exotic while neglecting the treasures beneath our feet.

The conversation meandered through territory I had been mapping in my own mind: the sociology of supper clubs, the economics of food innovation and retail, the possibility that food travel could become a form of cultural diplomacy. Jaume’s story mirrored my own convictions. An economist who grew tired of theories without practice, he opened a restaurant to test his ideas about economic equity. Instead of lecturing about sustainable food systems, he had created one. La Penya, a company founded by Jaume and his partners, became his laboratory for proving that food innovation and travel could serve communities rather than extract from them.

His mission is to empower farmers, protect what they create, and ensure forgotten crops like carob don’t become the next trend enriching middlemen while leaving growers behind. The photos they showed me - of a carob tasting menu designed for a recent event - were just one piece of a larger puzzle. This isn’t about carob alone; it’s about rewriting how we engage with food, land, and the people who tend both.

Jaume is already creating these experiences across the world. His partnership with Dénia (an ancient Mediterranean port town in Marina Alta, recognised by UNESCO for gastronomy) proves a sustainable food travel model is possible: one where gastronomic glory and local prosperity are two sides of the same coin, where tourism and culture enhance rather than erode each other. A place where local fishers, farmers, and chefs collaborate to tell a collective story of land and sea. Visitors can help pick grapes at harvest under the watchful eye of octogenarian farmers; collaborative meals where the grower, the chef, and the guest all share the table as equals; storytelling that traces the journey from pod to plate with stories told by those who live them.

I found myself returning to an uncomfortable truth: too often, food travel today is consumption dressed up as connection. We tick off the latest hotspots without asking who grows the rice, who stirs the stock, who owns the story. We speak of authenticity but rarely ask what it costs the people whose lives we brush up against. Even well-meaning travellers, me included, can become complicit in a system that extracts more than it gives back.

What if every meal became an act of reciprocity rather than consumption? I believe that travel needs to connect diners directly to the land, to the people, to the full messy beautiful truth of how food gets to the plate - the muddy boots, the calloused hands, and long harvests. It means paying into community-run kitchens and co-op funds rather than middlemen. It means choosing itineraries where everything, from food to transport, is sourced locally, and where intellectual property stays with those who create it. It means travelling in smaller groups, staying longer, coming in off-season sometimes - ways that leave more behind than physical and digital footprints. Real sustainability and economic impact need structure, not just sentiment.

Imagine trips that bring you not just to the table, but to the grove at harvest, the vineyard, the fishing boat. Journeys where you shake the farmer’s hand before you taste his rice, where you see the soil that gives the wine its minerality, where you help harvest the carob before you savour its depth in a sauce. These are the experiences that nourish both guest and host, that root us in place rather than skimming its surface. Where the money spent nourishes the community, not just the brand.

And so, as the plates were cleared and the evening drew to a close, I found myself lingering not on the flavours (though they were memorable), but on the ideas they stirred. In a world increasingly divided by the tensions between tourism and authenticity, perhaps the answer isn't found in restricting movement, but in reimagining how we move. Food is always more than flavour; it’s story, it’s connection, it’s choice. And the future of food travel, I'm convinced, lies in the confluence of authentic flavours, cultural immersion, and sustainability. If we dare to get it right, it will demand more of us as travellers. It will ask us to go slower, to look deeper, to spend more meaningfully. To look beyond the plate, to the people, the place, the purpose. The question remains: what kind of traveller do we want to be?

—

Not all those who wander are lost - some of us are just trying to taste the world differently.

Ankita

—

Our first encounter with this extraordinary city (read it here) had already left us spellbound by its culinary duality: ancient and modern, sacred and irreverent. I had written then of the city’s seamless thread from indigenous cornfields to tasting menus, from abuelas grinding mole by hand to young chefs bending tradition. That was exactly the side of Oaxaca I had hungered to experience then. But this time, we were venturing beyond the city's embrace, into the mountainous heart where those traditions were born.

And so, one crisp morning, I found myself boarding a rickety bus at dawn, trading the colourful chaos of the city for the winding roads of the Sierra Norte. The city faded into the rearview, replaced by a landscape that felt untouched by time: rugged hills dotted with agave, the air thickening with the perfume of pine and woodsmoke with every turn.

After an hour, we arrived at a village so small it barely seemed real. A scattering of maybe twenty homes, built the way they must have been for generations. The houses were simple, made from adobe and wood, their tiled roofs sloping gently under the weight of years. Thick walls that breathe with the earth, courtyards that open to the sky, and behind each dwelling, sprawling gardens that blur the line between cultivation and wilderness. Each backyard seemed to stretch endlessly, framed by low stone walls and bursting with fruit trees, herbs, and the occasional wandering chicken or goat. At the edge of these yards stood open barns stacked high with firewood, the logs ready for the fires that fuel both warmth and flavour here.

We had come in search of a woman whose name is spoken with a kind of reverence among those who know. Chef Mimi López. But to call her just a chef would be a disservice. She is a guardian of tradition, a storyteller of masa and the comal, and above all, a woman who cooks as if feeding you is the greatest act of love.

She appeared in her doorway like the embodiment of Oaxacan hospitality itself, her smile wide, her eyes warm, her hands already dusted with masa as if she had been waiting for us. Her embrace felt like coming home to a place I'd never been but somehow always known. Within moments, she was treating us not as curious travellers but as long-lost family members who had finally found their way back to her table.

The Chilmole: Smoke, Stone, and Salsa

"We will start with the chilmole," she announced, as if this were the only sensible way to greet the day. Her hands already reaching for the chilmolera, that sacred grinding stone that's been the heart of Oaxacan kitchens for millennia. The chilmolera is no ordinary mortar and pestle. Its deep basin and rough surface are designed to break down chillies, garlic, and tomatoes in a way that releases their essential oils and coaxes out their deepest flavours.

There was no preamble. No formality. We rolled up our sleeves and began. The salsa that emerged from that chilmolera was unlike anything I'd ever tasted, let alone made. Each ingredient sang with the clarity of morning harvest, the tomatoes still warm from the sun, the chiles carrying the very essence of the soil that birthed them. But it wasn't just the ingredients, though they were perfection. It was the air itself, the crystalline water, the indefinable alchemy that happens when food is made with love in a place where love has seasoned every meal for generations.

Mimi's hands moved with the choreography of someone who'd been dancing this dance since childhood. Our hands followed her rhythm. She spoke of ancient methods with the passion of a scholar and the tenderness of a mother, caressing each ingredient as if it were precious beyond measure. Her stories wove through the preparation like smoke through the kitchen, tales of growing up in these mountains, of learning at her grandmother's side, of the deep, abiding love that still fills her every time she steps into this space.

Tamales Wrapped in Ritual

The tamales we crafted next were flavour-packed marvels wrapped in corn husks. Coarse-ground masa mixed with generous amounts of pork lard (Mimi's hands never hesitating as she added what seemed like impossible quantities), fresh parsley, and the herbs that make Oaxacan cuisine sing. Epazote, the pungent, gasoline-scented leaf that transforms everything it touches, adding an earthiness that's both ancient and alive. Hoja santa, the massive heart-shaped leaves that taste like anise and pepper had a beautiful, aromatic child.

We blended these herbs with jalapeños and chile serrano, creating a verdant paste that we strained again and again until it reached a silk-like perfection. The mixture was spread across corn husks - a choice more typical of central Mexico, but that day, it was what our hands worked with, what Mimi had at hand. The masa cradled the pulled pork like a gift, each tamal wrapped tightly, ready for the steam to work its magic. Though Oaxacan tamales are so often cloaked in banana leaves, their grassy aroma sealing in moisture and lending a subtle grassy sweetness, ours carried the imprint of the husk - a different kind of earthiness, but no less bound to the land. And as always, they were about the mole. Black mole, yellow mole, red mole - complex, layered sauces that are less condiment, more centrepiece.

We gathered around the steaming pot, each of us cradling a carefully wrapped parcel of masa, pork, and herbs. The tamales, glossy and fragrant, were tied into neat little bundles, their folds holding the promise of something sacred. There’s a tradition here - una bendición sencilla - a quiet blessing whispered over each tamal as it’s placed gently into the steamer. A few murmured words, a touch of the hand, a hope that it cooks evenly, tenderly, perfectly. It felt ceremonial, this act of stacking them inside the pot, the steam rising like prayers as we bid them goodbye. The pot lid was placed on with care, sealing in both heat and intention.

Mole Negro: A Sauce, A Story

This brings me to the mole negro - the true test of our devotion.

Mole negro is so much more than a sauce. It is history rendered edible, ritual disguised as food, a dish that holds within it the weight of centuries. No other dish in the world demands so many ingredients, nor weaves them together with such patience and reverence. The list is a poem of the land’s abundance: rare chiles, seeds, nuts, fruits, spices, bread, chocolate - each element charred, toasted, ground, folded in, like a litany, like prayer. Mole is not made in haste; it is coaxed into being through time and toil, every stroke of the grinding stone an offering. Born from indigenous traditions and refined over centuries, mole negro is both history lesson and love letter, a sauce so complex it defies description. It is a story - of land and loss, resilience and reverence, love and labour - carried forward one simmering pot at a time. And if there's a dish that embodies the soul of Oaxaca, it's this obsidian masterpiece.

Mimi rattled off the ingredients and I gave up trying to keep track. There were too many. Chilhuacle negro chillies (rare, smoky, precious), plantains, raisins, almonds, pumpkin seeds, sesame, cloves, cinnamon, cumin, garlic, onions, bread, tortillas, lard, chocolate - the list went on. Most of these ingredients we charred on the comal until they were nearly burnt, their bitterness essential to the final depth of flavour.

We then ground everything by hand in the metate (a flat volcanic stone), our sweat literally seasoning the mixture as we worked. The labour was meditative, each stroke of the stone releasing fragrances that filled the kitchen with promises of what was to come. Hours passed in this rhythm, the mole slowly transforming from collection of ingredients into something that felt almost alive.

As the mole simmered low and slow, we turned our attention to rice, but not as I'd ever experienced it. Mimi instructed me to fry mountains of onions and garlic until they were golden and fragrant, then remove them, leaving behind oil that had captured their essence. Into this perfumed oil went the rice, each grain toasted until it was gently brown, before broth and herbs were added and the whole thing left to simmer into aromatic perfection.

Learning to make tortillas under Mimi's watchful eye was like receiving a masterclass in intuition. The masa had to feel just right, soft but not sticky, pliable but not weak. Her hands guided mine as we formed perfect circles, teaching me to feel for the moment when the dough was ready, how to press the dough using a tortilladora, and then finally placing it gently on the comal to see them puffing into magical balloons that signal tortilla perfection.

A Feast of Memory and Meaning

At last, it was time to sit down and savour what we had created. Lunch unfolded in courses. First, we scooped our chilmole salsa onto memelas, thick corn cakes hot off the comal, their edges crisp, their centres tender. Slathered with black beans, crowned with crumbly cotija, they were the perfect canvas for that smoky, fiery salsa.

When the tamales were ready, the husks had darkened, their aroma deepened. We unwrapped them at the table, the steam escaping in a fragrant rush - earthy, herbal, faintly sweet from the hoja santa and epazote, with a gentle hit of smoke from the husk itself. The masa was tender, coarse enough to feel rustic on the tongue, but soft and yielding. The pork filling was rich and juicy, tinged with the chiles in the masa. Every bite felt like it carried the land with it: the brightness of the herbs, the warmth of the lard, the faint, grassy bitterness from the husk.

The mole negro arrived at the table in all its dark, glistening splendour, ladled generously over tender pieces of chicken that had been cooked just long enough to fall apart at the lightest touch. Alongside it sat the fragrant rice, each grain infused with the warmth of garlic and onion, ready to soak up every drop of that complex, velvety sauce.

Unsurprisingly the mole negro was the crescendo, the moment when everything we had worked for came together in a single, transcendent bowl. The depth of flavour was staggering, layer upon layer of complexity that revealed new ingredients with each taste: the initial smokiness, then the warmth of cinnamon, the slow build of heat from the chillies, the faintest sweetness from the dried fruit. The chocolate Mimi had made herself provided a base note that grounded the entire symphony, while dozens of other ingredients contributed their own melodies to this edible orchestra.

Rooted in Reverence

Cooking and eating in that courtyard, surrounded by ingredients that had grown in the very soil beneath our feet, tasting flavours that had been perfected over generations, I understood something profound about the relationship between place and palate. It felt like intimacy. With the land, with tradition, with the countless hands that had shaped these techniques over centuries.

The harmony wasn't just in our tastebuds, though they were certainly singing. It was in the understanding that we had been invited into something intimate - a way of cooking, of living, where every ingredient, every technique, every tool carries meaning. In Mimi’s kitchen, beneath the watchful mountains of Oaxaca, we had certainly eaten well. But we had also touched, however briefly, the roots of a place and the people who keep its stories alive through what they feed you.

—

Not all those who wander are lost - some of us are just looking for the perfect mole negro.

Ankita

—

I found sustenance almost immediately, as one does in Shanghai - a city where food vendors appear every ten paces. A street-side stall frying scallion pancakes beckoned, steam rising from the griddle like swirling dragons. It was the kind of place where locals begin to queue right after dawn for treasures that won't survive the lunch hour. One pancake emerged golden and crisp, its layers flaking apart to reveal pockets of fragrant oil and emerald spring onion.

Thus fortified, I made my way to Yu Garden, that jewel of classical Chinese architecture where tourists arrive in waves. Eight years had passed since I last travelled alone, and I was out of practice. My movements lacked the choreography of seasoned solitude. I stood near the entrance, fumbling with my phone like some bewildered stereotype.

Yu Garden shimmered in the late morning light - serpentine bridges, pavilions floating on lotus-choked ponds, red lacquer balustrades mirrored in green water. The crowds were Biblical. Tour groups moved as one organism, following raised flags and multilingual megaphones. I raised my phone, awkwardly attempting another selfie.

"Do you want me to take a picture?"

Perfect, crisp English cut through the linguistic cacophony. A young Chinese woman, mid-twenties, with eyes that crinkled at the corners and a smile so genuine it made me forget every travel warning. She was dressed in the studied casualness of a backpacker, everything suggesting fellow wanderer rather than local. In that moment, she represented everything I had hoped to find in Shanghai: connection, serendipity, the magic of unexpected encounters.

"Oh, would you? Thank you!"

We exchanged cameras with the easy intimacy of travellers recognising kindred spirits. She captured me against the garden's ornate backdrop whilst I returned the favour.

"I'm Claire," she introduced herself. "Visiting from Anhui Province. First time in Shanghai." Her English was flawless, each word delicately enunciated.

"Same here. First time in China! It's a little overwhelming, isn't it?"

She nodded knowingly, then her face lit up with an idea. "Actually, I heard there's an authentic tea festival happening nearby. Something local, not touristy. Want to check it out?"

Of course, I said yes.

The word 'authentic' should have triggered alarm bells. In my years of chasing culinary adventures, I had learned that authentic experiences rarely announce themselves with such theatrical timing. But I was disoriented, jetlagged, and desperate for cultural immersion.

Here's where the first red flag unfurled, though I was too grateful for companionship to notice. Claire navigated the labyrinthine streets with local confidence, turning without once consulting her phone. Her supposed unfamiliarity with Shanghai evaporated with each sure-footed turn through narrow alleys. The tourist veneer of the main streets gave way to something more intimate and genuine, or so I believed.

"Here," she announced, stopping before an unremarkable doorway. No sign, no indication of what lay beyond. She pushed it open with the familiarity of someone coming home.

Inside, the air changed. The chaos of Shanghai evaporated. The tea shop was a shrine to ceremony and tradition, all dark wood and carefully arranged porcelain. A woman emerged from the shadows, moving with measured grace, wearing a scarlet silk qipao. She greeted Claire not with polite formality but with warm recognition. They exchanged rapid Mandarin whilst I stood feeling like a child in an adult conversation.

That should have been warning sign number two.

"She says we're very lucky," Claire translated. "She has rare teas today, ones she usually reserves for serious collectors."

The ceremony began before I could even find my bearings, the woman's hands moving with practiced choreography. She handled each vessel with priestess-like reverence, warming and rinsing the teapot and cups, measuring leaves with apothecary precision. Steam rose from the first pour, curling into the wooden rafters above.

"This is Tie Guan Yin," Claire explained as the woman spoke in gentle Mandarin. "Iron Goddess of Mercy. She says the leaves were picked at dawn, when the dew still holds the mountain's dreams."

The poetry was intoxicating. I sipped, and the tea delivered everything promised: layers of flavour unfolding like stories, each note distinct yet harmonious. There was fruit, earth, something mineral and ancient.

Cup followed cup. Pu-erh aged in caves, its dark liquor tasting of centuries. Dragon Well green tea so delicate it dissolved before I could properly taste it. White tea allegedly blessed by monks. Whether she was serious or simply caught up in the theatre of the moment, I couldn't tell. I was suspended in ritual. I wanted to believe.

Somewhere around the fourth cup, Claire's questions started feeling less like conversation and more like interview. Where was I staying? How long in Shanghai? Travelling alone? Budget? Each inquiry wrapped in genuine interest made me answer freely whilst she remained frustratingly opaque about herself.

By the fifth cup, unease crept in. Questions felt calculated, the elderly woman's attention performative. Claire's familiarity with the space didn't align with her story of being a first-time visitor.

The sixth tea was presented with particular ceremony. "This is very special," Claire said, eyes bright with what I was beginning to recognise as something other than cultural excitement. "Aged oolong from Taiwan, over twenty years old."

The tea was delicious. If this was performance, at least the props were legitimate.

Then came truth, delivered in a leather-bound menu revealing prices that made my stomach somersault. It was all written in Mandarin but all I could read was ¥200. She asked me with a smile if I would care for four more teas, a selection even more special.

"Is that for the whole experience?" I asked, my voice calm but tight, and their guilty glances already providing the answer.

"No, per tea," Claire confirmed, voice stripped of earlier warmth.

200 yuan per cup. Six cups. 1200 yuan total. Roughly £125, or $170, give or take the exchange rate and the cost of my dignity.

"She's asking if you'd like to purchase any of the teas we've tried," Claire said, no longer meeting my eyes directly. "They're very special, very rare."

The spell shattered. I was no longer a fellow adventurer sharing an authentic cultural experience. I was a mark who'd walked willingly into the oldest tourist trap, led by someone who probably did this thrice daily.

I had fallen for a scam so obvious it had its own guidebook chapter. The sophisticated traveller reduced to tourist cliché in six cups of tea.

I paid without argument. What else could I do? Argue? Besides, nothing had happened. I wasn’t drugged, and the tea had been genuinely good. I was just... scammed. Politely. Elegantly even.

"Thank you for the cultural experience," I said to Claire as I prepared to leave, keeping my voice carefully neutral. She had the grace to look slightly embarrassed.

I navigated my way back through the maze of alleys, emerging into the chaos of Shanghai's main streets. The city pulsed as it always had. But something had shifted. The city's energy felt different now – not mystical it felt just this morning, but more life-hardened and real. The strangest part was that I wasn't angry. Embarrassed, certainly. Disappointed in my gullibility, absolutely. But also oddly grateful, having learned the difference between serendipity and setup. Sometimes the best travel stories emerge when everything goes slightly awry, when you're reminded that adventure and misadventure often share the same address.

Later that afternoon, I sought redemption in the most elemental way possible. I found myself at a bustling street stall, watching steam rise from bamboo baskets. Xiao long bao, those perfect soup dumplings made of thin dough cradling molten pork and scalding hot broth. Each dumpling was a small miracle: the delicate pleats gathered at the top like tiny parcels, the first bite releasing a flood of rich, savoury soup that soothed me instantly.

These cost twelve yuan for six pieces. Roughly £1.25. The universe, it seemed, had a sense of humour.

Months later, safely back in London, I defended the experience to outraged friends. But here's the thing: the tea was tasty, the ceremony genuinely beautiful, the lesson invaluable. And in the end, isn't that what travel is really about? Not just the places we go or the foods we taste, but the stories we collect, the mistakes we make, and the way those mishaps become, in time, our most treasured souvenirs.

—

Not all those who wander are lost — some of us are just trying to make the best of an overpriced oolong.

Ankita

—

Along the cliffs of this forgotten kingdom, where Celtic mists dance with Iberian dreams, the sea throws itself against stunning stone cliffs with fury. This is not the Spain of postcard beaches and sangria sunsets. This is something prehistoric, rustic, even primal.

We began in Llanes, a town that sits perched between mountain and sea, where orange-tiled rooftops lean into turquoise coves. The rain falls sideways, and the locals walk with the unhurried confidence of people who understand weather as a fact of life rather than an inconvenience.

Its medieval streets lead inevitably to the Paseo de San Pedro, a cinematic cliff-edge promenade ringed by sheer drops and breathtaking vistas. It offers glimpses of the Picos de Europa through breaks in the clouds, while in the distance, the lighthouse stands guard against the Cantabrian waves that have been throwing tantrums for millennia. Below the cliffs, the beaches have found their foothold by carving secret coves, where the rock relented and where sand gathered quietly out of reach. Walking the Paseo de San Pedro in weather like this requires a certain kind of madness. Salt spray mingles with rain, and somewhere in that confluence of elements, my hunger sharpens.

Eventually, we found cover in a wood-panelled sidreria, where the floors were sticky from years of cider spills and the walls bore the ghosts of generations past. There was a man near the bar who stood tall and tilted a green bottle high above his head, pouring a golden stream into a glass held low - sidra natural, treating the ritual with the solemnity it deserved. The traditional method “escanciado” involves pouring from high above, oxygenating the cider so each small culin sparkles with foam and ritual. Asturias’ alcoholic emblem.

Asturian cider bears no resemblance to its sweet cousins from other regions. This is something ancestral, fermented and aged in chestnut barrels, wild and funky, slightly effervescent, with a tartness that cuts through the richness of Asturian food. This bone-dry apple cider has just earned UNESCO intangible heritage status, though everyone here already treats it with reverence.

The first plate of food came hot: a blistered pile of pimientos de padron, half of them mild, half sneakily spicy. Charred, oily, perfectly salted. Then, a single, glistening chorizo, placed formidably in a terracotta bowl of rust-red oil. It looked simple enough. It tasted like fire and pork and paprika and storm.

Another round of cider brought tortos asturianos - fried cornmeal discs that were golden, crisp-edged, and slightly chewy at the centre. They were topped with alternating mounds of queso de cabrales (local blue cheese), crisped morcilla (blood sausage), and picadillo (spiced minced chorizo). They were absurdly rich, and deeply satisfying. The morcilla stayed with me the longest - I could still taste the iron tang of the blood sausage two hours later, in the best way.

The next morning, the rain paused - as if Asturias had taken a breath and given us a break too.

We drove inland toward Covadonga, where the Picos de Europa rise so close they feel within reach. The road narrowed. The cliffs thickened. Moss hung heavy from branches. And just before the trailhead, a chapel emerged from the mist, tucked inside a cave, a waterfall streaming past. The hike up to the lakes winds through beech forests that seem to hold their breath, each step as much an ascent in altitude as in anticipation. These mountains have seen it all: Celtic warriors, Roman legions, Moorish armies stopped cold by terrain and weather.

The lakes emerged slowly into view, their surfaces mirror-still despite the wind, reflecting peaks that disappear into clouds. Lago Enol and Lago Ercina stretched with its waters so pristine they seemed to hold the sky itself captive. This is where Pelayo made his stand in 722, where Christian Spain began its long reconquest. But standing there, lungs burning and legs aching, all I could think about was the bowl of fabada waiting somewhere below in the valley.

Back in Llanes, in a tavern whose name I've forgotten but whose warmth I never will, I encountered my first proper fabada. It arrived looking unassuming: ivory beans swimming in a broth the colour of autumn leaves, punctuated by a chunk of chorizo that released its paprika-stained oils with each spoonful. The morcilla dissolved at the touch of my spoon, painting the liquid with its mineral darkness.

Fabada Asturiana has swaggered out of humble beginnings to culinary icon. First noted in 1884, it contains fabes de la Granja - large white beans with a buttery shimmer - soaked overnight, then simmered gently for hours with compango: chorizo, morcilla, lacón (cured pork shoulder) and tocino (pork belly), held together by saffron, garlic, olive oil and salt.

The key to this recipe is the ingredients, which need to be from Asturias (otherwise it just won't be the same). The fabes, those plump white beans that form the foundation of everything, grow only in certain valleys where the climate strikes exactly the right balance between mountain chill and Atlantic moisture.

Fabada is a hot and heavy dish, and for that reason, it is most commonly eaten during the winter. But even though this was June, the Atlantic brought sufficient rain and chill to make it worth our while. Some dishes exist not just to nourish but to anchor the soul against storms. This is one of them.

Later, I read that María Luisa García, Asturias’ most beloved cook, had written about fabada not as cuisine but as ritual. “Se empieza la fabada sin hablar.” You begin the fabada without speaking. She was right. It commands silence.

Standing on the cliffs of Paseo de San Pedro on my last evening there, I understood why this land has inspired such fierce loyalty. Perhaps it's the way the food here holds the essence of this place, the way each spoonful contains not just pork and legumes but the very DNA of Asturias: stubborn, generous, unforgettable. It's not an easy place to love, this corner of Spain where the weather changes by the hour and the mountains lean into the sea like old friends sharing secrets. But once it claims you, once you've tasted its beans and weathered its storms, it becomes part of your personal geography, a coordinate you'll always carry in your heart.

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Not all those who wander are lost – some of us are just looking for the perfect stew on a stormy coast.

Ankita

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