Eating out when travelling can be a lottery, the well known restaurants around the world often come with a hefty $$ value and are not always where you feel like eating and while you can sometimes luck it and wander into a great restaurant, many good eating places are not in high foot traffic areas. Preceding a recent trip to San Francisco I spent ages trawling through online restaurant reviews working out just where we should eat. While that gave us a good guideline, fellow food writer Ginny Grant arrived armed with a book I had never seen “Where Chefs Eat”. Forget what the restaurant critics say, this is a compendium of where chefs choose to eat when they are not cooking for others. Some places are obvious and it would be almost rude to not select them e.g. Auckland’s French Cafe. However there are plenty of others that take you right off the beaten track to places like the Barilla Dumpling House in Dominion Rd, recommended by Al Brown. Our $60 meal was of such size that we brought home a doggy bag for lunch the next day!
In a book that traverses the globe there will be many great places and towns that just cannot feature. Don’t be disappointed by the small number of NZ restaurants covered as this is reflective of just how many places there are in the world. Already it is a weighty book with mainly major cities featured and a friend sensibly scanned the relevant pages before heading off to Turkey rather than carrying the book. Published December 2012 it is current and hopefully the success will mean it is updated regularly and you can already purchase an app as well.
Most of the restaurants and cafes we ate at during our week in San Francisco were recommended in the book and we were far from disappointed with the one exception of Slanted Door which possibly has lost some of its attention to detail over the last year.
Otherwise flour + water, Lers ros Thai and Ramen Underground would all have remained unknown and we would have missed some great food and finds.
At RRP of around $30 this book is a must for anyone who travels and wants to eat well while away!
Thanks to Phaidon publishing we have 4 copies of Where Chefs Eat to give away.
Simply enter your details below and you will go into the draw.
Where Chefs Eat was originally posted by foodlovers.co.nz