Andrew Zimmern on the Five Meals He’ll Never Forget
Chef, author and veteran traveller Andrew Zimmern believes a single plate of food can reveal a place’s entire history. “Food is the way to understand another culture,” he says. “If someone from outer space came down and said, ‘Show me your hometown’, I wouldn’t take Mr Spaceman to the museum. If you want to understand a human being, sit down and have a meal with them.” Asked to name the five meals that shaped his life, Zimmern produced something closer to an autobiography told through food.
Lyon, 1976
At 14, stranded by six days of snow on a ski trip in Val-d’Isère, Zimmern’s family finally drove to Lyon, where he ordered a 15-course tasting menu at Restaurant Paul Bocuse — including chicken cooked inside a pig’s bladder and a warm liver pâté timbale he still ranks among the ten best things he’s ever eaten. Impressed that a teenager had ordered such an ambitious meal, staff asked if he wanted a second portion; moments later chef Paul Bocuse himself appeared at the table to serve it to him personally. Watching the restaurant’s garden, home-baked bread and house-made butter convinced Zimmern, who had already decided to work in food, that there was “a sense of craft bigger than I had even imagined.”
A cruise bound for South Korea
Decades after discovering Japanese-French fusion chef Kiyomi Mikuni through his 1980s cookbook, Zimmern finally dined at one of Mikuni’s restaurants — this one aboard a cruise ship. The chef spent the evening cooking and talking with his guests, serving a French-leaning menu reworked with Japanese ingredients: grilled aubergine, a corn soup built on beef consommé gelée, and a bitter tempura sweet fish meant to be eaten head-first in two bites. Zimmern calls it the best food he’s had on any cruise line.
Florence, across the decades
Zimmern’s connection to Trattoria Sostanza in Florence spans his father’s 1950s honeymoon through his own visits in the late 1960s, mid-1970s and beyond, watching the same waiter rise from server to maitre d’ to manager as the restaurant’s staff stayed for life. The simple crostini di fegato — liver spread over stale bread, cooked in a pot that Zimmern believes “never came off the stove in 40 or 50 years” — remains, he says, a strong candidate for his hypothetical last meal.
Palawan, the Philippines
On a seafood-focused trip to the island of Palawan, Zimmern ate at a stilted restaurant built over the water, where fishermen delivered the night’s catch by canoe throughout the meal. He singles out grilled tuna cheek and jawbone served in distinctly local style with wrapping leaves, alongside a spicy shrimp dish and a banana-stalk dessert, calling it “one of the greatest meals of my life.”
Fez, Morocco
At Riad Laaroussa, considered one of Fez’s finest, Zimmern became the first man ever allowed into the all-female kitchen, where he helped prepare a traditional pigeon pie, b’stilla, alongside the staff. The head chef’s visible pride when the dish matched the kitchen’s usual standard left a lasting impression on him about the significance of that women-only space. “I learned everything I needed to learn about Moroccan culture in that room,” he says, reflecting that the experience reshaped how he thought about womanhood.
Source: BBC News