A food critic travelled the world to scour the 'best restaurants' for two magazines. The eating was constant, ridiculous and delightful, but also brutal—"It would be wrong to complain about what is obviously a dream job, but allow me one brief lapse to say: This was a very hard few months"
On Mother’s Day, I lay sprawled across a bed on the top floor of a riad in the middle of a medina in Morocco, trying desperately to remember where I’d woken up that morning.
I couldn’t recall the room or the building where I’d been less than 12 hours earlier, but more distressingly, I couldn’t remember the country. As I listened to the long, low moan of evening prayers ringing out over Fez, the closest I could guess was Europe. That morning I had been somewhere in Europe.
For four months this year, I traveled across the globe eating myself silly, trying to find 30 restaurants worthy of the title “Best in the World” for a joint project by Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure magazines. In total, I visited six continents, traveled more than 100,000 miles and spent almost 300 delirium-inducing hours on airplanes.
In Fez, my mind whirled through all the places I’d visited that week: Paris; London; Cork, Ireland; Naples and Puglia in Italy; the mountains of Slovenia; Copenhagen. None of them were the answer. I could feel the synapses in my head sputter and fizzle. Humans were not built for what I was doing.
I finally gave up and checked my itinerary: That morning I had been in San Sebastián, Spain. I had spent my time there gobbling pintxos and freshly grilled seafood, sitting through long and elaborate tasting menus, and staring longingly at beautiful Basque cheesecakes in the marketplace. I was, heartbreakingly, entirely too full to consider buying one.
And, as always, I’d been contemplating the nature of the word “best.”
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