Whole Journeys

A group of travelers enjoy dinner in Provence, France with local chef Ghyslaine Martin-Castellino.

So, you consider yourself a foodie. But are you an adventurous foodie? You haven't really taken the plunge into becoming a full-fledged gastronome until you've traveled to some far off destination with stories about how you hand-picked coffee berries straight from the tree in Costa Rica.
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Unless you want to deck out the interior of your megayacht, redesign your multimillion-dollar condominium on South Beach, or create some custom-built furniture for your new waterfront estate, there's probably never been a reason for you to visit the Design Center of the Americas (DCOTA) in Fort Lauderdale -- until now.

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Disney

Toast to the Beast at "Be Our Guest."

For the first time, you'll be able to get wine or beer at the Magic Kingdom.

The Be Our Guest restaurant, themed after Disney's Beauty and the Beast, is part of the Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland revamp. Located inside the Beast's castle, the restaurant will allow diners to choose from three themed rooms (the west wing, the rose gallery, and the ballroom).



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Roberta's opened four years ago near the ugly, post-industrial border of Williamsburg and Bushwick. It was a warehouse, more or less. People sat communally at picnic tables and ate the products of a massive red wood-burning pizza oven that dominated the open kitchen near the front of the dining room. When the New York Times first visited the place, Roberta's was BYOB and hadn't yet turned on the gas: all non-pizza items were cooked on hot plates. By the time I arrived, the cooking had undergone a considerable evolution. As the front kitchen pumped out pies and calzones, a kitchen in back produced foie gras with caramel and black pepper; lamb cooked sous vide with transparent mint gelatin; sweetbreads with some kind of sweet and toothsome white sauce; agnolotti with black truffle and cheese; angel hair pasta with cockles; sea urchins with pairings undreamt of in Japan or anyplace at all beyond this once-desolate patch of Brooklyn.
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Norwegian Cruise Line's Chef Table does not include Rockette's-style dancing.

​Norwegian Cruise Line casts its line for foodies, beefing up offerings for those who prefer burrata to buffets. Moderno Churrascaria is the newest offering for frugal foodniks, a Brazilian steakhouse with passadors who serve an unlimited rounds of beef, chicken and pork tableside for $20 a person, including sides.

By the end of March, the company will have launched Chef's Table, a 12-person, nine-course,2.5 hour, $75 dinner offered once per cruise. As if that's not prescriptive enough,More »

Bright green valley.

​Two summers ago I accompanied my friend James "The Amazing" Randi on a speaking tour of northern Europe. We visited Scandinavia and the Baltics, and enjoyed a quick southerly jaunt to the Netherlands. Our final engagement was in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the middle of the Atlantic.

Reykjavik is a modest city, a little more populous than Fort Lauderdale. (Iceland is the size of Kentucky with roughly one tenth the population.) Its architecture is lovely but spare -- far sparer than that of any mainland European capitol. Iceland needn't rely on manmade monuments to impress, for the Icelandic landmass itself is more dramatic than anything made by human hands, and it monumentalizes concerns far grander and less temporal than our own. On the drive from the Keflavik airport to Reykjavik, you encounter a shallow but endlessly long ravine which is actually the point of departure for the Mid-Atlantic and Eurasian tectonic plates, which move apart at a rate of about a meter per year, pulling with them the two halves of the ocean as well as the continents of Europe and North America. Nearby, you find vast fields of rough volcanic rock, covered in low sulfuric mists ejected from boiling pools just below (and occasionally atop) the soil. Elsewhere, you drive over a ridge and come face-to-face with a bright green valley that seems all out of proportion to the ordinary rules of human sight-lines. Your eyes follow distant rivers for what seem like ten, twenty miles, until the rivers open up into far-distant marshlands and shallows. Never has your eye captured so much territory at a glance, and the astounding quantity of earth arrayed before you is made harder to contextualize because of the near total absence of trees, which would otherwise be a handy indicator of size. The soil of Iceland is too new to facilitate much vegetation, beyond the occasional shrub and the ubiquitous coating of pillowy moss.

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Domino's Japan

Domino's Japan wants to put pizza on the moon.

​Domino's Pizza Japan wants to open a branch on the moon.  We seriously think this is a great idea. First of all, there's the myth that the moon is made of cheese. Plus, think of all the space aliens that must get hungry from intergalactic flight.

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CheeseMe Food Truck

Tomorrow, Miramar is getting invaded -- by food trucks.
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Laine Doss

Chicken and waffles at Emeril's

​There are few people in the world who are so famous that they don't need a last name - Cher, Madonna, Gaga and.....Emeril!  Known as much for his catch phrases "Bam" and "Kick it up a notch" as his food, Emeril is a television celebrity and a personality, but deep down, he's really a chef (and a great one at that).

Though Emeril and New Orleans are sometimes considered one and the same, Emeril Lagasse was born in Massachusetts and attended Johnson & Wales University in Providence.  1982 was when Emeril really took over New Orleans, when he replaced Chef Paul Prudhomme as Executive Chef of Commander's Palace.

On a recent trip to New Orleans, Clean Plate Charlie was invited to take a culinary tour of Emeril's world, visiting two of three of Emeril's New Orleans restaurants, as well as Commander's Palace, where the magic started.

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John Linn

Deviled eggs, with paprika and chives, is one of a trio of truffle selections at The Office in Delray Beach.

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Picture a breath-taking restaurant perched on the edge of a dramatic gorge in a tiny town in southwest France. The menu, posted beside the door, recently featured a four-course truffle tasting for $60, including fillet of beef and foie gras. Foodies have called truffles "diamonds of the table" and "jewels of haute cuisine."

Now think of french fries. Mac n' cheese. Popcorn. Deviled eggs. Dips.  They're a far cry from international haute cuisine served in four-star restaurants on white- linen tablecloths. But nowadays, you find truffles in these comfort foods, too. 

 


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