A Life Worth Eating

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320 Village Lane, Los Gatos, California, Official Website

I first visited Manresa in Los Gatos, California, during the spring of 2006. I was immediately intrigued by chef David Kinch’s cooking. This is a chef with a near perfect understanding of his restaurant’s time and place, one who truly utilizes the local ingredients of the bay area; Manresa would not work if located elsewhere. Chef Kinch has a masterful understanding of when to enhance an ingredient’s flavor through cooking, and when to step back and let nature speak for itself.

I have since been back half a dozen times, each time a completely different menu and experience. Each meal has been progressively better. The ever evolving cuisine reveals a chef with tremendous versatility, precision, and passion. For these reasons, I believe Chef Kinch is currently the best chef in America.

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2124 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA, Official Website

At Saison, chef Joshua Skenes uses simple cooking techniques to maximize each ingredient’s flavor. While the cooking techniques are simple, the process is not: meats are aged for several months, fish bones are roasted over embers and turned into a broth subtly brushed over cuts of sashimi, lemons are preserved for hundreds of days to counter their acidity. With a casual glance of a dish, one may never notice the labor involved; but when tasted, every course reveals a depth only possible by an involved cooking process. My recent meal was one of the most memorable, and delicious, meals I have ever tasted.

Chef Skenes is obsessed with flavor and how best to enhance it. In contrast to restaurants that over-embellish dishes and add complexity at the expense of flavor, Skenes takes away. Flavor is paramount for chef Skenes; everything else comes secondary. There is a firm Japanese influence in his cooking rooted in its simplicity, from his cuts of sashimi and live prawns to his use of sea vegetables. Skenes builds on this base of Japanese ingredients and applies fire, culminating in a magical and unique cooking style.

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40-17 Broadway, Astoria, Queens, New York, Official Website

I first visited The Queens Kickshaw when I learned they had received a La Marzocco Strada MP, the latest of a new line of hand-crafted espresso machines from the Florentine manufacturer that allows for the manual control of a shot’s pressure profile during the extraction. In theory, this kind of pressure control can bring out flavors of coffee beans that traditional machines cannot. While this fancy machine was the bait that drew me into Astoria, it was the flavor of the resulting coffee that kept me coming back. The more I visited the Kickshaw, the more impressed I became.

Owner Ben Sandler is the barista in charge. While he’s made it clear from the beginning the kickshaw is not only about coffee, they happen to serve a great shot; one of the best in the city, in fact. Single origin coffees from Coffee Labs Roasters rotate in the grinder, most of the lots trackable online to a specific farm ensuring fair-trade practices. In addition to espresso drinks pulled from the Strada MP, the Kickshaw does V60 pour over and, more recently, 12-hour cold brew coffee on tap.

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75 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Paris, France, Official Website

Ladurée has the finest macarons I have tasted anywhere.

Unlike pâtisseries such as Pierre Hermé which pride themselves on constantly introducing new and unique flavor combinations, Ladurée takes a much more straightforward approach. Most of the macarons are single-flavor, with a few being a combination of two, at most. This emphasis on simplicity allows Ladurée to completely focus on ingredient quality and taste, ensuring each macaron is the best of its kind.

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445 N Clark St., Chicago, IL, Official Website

Mexican cuisine is extremely regionalized; each state has its own specialties and variations on national dishes. A lot of this regionalization is due to Mexico’s diverse climate. Tacos al Pastor, the late night street food where pork is sliced from a spit and layered in a corn tortilla with pineapple, originates far from the ocean in Mexico City where swine is abundant.. Ceviche, campechanas, and seafood cocteles can be found in coastal states like Baja California and Sinaloa, where fresh fish is plentiful. Tinga, a dish where shredded pork is placed in a clay pot and stewed with chipotle, tomatoes, onion, and garlic, can be traced back to the farms of landlocked Puebla. Given this incredible specialization of regions and their dishes, creating a single pan-Mexican restaurant that tackles all of the regions while maintaining quality, is no easy task.