Dishes run from a collection of the babiest of Provencal vegetables flavoured with truffle to breast of squab with grilled foie gras and Piedmont polenta, and a divinely crunchy, chocolate gold-leafed confection known as Le Louis XV au croustillant de praline.Price per head: Louis XV: Les Jardins de Provence menu €150 (£100).Book ahead: Five weeksAddress: Hotel de Paris, Place du Casino, Monte Carlo, Monaco (00 377 98 06 88 64; alain-ducasse. com).Can’t get in? Try Bruno Cirino’s Michelin-starred Hostellerie Jerome, just a few miles above Monte Carlo in La Turbie (00 33 4 92 41 51 51). 10: West is best in San Francisco Its inclusion in Restaurant Magazine’s top 50 restaurants in the world and recent rave reviews in San Francisco and London have raised the profile of one of the Bay area’s most lauded restaurants. Set in a low-slung ranch house, Manresa showcases the inspired, French and Catalan-influenced cooking of chef’s chef David Kinch.
Impeccably sourced ingredients litter an inventive menu that includes biodynamic risotto with pine mushrooms and meat jus scented with coffee and parmesan, local abalone Meuni?-style with shallots braised with pig’s trotter, and black seabass on the plancha with butterbeans and wild fennel.Price per head: Manresa: Tasting menu $150 (£86).Book ahead: Three weeksAddress: 320 Village Lane, Los Gatos, California (001 408 354 4330; manresa restaurant ).Can’t get in? Try the elegant French cuisine of chef Roland Passot at San Francisco’s recently remodelled La Folie (001 415 776 5577. The best in the Big Apple: Keller knows his onions Having been hailed America’s best chef for French Laundry, Thomas Keller tried his luck with Per Se The three menus change daily. His salmon and cr? fraiche ice-cream cones, slow-cooked butter-poached lobster, oysters, tapioca and oscietra caviar have earned him three Michelin stars. Price per head is $210 (£120) (00 1 212 823 9335; perseny ).Can’t get in? Try Masa, the nearby Japanese restaurant, (00 1 212 823 9800). The best of British at Bray: Guaranteed gastro gasps One thing is certain: you won’t be bored at The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal’s three-starred temple to molecular gastronomy in Bray, Berkshire. From the puffball of lime and green tea mousse poached in liquid nitrogen, snail porridge, sardine on toast jelly and roast foie gras with almond gel to the leather, oak and tobacco chocolates, this is edge-of-your-seat dining.
Price per head for a three-course menu is £67.75(01628 580333; fatduck.co.uk) Can’t get in? Try The Hinds Head (01628 626151).. 502 Proxy Error
Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid
response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /travel/news-and-advice/teach-them-to-eat-the-world-519175.html.
Reason: Error reading from remote server. Taking a holiday in one of the world’s culinary hot-spots sets up a tricky dynamic.
While it is undoubtedly good for the palate, the spirit, the tastebuds and the soul, a vacation that centres on the consumption of food and drink can have unfortunate consequences for the figure. Consuming in moderation would be one solution, but that’s easier said than done when faced with regional temptations such as tagliatelle with pumpkin and truffles, spiced wild rabbit, Tuscan lemon sorbet and first-rate bottles of Madeira. It is disappointed that the DTI has failed to look at an outright ban.”The danger is that these cheques – pushed without any clear advice – are usually treated as a cash advance. “I just hope it is going to be well received.”Consumer body Which? has campaigned against the cheques and says the consultation does not go far enough.
