Search results for

Passionate Mexico City foodies are rediscovering and reviving Mexico’s rural culinary delights.

Berlin: Off the Wall

Bracingly fresh wines, just-picked organic vegetables, and local cheeses are served alongside Indian curries and Indonesian noodles in New Zealand’s increasingly cosmopolitan cities. While touring vineyards, stop for food and wine paired perfectly with stunning landscapes. Wine lists are, as expected, top notch in every part of the country.

Xi’an is the historical heart of China. Walk along the Old City Wall, and imagine yourself in the Tang Dynasty. The city feels especially enchanted when the lanterns light up and street musicians play traditional music on street corners. Xi’an’s food is enough to win over the most reluctant visitor: biang biang noodles, a regional specialty, and street food in the Muslim Quarter, and all the sweet desserts.

With celebrated chefs hailing from every corner of the globe, Shanghai’s broad culinary landscape offers incredible restaurants in a spectrum of styles. Dumplings—Shanghai’s most popular snack—come in every glorious incarnation: fried and steamed, pork and radish. But there’s much more to eat and drink here. Duck into an urban soup kitchen, sit down for satisfying noodles, or discover the plethora of options on Wujiang Lu. Here are our picks of where to go!

If eating huge plates of pork, deciphering local slang, and snowshoeing through the woods of Québec can’t bring two siblings together, what can?

The beloved Cambodian breakfast dish of nom banh chok is a love-it-or-hate-it dish for most foreigners, who would probably prefer to have this cold to luke-warm noodle dish served hot. The process of making these rice noodles is depicted in bas reliefs on Angkor temples, suggesting that the dish dates back to the Khmer Empire and traveled to Thailand at the end of the Angkorian era. In Thailand, there is a similar noodle dish called kanom jeen. In Siem Reap it’s typically served at street-side stalls and by roaming women vendors who carry baskets of ingredients on their shoulders. Like anything in Cambodia, you can expect to find an array of versions but a favorite comes with a yellow kroeung curry, a mound of thinly sliced banana blossoms, pickled cucumber, and fresh fragrant green herbs.

Muslim noodle restaurants are ubiquitous all over China, but Xi’an, with its large Muslim population, has a far better class of them. Most restaurants have photos of the various dishes on the wall, and all you have to do is point. My personal favorite is 面片, which translates as “noodle flakes.” The chef has a clump of dough and flicks thin slices of noodle off into boiling water. At Lanzhou Muslim Traditional Beef Stretched Noodles I like the noodle flakes with beef and potato gravy, but the options for toppings are endless.

Din Tai Fung is not a Singaporean chain—it originated in Taiwan—but outposts of this restaurant have flourished all over the city, thanks to its addictive dumplings. (Seriously: addictive.) Making the perfect soup dumplings (xiao long bao) is a skill that takes years to perfect. You can see the experts hard at work in glassed-in kitchens at every DTF eatery. To enjoy, swirl a little bit of soy sauce, black vinegar, and chili in a shallow dish of thinly sliced ginger, and dip away. Din Tai Fung also serves up the ultimate comfort food: Beef noodle soup. Its restorative, deep-brown broth with thin noodles can be savored with or without beef brisket. The spicy wontons in a vinegar sauce are also top-notch.

You can’t talk about Xi’an without talking about biangbiang noodles, a unique Shaanxi food. The character for biang is one of the most complex among noodles, and is achieved by kneading the dough 58 strokes. With all the hype about the giant character, I was expecting the noodles to be a bit of a let-down—oh, was I wonderfully wrong! The noodles are huge, practically long lasagna sheets. The sauce reminded us of a kind of thick minestrone soup: tomato, flakes of slow-cooked lamb, and fresh herbs. It’s such a cheap, hearty, and delicious meal—I would eat this every day if I lived in Xi’an.

From the dingy exterior, you might expect Little Village Noodle House to be a hole-in-the-wall, but it’s surprisingly cute and nicely decorated inside, with fountains, decorative woodwork, and nice tables and chairs. The chef’s special fried rice is justifiably a signature dish: piled high with pork, shrimp, duck, egg, and other goodies. The orange chicken was intensely citrusy with lots of orange flavor — but not that gross, sickly-sweet syrupy coating that usually makes the dish a soggy mess. Lunch items are around $10-12, and portions are decent, though not huge. Considering the unexpectedly fancy decor and fast, friendly service, this is a great choice for a meal in Honolulu‘s Chinatown.

Located on the international culinary corridor that is Buford Highway, Food Terminal brings the flavors of a Malaysian food market to Atlanta. Here, Amy Wong and Howie Ewe (who also own Sweet Hut Bakery and Café and Top Spice, a Thai and Malaysian chain) cook family recipes, drawing from memories of their homeland. Grab a seat in the modern space and choose from a menu of numbered noodle and rice dishes. The Grandma Wonton BBQ Pork Noodles—served with fried pork wontons, tender pork belly, egg noodles, bok choy, and a fried egg—are a favorite, but the Hainanese chicken and roti canai are also popular.

Located in the heart of Orlando’s Little Vietnam district, this casual eatery does Pan-Asian cuisine perfectly, with a spread of affordable, piping-hot dishes inspired by hawker-style street food. It’s hardly a new concept in a city known for great Asian restaurants, but Mamak does it exceptionally well with small plates like beef bulgogi, golden roti canai bread, Indonesian nasi goreng, and a spectacular version of Malaysian char kway teow noodles. Come with a group so you can order a little bit of everything—it’s the kind of place where sharing just two dishes is nothing short of sin.

The chance to try Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto’s first Pan-Asian restaurant is what brings most people to this Disney Springs spot, which opened in 2015. The menu blends flavors from China, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia, while the decor impresses with a glass staircase, sparkling chandeliers, and a 270-foot-long bar. This is the kind of restaurant where sharing plates makes for the most satisfying meal, so come with a group and cover your table with Peking duck, sushi and sashimi, shumai dumplings, pad Thai noodles, and more. Just be sure to save room for the revelatory desserts, which range from Oreo tempura to house-made churros.

Among the small shops and restaurants that line Elmwood Avenue, Thin Man Brewery stands out in more ways than one. In a literal sense, its second-floor balcony extends over the street, offering guests the perfect place to sip pints in the sun. More figuratively, its beer selection is among the best in the city, with more than two dozen brews on tap, including the Prairie Paradise (a coconut-and-vanilla imperial stout from Prairie Artisan Ales in Oklahoma) and the Taras Boulba (a pale ale straight from Belgium). Thin Man also brews a few of its own beers on-site—if they have it, be sure to try the Pills Mafia pilsner. Since opening in 2016, the brewery has become so popular that there is now a second location in Black Rock, in a collaborative space with Tappo Pizza.