Food

At first glance, the average fahsa restaurant looks more like a venue for metallurgy than, well, cooking. Kitchen staff stand perched above heroically oversized metal pots; propane flames spit out from underneath the cauldrons. But the danger is more imagined than real: these men are professionals. Prep work starts at dawn—fahsa must be served fresh—but the real action starts around noon, the start of the Yemeni lunch hour.

You could call fahsa a stew, but such a simple descriptor belies the complicated nature of the dish. That’s not to say its charms are obvious from looks alone. It is a thick, brownish-red, meat-studded broth served scalding hot, covered in green foam, in a flame-blackened pot. It does not seduce the eye. But the taste silences all critics.

The popular narrative is that fahsa began in the days when the Yemeni highlands were part of the Ottoman Empire, as way of stewing kitchen scraps, donations and leftovers at poor houses. In the centuries since, the stew has slowly transcended its lowly beginnings—the addition of a generous portion of meat distinguishes fahsa from salta, the more direct descendant of the beggars’ broths of the past. Both dishes are ubiquitous in Sanaa now, beloved by rich and poor alike.

Fahsa began in the days when the Yemeni highlands were part of the Ottoman Empire

Like many aspects of Yemeni culture, eating fahsa tends to be an intensely communal experience. The stew is dropped in the middle of a table, accompanied by extra maraq (broth), sahawaq (the local tomato-based salsa analogue), helba (fenugreek foam) and a basket of flat bread or khadam (a sort of sourdough roll). What follows is driven more by instinct than by decorum. Someone will drop in more maraq; someone else will add the helba prior to breaking the seal with a chunk of bread. At its best, the spread is like a perfectly constructed work of art, each element complementing the other. The helba cools the heat, the meat provides depth and the bread provides a means of delivery—though, it’s worth noting, Yemeni bread is often an attraction in and of itself. The eating process isn’t particularly elegant: everyone’s going after the same food in the same pot. But even if you end up elbowing the guy to your right, no one will take offense. The food is delicious and anyway, in Yemen, you’re almost always among friends.

Fahsa has been a recurring presence during my two years in Yemen. Filling and warm, it’s classic comfort food—whether in times of war or peace. At lunch with tribal fighters during Sanaa’s Hasaba War of May 2011, there was something deeply soothing about breaking bread and devouring the meaty stew as the neighborhood around me dipped in and out of chaos. During the heady days of the Yemeni revolution, post-demonstration fahsa lunches with activists seemed like a perfect fit as well, providing vital nourishment as tens of thousands of Yemenis peacefully gathered to call for a better future.

Last night, a panel of journalists, chefs and restaurateurs comprising the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best panel confirmed what seemed to me like a foregone conclusion after my first spectacular meal there three years ago: that El Celler de Can Roca is the world’s best restaurant. It’s not a shock by any stretch (after all, El Celler has held the number two slot on the list for the past two years), but now, life for the three Roca brothers and their restaurant is about to change in unfathomable ways as the collective gaze of the gastronomic world rains down on their tiny corner of Girona, 90 minutes north of Barcelona.

My first dinner there was, in fact, my first Serious Meal ever in Europe. And I’ll be back another day to write more about the spectacular, paradigm-shifting cooking they’re doing. But for now, if you’ll indulge me, I think I can tell you something about the brilliance of the place by talking about the other Roca restaurant in Girona.

My earliest memories are of the smells of my mother’s food. —Joan Roca

The day after the first dinner I ate at El Celler, on head chef Joan’s recommendation, I went to have lunch with his parents. The Can Roca that everyone in the culinary world is currently reading about, the Can Roca whose website crashed this morning and whose reservation lines will be tied up from here to infinity, began as a humble blue collar bar called Can Roca run by the Roca brothers’ parents, Josep and Montserrat. The three brothers, Joan (in charge of the savory side of the kitchen), Josep (one of the world’s greatest sommeliers, who lords over a 60,000 bottle cellar) and Jordi (the young pastry wizard), grew up in their parents’ restaurant, working in the kitchen, doing homework at the bar. “My earliest memories are of the smells of my mother’s food,” Joan told me back then, “of being by her elbow watching her cook the dishes she still cooks today.”

The restaurant that day was packed with old men knocking back the day’s news with glasses of Estrella Damn and local construction workers looking for gas to get them through the afternoon. I entered cautiously and slipped into a corner table. When Montserrat came by to take my order, I told her that I was a journalist writing a story about her sons and that I would love to ask her a few questions. She looked unimpressed, maybe even a touch annoyed. “I have a full dining room right now, so I can’t really talk.”

Instead of an interview, I had the menu of the day: an iceberg salad with olives, tomatoes and onions, a plate of fideuà (short pasta) studded with chunks of hot dog and a hunk of fresh cheese with honey drizzled over the top. Classic Catalan, and along with coffee, bread and a few glasses of red wine, it set me back exactly 4 percent of what I paid for their sons’ masterpiece meal the night before.

After my first meal with the Roca family…I knew something had changed.

It might be hard to imagine food as intellectual and genre-bending as the dishes that come out of the Can Roca kitchen being inspired by noodles with hot dogs and iceberg salads, but if you look hard enough, you can draw a straight line from Joan’s best dishes to the humble fare being cooked across the street at their parents’ restaurant. Mom makes an escalivada by slow-roasting peppers, eggplant and onions; son takes those roasted vegetables, purees them, turns them into spheres in an alginate bath, dehydrates them until their skins are wrinkled like real roast vegetables, then serves them encased in a dome of smoke. A high-wire act, to be sure, but Joan’s is the best escalivada you’ve ever had, modeled after the best he’s ever had—his mom’s. There’s a reason why every day at the strike of noon, the staff of 40 at the world’s best restaurant walk across the street and sit down to eat lunch at the original Can Roca.

After my first meals with the Roca family, as I sat on the steps of the cathedral in the old part of town and stared out across Catalunya, I knew something had changed. Three hours later, back in Barcelona, I met my future wife seated at a street corner café. Coincidence, sure, but in my mind, that meal and that moment will forever be linked.

I’ve been back to the sons’ Can Roca a few times since, including this past Friday. I wasn’t alone at the table this time, as I was the first time I ate there, fresh off a plane from the States. Quite the opposite; I ate with a group of 14 out-of-towners, all hoping to sneak in a meal before El Celler became the new media darling and we had to share the place with the rest of the world. The meal didn’t have the same jarring impact on me as the first one (after three years living and eating around Spain, how could it?), but it displayed that same stunning mixture of precision and controlled chaos, studied composition and envelope-pushing technique. There was a black olive gazpacho that tasted like the Mediterranean in a bowl, a mid-meal slab of white asparagus and black truffle ice cream that had grown men licking their plates, and a gently poached oyster bathed in a hollandaise made from various game birds that left every last diner grasping for some kind of explanation: “But…what…I mean…no way!”

It seemed fitting that my dining companions were Danes, as it would be the pride of Denmark, Copenhagen’s Noma, that would soon cede the top slot to the brothers from Girona. On our way out, I wished Joan luck and asked him if he thought they had a shot at being number one. He shook my hand, bowed his head gently, and said, “I just hope you guys had a nice meal.” And that’s exactly what he meant.

If you’re the type who cares about these things (and, for the record, though San Pellegrino may have gotten #1 right, the list itself is deeply flawed for more reasons than anyone cares to read about), you’ll read a lot about the Rocas and their Girona temple of wonders in the weeks and months to come. Some will talk about this being a victory for modernist cooking, a reassertion of Spain’s dominance in the 21st century haute cuisine canon. Some will call it a win for a country desperately in need of a morale boost. No doubt a few proud Catalans will use it as proof of the superiority of their beloved region. But try your best to tune it all out. Because at the heart of all of the hype to come, more than any cooking tale you’ve heard before, this is a story about Mom and Dad. This is a victory for them.

Federico Motos Lajara was born October 3rd, 1930, six years before the Spanish Civil War, in a cave 140 kilometers east of Granada. He stands nearly 6 feet tall, with a wispy wheat stalk for a frame and smooth brown cheeks the belie a life spent under the Andalusian sun. He is a shepherd by trade, a bachelor by choice, and a cave dweller by both love and necessity. And in two months’ time, when I take Laura Pérez to be my lawful wedded wife, Chacho Federo will be my great uncle.

Laura is Catalan-Andaluz, born and raised near Barcelona, but with both sides of her family hailing from the south of Spain. Her father Angel was also born and raised in Fuente Nueva, a community that at its height in the 1950s and 60s had up to 500 people living as farmers, shepherds and craftsmen. Cave communities took root during Muslim rule in Andalusia, the northern Africans finding the Spanish terrain a perfect place to continue their long tradition of countryside cave dwelling. The habit stuck, and 500 years after the Moors were driven from Spain the caves remain, mainly because of a number of distinct physical advantages they provide: not only do they offer inexpensive, effective protection from the elements, they maintain an unexpectedly comfortable ambient temperature year round, taking the edge off the harsh winters and brutal summers that define this desert terrain.

My first trip to Fuente Nueva came in December of 2010, a far-reaching attempt to convince Laura and her family that I was serious about my commitment to this country. In three shorts days, I drank whisky with the local men, hung chorizo with the local women, and helped turn a pig into a year’s worth of charcuterie for strangers I wanted to desperately call my family. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a few weeks out of each year with Laura’s people in the south, and gradually over this time, they’ve become my people, too. None more so than Chacho Federo.

With the exception of a military stint in Morocco, Chacho has spent his entire life in the caves of Fuente Nueva, working primarily as a goat herder and wheat farmer in the amber plains surrounding the caves. Back in those days, he would deliver his goods to local markets on the back of a horse or a donkey, clad in wool cardigans and flannel shirts and espadrilles before los hipsters were even a concept. Like everybody in Fuente Nueva, he doesn’t speak Spanish; he speaks Andaluz. On paper, they are the exact same language, but leaving the mouth of a native speaker, Andaluz sounds like another dialect entirely, one almost entirely free of consonants. It has taken three years of intense study and concentration, but I now proudly understand about 50 percent of what comes out of Chacho’s mouth. HA

I have learned a lot about life in the south from Chacho over the past few years. I have learned that the respectable hour to wake up is 5 am, before the sun has stirred, in order to turn those waning embers into a waxing fire to warm the morning. I have learned that in the lean post-war years in Fuente Nueva, suicide became an epidemic, and Chacho acted as a catcher in the rye of sorts, rescuing desperate women who had thrown themselves into community wells. I have learned that a man subsisting on a diet of chorizo, fried sardines and hand-rolled cigarettes can be healthier than any God-fearing, doctor-loving relative I have in the States.

But the first lesson I ever learned from Chacho, before the bar crawls and soil tilling and history lessons that would follow, was how to make migas. The word means crumbs in Spanish, and in most places throughout Spain, migas are about a second life, a way to turn abandoned bread into a meal soft and savory enough to sustain workers for the long afternoon ahead. It’s a campo creation, invented by the shepherds who would spend all day moving their goat and sheep from one swatch of land to the next. Migas across Spain abide by a general formula, but everywhere you turn you find local tweaks and adaptations. In La Mancha, migas come laced with garlic and peppered with pork fat; in Almeria, the base may start with coarse semolina instead of refined wheat, and the accompaniments will probably include a few varieties of small, oily fish.

In Fuente Nueva, migas have always been about four ingredients, the most elemental and abundant of all: flour, water, oil and salt. Chacho starts with a liter of water in a special migas pan, a heavy-bottomed iron vessel with an extra handle, the easier to control and transport the final product. When the water is hot, he adds flour, then salt, and later, little by little, warm ladles of olive oil.

Many times I’ve tried to take down a recipe, and many times I’ve been denied.

“How much oil, Chaco? How much salt?”

“Por ojo.” Eyeball it. There are no set ratios; Chacho’s migas are the product of 83 years of careful finesse.

Occasionally, after a glass or two of wine, he might offer up a few breadcrumbs of advice. “The most important thing is to work the dough as much as possible. You have to get the water out of it and cook the raw flour.” For that reason, migas demand a low, steady flame and constant stirring. And done Chacho’s way, they require just three tools: an iron spatula for cutting the dough, an iron spoon for turning it, and a wad of tobacco for smoking away the time it takes to turn raw flour into warm little dumplings.

In a world where women do 90 percent of the cooking and 100 percent of the cleaning, migas provide a rare chance for the hombres de Andalusia to earn their domestic keep. The men like to tell themsleves, as Chacho puts it, that migas take muscle—not just for the constant stirring required to break up larger chunks of dough into smaller and smaller pieces, but also to lift the entire pan into the air and flip the bulky mass of flour and water with the same push-pull action a chef might use to keep a pan of sautéed mushrooms in motion.

A veteran migas cook knows how to work the pan, how to coerce from that shapeless slurry of flour and water a golden mountain of perfect pebbles, blessed with an exalted balance of crisp exterior and moist interior. Done properly, a dollar worth of flour and oil can feed a family of 12 happily. The toppings that make the rounds —a mischievous mix of fried pork and salted sardines, orange slices and chocolate chunks—mean nothing if the migas don’t sing.

The eating ritual may be nearly as important as the methodic cooking. Once the women and children have their little piles placed before them, the men grab their spoons, gather around the pan and, not unlike the Valencianos to the north sitting down to a great circle of paella, begin to eat their way to the center. Little is said during these migas moments, most attention devoted instead to mixing the warm piles of dough with the right combination of salty, sweet, savory and spicy add-ons. Give me crispy nickels of spicy chorizo, a blanket of fried green pepper and a wedge of raw onion and you won’t hear a word from me until my spoon lands in the middle.

The only thing as inevitable as the cigarette and wine that precede migas is the afternoon siesta that follows it. On most days for Chacho, that means a little shuteye next to the fire in the living room. But on a warm afternoon, when the wind has died down and the entrance to the cave sparkles in the sunlight, Chacho might just stretch out under the big blue sky and sleep until dinnertime. War, drought, pestilence, Americans: he and his migas have survived it all.

Ah, the outrage generated by pictures of Jay-Z puffing a puro in Old Havana while Beyonce snaps pictures of the crumbly walls. The first picture, above, from Lisa Shires’ photoessay from those same streets seems to me worth far more contemplation.

In that moment Shires caught on camera, a young boy is trying to buy vegetables off a street vendor, only to be told that he doesn’t have enough money. All Cubans, of course, have rations that are meant to keep them from starving (plus: elderly men are given an added cigar ration). But getting anything more than rice and beans is difficult; the government stores have a late-Soviet barren quality to them. So food, the kind that gives people a bit of protein or real nutrients, is relegated to the streets and to the black market.

There are those who would romanticize Cuba’s moves toward food sustainability, particularly its well-publicized foray into urban organopónicos, those organic victory gardens that were supposed to solve the simmering food crisis. This recent piece from the lovable scamps at the socialist Monthly Review is well-intended but written with the enthusiasm of someone who has never had to actually rely on Cuba’s “food revolution” for dinner. It may be, as the article says, that “urban agriculture within and around Havana accounts for 60–90 percent of the produce consumed in the city.” But Shires went trawling through the rooftops and schools of all of Habana Vieja and found only one withered organopónico, at a school. And regardless of how much is grown in the semi-rural outskirts, very few people without access to U.S. dollars can afford them.

[If you have the time, read this brave op-ed in the NY Times about how blacks are increasingly excluded from this group of US currency-holders. The author of the piece lost his job at a publishing house in Cuba after it was published, a firing he blames on the blunt headline that editors at the Times put on the story.]

The basic movement in Cuba’s economy is this: the island is in the multi-year process of laying off up to a million public employees, because the government knows it can no longer afford to employ 80% of the total workforce, as it has in years past. The hope is that many of those laid-off workers will become dirt farmers and animal husbanders—goats, anyone?—and thereby add to the limited food supply. It would be an intricate maneuver for even the most efficient country to pull off. Cuba’s sclerotic and sometimes delusional administration hardly seems up to the task.

Until they get it right, the black market will continue to dominate, and regular Cubans won’t be able to eat well. And that, not rap-agent-moguls strolling Habana Vieja in fedoras, is actually worthy of outrage. —Nathan Thornburgh

—

Lisa Shires is a Baltimore-based photographer. Check out her work here, or follow her on Twitter

“A barista can only fuck it up.”

A bold statement surely, from someone who by the way pays his rent and buys his food with the money he makes pressing shots at an espresso bar. But as befitting the Dutchman who said it (Olivier Vos: buzzcut, with thick glasses, and a determined enthusiasm that would take apart a floor in order to fix loose grout), there is a tremendous amount of logic to what sounds initially like a blustery provocation. Coffee – even the finest, most confident, most edifying – is still just roasted beans and water. There are three young men in the Netherlands who want to take the barista, whom they see as a part-TEDx presenter, part-birthday magician, out of the equation. They want people to make their own coffee, and to make coffee they can be proud of.

Okay, so it might be a bit more complicated than that. The trio founded Koffie Leute calling themselves “personal assistants on the way to the perfect cup of coffee.” For them, the perfect cup is full of “slow coffee”, a liquid made with 21st century supply chains and 19th century patience. “It’s not just taste, but the experience of coffee,” says Olivier. Their coffee is ground fresh and by hand, put into a cup via V60 (a conical pour-over coffee filter used by most serious baristas these days), and ideally enjoyed over conversation (and maybe a cigarette, as Dirk, the most hirsute and least talkative of the bunch demonstrated often during our chat). “Espresso bars are espresso,” explains Olivier. “But Dutch history is just a good cup of coffee.”

You see, the protagonist of the story of the Netherlands isn’t William of Orange, Johan Cruijff, or Vincent van Gogh. The story of the Netherlands is all about coffee. Joint-stock companies formed in coffeehouses brought coffee to East Indies plantations to sell the beans back to the coffee houses, creating the need for enormous banks, even bigger ports, and something to go better with a cup than the native endive. Chocolate and tobacco, Moluccans and Arubans, shipwrights and navigators, were all brought in to an empire and later a nation founded on coffee. This is not to say that it’s a heroic protagonist, and one of the greatest Dutch novels, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, describes and decries the plantation economy. But until the 20th century, Dutch coffee was Dutch coffee: fresh ground, more brown then black, and enjoyed with friends.

So what changed? Olivier says that factory owners forced their workers to take shorter coffee breaks, driving the men towards instant coffee. It is more likely that the bombing of Rotterdam, the World War II occupation (and starvation), and the subsequent loss of the Royal Dutch colonies did as much to coffee culture as modernization. Coffee was no longer a Dutch right but a commodity to share with the rest of Europe. Though Koffie Leute is attempting to reject the commodification of coffee, they are sharp enough to realize that much of coffee’s history is best left in the past. Bringing an Old World coffee culture back to the city while embracing ethically-grown coffee is tricky. A question about the beans’ origins led to a short if impassioned soliloquy by Martijn, the lanky Frisian with a Skrillex haircut. “The roaster knows the plantation. People tend to forget that…do you know if the guy who sold these beans to you went to the farm to get these beans?”

The beans we shared when I met them were Colombian by way of a Danish roaster, and at events Koffie Leute sells beans that are, if not from friends, from friends-of-friends. They have their origin stories memorized and are always ready to share this knowledge. It’s what they believe separates them from the standoffish irony that coffee people are infamous for. Knowing the beans’ story, the equipment’s story, and the country’s story – along with the enthusiasm to launch into well-timed expository – demands a dedication to the craft that purveyors of quicker coffee usually don’t have.

Slow coffee is different, perhaps because it comes from beans. Most coffee comes from tins or from coffee-extruding machines, known in the Netherlands as a Senseo. Martijn explains this and his distaste for the latter is palpable. Palpable distaste is a familiar reaction if you’ve ever had Senseo coffee. “It’s easy to sell something faster, not to sell something better.” The highfalutin espresso machine is even stranger to him, a Rube Goldberg contraption full of bells and whistles that purports to make the best coffee but is most notable for needing a jockey. The barista.

“All these people go to the expensive espresso bar with a hipster, rockstar barista. That’s not what we do. We want people to relearn what was lost.” Martijn and his friends thought the first step in this reeducation was breaking down walls. Particularly, the one between the front and back of the counter. Koffie Leute doesn’t hand customers coffee, it hands them the beans. The customer then pours the beans into a hand-powered burr grinder, closes its hatch, and gives the thing a good minute of spin. Next up is a trip to a specially rigged table the Leute made in the backyard, where filters are wetted and placed in V60s, with a fresh cup waiting on the gravity end. A few steady pours later and the coffee is ready to drink. This takes time, yes. But so does the thousand-euro rig on a matte-black counter. And here, the coffee masters are guiding and chatting every step of the way.

The grinders are all gorgeous pieces of mid-century carpentry. The little wood boxes were all bought at yard sales or spirited away from friendly attics. Refurbished by the trio, the chests hide the blades deep inside like pearls. A few spins on the brass handle leave one with a box full of fresh coffee grounds. Koffie Leute’s hand-ground beans are set to be a bit coarser, the better to be used with the slow-funneling V60. Most importantly, the hand grind with its dramatically lower revolutions-per-minute prevents frictional heating, which “pre-heats” the beans and gives them a slight – but noticeable – microwave effect. As one can expect from machines with generations of on-and-off use grinding coffee, they smell and look fantastic.

Olivier talks of grandparents seeing the grinders and coming up to him, telling stories of how they used grinders like these to make coffee for their grandparents in foggy old days. He tells the story of a guy who walked towards their booth and paid to grind coffee beans and pour cups, giving away the coffee he made. At festivals people mill around for the smell, and then share cups with complete strangers. The magic of the beans and the beauty of the grinders make for a heady brew on their own, but Koffie Leute isn’t averse to a bit of stagecraft either. Set up on a beach, they heat their water supply by bonfire and supplied a music festival with electricity-free coffee.

“It’s a coffee counter without a bar. Just a table,” Dirk explains. “We are searching for something more creative and interactive. The baristas don’t share their knowledge. I noticed that when I talked to customers at a bar, they really enjoyed it. We want to use this customer curiosity for good.” There is an idealistic bent to this, Dirk admits, and Olivier adds that they make a point not to wear a special uniform so that they’re on the same level as the customers.

But they are still Dutch, and they are still practical. Coffee has always been an at-home tradition in the Netherlands; the first espresso bar in Utrecht, the country’s third-largest city, opened six years ago. The number has grown, but people still tend to make their morning cup at home and their afternoon’s at the office. It’s for this reason that Koffie Leute has partnered with Roast.nl to mail the roasted beans to peoples’ homes. Of course the Senseos make things simple, but they’re expensive and they confuse coffee with a coffee-like product. The trio may be lacking the capitalistic drive and its many million reasons to suffer through acidic sludge – Martijn chuckled at the thought, saying “it’s not a venture capital thing” – but to paraphrase a young Ewan McGregor, who needs reasons when you’ve got coffee?

When it finally makes it to the cup, the trio’s slow coffee is going to be much less hot than a Senseo’s near-boil, and far more complex. Different notes play out as the coffee can sit on the drinker’s tongue without fear of burning it. It’s almost an unfair trick after you start with better beans, super-freshly ground, but it is another way to set slow coffee apart as good coffee. Martijn jokes that most Dutch like their coffee super hot because it seems fresh, even though it’s only just “fresh from the machine.” The filter and fresh grind let the grinder influence the cup the most, and it makes more sense for Koffie Leute to let the drinker do the grinding. Olivier explains that it is a week after roasting when a coffee is at its best, that the flavors are at their peak. But after two weeks, the coffee is flat, without all the extras. “And that,” Olivier sighs, like a man after a search and rescue mission gone awry, “is a shame.”

All three bring a tinkerer’s inquisitiveness to the coffee equation; any mention of a way to improve – or even just mess with – a basic cup is considered. Martijn has logged hours in a roastery learning how to determine the beans’ flavor by color and sound of the roast. He thinks customer-roasting is the next step after customer-grinding. Reading about how starving Dutch thinned their coffee with chicory (a la New Orleans’ Café du Monde) during World War II, they are trying it out to see which beans the root tastes best with. When I mentioned Stockholm pour-over institution Drop Coffee’s focus on the water, tittering of approval and possibilities swept around the table. All avenues are welcome, save one. “Milk is just used to hide imperfections,” spits Olivier. “We don’t mind sugar – it is your coffee – but milk is frowned upon.”

So how is the coffee? It’s…different, of course. Brown more than black and without any sort of lemony scorch. Koffie Leute has a handmade flavor chart for their customers that ranges from knoflook (garlic) to teer (tar). Their focus is on the Spring side of the spectrum; notes of cilantro, anise, jasmine, and basil. It seemed so impossible that my first thought was “these guys have no idea what they are doing with their coffee.” After another few sips, though, I noticed that I was not just holding the mug in my hands to warm me up on this still-chilly March morning but rather resting it against my cheekbone—the easier to smell, the quicker to sip, and the more to immerse myself in the coffee. I then realized that these guys knew precisely what they were doing with their coffee. It’s the sort of coffee that makes traveling worthwhile; so cocky and comfortable in its own norm that I, initially disgusted, grow quickly to admire it. The next step is bragging to all my less-cool friends back home.

This coffee is not a “reinvention” of coffee. It’s a reminder of what coffee is, was, and, arguably, should be. As seen in Stockholm, Berlin, and Brooklyn the future of coffee is here, it just needs to be distributed a bit more evenly. It does not need packets, pipes, or a pulsating machine. It definitely does not need a sleeve-tatted, standoffish sort to abracadabra a wad of Euros into a cup behind a curtain wall. In fact, hand-ground, poured, and shared over a low table, the future of coffee looks an awful lot like its past.

—
Asher Kohn is a student currently brewing in The Netherlands. He is the editor of The Tuqay and can be found tweeting as @ajkhn. He usually writes about West and Central Asia, but he supposes that Utrecht is close enough.

For another look at the rise of coffee obsession, Strange Brew tells the story of the modern coffee movement as filtered through a very small, very serious coffee shop in Stockholm.

On paper, it appears bowl-of-cereal simple: boil the water, drop the chicken, cook the rice, pile one on top of other. It’s a starving-student construction, what one turns to when the cupboards are bare and inspiration is past its expiration date.

Indeed, the first time I encountered chicken rice, I was hungry and broke, on my final day of a Southeast Asian bender and down to my last three Singaporean dollars. The sexier items—fish head curry, crab claws slathered in crimson chili sauce—all came with adult price tags, and after a desperate calories-for-cash calculation, I landed on this prosaic dish, unaware of its immigrant origins, ignorant of its cultural importance, and uninitiated in the complex charms of the world of flavors trapped within.

In the years since that first encounter I’ve often found myself crunching numbers, trying to figure out how something so elemental—a piece of lukewarm protein, a pile of unadorned carbs—could deliver the kinds of flavors that burrow into your memory bank and never find their way back out. 1 + 1 = 10? The math in my mind just didn’t check out.

A decade later, brought back to Singapore—that great and bizarre and unsettling metropolis of culinary decadence and authoritarian order—on eating business, there was no question where the bulk of calories and stomach real estate would be allotted. After a few warm-up rounds across the city-state, I headed into Maxwell Street Hawker Center, arguably the most famous of the island’s fleet of hawker centers, the lion’s den of chicken rice obsession.

If you listen to the Singapore press, there’s a chicken rice war going down in Maxwell. Ever since Tony Bourdain waltzed into the Chinatown food court in 2008 and lost his mind on camera over a plate of Tian Tian’s chicken rice, the family-owned vendor has claimed the title of Singapore’s chicken rice king. But this reign has not been without turbulence. After 20 years of blanching chicken and boiling rice, one of Tian Tian’s star cooks, Wong Liang Tai, was dismissed after a quarrel with the chicken rice chieftains. Not content to slink quietly off into the Singapore sunset, Tai decided to open his own stand just three stalls down from his former employer, using the same magical formula that had made Tian Tian so famous (a formula that Tai has argued he helped invent).

Chicken rice is originally a Chinese creation, a deceptively sophisticated preparation from the southern island of Hainan involving poached chicken and rice cooked in fragrant, fatty chicken stock. The staple traveled south to Singapore with the wave of Hainanese immigrants and promptly became a star of the street food scene around the city. You’ll find chicken rice up and down the Malaysian peninsula, but Singaporeans have claimed it as their own national dish, and cook it as if they eat nothing else.

I may have been ignorant to the power of chicken rice the first time around, but I would not make the same mistake twice. So I solicited the help of one of Singapore’s most respected eaters, Leslie Tay, a full-time pediatrician who moonlights as the insatiable force behind the food blog ieatishootipost.sg. Dr. Tay has spent many years cataloging the best of Singapore’s hawker food and has an incredible ability to drill right down to heart of a dish.

“First of all, look at the rice. The grains should be plump and unbroken with a nice fragrance. There should be a gelatinous layer of fat just beneath the skin. If I see the gelatin, I know the cook has put in the proper effort.”

Dr. Tay says that condiment craftsmanship is nearly as vital as the dish itself.

“Smell the chili sauce. Do you smell calamansi lime or do you small vinegar, a cheap short cut? And a good black sauce should have the thickness and complexity of an aged balsamic vinegar.”

The more I talk to the good doctor, the more it becomes apparent that there is likely no one on earth more serious about food than Singaporeans. They queue up for hours at a time, plan meals like chess moves, and remain fiercely loyal to the cooks who know how to make their bellies dance. For further proof of how deep the food love runs, you need only check out Chicken Rice War, a bizarre adaption of Romeo and Juliet in which the Montagues and Capulets are replaced by the Wongs and Changs, two families of warring chicken rice hawkers. These days in Maxwell Center, it seems life is imitating art.

I arrive at 11 am, before the lunch crush has set in, and head straight to Tian Tian stand, where a healthy queue has already formed. Clouds of chicken steam and the thwack of butchers’ knives act like appetizers for the hungry masses. When I finally sit down to my plate, I work through Dr. Tay’s qualitative cues. The rice, tinted a gentle brown from its poultry bath, emits a heady fragrance of ginger and herbs. A sheen of rendered chicken fat coats the grains and gives the rice the moist sparkle of a good sushi rice. The dark soy-based sauce clings to the tines of my fork; the chili sauce next to it smells like citrus peel and is so red it almost glows.

Then there is the bird itself, served at room temperature, wobbling gently atop the mound of rice. With one glance you can tell that the cooks here have captured that exalted state of slipperiness, the fat gently rendered and shocked into a semi-solid jelly by plunging the cooked chickens directly into a frigid ice bath. Before you go crazy with the condiments, before you begin to mix protein and carb and ground chili into some gloriously abstract salad, take a bite of that chicken: This is what chicken tasted like before everything else tasted like chicken.

After Tian Tian, I walked the 15 paces down the aisle to Ah-Tai Chicken Rice and repeated the process. And what I found at the former employer’s stand was noble and delicious and deserving of the small queue it claimed, but it was not Tian Tian. I’d love to say that the hype is an exaggeration, that Bourdain was merely hamming it up for the camera, that in a sling shot battle, David slays Goliath nine times out of ten. But with the infintesimal knowledge and experience that I have in these matters, I can say that Tian Tian is in a different league than most chicken rice stalls in Singapore.

This is by no means a comprehensive judgment of Tian Tian’s chicken rice supremacy across Singapore; I talked to a dozen different cabbies during my time in town and everyone offered a different take on the best purveyor: Five Star, Loy Kee, Boon Tong Kee.

I can’t say much about those places; those will have to wait for another visit. I can say, without hesitation, that if I was stranded in Singapore and down to my last $3, I’d head to Maxwell and take my place in the queue.

SXSW IS LIKE THE SUN: huge and gaseous and best viewed indirectly. Don’t stare straight at the Austin Convention Center, where Oreos Brand Ambassadors are incinerating what was left of the tech-rawk-film convention’s indie credibility. Don’t burn your retinas on the blinding orb of anti-awesome that is the Fleishman Hillard corporate communications “lounge” at the Four Seasons Hotel.

Instead, enjoy the shady corners of the festival: the side conversations at Clive Bar on Davis, the serendipitous reunions on South Congress, or the chance to bump into Bassem Youssef and DJ Spooky in the same random hallway. It’s cheap and easy to criticize what a brand bazaar the festival has become, but there’s no need to make yourself a victim. Just walk away from all the parts you don’t like.

The hunt for food should be guided by the same principles. Don’t wait in line for that free taco. Avoid any meal that has a launch partner. Turn your back to the carnival of handouts and cross under the freeway to East Austin and see what chef Paul Hargrove is doing on East 6th Street.

Roads & Kingdoms has a history with Hargrove. Those readers who were with us when we started—at this selfsame festival in Austin last year—will remember the transnational powerhouse he put on at our launch party. He took our three early obsessions—Spain, Southeast Asia, and Peru—and made a menu out of it. That meant, in part: pimientos del piquillo con bacalao, open-faced bánh mì and ceviche with Gulf snapper and grapefruit.

Relationships like this can get messy. A man who cooks like that is someone you just want to be around. So this year I found myself, along with my brother, sitting at a table in Hargrove’s Travis Heights home, while Hargrove’s wife—it was her birthday—poured deep drams of George Dickel laced with ginger beer, simple syrup and lime. We drank until we began falling out of our chairs, and then we walked home.

SxSW ended on Saturday with a double pop explosion: Prince brought to you by Samsung, Justin Timberlake brought to you by the new MySpace. My own finale came on the way to the airport, when I made a second stop by the East Side Show Room to catch Hargrove putting together this singular dish, Roasted Richardson’s Pork Belly.

Richardson Farms is in Rockdale, Texas, an old Alcoa town (and home to Pee Wee Crayton) some 50 miles from Austin. The dish is named after the pork belly they deliver. But it’s really Hargrove’s dish, a polyglot bowl the size of a hubcap with European inspiration and ratios like an inverted ramen: a little bit of broth, a ton of tender pork belly.

It’s worth interjecting here that Hargrove does not go for the word ‘fusion’. He’s not alone in this. The savant of Central Restaurante in Lima, Virgilio Martinez, got somewhat tongue-tied in our conversation with him when he tried to find a polite way to disavow the term.

Hargrove’s problem with the word is that it’s just imprecise. “Fusion” is not a style, he says. “Just like farm-to-table: That’s not a style of cooking, [that’s] a supply chain.” Richardson’s pork belly came from a local farm to Hargrove’s table, but that doesn’t tell you much about what he’s going to do with it.

For Hargrove, French cooking is a style, and it is has been his style ever since he cooked at Daniel in NYC. For this dish, that means curing the pork in brown sugar and salt and spices for six hours. Then he poaches it in white wine, water and a mirepoix for another four hours at 325°. The salt turns the liquid into a broth. Strain and add grace notes of parmesan and mustard.

That’s the French twist. But on top of the poitrine de porc comes a wholly Italian innovation, the uova da raviolo. Note the singular: This one raviolo is the size of a fist. There is herbed ricotta and a single egg yolk inside, and the whole thing gets cooked for just an instant—merely threatening the thin raviolo with boiling water is almost enough to get it there—so that the yolk remains runny and as golden as the sun.

All of this is topped with a Spanish touch. On a trip to northern Spain, Hargrove didn’t just remember the Basque pintxos, but also the way that every restaurant and café in San Sebastian seemed to serve diners a fistful of thin-cut fries. So Hargrove’s pork belly is ringed with black-eyed peas and mushrooms and then crowned with a golden haystack of fries.

Hargrove’s best explanation for how he came up with the dish is: “I cook what I like to eat.” Good words to live by, and the reason his dish makes for a fine anniversary meal. If there’s one thing we can say about the first year of Roads & Kingdoms, it’s that we cooked what we liked to eat. Stories about legendary chili sauces, mapped-out dispatches of a heavily-armed dash for Mogadishu ice cream or a minibus journey through the heart of Armenia: this is the menu we’ve chosen.

The East Side Show Room is, rather self-consciously, a speakeasy. The bar is the centerpiece, all class and brass, with devil-red accent lighting. But an honest dish like this, where egg yolk spills over pork belly into a darkening broth, isn’t meant for pairing with cucumber martinis. Give it a local beer—maybe a Pearl Snap pils—and begin. The carnival barkers and bacchanalians to the west will have to wait.

In the heart of the Mongolian winter, photographer Khasar Sandag accompanied correspondent Brett Forrest to a traditional encampment on the Steppes to witness bodog, a feast prepared by cooking a goat in its own skin using hot rocks, blowtorches, and a very sharp knife.

Read Brett’s Roads & Kingdoms feature on making and eating bodog for more.