boqueria + favourite restaurants

Last weekend we were in New York for Louise’s 50th birthday and, happily for me, her birthday dinner was at a restaurant on my 5-favourite-things list: Boqueria. We went to the Soho location and had a prix fixe menu which was great because, just like my burger option at the other end of the restaurant spectrum, it meant that we didn’t have to make any decisions. The food was delicious.

Despite the delicious food, my favourite restaurant in New York is still Il Buco. I love the antiques and the wine and the olive oil tasting and the eclectic food; I also love that Bond Street is usually quiet and dark and deserted and so the restaurant is a surprise: you step from the stillness of the night into this warm and cozy and charming space.

My top 5 favourite restaurants anywhere: 1) the new place in Spain that Joel and I discovered on our bike trip this past March (it was also a tapas place and had a stupendous wine that I committed to memory so that I could buy again but have, alas, forgotten); 2) a tiny tiny restaurant perched in the side of a mountain in the middle of France (St Circ Lapopie) that you arrive at by dark twisting roads (that always used to make me sick but still were worth it) and that served an amazingly rich duck in prune juice dish that I would no longer eat but that, even so, is still one of the most rapturous things I have ever tasted (no doubt intensified by the fact that I haven’t been there in over 25 years); 3) a place in Florence that Marla told us about that is too expensive for ordinary people but that has a sidebar café which serves the same food; we had some tomato thing that is, to date, in the top five things I have ever eaten in my life; 4) a tapas place that Richard took me to in Oxford where everything we tasted was familiar but better than I’d ever tried before (the hummus was transformed into something otherworldly; ditto, impossibly, the cheese—shouldn’t manchego cheese just be manchego cheese? But it was better than other manchego’s I’ve tried; 5) the 4th Avenue Wine Bar—which will discredit me as any sort of judge of food since the food is fine but not like these other one-of-a-kind places but it is such a lovely place to sit and spend an evening and I need to mention some place in Ottawa! (Actually, there’s also the Zen Kitchen which is fabulous.)

I realize that I have only one name for my top favourite places; I will have to seek out the names of the other restaurants.

In New York I also went out early on Sunday morning to buy my favourite sticky bun in the world from Balthazar’s bakery on Spring Street. There was a line, people were boisterous and impatient, and there was a dog almost as tall as my shoulder waiting beside me--but the wait and the rowdiness was worth that first delicious bite.

And now I’m going to go downstairs and have some toast with butter and honey (my favourite “at home” snack).