Next time, I’m bringing my Fez.  Fezzes are awesome.  Especially when they’re little mini-fezzes being worn by monkeys, but even sans monkey, the Fez is probably the ultimate gentleman’s accessory, whether you’re an English colonial gentleman in a dinner jacket, or a hooka-smoking Syrian trader.

The Fezzes (does one capitalize the name of the hat?) in the Yahabibi seem like the real thing, though.  Along with the swords and plates and rugs (take off your shoes and sit around a low table, with tons of cushions, for extra goodness) and belly-dancing videos featuring seductively gyrating Russians constantly distracting you from your dinner and conversation.  In fact, that was the only downside of this restaurant – the lack of a real flesh-and-blood bellydancer, but I guess they don’t do that on Tuesday nights.  And the name of the restaurant just runs off the tongue.  Yahabibi.  Say it.  It makes you happy and want to wear a Fez.

Fare is the standard “Arab” food, for those of us ignoramuses who can’t tell the difference between a Moroccan falafel and a Lebanese burek, and done well, with cute and attentive service to bring the stuff.  The wine list’s not bad either, with the first restaurant serving Kefraya – Lebanese red that we used to really like back at our favorite Lebanese place in Zurich, despite the fact that, at some point, they decided that they were a gourmet vintage and that they’d start charging obscene prices.  I guess someone realized the silliness of that, and brought the cost back down to normal levels.  Also, we were served the wrong wine, which doesn’t matter, because it was pretty good.  That says something for the quality of a wine list, when a waitress screws up your order and you’re still happy.

Go there, sit down, take off your shoes, pig out, have a shisha for dessert – have two, I couldn’t because of a miserable two-week cold.  But I’m going back, dammit.  The food’s just so good.  And I’m wearing my Fez.

Sömmeringstr. 48
50832 Köln
+49 (0) 221 510 7162
yadaary-orienthaus.de

So there you are, in this utterly packed place, bitching about the crowd, trying to get through to the counter, hovering over some poor harried diner for one of the few standing tables (or one of the even fewer ones with barstools), until you manage to snag one that’s located strategically smack in the path of where the fresh dishes are brought out from the kitchen.

The Euskal Etxea bills you based on an honor system of how many toothpicks or little spoons you have on your plate at the end of the evening, so you’re free to snag more goodies off the big plates of sausages, grilled stuff, cheese, you name it, constantly streaming out to the crowd jostling for a space at the bar.  Silly people, would that they were as smart as you, you big sexy beast you.

Right, I’m not talking about us, sure.  But at least the process of trying to flag down one of the (really friendly) waiters to get a refill (just fill the damn wine glass up all the way and bill me for three, save us both a lot of effort, buddy) is democratic enough.

And the food’s good, much much better than I would have expected of this weird mixture of bar, basque cultural center full of hoardings for strange ethnic bands full of the very dedicated, serious young people, seriously dedicated to the pursuit of popularizing basque culture, and restaurant.  I don’t quite get that part, a somewhat forlorn set of very elegant tables at the back of the joint, with lost-looking diners who must have decided against the near-combat of the tapas bar section in front.  But hey, my own theory is that tapas are the evolution of little reward snacks given to ancient Basque gladiators when they achieve success in the giant oily wrestling pits of San Sebastian.

I’d rather not think about oily wrestlers while eating.  But the tapas here are very very good.

Placeta Montcada 1-3
E-08003 Barcelona, Spain
+39 93 310 2185
www.euskaletxea.cat (guys, it’s kind of cool that you’re using a regional domain suffix, but if the Catalans can get one, so can you…)

Where indeed?

It’ll be a big banquet, the meat will be overdone, dinner will be expensive, your table will suck, and you’ll be surrounded by a bunch of drunks frantically trying to have fun before stumbling home for the night.

Well, the last bit was true.

Kudos to Murmuri for an outstanding meal – serving large numbers of people at the same time must be a daunting task, especially when you manage to maintain top-notch food quality and keep the (good) booze flowing.

They were a bit confused on the service, but thus a bank error in our favor, as they totally forgot to bill us for the massive vodka martini they served me as what I had thought was a welcome drink.  The combination of great cocktails (quality and quantity great) and neglecting to put them on the bill is what keeps me coming back for more…

Decor was tasteful, seafood fresh and cooked just lightly enough, and everything was good, solid gourmet food – nothing chichi, nothing too simple, just right.

Despite the large number of tables in a compact space, nothing felt packed – even when they turned out to be a bit clueless about how to arrange people for dinner and ended up putting some poor souls in the bar area.  Hey, all the better if you’re close to the source of all the goodness – until the very drunken Nicaraguan woman a few tables down from ours started trying to hump the table of an extremely puzzled-looking English couple still finishing their dessert.

I also hope, for the sake of the incredibly bored 8-year-old boy torn between falling asleep and watching his parents get dirty on the dance floor, that he had his own room in the hotel upstairs.

Rambla de Catalunya, 104
08008 · Barcelona, Spain
T +34 935 500 600
www.murmuri.com

Elia was the result of our search for neighborhood joints in our new German digs – and having decent Greek, Italian, and many other kinds of non-French food is one of the perks of having moved out of Paris.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Paris.  I will always love Paris.  I miss Paris.  Paris is the best place in the world, despite the high cost of living, the noise, the overcrowding, the road rage, the corruption, the bums, the tourists, and and and.  I don’t care it’s awesome.  But it’s, well, Paris – Lutetia, the city of lights, whereas we now inhabit humble Colonia Agrippina, former bastion of freezing Roman legionnaires against dark forests full of angry Teutonic tribes.

So all things considered, the food was a pleasant surprise, although I’m still stunned at the fact so many Greeks and Italians would be willing to freeze their asses off up here with the rest of us.  Power to them, though.

Elia’s proprietors are a congenial couple, who will gladly set you up with a (valuable) parking spot right outside despite the chaotic jumble of cars that clogs this part of town.  And inside, it’s a warm, welcoming place with nice decor and awesome food – all the better for occasionally being simple dishes done creatively and with a high attention to quality and detail.  There isn’t a trace of the oft-cheesy faux tavernas that dot German cities, much like Argentine steakhouses in Amsterdam (not that there’s anything wrong with either of those, but sometimes you just want something a bit more genteel).

The wine list is their star attraction – interesting Greek island vintages, well explained, perfectly paired with the dishes.  The owner even sent me several mails after the second time we’d eaten there, having done some research on different vintages as he’d promised.

Good stuff, check it out.

Bachemer Straße 236
50935 Köln, Germany
+49 221/434219 ‎

I love that word.  BACKFICKAN.

It is a restaurant.  The restaurant serves meat.  Lots of meat.  Meat is good.  This would be the ultimate low-carb eatery if their bread were not so damned good.

Djuret’s gimmick is – one animal at a time.  Each menu only serves one type of beast – in our case, this was pig.  And pretty much every part of the pig, every variation on every part of the pig, flavor of every variation on  every part of the pig, and then some.  Also, good bread.  The basic idea (of the meat) seems to be that this is a more sustainable approach to butchery, and that’s fine by me.

This is a bit of an exotic approach (the single animal thing, that is), enough so that the gentleman handling Djuret’s reservations seemed surprised that I would want to eat there.  He sent me a somewhat incredulous mail, asking “are you sure?  Do you know what we do here?”  Yes, dammit.  Meat.

Which brings us to the exchange between ladyfriend and Swedish waiter.

Ladyfriend:  ”What is the difference between pig A and pig B?”

Swedish waiter:  ”Pig A is a Swedish pig.”

LF:  ”Yes, but what it is the taste?”

SW:  ”It is a good pig.”

LF:  ”But what is the difference?”

SW:  ”They are different.”

…

And this is why you order the christmas pig – a piece of wood, at SEK 495.-, containing hot and cold pig sausage, pig paté, pig ham, more pig ham, cognac pig paste, and all the above-mentioned variations on the pig (I’m not sure whether it was a Swedish pig in the end).

I was not particularly sure about my order, though, when ladyfriend began mentioning the sausage’s lovely “anus taste”.  The waiter confirmed, “yes, anus.  Very nice.”

Guys, I know how sausages are made, but please don’t rub it in.

…

Oh, “anis”.  Right.

And it was good.  Very, very good, and plentiful – so much so that the battery of condiments suffered as a result.  Stuffed to bursting, I lay in my seat, looking about me at the meat hooks, hunting-themed paintings, and miniature taxidermy museum decorating the cozy dining room, when maliciously smirking Swedish waiter came by and asked whether I wanted more of anything.

You bastard, of course I do.  I’m going to die.  I am going to pull a Mr. Creosote all over your fine establishment, but BRING ME MORE ANIS SAUSAGE.

Not to mention that dessert was included, along with yet another offer to bring reinforcements once we were done attacking the delicious rice pudding.  Best of all, after we were done cramming vast Roman-orgy quantities of outstanding food and booze down our gullets, we could just stumble right upstairs into our waiting room at the Hotel Victory, there to ride out the night in stomach-bloated delicious agony.  But man, it was worth it.

Breakfast the next morning was out of the question.  But I was seriously tempted to go back and find out what beast they had on the menu the day following the dinner massacre.

BACKFICKAAAANNN.

Lilla Nygatan 5
111 28 Stockholm, Sweden
+46 8 506 400 84
www.djuret.se

A) build a cool hotel

B) fill it with awesome stuff

Seeing as how we are pretty much first-class experts at filling thing with awesome stuff, this concept appealed to us, and Karin asked for a room for her birthday.  Done deal.  Because it’s all for the girl, right.  And the massive amount of antique ship models, miniature cannons, brass naval stuff, and free gingerbread cookies (hooray, Sweden) are just a fringe benefit.

The Victory is named after Horatio Nelson‘s flagship at the battle of Trafalgar.  The history geek in me had to think for a second about this – didn’t the Swedes and the English have some unresolved historical snits that a one-armed sailor running amuck around the Baltic would have aggravated?  No such thing, quite the opposite – one wonders whether the name is at least partially a flippant gesture at Danish guests, seeing as how one of Lord Nelson’s earliest naval victories involved beating the living snot out of the fleet of the ever-beloved Danish neighbors at the battle of Copenhagen.  In fact, the only bit of Anglo-Swedish conflict I was able to dig up, the 1810-1812 Anglo-Swedish war, didn’t even see any casualties inflicted by the nefarious English.

So a tribute to Nelson it is, along with rooms named after Swedish sailing ship captains (replete with photos of their ships and unsmiling wives), heavy carpeting, lots of brass and dark wood, and very friendly, accommodating service – not to all you can eat gingerbread.  Hooray!  It is up there with the magnificent Hotel New York in Rotterdam in terms of decor, and unless you get one of the special big suites at the New York, the Victory’s rooms are cooler.  Just write down the address on a piece of paper, because while Swedish cabbies all speak pretty decent English, your hopeless attempts to pronounce even simple street names will cause you to end up in some godawful suburb – thank the stars for flat rate cab fares from the airport.

The receptionist even dug around their defunct “stuff-we-sell” closet when I realized I’d forgotten all of my cuff links at home, and sold me (at a very reasonable price) a pair of pretty spiffy Swedish “three crowns” logo ones.  I am wearing them now.  I am feeling distinctly patriotic leanings toward my cuff links, in fact.

Aside from the world’s slowest elevator (which you will be able to tolerate, because it’s a pretty nice elevator), and slightly thin doors if you have noisy, hyperactive neighbors, it was a decent place – beds were comfortable, noise levels (despite its central old-town location in the middle of Gamla Stan) were acceptable, and right, lots and lots and lots of model ships.  Enough to make you want to take the stairs instead of the elevator.  You’ll probably arrive faster anyway.

www.thecollectorshotels.se/en/victory/
Lilla Nygatan 5
111 28 Stockholm, Sweden
+46 8 506 400 00

Reason enough to skip breakfast.

Well, actually, no.  There is no good reason for skipping breakfast that does not involve angry bears loose in the hotel.  But a good all-you-can-eat pig-out is close enough.

Berns is one of the oldest eateries in Stockholm, at least if one discounts the presumably numerous little caves where grumpy bearded Nordic types dip horrible pickled fish-creations in tiny, Swedish-liquor-tax-compatible glasses of unspeakable spirits.

No such danger here, though.  Karin had originally booked us for what must be our earliest lunch ever (considering we normally have trouble even getting out of bed before noon on weekends) in the large red-themed dining hall, mainly for the decor (late 19th century glamorous chandeliers, art nouveau mirrors, great big open spaces perfect for fancy balls) but we ended up being magnificently surprised by the uniformly very high caliber of the food and service.

Whether this is always the case, I can’t tell – but for our visit, Berns managed an extensive, high quality “miscellaneous Asian stuff, also, meatballs” buffet.  There wasn’t a theme so much as a smorgasbord of “exotic foods from the faraway empires of Cathay, Corea, Siam and Nippon”.  The seafood was very fresh, the sushi – normally I would be suspicious of mass-produced raw fish product for such an event – on par with anything in a good Japanese place (they wisely limited themselves to 5-6 selections, managing to make each of them great), and everything else, from the oysters over curries to dessert, was top notch.  Buffets, like banquets, seem like one of the more challenging things to do well, and these guys succeeded brilliantly.

Props to the bartender, too, for mixing up one of the better martinis I have had recently – out of baby onions, he immediately cottoned on to the fact that someone ordering a gibson might not necessarily want olives in his vodka, so he intelligently went for a twist.  Good boy.  And a very fair wine list to boot, not to mention the fact that Berns appears to be the only place in Sweden whose tea selection extends beyond “Earl Grey, green, and rooibos”.

I was a bit suspicious about a help-yourself deal; I’d assumed we’d encounter a herd of overly social, determinedly wholesome Swedish matrons muscling their way to what they saw as their fair place by the dumpling baskets.  Not so – while most diners were fairly nicely dressed for what appears to have been a very civilized Sunday eating-out tradition, they were also accordingly well behaved.  And even better, the staff, bless them, were good enough to not only let disappointed diners staring sadly at an empty plate of stuff know that refills might be a while coming and you might as well wait sitting down – but they actually remembered your table and came to let you know when reinforcements had arrived.  Awesome.

Näckströmsgatan 8,
111 47 Stockholm, Sweden
+46 8 566 322 00 ‎
www.berns.se

No, not that kind – I haven’t really had a have-a-friend-come-over-and-smoke-something-and-get-really-hungry-and-desperately-search-for-hot-dogs-at-3-a.m. episode since college, but after a few martinis, I come pretty damn close to it.  And thus are born legendary quests for the first even vaguely plausible-sounding foodstuffs that cross your mind.

This is perfect.  No, really.  It’s the sort of place that welcomes you with warm light spilling out onto the narrow streets of  little Tokyo South-East of Paris’ Opera Garnier.  There’s inevitably a line out the door, sometimes even managing to contain the diners (unlike the hungry- and angry-looking fat American girl who muscled her way past us last night on a desperate quest for food, now.)

It makes me want early darkness and rain, as it’s somehow reminiscent (no idea why) of Rick Deckard’s noodle stand in Blade Runner.  Except that there’s free tea and far fewer replicants running around that need blowing up.

From the counter, you see the owner and his three cooks trying to exude an air of calm professionalism, while they (at least the three cooks) run around the tiny space doing everything at once, bumping into each other, and still managing to deliver the goods on time – at least, the gyoza appeared within 30 seconds of our order.  That’s awesome, especially when you’re packing a few drinks already.

Unfortunately, the dinner menu with its small plates (the agedashi dofu and takoyaki are really good, but the donburi and udon look outstanding) is only available after 18:00, and if you’ve been tearing through multiple bottles of hot sake, they start (very politely) trying to usher you out the door around ten p.m., so there’s not that much room for debauchery, but once you manage to get yourself seated, reach over to turn the air conditioning down from its default ‘arctic’ setting, realize that your attempts to make friendly conversation with the French girls next to you will only end in snootiness and tears, and get the good times rolling, the food just keeps on coming.  And the price is right too.

And once they (politely) manage to kick you out, there’s always a bunch of bars just around the corner.

We ended up being fed a hearty reasonable meal by the gregarious staff of the sort-of-nearby (if you count a mad dash over the dramatic hills toward nearby Gairloch) Myrtle Bank Hotel – dinner with a view and without the proto-Victorian guilt of having dared to show up late to the great table d’hôte of the Pool House.  They did maintain that they found the staff there a bit weird, and that we weren’t the first people who’d turned up at the Myrtle Bank’s doorstep, hungry, with confused looks in their eyes.

Their food was fine, the whiskey was good, and the latter notwithstanding, we managed to make it back over the hills…to attack the Pool House’s outstanding supply of single malts.

As in, holy crap, how much booze do you people have?  (The answer:  a lot.)

The proprietor, an elderly gentleman named Peter, also knew his stuff pretty well – in between regaling us with tales of World War II heroism (not his, alas, but the place is plastered in regimental badges, military photos, and, well, whiskey bottles), I really started appreciating the booze I’d been dropping ice cubes into.  I’m determined not to become a whiskey snob like so many of my acquaintances, but damn, that’s some good stuff there once someone actually sets you straight about how to drink it.

Our experience turned out to be a bit less odd than the initial impression suggested it might – as everything about the place was beautifully tasteful and steeped in the sort of stiff-upper-lip English expensive landed gentry air the owners wanted to convey – down to the copious name-dropping of famous guests at any opportunity.  But weirdly, although I’m usually really sensitive to that sort of thing, it didn’t detract from the vast suite, the incredible view of the wild Loch just out back, and the fit-for-a-day-of-wrasslin-highland-cattle breakfasts served on fine china and silver.

Only on our last day, when we were subjected to a weird bit of nostalgic justification for popular eugenics by one of the nice people there (“people used to be strong, but it’s because of all the breeding with weak stock that they aren’t anymore, I mean, you wouldn’t do that with race horses, would you?”) that we made some funny faces at each other.   Whoa, heavy.  But really, they all turned out to be really nice.  Especially Spodge the amazing friendly toothless cat.

But it was okay, because they also served some really good haggis, and that counts for a lot.

Poolewe
Achnasheen, Wester-Ross IV22 2LD, United Kingdom
01445 781 272
pool-house.co.uk

Except that haggis is really, really good, dammit.  I’ll freely admit that I sneered at it before trying it.  Wouldn’t you?  Except that, if you’d ever eaten a sausage, it’s pretty much the same crap, except with oatmeal.  Mmh, offal with oatmeal.  Works for me.  Helps if you’re brutally hung over from the night before….

On a side note, I’d been debating the idea of buying a full formal kilt outfit.  After all, if you have even the slightest bit of Scottish heritage, never mind the fact that that part of my family were some sort of slave-clan to either one or two more powerful tribes (depending on whom you ask), whose claim to fame appears to have been putting an opportunistic arrow through the skull of some opposing chieftain after he was betrayed by his butler late one night, it’s really tempting to dress up in a man-skirt and tuxedo.

No, not quite.

Although I could imagine it would be fun to enthusiastically piss off purists by wearing polka dot boxer shorts underneath, kind of like letting on to Scotch enthusiasts that you like to drink single malts with ice (another habit I was roundly disabused of – I’ll freely admit when I am wrong.  Sometimes.)

Except that it’s also a good thing to be able to take a hint, when a kilt salesman, after thumbing through a big book of clan tartans and finding all iterations of your clan’s patterns, just gives you a sad look and shakes his head, muttering something about your ancestor in charge of clothing design being a colorblind retard.

So no kilt, sorry guys.  But I was inspired, really, especially by fine folks like the two gentlemen having dinner at a table near us, in very dignified-looking formal regalia.  They turned out to be German, but enthusiastically expounded upon the absolute acceptability of wearing such gear at “Ze Rabbie Burns dinners in Chermany”.

Right, Kitchin.  Tom Kitchin, the boss, is a hyperactive looking, hyperactively-friendly master chef, who came to our table to serve up the outstanding monkfish in pancetta himself.  In fact, all service was excellent, as much so as the food – including the poor Spanish waitress shivering in these Northern wastes and only letting on after some prodding that she’d really like to be somewhere warmer.   But all staff were magnificent – meticulously attentive, constantly scanning the room for anything amiss, rushing over to refill glasses at the slightest raising of an eyebrow.  Now that’s hard-core professional.  Same goes for the wine selection.

It’s not cheap, but unarguably worth it in all respects.

While you’re at it, have a pre-dinner drink at The Shore Bar nearby.  They may not have any martini glasses, but the place is comfortably old-school, friendly, and typically optimistic about the Scottish weather (like almost all the places we visited, they had tables outside.  At least they had the foresight to equip them with blankets).

78 Commercial Street
Edinburgh, Midlothian EH6 6LX, United Kingdom
+44 (0) 131 555 1755
www.thekitchin.com