Last Sunday, I made matzah ball soup with my mom and the experience made me wonder why oh why do I only eat matzah ball soup at Passover? Perhaps that should be the fifth question posed at the Passover table.

It was a cozy little scene, punctuated by the trills and meows of Eleanor the Cat. The soup was for my buddy, also Cat, who was laid up after knee surgery. She had put in a request for the soup and dumplings, which Mom and I agreed could facilitate the healing of Cat’s meniscus.

Mom took quick action in my apartment, donning a blue bandana doo-rag. She assembled the key components while I ran out for turnips (and food for Eleanor, of course). Earlier in the day we bought several large Amish chicken drumsticks from Zabar’s because the venerable Upper West Side food purveyor didn’t seem to have anything in the way of affordable whole birds. Odd indeed. At any rate, the recipe here has been modified to include a whole chicken instead of the ad hoc parts we tossed in. But, of course, chicken soup is anything but precise, so throw in what you have on hand.

Now, for the controversy: Mom added a packet of bullion. Purists will balk, but you can’t always know how much flavor the ingredients are going to yield, so she hedged. Look, you can add it at the end or not at all, but there’s no reason to shy away from doctoring where appropriate. There is no shame in bullion.

Mom also leaves the skin on the onions. She said it contributes to a nice brown hue in the broth. I believe her. This particular soup includes carrot and celery in the final product, which you wouldn’t traditionally include during Passover, when most people serve the plainest of plain broths. But we wanted to make a whole meal out of it, so add the veggies we did! We also included egg noodles, but it’s just as good without.

Finally, I had some frozen kale, which we crumpled up and added at the end with the chopped up carrots and celery.

I produced the matzah balls, based on a Joan Nathan recipe. Nathan, late of Colicchio-Heimlich notoriety, knows her matzah. The only change I made was to substitute seltzer for water. I think it makes them a touch lighter, but not too light! You can also just follow the recipe on the matzah meal container.

I used kosher chicken fat, which I buy at Fairway, but you can also skin the fat from the top of the soup, as Nathan instructs, or render the fat from a roast chicken. Oh lord, that’s even better! People say oil is just fine, but I stand firmly behind the inclusion of fat, which adds a subtle but important richness to the dumpling. You can make a good matzah ball without fat, but a great one? Nyet.

Dill is the aromatic backbone of this recipe. Hear this: You can never add too much. My father always said dill was his favorite herb. He had fond memories of his own mother’s soup, which likely included heaping portions of dill. To get the most of your dill, do like my Aunt Susan does: Put a whole bunch of it in some cheesecloth and tie up the ends. When you remove it from the finished broth, let it cool and squeeze the bejeezus out of it right into the soup. Nectar of the gods.

Mom’s Chicken and Vegetable Soup

2 thick or 4 small carrots, ends removed and chopped in half, plus 2 more chopped in about ¼ inch pieces
2 celery stalks, cut in half, plus
1 large onion (or 2 small) quartered with skins on or off
2 small or 1 big turnip, tops removed and halved
1 whole chicken, cleaned with innards removed
Bunch of dill in cheesecloth, plus 2 tablespoons chopped for garnish
1 bullion packet or cube (optional)
¼ cup dry white wine
1 tsp salt, plus more to taste
Pepper to taste
Cold water

1.    Into a large heavy-bottomed pot, place the carrot and celery halves, turnips, onion, salt, pepper and chicken. Add the wine and bullion, if desired. Fill pot with water to a couple of inches below the bird. More than that will make a thin broth. Bring to a boil.

2.    As grey scum forms, skim it off with a large spoon or paper towel. You’ll have to do this several time, over a 15 or 20-minute period. Reduce heat to low and put the pot lid on most of the way, leaving a crack. Let simmer for an hour to an hour and a quarter.

3.    Remove chicken, vegetables and dill with tongs and set aside. Pour soup through fine mesh strainer. Return broth to pot. Place cooked vegetables in strainer. With the back of a cooking spoon, press down on the veggies to squeeze out remaining liquid. Optional: remove chicken meat from bones and return bones to soup for final steps.

4.    Add chopped carrots and celery to pot. Simmer for about 10 more minutes. When dill is cool, squeeze remaining liquid into pot. Remove bones. Season to taste.

To serve, add chopped dill for garnish and, if desired, egg noodles, cooked under separate cover.

Matzah Balls
Adapted from Jewish Holiday Cookbook, by Joan Nathan

4 eggs, slightly beaten
2 tablespoons checken fat, skimmed from the top of the soup
1 cup matzah meal
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
6 tablespoons chicken soup or water

1.    In a medium bowl, beat the egs and the fat together. Stir in the matzah meal, salt and parsley. Add the chicken soup or water. Refrigerate 1 hour or more, to permit the meal to absorb the liquids.
2.    In a 6-quart pot with a lid, bring 4 quarts of salted water to a boil. Reduce the water to a simmer and drop n balls of the matzah mixture about 11/2 inches in diameter. Cover the pot and cook just at a simmer for 20-40 minutes. The longer you cook them, the softer the matzah balls will be. When they are ready, they may be placed in chicken soup to serve.

Yield: Makes about 20 balls

That day I learned how hard it is to keep a population of sheep in fighting, or milking, trim. They can be very delicate and the wrong kind of bacteria could wipe out half the farm’s population in a matter of days! Valley Shepherd raises sheep and goats in wide open spaces with lots of good stuff to eat.

Um, how cute is she?

The cheese shop at the farm is a dream. You can choose from dozens of cheese types, which is unusual for a single creamery. Can you believe how gorgeous these are? And they taste incredible. If you see them at a green market in the New York, New Jersey or Connecticut, snap some up. It’s worth it!

Now you’re about to see the only rotating goat milker on the continent.

They only make these wackadoo machines in Europe but the rather eccentric owner of Valley Shepherd, Eran Wojswol, made sure to have one on the premises. The goats don’t seem to mind it. They chow down as the machine yanks their udders.

All of this dairy cheer inspired me to make my own cheese with the help of the fabulous How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman.

The recipe is so easy it’s almost a joke. Actually, the joke is that despite how easy it is, I still managed to screw up the order because I pulled my usual stunt of not reading the recipe through before I started. But it actually didn’t matter because the it’s completely idiot proof. I won’t even say what I did wrong because I don’t want anyone to get source amnesia and think that the dumb way I did it is correct.

The recipe calls for milk, buttermilk and salt. Yep, that’s it. And you can add all sorts of goodies, like peppers and herbs, which I’m going to do next time.

Next time I’ll use more salt than the recipe calls for, but I’ll tell you, this is a revelation. You can make your own queso fresco and it’s super healthy, assuming dairy doesn’t make you sick. I crumbled some over my morning toast, in a salad and on this roasted zucchini. How pretty is that, even with my lame-o camera skillz?

Readers, here is my dilemma: I have officially gone from being a nobody-outsider to—and I’ll be straight here—a celebrity insider. My position as objective food critic has thus been compromised and with this I struggle. Do I post a glowing review to stay in the good graces of Frankie and his crew, or do I forge ahead as the steely journalist I am and call it like I saw it? There is no easy answer, but I will do my best to stay true to my editorial scruples.

At 9:20pm last Thursday, three friends and I arrived at Rao’s, a few minutes before our reservation. The corner spot was packed and festive. The large round tables were stuffed with men, mostly burly and/or of a certain age. It’s a throwback, to be sure, and feels like a movie set. There was a convivial mood and the whole place was aglow.

As we waited to be seated, owner Frank Pellegrino greeted our group as if he cared about our comfort. It’s sad, really, how rumpled one usually feels dining out in New York. You drop hundreds of dollars only to be sneered at or made to feel like they’re doing you a favor. But not at Rao’s. From start to finish we received smiles, generosity and even a scant amount of admiration, as if we were, well, Denzel Washington, who also happened to be dining at Rao’s that night. But Denzel and his companion, who Victor spotted, was seated at the worst seat in the house—the deuce by the door. By contrast, we were seated at one of the half dozen booths that line the main dining area. We actually received better treatment than Denzel, something I pointed out to the polo-shirted maître d’. “You got it,” he said.

It turns out Denzel had just shown up without a reservation and Rao’s doesn’t accommodate stars simply because they are stars. It honors its reservations and doesn’t appear to kowtow to celebs, or so it seemed on Thursday. (Other bold-faced names in the house that night: actor Vince Curatola, who played the venerable Johnny “Sack” Sacramoni on the Sopranos and the actor who played Fiori (what’s his name??), Tony Soprano’s Sicilian heavy, neither of whom had a table.)

The nice gentleman who keeps the reservation book also recited the night’s verbal menu. We started with fried mozzarella and roasted red peppers. The bricks of breaded and fried cheese sat on a thin layer of red sauce. They were tasty, but not particularly flavorful. I would have welcomed a squirt of lemon or some salt. It felt a little Bennigan’s but who doesn’t love melty crispy fried cheese? The peppers, tossed with pine nuts and raisins, were wonderfully sweet.

For the pasta course (it’s all family style chez Rao), we chose the orechiette with broccoli rabe and sausage and the pasta puttanesca. The little ears were divine in garlic and oil and the sausage, which comes from Queens, was a little spicy and totally succulent. Instead of the puttanesca, however, we were served a rigatoni in what I think was an Amatriciana sauce, but with ham, not bacon. And I almost forgot about the two tremendous meatballs in red sauce.

Ok, so you’re probably thinking, god how boring! But I assure you, we were not bored. What makes Rao’s food so good and the food in Italy so fabulous: the quality and freshness of the few ingredients on the plate. The red sauce with the rigatoni had the perfect balance of sweetness, acidity and salt. There’s a healthy amount of superb olive oil and a ton of garlic added to the San Marzano tomatoes. That’s it. Done! The meatballs were tasty and light but I’ve never been able to get behind hunks of meat that size. Why not smaller and a little more manageable?

(Oh, in case you were worried about Denzel and his crappyjack table, he and his companion eventually secured a booth in the main dining room shortly after we sat down. From my vantage point I could spy the dome of his head.)

I was completely distracted by everything—the tables of would-be power brokers, the small- and big-screen stars and the shockingly friendly service we received. I barely participated in the table conversation but was a team player when it came to food consumption.

For entrees, it was the signature lemon chicken and steak. The chicken: eah. Not great. The skin tasted of bitter burnt garlic and the seasoning was off. A few bites were enough for me. The steak, on the other hand, was delectable. So tender you could cut it with a butter knife and fatty in all the right ways. The spicy seasoning wasn’t overpowering and it was cooked to rare perfection.

Our waiter said he couldn’t believe how much we ate. He said the last people to eat all their pasta were a group of very large men. I’m still not sure if he was teasing us, as we were three not terribly large women and one average-size (but not at all average!) man.

I stepped into the ladies room and overheard two women talking about the cleanse they were planning for the next week, but not before they had dessert. Hmmn.

We were far too stuffed for dessert, but happily sipped (and cleansed with) complimentary digestives (two, in my case). We chatted with the bartender, who’s been slinging liquor there for 33 years. I harassed the lord of reservations to book another table and he said I had to come back in November. Harrumph!

Anna Maria insisted on speaking to Denzel and getting his autograph. We thought that would be better than asking to take his picture (the only other choice she gave us) but in the sobering light, both activities seem deeply regrettable. The whole idea of Rao’s is that every guest is treated like, well, Denzel. Being a fine actor or a hot model doesn’t mean as much or, in some cases, anything at Rao’s. Stars go there to be treated like the masses and the masses go there to be treated like the stars. It’s a cozy arrangement that results, I speculate, in someone like Denzel Washington being equally as excited as we were to have scored a table at Rao’s. I’ll be sure to ask him the next time we hang.
(Anna Maria ended up taking this picture as D tried to slink out. I wouldn’t say he was exactly pleased…)

Bursting and over-stimulated, we stumbled out of the restaurant past 11:30, the last ones to go. It’s hard to peel yourself away from a place that makes you feel like an honest-to-goodness insider.

The first couple of times I visited Japan, in college, that bread tasted delicious to me. Toasted with butter, it was scrumptious. But the best of its kind came after a long wait in the food hall of one of Tokyo’s fancy department stores at Fauchon bakery. My friend Miho and I queued up with dozens of other women—young workers and older matronly types—to buy a loaf of hot fresh white bread. I believe each customer could only purchae a single loaf, so Miho and I paid for two and hightailed it to a bench, somewhere just outside the store. We devoured at least three-quarters of one of the loaves in about five minutes. Nothing, I repeat nothing, is better than fresh warm bread.

Once I moved to Nagasaki prefecture to teach English, I soon realized that my trips to Tokyo to visit Miho’s family (we met at college in the States) were not at all representative of what I would find in Nagasaki. Indeed, the Japan I knew was one where the locals didn’t sneer at foreigners or bother if a single woman ate dinner by herself in a restaurant. Most of those findings are for another post (or blog), but the other thing I realized is that I wasn’t so fond of that darn white bread known as pan, after the French word for bread, pain.

I had been raised on a steady diet of bagels, bialys and rye bread for most of my life, products so dense that when over-toasted, a great deal of butter-knife force was often needed to spread the goods. These are tough breads that could crack a tooth under the right conditions. My guess is that I was attracted to the Japanese white bread as “other.” It was oddly different, exotic.

About three months into my time in Imabuku, a little fishing village on the Sea of Japan, my Kiwi friend Pip and I joined a food cooperative called the Foreign Buyers Club. We joined the club expressly to buy cheese, as the dairy situation in Japan was dire. The only hard or strong cheese to be found in Nagasaki was imported and came in tiny quantities at exorbitant prices. Pip and I ordered kilo-size blocks of cheddar and Swiss that we split in half. It was a lot of cheese, but Pip usually blew through hers in a couple of weeks. I rationed my portion so it would last at least six weeks. I used a sharp knife or vegetable peeler to shave the hunk and carefully wrapped the brick it in plastic so that it was only exposed to air for a few seconds at a time.

The morning ritual was my favorite. Two or three days a week, I would toast that white bread once and then carefully butter it. It was easy to rip the bread, especially if the butter was cold, so I often removed the butter from my little fridge before I showered so it had time to get close to room temperature. I would then take a few slivers from the cheese hunk, place them on the toast and then put it back in the toaster over for another round, until it was all bubbly and brown and melty.

But that white bread, after a time, just wasn’t satisfying. I wanted something that needed to be chewed with incisors, not gummed and swallowed. I would have paid a lot of yen for a hardy wheat, pumpernickel or crusty baguette.

I would have paid a lot of yen for this almost no-knead bread from the December ’07 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Yeasty with a touch of tang, it knocked my socks off. The Cook’s staff made a few modifications to Mark Bittman’s now-famous no-knead bread recipe that appeared in the Times last year which. That bread, it turns out, has a bit too much water in it. I’m no baker and tend to be intimidated by yeast, but this recipe is so easy and so delicious, you truly won’t believe it.

If I had known how to make this bread in Japan, it’s very possible it would have saved me and all my friends from the achy-breaky Kyushu blues, from which we all suffered mightily.

Why am I not in the little town of Pržno in walking distance to four small beaches and the fairytale-like Sveti Stefan? The stretch of Montenegrin coast South of the ancient city of Budva is known as the Budva Riviera. While it may not compare to its French counterpart in scale or chic-ness or mind-blowing bling, it is largely undiscovered by Americans and to my mind a far less pretentious and expensive terroir, but no less enjoyable.

The small towns of this region are locked in a perpetual movie-scape with the cerulean sea in front of them and the black mountains for which Montenegro is named jutting up from behind. But save for the smattering of large and homely casino hotels and the luxury yachts moored in their harbors, there is nothing in these towns that says, “look at me.” (Except perhaps for the Russians who have overtaken the region and don’t much suffer from modesty.)

Cat and Charlotte and I landed in Montenegro in September. It was the last leg of our Serbia-Croatia-Montenegro extravaganza and we were pooped. We rented a car at the Tivat airport and made our way south about 20 kilometers to Przno via Budva, a medieval walled city on the Adriatic.

We parked and made our way to the town center by passing through a ragtag flea market along the shore. It’s a slightly grim setup with an outdated/communist bent, but it’s where real Montenegrins and tourists collide, along with Nutella crepes, bad CDs and cheap-ass clothing. It’s also where I saw a little Roma girl nearly get run over by an angry local.

Our lunch in Budva was a little ways from the walled city past the marina at a spot called Jadran. We sat a few feet from the narrow beach and ate a sublime meal, only half of which could be attributed to the food. The breezy Adriatic, the goofy waiter, the feeling of being so far away in such an unfamiliar but utterly pleasant spot – all of that constituted the other half.

We ate a salad, a ton of yeasty bread and a heaping bowl of grilled shellfish, including clams, two kinds of mussels, langoustines and the only shrimp I’ve ever seen with roe in it. If I found out that those fresh, salty and garlicky mollusks were to be my last supper, I would have been deeply satisfied.

I’ll get to Pržno proper in my next post.

Jeremy Marshall, Chef owner of Aquagrill was indignant when I asked if his shuckers rinse the oysters once the shells are open. He assured me that that practice was verboten and that the only contact shuckers have with the liquor is to flick out stray sediment with a rubber gloved finger.

How then does he explain my experience of some of his oysters?

Marshall said the intensity and flavor of the liquor depends on where the oysters grew up. He says the water they were raised in has everything to do with their deliciousness, or lack thereof. So, for example, Mashall says west coast oysters and those from Virginia and New Jersey (!) tend to have a flabby or bland taste. And forget about New Orleans. Marshall would never eat those southern creatures on the half shell.

(I loved his use of the word “flabby.” It’s a great way to describe many an oyster I have known.)

The salty, briny, blood-pressure heightening ones, Marshall says, tend to come from Prince Edward Island, Novia Scotia and Alaska. And he said there’s an Alaskan current that makes it’s way down to the waters of Baja rendering oysters from that region particularly briny.

This all got me thinking about the oysters I’ve thrown back at the Acme Oyster Bar in New Orleans. If I’m honest with myself, they weren’t spectacular. They were just fresh and plentiful and the atmosphere is so great, you just end up routing for the little guys.

So that’s some of the skinny on the enigmatic oyster. It’s true that the night I was at Aquagrill, I grooved on the East coast kids. The West coast may take the lead in every Asian and Latin cuisine, but it’s the East that’s said to rock harder when it comes to our hard-shelled friends. I’m going to put the theory to the test and so should you.

Friends, I have procured the unprocurable: a reservation at Rao’s! I had no say over the date, time or number of seats, but I’ll be damned if I don’t have a card in my wallet in the handwriting of the reservation guy with all of the salient details.

How did this come to pass? How will I be rubbing elbow’s with that special class of New Yorker consisting of highly connected politicos, business folk and “others” who have standing reservations at the mythic Harlem haunt?

My friend Anna Maria read somewhere that if you show up at Rao’s the week of Thanksgiving, you can maybe/possibly/perhaps with much begging, pleading and adorable smiles get a reservation for next year. On Monday, Anna Maria and I walked to the wee eastern edge of Manhattan to see if the rumor was true.

Rao’s
by kidflash

It seemed like pure folly when we headed over there, but when we asked the maitre d’ in the oversized polo shirt about booking a table, he led us to a man who sized us up and led us to a back office filled with stale air from cigarette smoke and the holy grail of the restaurant universe – the Rao’s reservation book. It was old school-big and black and leather bound. He flipped through it and asked us which month we had in mind. I said February. He said, “9:30, on a late February evening for four people” and we said, “OK.” It all happened so fast and Anna Maria and I just thanked him and backed out of the office. I guess we were in shock because in a way, it was kind of, well, easy. There wasn’t any begging to speak of. I did flash a few big smiles, but the truth is that I expected some kind of struggle to make the whole thing more satisfying—and colorful.

We squeezed in at the bar where the only red wine on offer (to us) was a Chianti. After a half hour or so it dawned on me that we had only gotten one reservation. Neither of us minded that we would be eating together but it would have been nice for each of us to have our own rezzie. So I headed back to the reservation room and asked the kind gentleman if we could have just one more reservation. I mentioned that Anna Maria had wanted it for her anniversary but he did not bite. This is how it went down.

“No,” he said. “You can’t come in here expecting to get separate reservations.”

“Yessir,” I said, “but we had never intended to get a reservation together.”

“Look,” he said, now slightly agitated, “I gave you a reservation out of the kindness of my heart. That’s it. No more.”

At this point I noticed I was bent forward with my hands on my knees. He was sitting down and I must have unconsciously tried to lower myself to his level. Weird. The guy in his gentle way was completely intimidating. I have been known, under some circumstances, to have a big and demanding mouth, but not at Rao’s. I was cowed into submission from the start.

Feeling dejected, I went back to the bar and broke the news to Anna Maria. In a way, I guess I had experienced the struggle I had longed for, only it wasn’t that satisfying.

A few minutes later Frankie Pellegrino, the legendary owner, greeted us warmly, like we were one of the special class. If only.

My parents were visiting me and Josh, my then-boyfriend, while we were living in Paris for the summer. After a mesmerizing turn at the Bayeux Tapestry we headed toward the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial on the English Channel by Omaha Beach. We were pretty hungry after examining that gorgeous tapestry so we stopped at a small seaside restaurant right on La Manche.

It sounds cliché, but it does seem like it’s generally the unplanned meals that end up being the ones you can remember decades later, the ones you’ll probably bore your grandkids with. I guess it’s the lack of anticipation or expectation. We sat at a picnic table on a deck right on the water and shared a plate of oysters, two of mussels and a bowl of frites. My mother, who grew up in Belle Harbor, Queens, right at the ocean, was in shellfish heaven. My father, on the other hand, was from Sunnyside, Queens, only a few miles inland but galaxies away when it came to eating raw seafood. Plus, he had grown up in a mostly kosher home (except when his mother snuck in shrimp cocktail for the kids).

Josh and I were stupid with joy and bivalves. The beverage: a dry lightly sparkling hard cider, the kind you can get all over France and Canada. That dry cider was very much a part of the meal and I do believe that it is a most satisfying partner to the oyster.

The Times ran a piece last week on the ice cider trail in Quebec. We’re a little clueless about hard cider south of the border but there is a growing cider movement in the States and Autumn Stoscheck of Eve’s Cidery in Ithaca, New York is one of its pioneers. The 28-year old Stoscheck and her husband make dry and semi-dry hard cider as well as peach-apple wine and apple ice wine. I love the driest, Northern Spy, and that probably comes closest to the Norman cider we drank that summer day in France. The ice wine is a kick. It’s very sweet but has a nice acid backbone that makes you want to taste and taste and taste.

When I spoke to Autumn a few weeks ago, she said she thought that cider was the ideal beverage to drink when cooking. She says it’s refreshing, light and is made from 10% alcohol, a little less than wine. I thought I’d test Autumn’s theory on Friday night. As I cooked lamp chops, curried cauliflower, roasted asparagus and couscous, I opened a bottle of the semi-dry Autumn’s Gold. The cork popped violently and about a quarter of the cider landed on the floor, and counter and me. Once I cleaned up the mess and actually put the stuff in my mouth I thought, Autumn is not wrong. It is delightful to sip cider while cooking. It was even more delightful to sip cider with my friend Miho who came over for dinner.

So I’ve got oysters on the agenda for the next few weeks. I’ll let you know when I check them off my to-do list. Also on the agenda is finding a BYO oyster restaurant so I can bring Autumn’s cider along for the ride.

I sat at the bar, ordered a Chablis and asked the server to select six different oysters for me. They were all tasty – the one from Duxbury, Mass. was the sweetest and plumpest – but they did not sing the song of the ancient seas. They were extremely fresh but lacked the brine and saltiness of my Dubrovnik darlings. I wanted more and I think they did, too. I just put in a call to inquire about shucking techniques and whether there is a cleansing process that includes diluting the liquor.

I also ordered the Maine sea urchin. Again, good but not great. It didn’t taste like the rich sea essence is often does at a sushi restaurant. The meat came in its shell perched on ice with a sad little seaweed arrangement. No garnish would have been better. And for some reason, the sauce that accompanied this delicacy – a ponzu with scallions – comes in a large metal gravy boat. It’s definitely on the tacky side and from a practical standpoint, it’s difficult to control the pour and who on earth needs eight tablespoons of sauce for one tiny little urchin? It should come with an eye dropper instead.

Here are some Adriatic urchins off of Cavtat, near Dubrovnik. We saw these spiky guys all over, except on restaurant menus. I’ll have to look into that at some point. Maybe the water is too warm.

The service at Aquagrill was friendly and generous. When a few fruit flies were harassing me, the manager suggested I move further down stream, toward the raw bar. I ended up chatting in French with a lovely oyster shucker from Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso in West Africa. He said he’s never eaten an oyster and that he’s allergic to shellfish. I guess if you don’t know what you’re missing, it’s not so bad to be ensconced in oysters all day, but lord, I would crumple if I ever developed an oyster allergy.

We made our way back to the Hotel Slavija where a shuttle departed for the airport every hour. Just before we left, Eric wandered on. He was hoping to get an earlier flight back to Germany, his layover on the interminable flight to Indonesia. He looked pretty darn together considering he was operating on about three hours sleep. He also had the skinny on further Chip insanity: they had arrived back at their hotel room at about 5am, Chip got into bed at 5:15 and his alarm went off at 5:20. He had to fly to Rome for a business dinner. Eric warned him that five minutes sleep was worse than none at all but the advice fell on deaf, dumb and blind ears.

At the airport, we found out that our flight was delayed two hours. AGHRRRHG! I was so annoyed to have missed out on the sleep but tried to put it behind me. Eric was able to get on an earlier flight and we all settled into the café we had come to consider our own. Then we made the monumental mistake of going through security with Eric. Life on the other side was not pleasant. The duty-free shopping stank and the place was so damned crowded the only spot we could find to sit ourselves down was in some Romper Room chairs. The life-size Leggo Harry Potter was definitely a bonus, however.

Let’s please jump to Montenegro. We landed at the Tivat airport in northern Montenegro. We took a shuttle bus across the bay and then a private taxi across the border because we had just missed the one afternoon bus, which would have been far less expensive.

No one tells you just how complicated it is to cross between Montenegro and Croatia. It’s like, yeah, we know you guys hate each other and yes, Montenegro bombed Dubrovnik less than 10 years ago, and sure, the Croats did some ethnic cleansing in the 90s, but that’s all ancient history to us Americans. Hear this: it’s time to move on because you’re making it a royal pain for tourists to experience both of these wonderful countries.

First off, even though the Tivat airport is only about 30 kilometers from Dubrovnik, there is no direct way of making the journey by public transportion. You can take a shuttle from the airport to a dumpy bus terminal in a town called Herceg Novi, but buses to Dubrovnik from there are sporadic. In fact, we missed the bus by only a few minutes and the next one wasn’t for a couple of hours so we ended up taking a taxi into Dubrovnik for around $60.

Dubrovnik. Where to begin? It’s a glorious walled city on the Adriatic in southern Croatia directly across the sea from Italy’s mid-calf, the Abruzzo region. It was originally built in the 7th century on a nearby Island and was called Ragusa. It was later moved to its current location and was its own citystate for a few hundred years. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage city and it’s freaking awesome. There are fortresses protecting the city from marauders at see, but in the 1990s the city was attacked and a reported 80% of its buildings were damaged. The history is long and complicated. I won’t attempt to explain it here.

We stayed in an apartment located above the old city outside the walls. I think there’s only one place to stay inside. Here we are within a few minutes of our arrival.

We were so tired but it wasn’t hard to hoist ourselves up and wander down to the old city. Cars aren’t allowed inside the city walls and we meandered along the narrow and extremely clean streets and alleyways for a while. The city plan is built like a funnel so when you walk towards the outside walls that sit on the sea, sometimes you’re several stories up.

Not quite in time for sunset we stumbled on a bar that had seating embedded in the rocks on the city’s outer wall. It’s called Busza 2 and it’s the best spot in Dubrovnik for salty service and the sunset.

Photo by Cat Fitzgerald

Photo by Cat Fitzgerald

It was the first time in days we were completely relaxed and the white Croatian wine went down real smooth. After taking in the airs, we made our way back down to the main drag along steep and narrow paths, past stone houses and churches. After much cross-referencing of restaurant reviews, we settled on Kamenice, where we actually had to wait on line, something I’m adamantly opposed to doing in New York because it’s never worth the frustration and humiliation. Not so at Kamenice, where all the seating is outdoors on a square where the farmer’s market is during the day.

We started with oysters and thank the lord we did because these briny and juicy blobs of the sea were unbelievably fresh and delicious. Cat thinks they were the culinary highlight of the trip. They reminded me of how denuded and tasteless oysters often are in the States because of preposterous regulations that sometimes require restaurants to wash the oysters. Unconscionable. Kamenice’s oysters were heaven in a shell.

Next we split three dishes: a squid ink risotto, mussels in wine and langoustine bouzara. The risotto was unexceptional but the mussels and langoustine were stellar. I had never heard of bouzara before but it was on the menu in all the coastal towns we visited. The primary ingredients are tomato, onion and oodles of garlic. The mussels were small but sweet and the langoustines quickly made it to one of my top five meals. Also called scampi, Norway lobster and Dublin Bay scampi, langoustines look like baby lobsters and some say crayfish but apparently the two are not related and you can’t even compare the taste. The taste of langoustine lies somewhere between lobster and shrimp and the texture is like crab. At Kamenice, they were SUBLIME. Sweet, fragrant and they stood up to the strong sauce – although they would have been equally as dreamy just grilled with a little lemon.

Photo by Cat Fitzgerald

I haven’t eaten many langoustines in my day, and the only time in recent memory was at the very up-market L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York City, where they were wrapped in a filo-like pastry called brick. Those were very good. Kamince’s were exceptional.

Full and sleepy, we wended our way out of the old town (after stopping off for some gelato), up the half mile of stairs to the apartment.