Travel

bermudaBermuda is pretty pink beaches, dazzling turquoise water, lush vegetation, touches of British style, pastel painted homes and truly friendly people. It’s posh yet casual and while not a bona fide culinary destination, it offers some delicious things to eat and drink that you won’t find elsewhere.

Here are my top picks:

FISH CHOWDER
This scrumptious soup, considered the national dish, was originally poor people’s food, made from fish bones. It’s a rich broth, with vegetables including onions, tomatoes, celery, carrots and a variety of spices and herbs. It's a little bit like Manhattan style chowder but with bits of fish instead of clams, but what makes it most special is the black rum and sherry pepper sauce that’s added to it, often at the table.

Where to find it: I loved it everywhere I had it, and it’s on just about every menu, but I’m told, the best version is sold at the Rubis gas station near the airport (get your taxi driver to take you!). I tried it at Bonefish, Henry VII and Wahoo’s Bistro.

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carlyLike my ancestors before me and their great ancestors before them, I like love food. The members of the Santiago clan aren’t known for being particularly picky about their cuisine. Eat first, ask later (or ask while eating). But eating anything in China is like a blindfolded taste test. The labels are written in Chinese, so I sit and I poke and I prod.

While I come from a long line of low maintenance eaters (and pride myself for it) I still must inspect the mystery meat that is tossed onto my personal safe haven of choice, white rice. Just because it looks like beef, photographs like beef, and is doused with similar sauce does not guarantee beef.

However, there comes a point in every young adult’s life, where you realize your budget restraints, stop questioning and start eating. I’m not saying I gave in to eating turtle or even chicken claws for that matter, but like the Donner party would have said, “When I’m starving, I will eat almost anything”.

Lunch is promptly at 12pm every day. Like any daily activity, it is a large, public game of charades in which I act out what I’m thinking, the Chinese guess, and occasionally someone bilingual steps in to finish the job. 2 words! Hot? Cold? Hot Tea? Two Sakis? Hot Water? Ice Water? Ding ding!

Unfortunately, this isn’t foolproof, but, in general, I've discovered that China has great food. Especially, if you trust a native Chinese foodie to lead your American taste buds in the right direction. Here is a mini-guide to my food adventures thus far:

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tarte01.jpgWhen I told friends I was going to spend four weeks in St. Tropez last summer, more than one of my foodie friends told me I must try the Tarte Tropezienne—which was described to me as a giant brioche filled to the heavens with a creamy vanilla custard. This sounded like a dream come true. As I child I loved pudding—homemade butterscotch pudding, or bread pudding, or crème brulee, were the best—but mostly we ate packaged pudding, the Jell-O Brand. I liked vanilla and my brother, ten months older, liked chocolate, and my father told us that as toddlers we would sit facing each other in twin highchairs and smear our respective puddings all over our faces, smiling in ecstasy. 

So naturally, finding and sampling this so-called Tarte Tropezienne went to the top of my “list of things to do” while I visited St. Tropez. That’s what one does when one travels to France—you get obsessed with pastries. And wine. And bread. And olives. And cheese. Plus, we New Yorkers tend to become obsessed with finding “the best” (primarily so that we can go back and tell our friends at dinner parties that we found “the best” goat cheese or the best rosemary-and-olive fogasse or the best early-season figs. 

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dinglepeninsula.jpgMy best friend Kim swears my favorite movie is 'The Blue Lagoon.' Ok, I admit, it's true that I have watched it a half a dozen times or more over the years. But when you're 15 years old and the same age as Brooke Shields and she's frolicking on a tropical beach with a cute boy and I am stuck in a small town, on a farm in Georgia with boys who look nothing like Christopher Atkins, one can understand my emotional attachment. Kim would also tell you I am a huge fan of 'Far and Away' and yes, I have also watched that movie more times than I can count. I am sure that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman would prefer that movie be removed from their list of credentials on IMDB because as many times as I have seen it, I still couldn't tell you what's going on in that movie.

'The Blue Lagoon' was filmed on Turtle Island on Fiji and 'Far and Away' was filmed on the Dingle Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. Turtle Island is high on my list to visit and the Dingle Peninsula is one of my most favorite and most magical places I have ever been to. After almost 19 years of being a 'Stewardess', I am often asked what my favorite place is. There are a lot of places I love but Ireland and the Dingle Peninsula are always on the top of my list.

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santefe.jpg A trip to Santa Fe is at once exhilarating and embarrassing.  You say to yourself, “how can I be so corny and fall in love with the food, the shopping, the art, and the physical beauty all over again?”. And yet, you do, embracing it all as you roll your eyes at your own enthusiasm.  The food, of course, is of superior class with an emphasis on how we want to eat today: local and seasonal.  And each Santa Fe friend has their own passionate reason why their favorite restaurant has the best green chili.  But there is more to the palette of Santa Fe food than traditional Northern New Mexico cuisine, as good as that is.  Here are a half dozen of my personal favorites.  One of the great things about them all is their unique points of view on feeding you. Unique, like Santa Fe itself. 

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