The Bizarre Truth (6 page)

am a traveler. I am not a tourist. Occasionally, I do touristy things. But I have spent about ten weeks’ total time in the People’s Republic of China and never seen the Great Wall. Go figure. Long ago, I developed a way of exploring a country by diving into their culture mouth first, mostly because I’m obsessed with food in a way that makes most cuisine-conscious culinistas seem only casually interested by comparison. As a young boy, I traveled a lot with my family, and it was through them that I got turned on to a new way of interpreting how to spend time in a foreign country. My dad and I spent as much time cruising the aisles at Harrods, exploring Chinatown, or shopping for socks at Marks and Spencer as we did looking at the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles. I learned early on in life that you could view as much of Roman culture ordering shirts at Brioni as you could sitting in a tour, perambulating the Coliseum.

We traveled to eat, and often that meant going great distances in the opposite direction of the herd. In the mid-seventies, we were skiing in Val d’Isère and on our second day it started to snow heavily. When it stopped six days later, food delivery to the little ski town had been halted for three days. We ate sardines and crackers in the lobby of the hotel, and as the snow stopped falling, we anxiously awaited the first new truck deliveries through the pass, as well as some superb skiing. We were wrong. The pistes needed to be blasted with dynamite to make the runs safe from avalanches, and while cars could go out the pass when it was plowed, the four-wheelers
were still a day away. No food, no skiing. So Dad piled everyone in the van and drove all day across France to Lyon, where we ate a dinner for the ages at Paul Bocuse, in the era when his eponymous restaurant was universally regarded as the world’s finest. We spent the night driving back, skied the next day, and enjoyed the rest of our vacation. I remember the ease of the decision to bolt for Lyon as well as I remember the thumbnail-size mousse de foie gras course or the truffle soup en croute.

We simply wouldn’t ever have considered staying trapped in town for one more day as an option, and hitting the road, traveling as far as we could in one day just for a great meal, was how we rolled. Literally. Trekking to the absolute last physical place you can, with a goal to seek out a unique food experience, is the best travel advice that I ever learned, and I learned it from my father. In Spain, we drove out from Madrid to a 400-year-old restaurant underneath the Roman Aqueduct in Valle De Los Calledos just for a taste of roasted baby pig. I remember driving an hour outside of Milan in his buddy’s flashy Italian sports car to the little town of Bergamo, simply because they served up the best gnocchi and quail in northern Italy. As we feasted in that ancient restaurant with the twinkling lights of Milan in the distance, I clearly remember deciding that if finding the perfect meal meant going to the last stop on earth, it was certainly worth the trip.

Time is the enemy of great-tasting food, and so I believe in pursuing food at its source. I want whatever is freshest on my plate. I want lobster that goes from the sea straight into a pot of boiling water. I want shrimp that’s pulled directly from a fisherman’s raft through a rope-and-pulley system out of the bay and right into a kitchen. Those ingredients can’t compare to the “sit around the food locker” stuff from a nameless, faceless mainline supplier. God knows how long those edibles spend in the depths of some industrial freezer, how far they’ve traveled to get to your plate, and how they’ve been handled along the way. With the exception of a few ingredients—wine and cheese come to mind—the idea that
freshness counts is as old as the hills. Traveling in its purest form allows you to gain unbridled access to foods at their source.

Growing up in New York City, we rarely ate food at its freshest. You don’t find shrimp in the Hudson River. There was lobster once, but 125 years ago they were overfished out of the tidal estuaries in and around the island of Manhattan. Every summer, my dad would drive me out to Montauk, Long Island. We’d sit at the dock, watching fishing boats unload crates of fresh seafood right out of the Atlantic. Like the paparazzi hot on some young starlet’s trail, we would hound these crates to the clam bars on Montauk’s docks just to eat the freshest catch.

There was one big tourist restaurant on the docks of Montauk called Gossman’s. They had pretty fresh stuff, but their lobster was kept alive by holding them in aerated, ocean-water tanks. Standard ops then and now for larger commercial seafood restaurants. Minute by minute, day by day, the meat would break down. The lobsters became less flavorful, less briny, less saline, less intense the longer they sat in tanks. Time is the enemy of food, even when the food is still alive.

We skipped places like Gossman’s whenever we could, in favor of smaller local clam bars. In those days, Salavar’s was the working-class seafood shack we ate in, a small joint open at 5
A.M
. to serve donuts and egg sandwiches to the commercial fishing crowd and dock crews. It sat about 500 yards down the road, but it was a world away in terms of culture. Real people ate, argued, and hung out at joints like Salavar’s, Lunch (the Lobster Roll), and the Quiet Clam. This was the sixties, before the jet-set crowd had yet to discover the Hamptons. And these were the unspoiled clam shacks we spent our time eating in.

Now in his eighties, my father is still as tenacious a traveler as anyone. About five years ago, he moved to Portland, Maine. If you hold the state of Maine under a magnifying glass, you’ll see its coastline looks like a thousand little fingers pointing into the Atlantic Ocean. In some areas, these peninsulas are protected from
the brunt of the Atlantic storms by islands, creating quiet waters perfect for fishing and lobstering. I don’t care how many times you’ve dined at fancy seafood restaurants in Chicago or New York: Until you’ve had lobster fresh from the cold waters of Maine, you really haven’t had live lobster.

The very first time I visited Dad in Portland, he insisted we drive up to the Five Islands Lobster Company for what he felt was the best lobster roll in the state. Five Islands is a third-generation, family-owned lobster company. Their food shack is like Red’s in Wiscasset, or Day’s in Portland, one of those under-the-radar joints whose address is passed among foodies like heroin junkies trade reliable connections. I am probably performing an act of culinary self-mutilation by revealing my most precious source, but here it goes.

Five Islands is one of those rare food finds, if you can find it at all. You drive about forty-five minutes north of Portland on I-295, make a right, and head east on US-1. You begin to head east down county road 127, onto the paved road, turn left onto a dirt road, and you’ll drive right up to the eighty-year-old, barnlike wooden structures where you can park and get some fresh air. Just look for the signs saying Five Islands Lobster Company—you can’t miss it. The family still goes out every day and lobsters. That’s their main business. You can sit and watch their boats coming in with crates and crates of lobsters, some headed off to the world’s finest restaurants and fish shops. However, the family keeps the best stuff for themselves. Steamer clams, haddock, hake, clams on the half shell, local shrimp, oysters, or their famous lobster: It’s fresh, delicious, and they’re cooking it on the spot.

Enter the wooden swinging door and you’ll notice the requisite mugs, T-shirts, and bumper stickers for sale at the counter. Crayon and marker-drawn cardboard menus line the walls of this crazy little room that houses a cooler you fetch your root beer from and the counter where you order. Somehow, they’ve managed to squeeze a kitchen into the back of this teeny space. Everyone
orders the same things: Maine lobster rolls or deep-fried clams, or in my case, both. These items pair perfectly with their made-from-scratch dill-and-lemon tartar sauce, homemade coleslaw, and hand-cut French fries.

The thing that sets Five Islands apart from the rest of the clam shacks I love is not just that the lobster marches straight from the traps to the kitchen. This family takes their product so seriously that they don’t want a giant food-service truck unloading on their dock. They could doctor up a decent tartar sauce from a jar, but they don’t: They make their own from scratch, and the quality of their lobster rolls and hand-dusted fried clams is well beyond that of their competitors. The Five Islands lobster roll is a singular experience. You don’t even notice the mayonnaise coating the meat, even as you put the overstuffed toasted hot-dog bun into your gaping maw. If you can stop yourself at just eating one of them, you’re not really a lobster roll aficionado. I am usually good for two, plus a little side order of clams.

Now, there are two schools of thought when it comes to lobster rolls in Maine. The first kind, which you’ll find at Five Islands, is a lobster salad coated with a gossamer-thin gloss of mayonnaise, salt, and pepper. The other kind of lobster roll, which they do best at Red’s in Wiscasset, is simply a warm lobster plucked from his shell and put into a toasted bun and drizzled with melted butter. Most Mainers will argue at length about which version is the authentic Maine lobster roll, but frankly the point is moot. They both rock.

Just like lobster rolls in Maine, every country, state, or city has its own hidden gems if you know where to look. It’s the same in the Philippines. In a country with more than 100 million inhabitants, it’s mind-boggling to realize that few locals have ever traveled to the southern island state of Palawan. With its sky blue water, fresh produce, and incredible seafood, Palawan seems like heaven on earth—yet this picturesque locale is without a doubt the island less traveled. Simply put, people don’t know it exists. Sitting to the
north and east of Puerto Princessa, Boracay is the siren of the Philippine islands, luring in tourists with its famous diving, snorkeling, and beautiful beaches. Puerto Princessa is just a quick stopover on the way to someplace better. And I get it. It’s not the most charming town. But it’s the gateway to the rest of the island, which, simply put, is absolutely perfect if you prefer real, working beach towns to the all-inclusive, resort-lined streets of what used to be a working village, but now relies 100 percent on a tourism-driven regional economy.

Boracay may have great underwater activities, but you’re not going to find a lot in the way of honest and authentic culture there, especially when compared to Palawan. For me, going to the last stop on the subway means actually going where the locals go, eating what the locals eat, and doing it in a place that still maintains its sense of local relevance. In a world that is becoming flatter every day, where globalization has killed so much indigenous food culture, these end-of-the-line locales are the last unspoiled destinations for travelers craving a real experience.

Puerto Princessa houses a few decent restaurants, and I did eat some superb meals at Kinabuchs. But if you crave a one-of-a-kind experience, you have to head into the most remote section of the surrounding mangrove forests on the outskirts of the city and find the Badjao Seafront Restaurant. Mangroves are like nature’s take on the medieval walled city. These weedlike trees grow very quickly and become almost impenetrable within a few years. They densely populate Southeast Asia’s coastal wetlands, inhibiting businesses there from doing much besides aquaculture. The mangrove forests are a haven for many species of all types and provide unique coastal protection from environmental disasters of both the natural and man-made varieties.

Ask any local or tricycle driver (lingo for a bicycle or motorbike with a sidecar) and they’ll happily point you in the right direction. You turn off Abueg Road and park in a rather large field, make your way from your car to the little sign that says
Restaurant This
Way
. The Badjao Seafront Restaurant owners cut a half-mile-long wooden walkway into the jungle from the mainland side, which leads to a long, narrow teak deck. You realize about halfway down that you are walking along a wooden pathway built on stilts, and beneath you is the swampy waters off the Sulu Sea. At the end of this walkway, sitting like a glowing fireplace on a cold winter’s day, is a gorgeous teak-and-mahogany restaurant, built on top of a floating raft on stilts, poking out into the bay.

Our local tourism department contacts and I sit down at Badjao and soak up the 270-degree view of the bay, dotted with small sanpans, little fishing and shrimping boats, gliding along one of the pristine inner bays of the Sulu Sea, framed by a horizon of mountains. The menu reads like a greatest hits list of the best of Philippines seafood cuisine. I was as giddy as a schoolgirl as I navigated my way through the dishes, sniffing with joy and spying on what other diners had ordered. I was blown away when I saw fresh whelks sautéed in coconut milk with shredded banana flowers making its way to another table, and I almost fainted with happiness when I peeked at the menu and saw it priced at three dollars a pop.

I took on the mind-boggling task of paring lunch down to seven or eight dishes. Luckily, everyone was into sharing. Our server offered up a mango-and-banana shake to tide us over. This was no ordinary shake. The Badjao Seafront Restaurant plucks the juiciest mangoes straight off the trees, adds bananas from the huge four-and-a-half-foot-tall bunch leaning on the bar, purees them with a bit of ice and a splash of water, and sticks a straw in it. I should tell you that the number-one agricultural force in Palawan are the banana farms—bananas of such sweet and primal excellence that you won’t tire of them showing up at every meal. Look for roadside stands selling banana-Q, a local treat made by rolling fresh, ripe bananas on sticks in a bowl of crushed brown sugar and deep-frying them. Like a candy apple mated with bananas foster, just absent the snooty waiter and the rolling tableside cart.