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FLAVORS OF TRAVEL

The scent of garlic wafts through the air, sharper than basil, thicker than jasmine on a soft summer night. But wait: There’s a mix of something else, something sweeter, yes, an essence far more sensual.
Oh my, there it is again; romance, that incomparable aroma wrapped intricately around travel and fantasy. The smell stimulates every sense and flavors much more than food. And food, well, no travel fantasy is complete without food.

Truth is, mine usually begin with food, with the thrill of dining out. No grocery prep. No dirty pans. No kitchen fuss or muss. Just glorious service, service, service enhanced by the wonder of new cities. Better yet, the wonder of new countries shot through and through with a living culture so strong I can taste it. South Australia, for instance, where eat streets like Adelaide’s Gouger Street is awash in international cuisines. Where a compact cultural core such as Miami’s SoBe seamlessly blends Mediterranean and Italian or Asian and Caribbean into a food fragrance gusting over Ocean Drive that is unmistakably South Florida.

This is where the spice of life oozes in the form of ginger and cardamom, or from herb and spice blends like Dukkah, a hard to find Egyptian dipping spice. Such is not the comfy food of grandma’s kitchen: I have in mind foodstuffs believed to have more power than silver bullets.

Oysters, caviar and chocolate are considered the Trinity of Western turn-ons. But a Food & Wine magazine poll claims champagne bested even these stalwarts of foody fantasies. Question is: Can a bottle of Pommery’s Cuvee Louise set a mood more powerful than shark fin soup or tiger-paw pasta? Aphrodisiacs found only on the shelves of Chinese supermarkets truly pit Eastern living cultures with my Western sense of responsible travel. Sometimes I just can’t do what the Romans do.

Fortunately, the natural order of the universe eventually prevails. According to Rob Bredl, internationally known as the Barefoot Bushman of the TV documentary series “Killer Instincts”, rhinoceros’ are making a comeback in the wild since Viagra hit the streets. Seems that powdered horns are not what they used to be now that manmade chemicals do the trick better than that which is au natural.
But chemicals don’t do the trick for me. In my food fantasies there is no room for saccharine, no fake butter, no beefed up hormones in my milk. Nourishment and fantasy become one when I find fine, fresh cuisine. What’s more, it has to be backed with incomparable ambiance. No simple task, to be sure. Even within big cities, major league restaurants that serve up great food in great surroundings are hard to come by. Mobil’s Five-Star and AAAs Diamond awards make businesses of searching out such “bests”, and in all of Florida -- population: 15,982,378 -- there were only three Five-Star award winners in 2003.

More often in the search for romantic dining, I find listed hundreds of “B” teams that offer good food in generic spaces that could be located anywhere on the planet. But in spite of my need to eat, I don’t want to feel like I’m in Chicago when I’m in Rio de Janeiro. Worse is merely downing mediocre food in truly magnificent places that speak to the city or island or secluded getaway that I spent a lot of time selecting.

With the right person, romantic dining sometimes happens where perfection does not. But why take chances when I have only a week or so to play? A little research goes a long way here. Definitely, the plethora of travel guides is helpful, although some, like DK Eyewitness Guides and Footprint Handbooks, offer weak restaurant reviews. Newspaper reviews include fewer restaurants, but they are more current than books if they’re available for, say, Bequia, a little known island treasure just south of St. Vincent in the Grenadines.

Online searches work, but some websites tend to be a pain to navigate. More importantly, they are most useful for restaurants in the US. A citysearch.com for Miami, for instance, offers a number of links to restaurants and bars, some with easy to read ratings and comments by people who dined there. Plus, there are lots of websites listed under a search as simple as “Miami restaurant reviews”. Among them, I liked best www.boulevards.com/miami/dining.html, which details information by Miami New Times reviewers for everything from Blue Doors at the Delano to Miami Beach’s B.E.D. A citysearch.com for Marigot Bay turned up www.kc.travel.net and good info on restaurants in the French or Dutch halves of Saint Martin. But it was last updated in 2000, which is the biggest problem with restaurant reviews outside the US.

www.Zagat.com has the most comprehensive selection of restaurants worldwide. Still, these short descriptions akin to the diner-collected-ratings the company has been publishing in book format for 20 or so years is only updated annually. And this is a subscription-based site.

With no cost attached, www.dinesite.com offers detailed reviews for US restaurants. This user-friendly site turned up nothing less than a category for “romance” in St. Augustine, Florida. Le Pavillon restaurant caught my eye, and will get my business when I travel in that direction. I’m curious to see if it’s comparable to one of my South Florida favorites, Coconut Groves’ Baleen.

Then there are those truly grand moments when all the stars and moons and planets line up unexpectedly. This happened to me in the Saints, or Iles des Saintes as they are properly known. These five tiny islands in the French Antilles get my Five-star Award for Caribbean Charisma: red tile roofs on old wooden buildings. Shutters patina-ed in a turquoise that must have been splashed by the sea itself. Fort Napoleon atop a small mountain overlooking the bay. Balconies and bikes and naked toddlers decorate the narrow, cobblestone streets. With only six restaurants on Terre-de-Haut, the largest of the five islands, even the pizza joint is strategically located for romance: on the aquamarine harbor where sailboats bob and palm trees sway and Trade Winds perpetually lick the nape of the neck. Here, everyday is Valentines Day.

Though we may not always be able to count on the French when it’s time to fight, when it’s time to eat, never doubt their gastronomic or romantic capacity for excellence.