The Everywhereist

Some of the fowl offerings at Crackbird.

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I walked into Crackbird with a bit of trepidation.

It’s an immensely popular restaurant in Dublin, and they specialize in fried chicken – as well as grilled and roasted – but fried is their signature, and the name of the restaurant is a play on its apparently addictive qualities.

They want you to describe the birds they cook as being like crack. And, frankly, that’s not how I would put it.

Despite my family’s European roots, I grew up on fried chicken. It wasn’t that we ate it all that often, and it was rarely store bought (though occasionally, on days when my mother had class, or my grandparents had to be driven to doctor’s appointments, or when no one could be bothered, it was). My mom while away an afternoon dredging and battering chicken, and gingerly placing it into a cast-iron pot filled with oil.

The stove top would bubble and foam and splatter, eventually yielding gorgeous, golden-brown pieces of chicken.

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We walked right by Made in Belfast, and didn’t even realize it.

“I know exactly where it is,” Rand said confidently, as we walked across a pavement slick with the rain that seemed to fall pretty much constantly across Northern Ireland.

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The lobster roll at Neptune Oyster.

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I’m always up for a bit of decadence. You don’t get hips like mine from being restrained.

But there’s the everyday sort of decadence (which involves a bit of cake with breakfast, and a bit with lunch, and hell, some with dinner, too) and then there’s the once-every-few-months-or-my-heart-will-suffer kind of decadence. And Neptune Oyster in Boston’s North End falls into the latter category.

After a meal there, I looked at my husband and declared myself in need of a shower and a cigarette. And I don’t even smoke.

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The San Francisco Ferry Building.

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The other day, I read a post about a woman having breakfast at the San Francisco Ferry Building Marketplace.

And, oh, if it wasn’t the cutest thing ever.

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Lunch at the Arts Factory: plantains with pomegranate sauce and goat’s cheese.

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It’s hard to hate everything about a destination.

Don’t get me wrong – there are certain specific places that I hate with a burning passion (there is an Ashland hotel that is right now on my OH-NO-YOU-DIDN’T list, and my blood pressure spikes just thinking about it), but it’s hard to hate everything about a country, or city, or town.

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Note: The steroids are still in my system, and consequently I am still talking about food. And Vegas. Bear with me, kids.

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I am a 31-year-old woman of reasonable intelligence (even after my brain surgery, I feel this latter comment is safe to say). I would like to think that most of my tastes are fairly sophisticated. I can enjoy a decent glass of scotch. I appreciate liver pate. I think Woody Allen is funny and still sort-of-relevant.

But despite all of that, I have a confession: I really like rainbow sprinkles.

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My favorite thing about travel is that you can often discover the most amazing meals in the most unexpected of places.

And I don’t mean the discovery of a candied peanut at the bottom of my bag in a hotel room in Bulgaria. (For the record, Rand wouldn’t let me eat the peanut, which I was able to trace back to an earlier trip London. I am still a bit peeved about that).

No. I’m talking about truly fantastic meals.

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I know it’s not technically Friday, but I’m hungry and thinking about food right now, so time means nothing to me. 

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There are statements I never thought I’d say. But after enough travel, I’ve started saying them.

To a maintenance man in a New York city hotel: “Oh no, I’m happy to plunge my toilet myself.”

Or, to a girl with whom I switched airline seats, so I could be next to Rand: “Can I have your middle seat for my aisle?”

Or the phrase that escaped my lips as I sat in the Blue Scorcher Bakery and Cafe in Astoria, Oregon:

“Oh. My. God. This is the BEST yogurt EVER. Rand, try this yogurt. It’s amazing.”

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