Tomato salad and steak

Chet Sharma, chef-patron, Bibi, London

I took a couple of days off in June and went back to San Sebastián, where I used to work [at Mugaritz]. I revisited my regular haunt, Bar Nestor, for tomato salad and rib-eye steak. It’s not a fancy place: small, with a long bar running down one side and shirts from local football clubs on the walls. As soon as I ate the first bite of the tomato salad, I was transported back to a time when I was finding my feet in the world of food. It was a reminder of how great something as simple as tomatoes dressed with salt, olive oil and a little bit of sherry vinegar could be.

Pumpkin rice

Olia Hercules, food writer and co-founder, Cook for Ukraine

The other day my husband Joe made a pumpkin rice dish, enriched with pumpkin puree. It was one of the most ambrosial things that I’ve eaten this year. In Ukraine we eat pumpkin puree for breakfast with honey or sugar and evaporated milk, but Joe made a savoury, gingery version with brown rice. I ate it with pickled chillies. It felt deeply familiar and new at the same time. I haven’t had much appetite recently, because of stress, but on that day – maybe there was some good news coming from Ukraine – I felt hungry again, and that dish really hit the spot. It was pure comfort and nourishment.

Coconut and red lentil dal

Sarit Packer. chef and co-owner, Honey & Co, London

We’ve been doing lots of eating at home this year, trying to avoid anything processed as part of the recovery from long Covid. The best thing we made was a coconut and red lentil dal. We didn’t have much in the kitchen: just some onions, lentils, carrots and butternut squash. Usually I would go for a lemony Middle Eastern soup, but we fancied something a bit different, so we put in a whole lot of spices – coriander, cumin, mustard seeds, fenugreek – with coconut oil. Then onion, garlic and ginger followed by the vegetables, the lentils and finally some coconut milk, and let it all soften together for an hour or so. We made it again and again. You can make it thick like a stew, or dilute it down so it’s more of a soup, and change the vegetables around, and it’s always good.

Salmon blini

Merlin Labron-Johnson, chef-owner, Osip and The Old Pharmacy, Bruton, Somerset

Newell is a restaurant in Sherborne run by an Australian couple – he cooks alone in the kitchen and she runs front of house. They used to run the Giaconda Dining Room in London. Newell feels like a bistro you’d stumble upon when you’re travelling in France, with simple decorations and a blackboard menu. I took a friend who’s also a chef – I’d been telling him about it for a long time. Everything was great, but we had the most exceptional starter, thick-cut smoked salmon that came with an enormous blini made from buckwheat flour and fried in butter, and a pot of ice-cold creme fraiche and trout roe and shallots and chives and all the nice things to build your own blini. It was superb.

Breakfast udon

Anna Tobias, head chef and co-owner, Cafe Deco, London

I was really exhausted one morning, just from the toil of opening a restaurant, and thought, I’m going to get out of the house and do something and not just be here on the sofa, exhausted. I went to Koya Ko on Broadway Market [in Hackney, east London] and had a breakfast udon. It was the miso classic with pork, ginger and greens. When I took the first sip of broth, it was a really visceral experience, like new life was flowing through my veins. It felt so restorative in the exact sense of that word. It was delicious, obviously – and affordable too.

Pheasant sausage roll

Roberta Hall-McCarron, head chef and co-owner, The Little Chartroom and Eleanore, Edinburgh

There’s a lovely little coffee shop up on the Causewayside in Edinburgh called Kate’s. The woman who runs it makes all her own cakes but she also makes pheasant sausage rolls. I’ve ordered them each time they’ve been on and they’re absolutely delicious. She makes homemade chutney to go alongside them. It’s the most simple thing in the world, gamey and delicious, and the perfect savoury snack to eat mid-morning. Which is quite naughty. We get such amazing game in Scotland, so it’s great to see it used in different ways. You wouldn’t necessarily come across something like that in your average coffee shop.

Fish and chips with curry sauce

Stephen Toman, head chef and co-owner, Ox, Belfast

At the start of the year, me, my brother, my cousin and a few mates took the Harleys out and went on a ride across the north coast. It was the first sunny day of the year. We stopped off at a seaside village called Carnlough and had fish and chips and curry sauce from the Galley, facing the harbour. We sat on the wall of the dock and tucked in. It was a magic moment. I’ll not forget it.

Challah french toast

Max Rocha, head chef and owner, Cafe Cecilia, London

Working in New York earlier in the year, I went for breakfast at the B&H Dairy. It’s a kosher restaurant in the East Village that’s been open since the 1940s, and every time I go to New York I make sure I have breakfast there. I had challah french toast with orange juice. They make the challah – a braided, egg-enriched bread – every day in the kitchen. The french toast is served with just a sachet of maple syrup on the side and it’s absolutely delicious. And super affordable too. It was $8 for the toast, orange juice and a coffee. Breakfast is my favourite meal but you can have lunch there too. I saw them making matzo ball soup so I’ll be going back for that.

Milk soft serve with a cherry on top

Shuko Oda. co-owner, Koya, London

General Store is a small deli behind Peckham Rye station. After lunchtime in early summer, I thought, oh, I might try that milk soft serve I saw on their Instagram. It was the perfect thing – the closest I’ve had to the soft serve I like in Japan. Japanese people love soft serve. Wherever we went in my childhood, we would end up eating it. This one was not too milky, with little hints of icy texture. On top, it had a pickled cherry in almond syrup. I never used to like cherries on desserts, but this one was excellent.

Errindlev peas

Dan Saladino, presenter, Radio 4’s Food Programme, author of Eating to Extinction

I went to a slow food event in Copenhagen where they were showcasing lots of different endangered foods. A very simple stew made with errindlev peas stood out. It’s the most humble and unassuming of ingredients, a dark-coloured bean that almost became extinct in the 19th century. The woman who cooked it for our meal had boiled it for quite a few hours, then mashed it up and served it with olive oil and some seasoning. The flavour really shone through – rich and almost meaty. The bean was saved by a woman in the town of Errindlev and now seed savers around Copenhagen are bringing it back by sharing it with other amateur growers. I love the idea that there is a sort of lentil underground across northern Europe, young growers and producers bringing back these lost legumes.

Sardines

Bee Wilson, food writer, author of First Bite and The Way We Eat Now

In August I took my two kids on the first holiday I’d arranged post-divorce, which felt like a huge thing. We went to Slovenia, and in Ljubljana we ate at a Slovenian tapas place called Tabar. Everything we had was stunning, but what really stood out was a bar snack of Adriatic sardines. They were tiny and coated in polenta and fried perfectly so they were completely dry and crisp, then rearranged on a board, crisscrossed, as if they were in a can. They were just so sweet and delicious. To be eating them outside, sitting in a warm courtyard on an August lunchtime, was just completely lovely.

Dates

Noor Murad, head of Ottolenghi Test Kitchen, co-author of OTK: Shelf Love and OTK: Extra Good Things

We have date palms in our family garden in Bahrain. It’s my dad’s retirement project: he is very proud of picking them and drying them in the sun. He brings dates to London whenever he visits and I keep them in the freezer to preserve them. Every time I get nostalgic, or miss home, I’ll take out a date and drizzle tahini over it, with a bit of aleppo chilli and some salt. It’s sweet and savoury and salty and spicy at the same time, and it’s just my favourite thing.

Jollof rice

Riaz Phillips, food writer, author of West Winds and Belly Full

At the base of Ridley Road market in east London, I found a golden box of jollof rice that took me back to travelling across Ghana in 2020. Jollof is a single-pot rice dish that has many variations across west Africa but the common thread is a combination of rice, tomatoes, onion, chilli and spices. The earthy, browny-orange version they serve at KT Restaurant & Bar carries a heat so unsuspecting it almost warrants a warning on the box. I can’t tell you about any of the other dishes at the restaurant because I’m so hooked on its jollof with a dollop of extra heat in the form of shito, a hot fish paste. Try it for yourself, it won’t set you back any more than £7.

Bullit de peix

Nieves Barragán Mohacho, head chef and co-owner, Sabor, London

I went to Ibiza this year for a holiday and had a traditional Balearic dish called bullit de peix. It comes in two parts: fish, such as red mullet, turbot or scorpion fish, in a beautiful aioli sauce made with olive oil, garlic and milk. Then a rice dish cooked in the remaining fish stock with extra aioli stirred through. I had it at a restaurant called Es Torrent, a short drive west of Santa Eulalia. It’s giving me goosebumps just thinking about it. The rice was almost sticky and it included cuttlefish that was so tender it was almost falling apart. I’ve cooked it for Sunday lunch at home, and I’m working on adding my own version at Sabor.

Waakye

Akwasi Brenya-Mensa, chef-owner, Tatale, London

I went to Ghana for a month at the start of the year – it was part-holiday, part-research before opening Tatale. Waakye is a rice and beans dish that I used to eat a lot as a kid and I was really looking forward to having it on this trip.

The beans and rice are cooked in water that’s been stewed with sorghum leaves, which turns the water a dark red colour. They’re served with a tomato-based stew, spaghetti (for a reason still unknown to me), a protein such as goat or fish, boiled eggs (which Ghanaians absolutely love), shito sauce and gari, which is dried, fermented cassava. The street food vendor – Anadwo Waakye by Mukasechic in Osu, Accra – was closed until just before I left. I kept messaging her saying, when are you opening? When I finally had it, it was incredible. I’m hoping to go back at the end of the year.