Hartwood, Tulum, Mexico

Around £45 a head, plus drinks

Chef-owner Eric Werner is smiling amiably as he shifts a huge grilled snapper into the wood-fired oven behind him. I’d been hoping, on the off-chance, to tag along on a foraging trip with him the following day. Kindly, but firmly, he tells me he is definitely going to spend his Sunday fishing, in the middle of nowhere, by himself. In other words, this journalist from London can do one – it’s his day off. He’s a chef with his priorities firmly in order.

Hartwood restaurant sits on the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula, on a coastal road between jungle and sea. There’s no roof: it’s open to the stars – and the occasional downpour that provokes sudden closure. The sea air mingles with the scent of copal wood (burnt to repel mosquitos) and hardwood embers in the oven; when you run a restaurant in the jungle, the plumbing and mains electricity don’t reach. Thus the wood-fired oven and grill, solar panels and generator, and the blocks of ice in chest freezers that make up their refrigeration system.

Werner and his wife Mya Henry left New York for Tulum in pursuit of a more sustainable and meaningful lifestyle. They perhaps didn’t envisage themselves, machetes in hand, hacking through thick vegetation and rotting trees on a cheap patch of land infested with snakes and iguanas to build this restaurant. But what they have made is beautiful; it is at once a restaurant and a family – you can’t manage in an environment like this without strong relationships, and the couple work closely with the local community. As you’d expect, they buy from independent farmers and fishermen, but they listen, too, picking up local knowledge. Take the cenote underwater cave systems – these sinkholes were considered sacred by the ancient Mayans and are known as snorkelling and diving destinations, but less considered is how their crystal-clear fresh waters feed deep-rooted plants. The couple will tell you about the particular type of tern whose presence marks the arrival of certain schools of fish; or the sweet flesh of the pale-pink Maya prawns caught by shrimpers along the nearby lagoon with hand-cast nets; which fish you can only catch with a spear and a guide (robalo); and how to cut away the stressed flesh around the wound before cooking. There’s a knowledge and reverence for their ingredients that means every dish – cliched as it has become to say it – is cooked with care and passion.

On our visit, there’s a simple salad of jicama – the tuber tastes like a savoury apple – with oranges, seeds and mint cream. The Yucatan ceviche is done with wild snapper, local mezcal, lime and ginger. A whole yellowtail amberjack is grilled first, the wood smoke infusing it with flavour, then finished in the oven and served with Mayan spinach and roasted pineapple. The house special is octopus; its tentacles served charred and smoky with coriander dressing, roast potatoes sticky under the mollusc’s tender suckers, with pickled onions and greens. The setting is magical. The food? The food is unforgettable.

And it is food that you can recreate at home, as evidenced by their new cookbook. In such a basic kitchen, the cooking can’t be complicated – temperature control is achieved by logs added to or removed from the fire (and if you want heat quickly, you make sure the log has already been roasted so that it ignites fast). But there are tricks (“kitchen workhorses” Werner calls them) to layer flavour – great use is made of various pickles, flavoured salts and roasted oils (chilli, garlic, onion) for cooking and finishing. Superstar chef René Redzepi describes Hartwood as “the place I dream about”, partly because of Werner’s cooking, but also, no doubt, because it’s such a special place to eat. The risk of losing a night’s business in a downpour still won’t persuade them to install a roof since “the magic of serving food to a room of people sitting under the stars is worth the risk of the occasional rainout”.

Susan Smillie
Editor, food and drink, G2

Hartwood’s rib eye with pepita-lime butter

This is for an enormous rib eye, a special-occasion cut. Make sure you rest it for five minutes on either side – if you follow this formula for all the meat you grill (skirt steak, lamb, pork), you’ll notice the difference.

(Serves 4)

• One 28oz bone-in rib eye
  
• 1 tbsp allspice berries, toasted until fragrant and ground
  
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  
• 12 fresh árbol chillies (or 4 serranos or jalapeños)
  
• 2 habaneros
  

For the pepita-lime butter

• 4 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
• 1 tsp pepitas (pumpkin seeds), toasted in a dry skillet until fragrant, then ground
  
• 1 tbsp grated lime zest
  
• 1 lime, halved
  

Prepare a grill for high heat. Preheat the oven to 230°C and oil the grill grate. Season the rib eye with the allspice, salt and pepper. Cook the meat until grill marks form – about two and a half minutes – then turn it 45 degrees, to form a crosshatch pattern, and cook for another two and a half minutes or so. Repeat on the other side.

Transfer the meat to a large cast-iron skillet, put it in the oven, and roast for 10 minutes, basting the meat with its juices every two minutes. Remove to a cutting board and let it rest for 10 minutes, turning halfway.

Meanwhile, clean and oil the grill grate. Cook the fresh árbol chillies and habaneros until lightly charred, about 3 minutes per side. Transfer to a plate and season with a pinch of salt.

Combine the butter, pepitas and lime zest in a small bowl and mix until smooth.

Slice the meat. Serve each portion topped with a tablespoon of the butter and garnish with the lime and chillies.

• Excerpted from Hartwood by Eric Werner and Mya Henry (Artisan Books, £27.99).

La Pineta, Marina di Bibbona, Italy

Around £50 a head, plus drinks

From the outside, La Pineta doesn’t look all that. Sure, it’s right on the beach, but this stretch of the Tuscan coast is hardly the most picturesque. The place looks more like an out-of-season deckchair storage facility than somewhere you’ll find some of the finest seafood you’re ever likely to encounter, and many first-time visitors will probably share my initial reaction: “Are you sure this is the right place?”

Open since 1964 – when the grandmother of the current chef and owner, Luciano Zazzeri, did the cooking – La Pineta has become a place of pilgrimage for me. Zazzeri, a former fisherman, has a ridiculously light touch for a man who used to haul nets for a living; in fact, with many dishes, he applies no touch at all, serving his wares in their natural state.

There’s seafood antipasti of outrageous freshness, much of it raw or only briefly introduced to a heat source – the better to taste the sea. As for main courses, before service, Zazzeri proudly wheels around a trolley topped with enormous wild bass, bream and whatever else has caught his eye at market that morning, giving diners some face-to-face time with their lunch or dinner, much as you’d get at a high-end Tokyo sushi joint. But if there’s a single dish that marks La Pineta out for me – and one I’d happily shove down my cakehole at least once a week – it’s Zazzeri’s red mullet maltagliati. It’s simply remarkable, and remarkably simple: just small, misshaped pasta of a colour that tells you proper eggs have gone into its making, a few flakes of mullet poached just-so in stock and oil, a scrap of diced tomato here and there, the merest fleck or two of parsley. That’s it. I’d trek out to La Pineta for a plate of that alone. So long as I can have seconds. And thirds.

At the end of each service, Zazzeri leaves the kitchen to take up residence at a desk by the door, where he personally draws up and takes payment for each bill. It’s his way of bonding even further with his customers: a final act of hospitality before we say our goodbyes. Somehow I can’t imagine the likes of Heston, Gordon and co ever doing that.

Bob Granleese
Editor, food and drink, Weekend Magazine

La Pineta’s maltagliati with red mullet

Maltagliati are traditionally offcuts from making tagliatelle and other noodles, and these small scraps of unevenly shaped flat pasta go perfectly with this sauce. It’s best to make your own, but good ready-made sheets of fresh lasagne will work.

(Serves 4)

• 100ml extra-virgin olive oil
  
• White onion, 4-5 very thin slices
  
• 1 small dried chilli, crushed and soaked in 1 tbsp olive oil
  
• 1 300g red mullet, cleaned and scaled
  
• 100ml fish stock (make this with just a fish-head or bone – monkfish or turbot is ideal)
  
• 1 good pinch sea salt
  
• 1 ripe tomato, chopped
  
• 1 tbsp parsley, chopped
  
• 6 sheets good-quality fresh lasagne, cut into triangles or wide ribbons
  

Heat the oil in a large, lidded frying pan on a medium-high flame. Add the onion and chilli, fry for two minutes, until softened, then lay the fish in the pan and add a ladleful of stock. Add a pinch of salt, then cover the pan and leave the fish to poach over a low heat for six or seven minutes.

Once the fish is cooked, fillet it in the pan – use two spoons to separate flesh from bone. Lift out the carcass, add the fish cheeks and head to the pot, then add more stock if needed and bring to a boil, so the oil and stock emulsify.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in lots of boiling salted water for three to four minutes, until just al dente. Drain the pasta, reserving a tablespoon of the cooking water. Tip the pasta and reserved cooking water into the sauce, add the tomato and parsley, then season to taste. Toss together until the sauce clings to the pasta (the fish will break up), and serve.

• Excerpted from The Seahorse Cookbook by Mitch Tonks and Mat Prowse (Absolute Press, £25).

Bo Lan, Bangkok, Thailand

When I went to Bo Lan, it was the first restaurant I visited on my first-ever trip to Bangkok. I didn’t realise what a mistake this was. Because nothing we ate for the remainder of our trip had even the faintest chance of holding a candle to this electrifying, eye-popping, enlightening dinner.

The restaurant’s owners – Thai Duangporn “Bo” Songvisava and Australian Dylan “Lan” Jones – met while working at their mentor David Thompson’s Nahm in London. Thai food guru Thompson was between restaurants at the time so we didn’t get a chance to compare with the master, but they share with him a love of Thai home-cooking and streetfood traditions, all realised with the finest ingredients; they’ve forged close relationships with local farmers, producers, foragers and fishermen. Some of the little starters and dim sum seemed furiously alien, but as soon as I ate one – the burst of sour fruit or jolt of mustard greens, reek of nam pla or the crisp joy of puffed rice with a rush of spices and palm sugar – I wanted to eat it again. If I close my eyes, I can still almost taste the pheasant liberally laced with freshly picked green peppercorns nipping at the tastebuds, so vivid they made any other peppercorns seem like pallid, sickly imitations. Cured pork with coconut cream featured a portfolio of entirely new flavours.

Bo Lan was one of the first upscale (ish – it’s still very reasonably priced) restaurants in Bangkok to not give much of a toss about being farang-friendly: no toning down of those Technicolor Thai keynotes. It’s as if your palate was being re-educated into a regime of exquisite, almost-pain. None of the Thai food we ate subsequently, whether the highest-end hotel dining rooms or the grungiest, most renowned street stalls (some introduced to us by Thompson himself) came close. Dammit. We just had to go back.

Even though the two owners have gone on to some celebrity in Thailand, attention to the restaurant is still their priority. At the time, the flavours made me feel trippy and now, looking back, the whole experience has the quality of a Mekhong spirit-induced dream. In a good way, of course.

Marina O’Loughlin
Restaurant critic, Weekend Magazine

La Raviere, Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, France

1 Route des Orgères, 74170 (but, more usefully, just off the Raviere run, look for the wooden sign off to the left)
Around £20 a head, plus drinks

On my first visit to La Raviere, I arrived in tears. I’m assured you can reach this mountain restaurant all year round on foot and, in winter, you can also ski there on a narrow track that branches off a gentle blue run. But by far the quickest route is off-piste through the trees. (The quickest, that is, if you don’t keep falling headfirst into piles of snow.)

The building itself is a small, wooden chalet with a lethal tiled floor that doubles as a skating rink, and a log fire surrounded by gently steaming piles of hats and gloves. There are only about six tables, permanently full to bursting with smug, pink-cheeked diners; reservations are heartily recommended.

Perhaps uniquely among restaurants in this corner of the Haute-Savoie, you won’t find any molten cheese on the short menu. The owners hail from Alsace, land of smoked pork, choucroute and enormous sausages, served with vast bowls of rosti (refilled on request) and bookended by charcuterie and cornichons, and a dessert trolley groaning with strudel. The only cheese comes in tart form, and very good it is, too, though the onion version is even better (especially paired with a glass of crisp Alsatian pinot gris).

If she likes you, Madame will leave a bottle of homemade firewater on the table along with the bill (cash only), to be poured round as liberally as you feel is safe before heading back into the forest. That fateful first visit, we eventually staggered out to find Mont Blanc no longer visible from the little terrace and all the lifts closed. A friend lost a ski, then the rest of us lost the rescue party; we ended up having to pay a passing local to drive us all back to town. But, warmed by schnapps and the lingering, convivial satisfaction of a lunch well done, not one further tear was shed.

Felicity Cloake
Food writer and Perfect columnist, G2