The Bizarre Truth by Andrew Zimmern

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-wheelerswere 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 thatfreshness 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