For the food lover, a visit to any city is an invitation to eat—and eat, and eat. What makes cities such incredible dining destinations is that they are, by nature, dense: with people, with culture, with history, and with food.

City life is often disconnected from agriculture, which might suggest worse food, but in reality, it often means better. Urban dwellers need quick lunches, comforting dinners, and everything in between. The demand feeds an industry of restaurants, market stalls, bakeries, and street carts that thrive on volume, competition, and creativity.

Cities are also crossroads. They rise on ports, along rivers, rail lines, and trade routes. Their foods are among the most immediate and delicious gateways to understanding their histories and the many different people who have passed through or settled down in them. As a result, each city has its own distinct gastronomic fingerprint—encoded into its unique pattern are the influences of rulers and the rich, of workers and the poor, of diasporic communities and religious groups.

All of this makes cities some of the most exciting—and overwhelming—places to eat. A lot of cities have so many places to eat that you could dedicate a lifetime to trying a new one every single day and still not visit them all before you die. So when you're going for just a week, where do you start?

That's where we come in.

At Serious Eats, we’ve long worked with a global network of culinary experts—writers, cooks, and researchers who live and breathe the food of their home cities. They’re the ones we email before we travel. They know where to go, what to eat, and why it matters.

In our Global Eats series, we’re sharing that insider knowledge with you, along with recipes you can cook before you go, while you’re there (if you’ve got a kitchen), and after you return home. Whether you’re prepping for a trip or just hungry for inspiration, this series is designed to get you closer to the cities you’re excited about, one plate at a time.

This is the second installment of Global Eats. In our first, we covered London, Paris, Cairo, Bangkok, Taipei, Buenos Aires, and Mumbai. This time, we’re taking you to seven more cities with distinct culinary identities: Kingston, Rome, Marrakesh, Kuala Lumpur, Santiago, San Juan, and Hong Kong. Think of it as your ultimate dining-out hook-up—a traveler's crib sheet from the people who know these food scenes best.

Cantonese Delights, Soy Sauce Western, and Desserts Galore in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a shimmering metropolis often referred to as “Asia’s World City” and the “Gateway to China." It's where East meets West, and every twist and turn presents an opportunity for food. The city is packed with cha chaan tengs (Hong Kong–style cafés), dai pai dongs (outdoor hawker stalls), street carts, and eateries dishing out local specialties, such as congee and clay-pot rice.

Your guide to Hong Kong is Serious Eats senior editor Genevieve Yam, who grew up in the city during the 1990s, when it was rapidly changing. Now based in the U.S., Genevieve frequently travels to Hong Kong to visit family and eat, eat, eat. Hot off of her most recent trip to the city, she's sharing some of her favorite eateries for brothy noodles, dumplings, French toast, pork chop sandwiches, seafood, and so much more. Inside the guide, you'll also find Serious Eats recipes for many of Hong Kong's most iconic dishes, so you can keep eating like a Hong Kong local when you return home.

Forget Sit-Down Restaurants and Start Liming Like a Local in Kingston

Far too many Americans who visit Jamaica stray no further than the buffets and hotel restaurants they frequent between sunbathing sessions at their gated, all-inclusive resorts. But for any food lover, that's a big mistake. Step away from the resorts, and you'll find a vibrant, ever-evolving food culture that’s a mélange of the island’s African, British, Spanish, and Taino cultures, spiced up with contributions from Portuguese Jews, French Huguenots, Syrians, Lebanese, Germans, Scots, and Irish immigrants—all built upon Jamaica’s agricultural bounty and access to both reef- and deep-sea fishing. 

Visitors from the U.S.—where dining out is the norm—are often surprised by how few sit-down restaurants exist outside Jamaica’s resorts. But incredible food is everywhere, if you know where to look. That’s where our guides come in: sisters Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau, acclaimed Jamaican cookbook authors, caterers, and food TV personalities. They’re sharing their favorite spots for jerk pork (yes, it’s more popular than chicken), pan chicken, beef patties hot from the oven, cornmeal porridge, ackee, and more local specialties. Inside the guide, you’ll also find recipes for iconic Jamaican dishes you can make at home—the ones below are just a taste. Oh, and if you don’t already know what it means to lime, you will soon.

Kuala Lumpur—the Middle Child of Southeast Asia—Claims Its Spotlight

Serious Eats contributor Alia Ali compares Malaysia's capital city of Kuala Lumpur to a middle child: “There’s something kind of like wanting to prove herself, but she also doesn't realize she’s already cool," she says. "We’re surrounded by places that are more popular and touristy, like Thailand and Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. People are like, ‘Where is Malaysia?’”

But Kuala Lumpur has so much to offer food lovers, namely a culinary scene that reflects the city's diversity, and is not so much a melting pot as it is an all-you-can-eat buffet, with mouth-puckering fish soups, fragrant rice dishes, rich curries, and an abundance of the sweet-and-savory finger snacks known as kuih. Alia is a native Malaysian and home cook who’s contributed more than a dozen recipes to Serious Eats, and she knows Kuala Lumpur inside and out. She is our guide to the “Muddy Confluence” (the city name’s literal meaning in Malay) and in addition to her picks for where to eat in KL, you'll find her recipes for making many of Malaysia's most delicious dishes at home inside the guide.

Souk to Nuts: The Best Places to Eat in the Ancient City of Marrakesh

Ringed by pinkish, millennium-old walls that give it its nickname, "the Red City," Marrakesh is a city that's "deeply rooted in Berber history with Arab and Andalusian influences, a blend of the Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean, the desert, and the Atlas mountains," says chef, cookbook author, Serious Eats contributor, and your guide to Marrakesh, Nargisse Benkabbou. “But it’s also a city that’s always looking forward—an overload of colors and sounds and smells where ancient history coexists with modern life, like with the ancient souks that have been widened to accommodate bigger crowds.”

The city's food reflects this coexistence of ancient history and modern life, and you'll find different restaurants serving traditional takes and contemporary spins on tagines, harira soups rich with the aromas of stewing tomatoes, turmeric, and cinnamon, and glistening lamb kefta. A native Moroccan and restaurant owner, Benkabbou truly knows the food scene of Marrakesh. She’s also the author of an internationally acclaimed cookbook on Moroccan cuisine, and inside this guide you'll find many of her recipes for bringing a taste of Marrakesh home.

When in Rome: A Short List of Where to Eat in the Eternal City

Rome is one of the few cities in the world that have a distinct cuisine that stands on its own. “How many cities could support dozens of cookbooks dedicated to their local dishes alone? Rome is one of them,” says Serious Eats editorial director Daniel Gritzer. Suffice it to say, the number of wonderful things to eat in Rome is just about limitless—classics such as Roman-style artichokes, pasta alla gricia, amatriciana, carbonara, pizza al taglio, and gelati, for starters. But while many in Rome are staunch cuisine traditionalists, there are also innovative chefs, turning out spins on classics and adding whole new foods to the canon. 

To help you ever-so-slightly narrow down the list of must-eat foods at must-go spots in Rome, we tapped experts Peter Barrett, the author of the Things on Bread Substack and a Roman resident for two years, and Sara Levi, a native Roman and chef at the Rome Sustainable Food Project at the American Academy at Rome, to share their insight into what—and where—to eat in the Capital of the World. Our guide also includes recipes for those aforementioned classics, and many more Roman dishes, so you can do as a Roman does even when you're not in Rome.

Sofrito, So Good: An Expert's Guide Eating Your Way Through San Juan

San Juan has long served as the capital of Puerto Rico, not only in political terms but also as the island’s culinary and cultural heart. Its food reflects a blend of Taino, Spanish Criollo, and African traditions. Almost any Puerto Rican will tell you that a trip to San Juan wouldn't be complete without mofongo—tender plantains, crunchy pork cracklings, punchy garlic, and a savory broth, all mashed together to make this beloved Puerto Rican dish—but there are plenty of other can't-miss dishes, including lechon, pernil, a wealth of seafood, and crispy twice-fried tostones.

Your guides to dining in San Juan are Serious Eats contributor and cookbook author Reina Gascón-López and chef and food entrepreneur Manolo López, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico and now lives in New York City. In this guide, they talk about what makes Puerto Rican food so special, what to eat if you’re not already familiar with the cuisine, and where to get the best representations of those dishes in and near San Juan. The guide also includes recipes from Gascón-López to make several Puerto Rican classics so you can better understand how the flavor is built from the ground up (hint: the sofrito is key).

From Hot Dogs to Oysters: Your Guide to Santiago's Eclectic and Excellent Food Scene

Apologies to Serious Eats' home-base of New York City, but if you want to eat the best hot dog of your life, you need to fly to Santiago and get your hands on completos—oversize hot dogs generously heaped with sauerkraut, diced tomatoes, mashed avocado, mayonnaise, and more. Of course there's much more to eat in Chile's capital city than loaded franks, including hearty charquicán, empanadas, and platters overflowing with enough briny oysters to make your eyes pop out of your head.

Santiago, which sits midway from north to south, is where everything in the country flows to, at least food-wise, making for a “very rich and very vibrant food culture,” in the words of Isidora Díaz. Díaz is a Serious Eats contributor and recipe developer, cookbook author, the director of the Chilean food and wine magazine Revista Fondo, and your guide to how to eat like a local in Santiago. Our guide also includes recipes for some of the iconic dishes you'll find in Santiago, including—yes—Díaz's recipe for making completos at home, complete with the sog-resistant homemade buns you'll need to contain a whole avocado and all those other toppings.

In Hong Kong, every twist and turn presents an opportunity for food. The city is packed with cha chaan tengs (Hong Kong–style cafés), dai pai dongs (outdoor hawker stalls), street carts, and eateries dishing out local specialties, such as congee and clay-pot rice. 

The city, a shimmering metropolis often referred to as “Asia’s World City” and the “Gateway to China,” is where East meets West. Towering skyscrapers stand proudly next to regal Victorian buildings, temples, and compact tenement apartments. Neon signs hang off the buildings, and below, double decker buses and trams from the 1900s rumble past, a reminder of the city’s British colonial past. Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, is home to about 7.5 million people, which consist of Cantonese locals, Mandarin-speaking Chinese nationals, expats from the West, and immigrants from other parts of Asia.

The food, like its population, is diverse. Cantonese food and Soy Sauce Western, a genre of Western-inspired Chinese food, reign supreme. But you’ll also find an abundance of regional Chinese cuisines and South Asian, Southeast Asian, Japanese, and Korean food. At swanky hotels, the British tradition of afternoon tea—complete with scones, clotted cream, and jam—continues. Traditional Cantonese joints dish out clay-pot rice, congee, and noodles, while cha chaan tengs serve rich milk tea alongside spam and egg sandwiches.

The city’s cuisine, for the most part, is a little British, a little Chinese, and distinctly Hong Kong. Chef Tony Tan writes in his book Hong Kong Food City, “While it’s undeniable that Hong Kong is a quintessentially Chinese city with temples and noodle shops, it is also tempered by its British legacy and sensibilities." 

I grew up in Hong Kong in the 1990s, a transformational time for the city. After 156 years of colonial rule, Britain returned Hong Kong to China in July 1997. China was just beginning to open up to the world, and businesses and investors flocked to Hong Kong, eager for a share of the Chinese market. Hong Kong—and Asia, in general—experienced rapid economic growth, and with it came great wealth and drastic income inequality, something that has continued to shape the landscape and social fabric of the city. Many of the beloved restaurants and shops my family frequented when I was a child are long gone, replaced by newer, shinier, international chains.

Though much has changed about Hong Kong, one thing has not: The food remains excellent and plentiful. Local markets sell fresh sugarcane juice and fruit from all over Asia—ripe Carabao mangoes from the Philippines, pungent durian from Malaysia, and sweet, tangy Kyoho grapes from Japan. Wet markets stock locally caught fish for pan-frying and steaming, including grouper, threadfin, and big-eye fish. Food, for the most part, remains affordable. A bowl of tender brisket, tendon, and tripe with rice noodles will run you about $12 USD, and a plate of roast goose and white rice costs just about $8 USD. 

For our second round of Global Eats—a food lover's guide to the culinary capitals of the world—I'll be your guide, sharing some of my favorite restaurants and meals around the city. (You'll find the first Global Eats series here.) A bad meal in Hong Kong is possible, but you’d have to try really hard—and if you eat like a local, you can’t go wrong.

Cantonese Delights

Duen Kee

57-58 Chuen Long Estate
Route Twisk
Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong
+852 2490 5246

No website

This dim sum restaurant is located at the base of Tai Mo Shan, Hong Kong’s highest mountain. Tucked away in the tiny village of Chuen Long, the restaurant is surrounded by mountains and is a hidden gem frequented by hikers and locals. The restaurant is self-serve: An assortment of tea leaves are available for you to brew your own tea. Stacks of steamer baskets, filled with Cantonese delicacies such as pork and shrimp siu mai, beancurd skin rolls, and fluffy barbecued pork buns, are lined up against pink- and white-tiled walls. Sit outside on the terrace, and you’ll be able to enjoy the scenery of Hong Kong’s lush mountains.

“You just feel so far from the chaos of the city,” Charmaine Mok, the deputy culture editor of the South China Morning Post, says. “They still do a lot of the traditional dim sum dishes, like preserved sausage buns. They have their own watercress farm in the back. It’s a wholesome experience and shows a different side of Hong Kong, like the nature surrounding it.”

Hop Yik Tai

121 Kweilin Street
Sham Shui Po, Kowloon
Hong Kong
+852 2720 0239

No website

Cheung fun (rice noodle rolls) are typically made with rice flour and water, with a small quantity of tapioca starch, glutinous rice flour, or mung bean starch for a slight chew. The batter is poured in a thin layer onto a steamer tray or piece of cloth, steamed until translucent, then rolled into noodles. They vary in shape and size: At dim sum restaurants, the noodles come filled and rolled with shrimp, beef, barbecued pork, or youtiao (Chinese fried dough sticks). Another popular method is to stir-fry noodle rolls—trimmed into two-inch lengths—with XO sauce and bean sprouts. Eaten as a street food, the rice noodle rolls are usually left unfilled and garnished with an assortment of sauces.

Locals and tourists alike flock to Hop Yik Tai for the cheung fun, which are silky smooth—a texture locals refer to as “wat loot loot”—with just enough spring. A little cart filled with fresh rice noodle rolls stands at the front of the shop; it’s manned by a gruff employee with a pair of scissors, ready to trim rice noodle rolls to-order. Each portion comes drizzled with sesame sauce, sweet sauce, and soy sauce, with a generous sprinkling of sesame seeds. Word on the street is that Hop Yik Tai seasons their soy sauce with lard, which gives the rice rolls an additional richness and savory flavor. At Hop Yik Tai, you’ll find other local street food favorites, including fish balls and siu mai (pork and shrimp dumplings).

Kwan Kee Claypot Rice

Shop 1, G/F
263 Queen’s Road West
Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong
+852 2803 7209

No website

Hong Kong’s subtropical climate means the city’s temperatures rarely dip below 59°F (15°C). When it does, however, crowds flock to eat clay-pot rice, a dish of rice steamed and crisped over charcoal stoves. The dish is Hong Kong’s version of a one-pot meal: Assorted toppings like funky preserved pork sausage, spare ribs marinated with black bean sauce, and velveted chicken are nestled onto the raw grains. The toppings gently steam as the rice cooks, and the grains at the bottom char, forming a beautifully crisp crust. 

At Kwan Kee, the demand for clay-pot rice is year-round: The queue for dinner begins long before the doors open at 5:30 p.m. each day, and some wait as long as two hours for a bite of the restaurant’s famous clay-pot rice. The restaurant is particularly well known for its white eel clay-pot rice: Plump morsels of white eel are drizzled in fermented black bean sauce and garnished with fresh scallions and chiles. The soy sauce, subtly sweet and fragrant, has a savory depth that brings the entire dish together. Kwan Kee may be known for its clay-pot rice, but I also recommend ordering several of their excellent side dishes, such as the eggplant braised with salted fish or steamed minced pork patty with salted duck egg, to go with your rice.

Sang Kee Congee Shop

7 Burd Street
Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
+852 2542 1099

No website

Sang Kee has been around since the 1960s; the congee shop operated as an outdoor food stall before moving into its current location in the 1980s. Over the decades, Sang Kee has amassed a loyal following. The no-frills shop is known for its congee with tender fish belly, though its congees with beef meatballs and fish balls are also popular. “Pure, thick, and snowy white with fully bloomed grains of rice, Sang Kee’s congee has an elegance that far exceeds the term ‘savory rice porridge,’” writer Betty Richardson raved in the South China Morning Post earlier this year. The congee comes with small bowls of soy sauce with julienned ginger and delicate ribbons of spring onions, but the porridge is so delicious you likely won’t need it. Do, however, order a side of Chinese fried dough—zha leung in Cantonese, youtiao in Mandarin—for dipping.

Shui Kee

2 Gutzlaff Street
Central, Hong Kong
+852 2541 9769

No website

This tiny, crowded noodle stall has been a mainstay of the city’s Central district since the 1940s. In 2014, Lam Kin Wing, the third-generation owner of Shui Kee, told the South China Morning Post that his grandfather opened up the shop in the 1940s, just after the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. Located in an alleyway amidst the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong, Shui Kee specializes in beef offal, which supposedly comes from freshly slaughtered cows and is never frozen. Diners vie for bowls of soup noodles with beef lungs, spleen, or intestines, though cuts like skirt steak and brisket are available, too. 

Prepare to go early: Shui Kee often sells out before 2:00 p.m., and hungry diners begin lining up around 11:00 a.m. Like Sister Wah below, Shui Kee’s broth has layers of savory depth, and each sip is infused with the rich flavor of beef. Also worth ordering with your offal soup: A side of crispy fried fish skin and a glass of housemade chrysanthemum tea.

Sister Wah Beef Brisket

13 Electric Road
Tin Hau, Hong Kong
+852 2807 0181

Sister Wah is known for its broth, which simmers all day long. When I asked an employee how much broth they make each day, they responded: “We never stop making broth. We make it all day long, until we close.” Clean and clear as the broth is, it is also deeply flavored—there is a touch of sweetness, a hint of star anise that gives it a very subtle warmth, and rich, savory depth from beef. 

The shop is small and cramped, and in true Hong Kong style, I shared a table with three other solo diners: two locals and a tourist, all silently slurping their noodles. The beef brisket, tendon, and tripe noodles here may very well be the best bowl of noodles I’ve ever eaten in Hong Kong. The tangle of wide rice noodles was topped with tender brisket, soft, chewy tendon, and tripe with just enough bounce. The other dishes on the menu, such as the wontons, are worth ordering, too, but the beef brisket noodles are an absolute must.

Sun Hing Restaurant

Shop C, 8 Smithfield Road
Sai Wan, Hong Kong
+852 2816 0616 

No website

Sun Hing is an old-school Hong Kong dim sum spot that’s open from 3:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. each day. It’s loud, chaotic, and very Hong Kong: Diners, perched on shabby plastic stools, crowd around small tables as servers shuffle stacks of steamer baskets back and forth. Order the fried milk—a milk custard that’s coated in batter and fried until crisp—a retro dim sum dish that’s rarely found on menus nowadays. The tripe, cooked in a mild Hong Kong–style yellow curry, is tender and springy. Don’t leave without ordering one of the light, fluffy custard buns that Sun Hing is well known for: Filled with a salted egg custard that oozes out, it’s a salty-sweet treat that people trek here for.

Wing Restaurant

29/F, The Wellington
198 Wellington Street
Central, Hong Kong
+852 2711 0063

https://wingrestaurant.hk/

When I asked Mok how she thought Hong Kong’s dining scene was changing, she mentioned that many chefs and restaurants in the city—long enamored with European cuisines such as French and Italian—have been returning to Chinese culinary traditions. One of those chefs is Vicky Cheng, a Canadian-born cook who is an alumnus of Daniel Boulud’s legendary French restaurant Daniel in Manhattan. Cheng moved to Hong Kong in 2015 and dove straight into learning everything he could about Chinese cuisine. “He started experimenting and really began to try to understand what defines Chinese cookery,” Mok says. “What are the ingredients? What are the techniques? That’s when he came up with Wing, which is a love letter to Hong Kong cuisine.”

At Wing, Cheng offers a contemporary take on traditional Cantonese dishes. Ingredients local to Hong Kong and southern China star in his cooking: Braised pomelo pith, a local delicacy that’s difficult to come by nowadays, is seasoned with savory shrimp roe and served in a sumptuous abalone sauce. Threadfin, a local variety of fish popular in Hong Kong, is steamed and topped with umami-rich salted pork and preserved vegetables. His signature dish is a “golden crystal egg,” a housemade century egg with amber whites and a jammy yolk, served with slippery Japanese oysters in a housemade chili sauce. It is, Mok says, a meal to remember—and one to make time for when visiting Hong Kong.

Yan Wo Dou Bun Chong

55 Jardine’s Bazaar
Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
+852 2808 4738

No website

Every time I visit Hong Kong, I visit Yan Wo Dou Bun Chong, an eatery that specializes in freshly made soy products. Their soy bean dessert—a silken tofu pudding—is tender and quivers on the spoon. It’s excellent plain with a sprinkling of rock sugar, but is especially delicious when topped with fresh ginger juice for a subtle kick. The savory smell of pan-fried tofu stuffed with fish sausage fills the air, and diners gulp down glasses of fresh, nutty soy milk before heading on their way.

Soy Sauce Western

Cheung Hing Coffee Shop

9 Yik Yam Street
Happy Valley, Hong Kong
+2572 5097

No website

Walking into Cheung Hing Coffee Shop feels like stepping into the 1950s. The tiled floors, ceiling fans, and mid-century wooden dining chairs give the cha chaan teng a nostalgic feel. Opened in 1951, the coffee shop is popular among locals for its puff pastry egg tarts and pineapple buns. The egg tarts—crisp, flaky, and filled with a golden custard that wobbles ever so slightly—are the best I’ve had, and for me, a visit to Hong Kong would be incomplete without one. The pineapple buns are available with various fillings, including satay beef or ham and egg, or stuffed with a generous slab of butter. The scrambled eggs are velvety and delicious on their own, or sandwiched with fried spam between two slices of buttered white bread. I’ve tried to replicate the silkiness of the eggs in my own recipe for the classic Hong Kong sandwich, though in my honest opinion, nothing will compare to the real thing from Cheung Hing. Of course, everything must be washed down with a cup of strong Hong Kong milk tea. Cheung Hing’s is silky smooth, and the evaporated milk’s richness balances the pleasant bitter, tannic notes of the tea. 

Yee Shun Dairy Company

506 Lockhart Road
Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
+852 2591 1837

No website

Macaroni and ham in soup and French toast drizzled with condensed milk may not sound like food from Hong Kong, but these local interpretations of Western dishes are cha chaan teng staples. Though Yee Shun Dairy Company hails from Macau, another special administrative region located an hour away from Hong Kong, the cafe is a Hong Kong stalwart frequented by both locals and tourists. My mother often brought me here for an afterschool snack when I was a child, and we’d each demolish a bowl of the shop’s specialty: delicate “double skin” milk puddings. The first skin is the one that forms when boiled milk cools; the second is one that forms when the pudding—a mixture of milk, sugar, and egg whites—cools.

The puddings are available hot or cold, and plain, chocolate-flavored, coffee-flavored, or with ginger juice. Ginger juice is my go-to—its warm flavor complements the natural sweetness of the milk. If you’re in the mood for savory food, consider the macaroni with satay or the Macanese pork chop sandwich, which is really just an excuse to eat a crispy, well-seasoned piece of meat between a toasted bun. Like the pork chop sandwich at Yee Shun, my recipe for the Macanese dish delivers a chop that's well-seasoned and crisp.

Chinese Bakeries and Desserts

Traditional Chinese pastries and desserts aren’t particularly sweet: They’re typically made with nuts, seeds, beans, rice, and fruits. There are dessert soups called tong sui, which means “sugar water,” though most of these aren’t very sweet at all. Most of them use nuts and seeds like walnuts, sesame, almonds, or coconut milk as the base. Sago, grass jelly, taro, sweet potato, and ginger are also other commonly used ingredients in hot and cold desserts. Cakes and dumplings like sesame paste-filled tong yuen are usually made with glutinous rice flour, giving them a pleasantly chewy texture. Fruits have a starring role, too: Mango, durian, lychees, and longan are especially popular.

C Dessert

Shop 1D, G/F, Newman House
35-45 Johnston Road
Wan Chai, Hong Kong
+852 2493 3349

When the beloved Hong Kong dessert spot Cong Sao Dessert (“Auntie Cong’s Dessert”) shuttered in 2020, locals mourned. The shop offered creative and contemporary spins on Chinese dessert, including longan sorbet with jellies and nata de coco and mango milkshake–flavored steamed milk puddings. Much to everyone’s delight, Auntie Cong returned with C Dessert in 2023. And every evening, you can expect to see a queue of hungry diners—eager for something sweet—snaking around the block. 

The desserts are bold and flavorful: Creamy durian, sweet and funky with notes of gasoline, sits on top of a refreshing bed of shaved ice. Chilled mango soup with pomelo and sago, a classic Cantonese dessert, is bright and refreshing, with pops of acid from the pomelo. The warm coconut milk with black rice, taro, and taro rice balls is creamy and comforting, a cozy dessert best enjoyed on a cool evening. Eat your way through the menu, and you’ll understand why the queue persists night after night.

Fook Yuen

7 Fook Yuen St
North Point, Hong Kong
+852 3106 0129

No website

Fook Yuen is a Chinese dessert spot renowned for their tong yuen. It is tiny and cramped, with barely any room to sit; still, people queue for a taste of the legendary dumplings, with some purchasing a box or two to cook at home. Their tong yuen is pillowy soft with just the right amount of chew, and both the sesame paste and peanut paste used to fill the dumplings are richly nutty and deeply fragrant, with small bits of nuts and seeds that provide a satisfying crunch. 

Kai Kai Dessert

29 Ning Po Street
Jordan, Kowloon
+852 2384 3862

No website

Kai Kai Dessert has been open since 1979, and serves up traditional Cantonese desserts like creamy walnut soup, taro soup with sago and lotus seeds, and fragrant almond soup. (Fun fact: Chinese almonds, called hung yun, are actually apricot kernels. If you ever spot “almond” on the menu of a Chinese restaurant, chances are they’re actually referring to apricot kernels.) Since 2015, Kai Kai has been on Michelin’s Bib Gourmand list, making it even more popular among locals and tourists. Over the years, I’ve eaten my way through most of their menu, and my favorite dessert from them is the black sesame soup and walnut soup combination, which allows you to enjoy the best of both worlds. Prepare yourself for brusque service, which is a norm in Hong Kong but may be considered rude by tourists.

Happy Bakery

66-68 Queen’s Road East
Wan Chai, Hong Kong
+852 9490 0156

No website

In July 2022, Happy Cake Shop, which opened in 1977, announced it was closing after their landlords decided to take the space back. Loyal customers prepared to say goodbye, and queued outside the mom-and-pop shop for the bakery’s famous horn-shaped cream puffs, egg tarts, and pineapple buns. Fortunately, Happy Cake Shop returned in 2023 as Happy Bakery just a few doors down from its original location, and today it sells many of the same baked goods it sold at its former spot. On my most recent trip to Hong Kong, I was lucky to visit when fresh egg tarts had just come out of the oven—they were warm and slightly sweet with a crumbly cookie crust. Don’t skip their cream horns and the fluffy buns covered in salty-sweet pork floss.

Hanging in Hong Kong

It’s very easy to get around Hong Kong: The city is extremely walkable, and a vast network of MTR subway stations, buses, trams, and minibuses makes it seamless to get from place to place. There’s plenty to do besides eating, too: Spend the morning hiking the Dragon’s Back, a popular trail in Shek O Country Park, go surfing in Big Wave Bay, or head up to The Peak for a glimpse of the city’s skyline. Or take a page out of my book and go on a food crawl through different neighborhoods. Wherever you end up, something delicious awaits.

Dissecting the food culture of a city as ancient and eternal as Rome is like conducting an archaeological dig—only the site is still bustling with the daily rhythms of modern life.

“Very few cities have such distinct cuisines that stand so strongly on their own,” says Serious Eats editorial director Daniel Gritzer. “How many cities could support dozens of cookbooks dedicated to their local dishes alone? Rome is one of them.”

Rome’s storied, deeply rooted cuisine is fiercely protected by the city’s culinary traditionalists, who are wary of anything they deem “un-Roman.” At the same time, it draws waves of starry-eyed visitors on a mission to eat their way through the canon of classic dishes.

“You have these two monolithic entities that are exerting a major gravitational force on the food scene: One is the tourists, who want all the things they’ve read about, like pasta alla gricia, amatriciana, carbonara, and pizza al taglio, and the other is the traditionalists—and Italians are largely pretty conservative when it comes to food,” says Peter Barrett, a food writer and former Rome resident who we turned to for insight into the city's food scene. “So for the new generation of chefs, the challenge is threading the needle—pushing the envelope while still maintaining a deep respect for the ingredients and traditions.”

Luckily, a new wave of Roman chefs is striking that balance admirably—serving dishes that nod to tradition without being confined by it. They’re not throwing out the classics, but they’re refusing to stop there.

The result is that Rome—seat of emperors and popes, home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, and shaped by generations of cooks, butchers, and bakers from across its layered history—remains one of the world’s great food cities, still thriving as a 21st-century crossroads of cultures.

And the ultimate beneficiary of all of this? You, the visitor to Rome, who can eat incredible meals, whether tried-and-true classics, pitch-perfect modern innovations, or both.

For our second round of Global Eats—a food lover's guide to the culinary capitals of the world—we asked Barrett, the author of the Things on Bread Substack and a Roman resident for two years, and Sara Levi, a native Roman and chef at the Rome Sustainable Food Project at the American Academy at Rome, to share their insight into what—and where—to eat in the Capital of the World. (You'll find the first Global Eats series here.)

Where to Eat in Rome

Sora Margherita

Piazza delle Cinque Scole, 30

Both our experts started off their tours of Roman dishes by delving into carciofi alla Romana, Roman-style braised artichokes, a highly seasonal spring dish requiring someone in the kitchen who knows how to prepare them properly. In the right hands, the result is meticulously cleaned hearts braised with white wine, extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, and herbs.

“I think of this as a really iconic Roman dish,” Levi says. “People coming from the United States, where people eat artichokes much more rarely, tend to think of them as a vehicle for dips, but here they're unadorned, so you get the purity of this perfectly cooked artichoke that is literally put on a plate with a little bit of braising liquid and oil and nothing else.”

Arguably the best thing about the Roman style of serving artichokes? They eliminate all the work for you, unlike, say, the French style, where they’re typically served with the leaves on for dipping into melted butter or vinaigrette.

“If you’re used to French-style artichokes, you have to work till you get to the heart,” Barrett says. “In the Roman artichoke, you don’t have to wade through a thicket of leaves to get to the good stuff. What ends up on the plate is entirely edible—you can fork-and-knife the whole thing. It’s still kind of al dente with a little resistance, and the olive oil and artichokes have this grassy green kind of simpatico—they really have something to say to each other, and it’s fantastic. It’s one of my favorite vegetable dishes.”

Barrett is still a fan of the first place he ever had the dish in Rome, Sora Margherita. “I went there when I was 19, 20 years old as a student and it was just the local place,” he recalls. “It didn’t even have a sign, it just had newsprint tablecloths, and you went in and looked at the piece of paper with the five things they were making that day. We’d usually get an artichoke to start if it was in season, and then a pasta, and at that time you could get all of that plus a liter of wine for 10 bucks apiece.”

Still under the same ownership, Sora Margherita hasn’t changed that much since, even though word’s gotten out about the great food there.

“Now the walls are covered with newspaper clippings about the restaurant, postcards from customers, and the service is brusque but congenial,” he says. “Think of tumblers of fruit water and wine and communal seating where if you can’t fill a table you sit next to strangers in almost school-desk chairs of chunky wood.”

Piatto Romano

Via Giovanni Battista Bodoni, 62

Levi is a fan of the carciofi alla Romana—and almost anything else in season—at Piatto Romano.

“The thing that stands out about that restaurant is that the owner, Andrea, really goes out of his way to source fruits or wild foraged greens that are hard to find these days,” she says. 

When you enter his restaurant, you see Andrea’s foraged bounty of the day in baskets laid out on a table right in front of the kitchen. “He’ll find things like these crazy lemons where you can eat the whole thing, and people will walk in and say, ‘What is this? Where’d you find them? Where’d they come from?’ And it’s always from some town not far away, and he’ll put whatever he’s found that day in one of his dishes that day.”

Barrett’s also a fan. “Very unostentatious, no pretense whatsoever, paper tablecloths, the whole thing,” he says. “Just reliable bangers across the board on the menu.” 

Testaccio Market

Via Aldo Manuzio, 66b

Not surprisingly, Piatto Romano’s Andrea seems to find many of his hard-to-source foraged treasures at Testaccio Market nearby. It’s a sprawling, covered marketplace of over 100 vendors that’s geared toward local food lovers rather than tourists.

“My advice, if it’s not your first time in Rome, is to rent a place with a kitchen and get the fixings for breakfast every morning and then make yourself lunch or dinner based on what you’re finding at the market,” Barrett says. “It helps you feel like more of a local because you have to visit six or seven stalls for each meal, you’re meeting people and you’re getting what Romans are eating right then and there, seeing what’s in season. If you’re interested in food, there’s no better way to understand the city, even if it’s just making a bowl of pasta and salad.”

Between all the grocery shopping, stop by Mordi e Vai, a grab-and-go, glass-countered panini stall inside the market, for a classic Roman offal sandwich, which is “absolutely as O.G. Roman as it gets,” Barrett says of the “excellently made tripe or tongue or brain” on white bread (though a brisket sandwich is usually available “if you’re too queasy for tripe or spleen”).

Armando al Pantheon

Salita de' Crescenzi, 31

Many Americans have a fantasy of indulging in classic Roman dishes in the shadow of one of its many beautiful, historic monuments, and there’s no shame in it. But if you do so, make sure you go to a restaurant with worthy food as well as spectacular views.

“One of my glib rules is never eat within sight of a major monument,” Barrett says. “The one exception to that is Armando al Pantheon.”

Both locals and foreigners crowd under the exposed wooden beams of this tiny, 14-table place with booth seats, big Art Deco windows, and wood-paneled walls to take in perfectly executed renditions of the classics.

“It’s absolutely one of the great go-tos for straight-down-the-middle, fastball-after-fastball of classic Roman fare, especially pasta. I would go for the classics, like carbonara, cacio e pepe, as well as the offal, like the oxtail stew and chicken livers—it’s a great place for quinto quarto fare,” Barrett says, using the Roman term—literally “the fifth quarter”—for offal-based dishes, a tradition rooted in the city’s historic slaughterhouse district.

This is where to go to find perfect examples of the simplest but hardest to make dishes. They can serve as models on which to base your home cooking for, say, cacio e pepe: that creamy, perfectly emulsified sauce of finely grated Pecorino Romano that coats each spaghetti strand with just the right amount of rich, cheesy, peppery flavor.

Trapizzino

Multiple locations

Like the beautiful, brilliant love child of a pizza and a sandwich, the trapizzino has taken Rome by storm and won over even those normally suspicious of culinary innovations. 

“I always find it an immensely satisfying food—you eat one and it’s a snack, you eat two and it’s a meal,” Levi says. “They’re kind of saucy, and when you stuff them into these triangular pizza pockets, the bread soaks up the sauces. The cacciatore’s my favorite because the chicken is braised in this garlic, rosemary, and vinegar combo, and the whole thing just pops in your mouth along with the texture of the beautiful bread with a nice, crispy exterior and soft interior.” 

Barrett, also a fan of the chicken cacciatore, likes to sometimes squeeze into the narrow Trapizzino in Trastevere, where throngs of fans line up for their turn at the counter before taking their trapizzini on the go or to the small, functional tables along the opposite wall or scattered on the sidewalk outside.

“It’s great for people-watching in the evening,” he says. “Trastevere is the hip nightlife neighborhood, and you have a lot of young, beautiful people spilling out onto the streets when the weather’s nice.”

SantoPalato

Piazza Tarquinia, 4 a/b

Just as Pablo Picasso mastered classical painting before moving onto his experimental phases, Rome’s best modern cooks demonstrate a command of the Roman classics while moving the needle of the 21st-century Roman table. Take Sarah Cicolini at SantoPalato, which serves “super hip, elevated trattoria fare” in an elegantly simplified setting of ochre walls and 1920s Italian cubist posters in a working-class district outside the tourist-filled city center.

“She makes one of the best carbonaras in the city and has unimpeachable cred,” Barrett says. “But then she'll take the famous Roman oxtail stew and turn it into fried meatballs dusted with dark chocolate and set it on a peanut-and-mustard purée. She manages to do this in a way that doesn’t outrage Roman traditionalists—she’s really admirably threading the needle, and part of the way she gets to do that is because her carbonara is ridiculous and she’s one hell of a cook.” 

According to Barrett, the perfection of her carbonara begins with the visuals. “It starts with the incredible red-orange color of the yolks, almost fluorescent yellow. It’s cooked until custardy enough to cling to the noodle but not so overdone that it’s congealed. She’s got it dialed in and understands that because Italian food is so simple and uses so few ingredients, the ingredients have to be perfect.”

Miraggio Trastevere

Via della Lungara, 16A

An iconic winter dish (and traditional Christmas Eve first course) in Rome is minestra di broccoli e arzilla, a soup of skate, Romanesco broccoli, and pasta that follows the tradition of la cocina povera, “thrifty dishes made from anything people could get their hands on while being extremely nutritious,” Levi says. 

She recently enjoyed the dish at Miraggio Trastevere, an unassuming place near the Tiber that serves hearty plates on red-checked tablecloths in an unadorned, almost homey yellow-walled setting.

“We had it with a carafe of red wine, and it was aromatic—maybe a little bit of garlic and anchovy paste and tomato,” she says. “And when you eat it, it’s satisfying, chewing on skate and vegetables, with everything soft.”

Retrobottega (& Retrovino)

Via d'Ascanio, 26A

Despite its industrial look—exposed ductwork, stark white walls, and dining rooms split by arches reminiscent of the Ponte Cestio spanning the Tiber—Retrobottega is considered one of the most exciting restaurants in Rome’s contemporary food scene.

“You sit next to strangers but by the end of the night you’re friends,” Barrett says. “Truly elegant, really imaginative, deeply talented, and they go foraging every week. It’s a terrific stop to see the state of the people pushing the envelope.”

He’s a fan of their sweetbread ravioli in a creamy sauce—"absolutely, perfectly tender pillows of meaty goodness in this foamy, frothy, decadent sauce"—and says the risottos are ”creamy and profound.”

Forno Campo de' Fiori

Campo de' Fiori, 22

Though it’s primarily a utilitarian bakery where locals order their daily bread, Forno Campo de' Fiori is also a renowned pizzeria, and is “beloved by locals and tourists alike” despite its perfunctory, matter-of-fact service, long lines, and the fact that there aren’t any tables or seats, just counters to order the pizza in the standard Roman style from along with a long glass case full of the regular bakery items (Barrett especially likes the zucchini bread).

“They make these very long, super thin pizzas that are about a foot and a half by five feet long, take them out with these peels that are five or six feet long, spread them on a big cutting board,” Barrett says. “You order them by weight: Ask for ‘200 grams of rosso,’ and they cut you a square, wrap it in brown paper and hand it to you. It’s glistening with oil, it’s piping hot, and it puts a smile on your face—it’s the ultimate to-go snack.”

Sinosteria

Viale Guglielmo Marconi 586

Rome has always been a city with a complicated relationship to its immigrants, but now the native-born generations of the more recent waves are making their marks in the Roman culinary scene, including the Chinese, who began forming increasingly significant communities there starting in the 1980s.

At Sinosteria, the menu meshes Chinese and traditional Roman cooking sensibilities to form a new genre in a sparingly decorated place that’s the brainchild of a father-son restaurateur duo.

Think kung pao chicken made with friggitelli peppers; coconut-milk risotto with Pettorano broccoli, zucchini, carrots, and crispy leek; or a giant, fried coconut dessert raviolo atop a sweet red wine glaze.

“Sinosteria points the way toward the future and continues to evolve,” Barrett says. “It’s a really bright light to me.”

Bar Gelateria, Alberto Pica

Via della Seggiola, 12, Centro Storico

Unprepossessing but renowned among fans of gelato, Alberto Pica is a beloved place in the Jewish ghetto that churns out exquisite traditional flavors such as pistachio as well as more unusual ones that are equally good, such as a crunchy, cinnamon-y rice pudding and candied rose petals.

Though the interior features the standard format that anyone who has ever stepped foot in a gelateria will instantly recognize—glass freezers with huge trays loaded with pastel-colored treats, each with a classic paddle-scoop stuck in it—you can take your laden cone outside to the small tables on the cobblestone street and gobble them up as passing Romans look on with envy.

All Meals Lead to Rome

Though it’s no longer the center of a continents-spanning empire, Rome has never given up its role as one of the world’s most important cities when it comes to sustaining food traditions, while also forging new gustatory identities in the 21st century. On your next trip to the Eternal City, make sure you take a nibble of the new along with the old, with the help of our Roman experts, then recreate your experiences at home with our recipes.

“Marrakesh.” Even the way the name of the Moroccan city trips off the tongue and echoes down the back of your throat evokes visions of an opulent Middle Eastern city redolent of rich, earthy spices, ornate Islamic architecture, and denizens in flowing robes clinging to a past as old as the dust coming off the Atlas Mountains.

“The soul of Marrakesh is unpredictable, chaotic, deeply rooted in Berber history with Arab and Andalusian influences, a blend of the Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean, the desert, and the Atlas mountains,” says chef, cookbook author, and Serious Eats contributor Nargisse Benkabbou. “But it’s also a city that’s always looking forward—an overload of colors and sounds and smells where ancient history coexists with modern life, like with the ancient souks that have been widened to accommodate bigger crowds. It’s a very unique place in Morocco.”

At sunset, the pinkish, millennium-old walls of the ancient old city turn a striking orange-red, giving the city its nickname, the Red City. This is when the city’s grand main square and its branching souks, under the watchful eye of the nearby ancient mosque, fills with food vendors opening their stalls, ladling out turmeric-perfumed bowls of rich, red tomato harira soups or handing out skewers of cumin-y lamb kefta dripping with fat while visitors gawk at performing monkeys and hissing cobras. 

But the Marrakesh of today is also a distinctly 21st-century city—one that has embraced its diversity. Recent influxes of French and British residents have made it a second home, bringing European sensibilities to the restaurant scene that mingle intoxicatingly with the city’s deep Berber and Arab cultural foundations.

“The food scene is very eclectic nowadays, and Marrakesh has evolved a lot in the past 15 years,” Benkabbou says. “A big chunk of the people who live in Marrakesh now are not from Marrakesh, which is great because they bring a modern perspective and a diversity that makes the most out of our traditions and celebrates them in that modern way. You can find places where people still eat like they used to communally 40 years ago, and then you can go to a place like Le Jardin that’s also traditional Moroccan but very modern.”

A native Moroccan, Benkabbou truly knows the food scene of Marrakesh, the city where she opened the restaurant L’Mida Marrakesh as executive chef five years ago. She’s also the author of an internationally acclaimed cookbook on Moroccan cuisine, making her an ideal guide for our tour of one of the world’s food capitals in this second installment of Global Eats—a food lover's guide to the culinary capitals of the world. (You'll find the first Global Eats series here.)

A Food Day in the Life of a Marrakesh Local

From morning to night, the rhythms of Marrakesh sway to the beat of its eats—from bakers pounding out dough at daybreak, to the scraping of clay tagine lids at midday, to the gentle splash of mint tea being “pulled” from pot to cup and and then deposited into a dainty teacup after dinner.

“You wake up and get a coffee or fresh orange juice or Moroccan mint tea or harcha filled with butter and honey, followed by a big meal for lunch or dinner,” Benkabbou says. “Lunch is often a tagine, which could be a chicken tagine or a prune tagine, accompanied by what we call salads, including raw salads like tomato and cucumbers or cooked salads like pea, olive, and preserved lemon salad.”

Sometimes a meal comes with dips, which are eaten with flatbreads like harcha, made with semolina and cooked on a griddle, or khobz, which is pita-like and made with regular flour. “You dip the bread and use it to scoop up peas and other foods—you eat with your hands a lot in Moroccan food,” she says.

Around 4 p.m., Moroccan tea time—which they call “gouter” after the French word for “to taste”—is sacred. You might take your tea with harcha, m’semen (a multiply folded griddled flatbread), fekkas (biscotti-like almond biscuits), or ghriba (a nutty, cinnamon-laced, sugar-dusted cookie).

That's how to eat in Marrakesh; now on to what and where.

Restaurants

Dar Marjana

5 Derb Sidi Ali Tair Bab، Doukala

Marrakesh is very much a city that embraces modernity, but that doesn’t mean that it’s forsaken its past. Dar Marjana is a restaurant that’s made itself a haven for those thirsting for the Marrakesh of yesteryear. 

The restaurant is built as if it were in a shaded oasis, inside an interior courtyard with a burbling fountain, checkerboard marble floors, and fringed with palm trees. Diners sit or lounge on low-lying, pillow-strewn couches called seddari. The place was once a riad, a palace or wealthy home built around that inside courtyard, and features ornately tiled and chiseled columns, dramatically hung velvet curtains, and soaring archways. The ceilings here are high—some 20 or 25 feet, making you feel like you’ve been invited to dinner at the behest of some sort of Moroccan prince.

Servers in traditional Moroccan caftans bring enormous tagines in the classic conical clay pots, along with smaller, elaborately decorated plates of salads and dips and other dishes, which you and your companions help yourselves to communally. Sometimes, you eat accompanied by a musician playing an oud, a traditional 11- or 13-stringed instrument similar to a lute. Or you eat as you watch people performing traditional Berber dances like an ahidous, in which the men and women stand shoulder to shoulder and move in rhythm to a central drummer.

“Dar Marjana reminds me of my grandmother’s house, because it’s like stepping back in time,” Benkabbou says. “It’s a big ceremony, and if they serve tea, they make the whole ceremony of the tea,” including the tradition of “stretching” the tea by pouring it back and forth between vessels in improbably long pours that make the liquid look like it’s defying gravity. 

One of the dishes to get here is the lamb and prune tagine, cooked the m’qualli way. “In Morocco, there are rules to cooking the tagine the m’qualli way,” Benkabbou says. “It’s traditionally made with ground ginger, ground turmeric, garlic, salt, and pepper, and that’s the core of the tagine—some people add coriander or saffron if they’re feeling fancy.” From there, the choice is whether to make the tagine savory—in which case it’s finished with preserved lemons or olives—or sweet, in which dried fruits and nuts are added.

“The secret to a good tagine is to let it simmer for as long as it can,” Benkabbou says. “I like to remove the meat and let the sauce reduce for an hour or more—in Morocco, there’s a debate about whether a thick or runny sauce is better, and I like a thick sauce, with the Maillard reaction and caramelization."

Benkabbou's own lamb and prune tagine recipe pays homage to her mother's version. "I think, to be honest, I was just recreating a recipe I ate all my life. After I left my parents’ house in my 20s, I would ask my mom for it first when I’d come home," she says. "It hits all the notes when it’s saucy and the meat is falling off the bone and you can smell what kind of tagine you’re having 10 meters away from the kitchen.”

Le Jardin

32 Souk Jeld Sidi Abdelaziz

Fast-forward half a century and you may find yourself at Le Jardin, a modern take on traditional Moroccan cuisine by young and inventive local chefs. Set in a greenery-festooned garden that could be the backyard patio space of a hip Brooklyn restaurant, Le Jardin is the place to go for smaller, less party-size portions of excellent chicken tagine under the illumination of hanging wicker lanterns. 

“They have their menu of traditional things, but keep it fresh and with a modern twist, like chicken bastila served with sour cream and cherry coulis,” Benkabbou says. Bastila is, to be as reductive as possible, a Moroccan chicken pie. But it’s much more than that, as she conveys in her streamlined bastila recipe.

“It’s definitely one of the most emblematic dishes of Morocco, a pie of nuts and scrambled eggs, chicken, and warqa that every single Moroccan has eaten growing up, especially for celebrations,” she says. “We serve it at weddings, at births or engagements—any big thing. If it’s your birthday, you ask your mom to serve bastila. I served it to the guests at my wedding.”

Bastila is a "labor of love," and is typically a dish that families trot out to impress a lot of people—Benkabbou recalls helping her mother make three or four very big ones for their family gatherings of over 200 people.

“You have to purchase the warqa [a Moroccan pastry dough similar to phyllo] from the women in the souk who make it in front of you, then put on layers of chicken cooked with with lots of spices and onions, then reduce the sauce and put eggs and almonds and so on in layers until you get that beautiful, golden, crinkled, crispy, crunchy pastry topping,” she says. “The recipe I developed [for Serious Eats] is a cheat version, all in one pan. It preserves the soul of the dish but saves you three hours minimum.”

Le Jardin’s contemporary take is made with cherries and sour cream for a "modern twist” that builds on a traditional foundation that every Moroccan knows as intimately well as their alphabet. “You take something so traditional and iconic and add something only to make it better. It’s a reflection of modern Moroccan chefs trying something new but not making it too crazy.”

Markets

Jamaa el-Fna

The closest thing Marrakesh has to a central square is Jamaa el-Fna, a millennium-old public space in the city’s medina, or old town, which is ringed by those 11 miles of pinkish-orange walls that give the city its moniker, “the Red City.”

Just as in the past 10 or so centuries, Jamaa el-Fna is still where people congregate to sell, buy, eat, drink, and celebrate. Looming over it is the 253-foot minaret of the 12th-century Kutubiyyah Mosque, which seems to look on as the square fills every day with musicians and dancers, buskers with performing monkeys on chains, snake charmers with hissing, swaying cobras, and other sights and offerings from all over North Africa and the Mediterranean.

But it’s at night when most of the food hawkers set up their stalls, filling the entire square with the smells of turmeric, cumin, and fried onions and garlic.

This is a good place to get a steaming bowl of harira, the thick, bright reddish-orange vegetable-and-legume soup that Moroccans traditionally break their Ramadan fasts with every day, along with a date. 

“My memory of harira is from when I started fasting at 12 or 13,” Benkabbou says. “Ramadan was always a special time because that’s when everyone would gather every night to break the fast no matter how busy my brothers or parents were, like a family reunion every night for a month. Everyone was just so happy to be eating that nobody was arguing!” 

For a large, hungry family, harira was the perfect solution to a day without meals, offering a hearty dish that filled their home with the fragrance of stewing tomatoes, turmeric, and cinnamon—all essential ingredients in Benkabbou's harira recipe.

Harira is a versatile dish that can be made myriad ways, and Benkabbou’s is just one version among many. When you’re not making your own, you can find good representatives of harira at the food stalls in Jamaa el-Fna. They start setting up in the early evening, around 6 p.m., and stay until they sell out. Benkabbou says she liked stall No. 35 on her last visit, but what’s there changes constantly, and you’re better off finding your own new favorite.

“I recommend people be adventurous and try out different stalls—you can always ask for a small taste before you decide to buy, and they will say yes because it’s part of our culture not to say no to people when they ask for food,” she says.

Jamaa el-Fna is also an excellent place to get sfenj, fried rings of dough that resemble roughly textured doughnuts but without the intrinsic sweetness. “They are light, chewy, and crispy on the outside,” Benkabbou says. Made from a simple yeast dough, they’re fried until golden and typically enjoyed warm, either plain or dipped in honey or jam, or sprinkled with sugar.”

Moroccans commonly eat sfenj for breakfast or a late-morning snack, usually along with mint tea, though vendors also sell them in the afternoons on weekends. When you buy sfenj, it’s customary to buy five or six at a time. The merchant loops them together on a length of twine, and ties the twine into a loop, which you hook your finger into and carry home to share with your family.

Mellah Market

Souk el Kheir

Salads play an essential role in many Moroccan meals, even if they’re often side dishes rather than the main attraction and generate less buzz from tourists than, say, a show-stopping tagine in a conical clay pot. 

One Moroccan salad Benkabbou likes to make at home is a joyful and complex ode to spring, built around the fresh spring peas that pop up at Marrakesh’s souks after the chill of winter fades away. She contrasts the pop of freshness from the just-warmed spring green peas and with the briny, sour power of olives and preserved lemons.

“It’s very common to use seasonal vegetables to make our mint salads, and peas are something we have in spring that we cook in the m’qualli way,” she says. “For me, it’s something very Moroccan and homey with the olives and the preserved lemon, a savory salad that’s a great side dish.” 

Radiating out from Jamaa El-Fna are the city’s historic souks, the honeycomb of open-air marketplaces that have fed and clothed the people of Marrakesh for centuries. Among these souks is the Marché du Mellah, or Mellah Market, which Benkabbou counts among the best places to buy fresh fruits and vegetables—including the key ingredients for her pea, olive, and preserved lemon salad. You might want to take home souvenirs or Marrakchi spice mixes, jars of preserved lemon, or essential Moroccan clay cookware, like a charmingly decorated tagine.

“This bustling market is a feast for the senses, with vibrant colors, fragrant spices, and the chatter of vendors calling out their daily specials,” she says. “Stalls overflow with seasonal produce, sun-ripened fruits, and briny olives, while the air is filled with the aroma of fresh herbs. It's lively, chaotic, and offers an immersive glimpse into the daily rhythms of Moroccan life.”

Making the Most of Marrakech

Considered by many to be the most beautiful city in Morocco, Marrakesh is an enticing destination for its stunning architecture, the vibrant melange of cultural influences on display, and tradition of hospitality. But this jewel of North Africa should also be on the bucket list of any world-trotting food lover. You’re sure to find your own culinary oasis here, whether it’s under the lid of a tagine or among the vegetable hawkers of a souk.

In Puerto Rico, every meal seems to be infused with joy—and that’s despite its many trials and tribulations, from natural disasters and population decline to financial crises and a fraught relationship with the rest of the United States.

The food we think of as Puerto Rican today is a mix of culinary influences, including Taino, Spanish Crillo, and African, reflecting the tastes and needs of the various waves of inhabitants of the island. Since the mid-19th century, when the island’s first restaurant opened there, San Juan has been the capital not just of Puerto Rico as a political entity but as a food culture. Today, of course, as a territory of the United States, much of the island’s culture in general can be seen as part of an extended dialogue between Puerto Rico and the rest of the U.S., with the large Puerto Rican diaspora to places like New York City and Philadelphia serving as two-way conduits.

And who better to guide us through San Juan’s food scene than those who are both celebrated food professionals and borinqueños. For our second round of Global Eats—a food lover's guide to the culinary capitals of the world—we talked to Serious Eats contributor and cookbook author Reina Gascón-López and chef and food entrepreneur Manolo López, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico and now lives in New York City, about what makes Puerto Rican food so special, what to eat if you’re not already familiar with the cuisine, and where in and near San Juan to get the best representations of those dishes. (You'll find the first Global Eats series here.)

There’s Something About Sofrito

Before you can even begin to talk about Puerto Rican foods, you have to talk about sofrito, the aromatic mixture that typically contains finely diced and pounded onions, green and red peppers, garlic, cilantro, ají dulce peppers, cilantro, culantro, and tomatoes that forms the base of almost every core Puerto Rican dish.

“Oh my gosh, it just reminds me of home, it reminds me of the caldera, of my grandmothers,” Gascón-López says. “It reminds me of their mortars and pestles—my most cherished possession is one that belonged to my grandmother and great-grandmother and still smells of garlic in the wood. There’s no better smell than sofrito hitting hot oil in a pan. The minute you smell it, you know it’s like, ‘Oh man, dinner’s going to be good.’”

The secret to a good Puerto Rican sofrito? Not that secret, it turns out. “I like putting a lot of garlic in my sofrito,” she says. “Any sofrito is supposed to taste fresh, herbaceous, and super strong with lots of garlic, lots of pepper,” Gascón-López says. “It adds a lot of body to the dish and adds another pop of flavor.”

As you make your tasting tour of San Juan and the island, be sure to try to get a feel for how sofrito can vary from place to place and what it adds to every dish. As for where to try these dishes, we’ve got you covered in the next section.

Where to Eat in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Manzana de Java

105 Cll Pomarrosa, San Juan

No website

Ask a Puerto Rican expat the food they miss most, and odds are good they’ll say mofongo. "Mofongo’s the first thing I seek out when I go back to Puerto Rico," Gascón-López says. "My dad’ll pick me up from the airport, bags in the car, and we’ll get some mofongo to eat. Texturally, it’s like mashed potato, and it should be a little creamy but a little firm to hold its shape—if the mofongo’s falling apart, it’s too dry. If it’s wet, it’s too mushy.”

López is a fan of the mofongo at Manzana de Java, a former ramen place in a residential neighborhood that the owners converted into a small (roughly 16-seat) Puerto Rican eatery that’s “very sleek and very to the point,” he says. It's filled with Puerto Rican-born millennials looking for new takes on traditional dishes. 

Not only are the plantains prepared perfectly, but the mofongo comes with a beautiful pork broth. “You can’t miss the pork cracklings and the seasonings, and you get the adobo spice and cumin and salt and pepper, and the raw garlic—those are the scents you’re getting as you eat this.”

Of course, if you can’t make it to Manzana de Java this trip, you can always try cooking at home with Gascón-López's own recipe for mofongo.

Playa Aviones

PR-187, Carolina, 00772

Though Gascón-López’s favorite mofongo place has closed down, she recommends hitting up any of the street-side food stalls, or kioskos, along Playa Aviones on the way from San Juan to Loiza, the beach town about 30 minutes east of San Juan. There’s a single road between San Juan and Loiza, and it’s lined with these modest shacks, many of which sell excellent mofongo, platters of rice, and other treats—though they rarely accept anything but cash. 

This is also a good place to get bacalaitos, salt cod fritters, palm-size bites that are crispy and golden-brown, sometimes flecked with little green bits of cilantro, pillowy soft on the inside, and fishy and salty and spicy enough to stave away any hint of blandness.

“They have these huge vats of oil and then pour in the batter similar to how you’d make a funnel cake, and then they use a kebab or big metal skewer and stab them out of the oil and let them drain,” she says. “You see the rows of fritters just sitting under the heat lamps, and then somebody next door is feeding chickens, and someone else at another kiosko is cutting coconuts as you sit in your little shack across the street from the beach eating your bacalaitos.”

La Alcapurria Quemá

251 C. Duffaut

Everyone in Puerto Rico seems to be, quite understandably, wild about tostones. Everyone also seems to have a favorite place to get them—Gascón-López, for example, swears by the tostones at almost any Chinese takeout joint.

“I’m not even kidding—I don’t know what they do to them, but they’re very thin and crispy and still kind of fluffy in the middle from the plantain,” she says. “And then they smash them in this ajo sauce, which is phenomenal”—and in line with her own recipe for tostones, which was “the way my mom made them: really garlicky.”

For a less-garlicky, arguably more traditional Puerto Rican tostone, you could also try them at La Alcapurria Quemá, a nondescript, no-A/C, cafeteria-like place in the lively neighborhood of La Placita de Santurce, where you take your food to sidewalk tables as old-school salsa music blasts from the speakers and pigeons try to sneak crumbs of your delicious fresh tostones off your plate. It’s a favorite of López’s.

“Oh my God, it’s a crispy, gold coin of perfection, with crispy edges and a crunchy bite to it but still soft in the middle, and always hot,” López says.

El Rancho Original

km 27.5, Carr. 184, Cayey

El Rancho Original is a lechonera, or roast pork restaurant, on Puerto Rico's "Pork Highway" in Guavate, in the mountains about an hour south of San Juan. It’s a popular place for San Juan families to go for special occasions and easy, cooler-weather day trips—and barbecued pork from the lechoneras that line the road up the mountain. 

Gascón-López’s family counts El Rancho Original among its favorites, despite its utilitarian aesthetics. You queue up at counters to order your food and then take them in Styrofoam clamshells back to aluminum benches. You do, however, get to set up shop next to a waterfall and a bridge over a babbling stream. Here, innumerable rows of pigs and chickens spin slowly on spits over licking flames and dripping pans. It’s the place to get tender, garlicky lechon and pernil (“with super crispy, paper-thin skin”), little cups filled with sides of yucca, boiled green bananas, morcilla (blood sausage), menudo (tripe soup), arroz con gandules (rice with pigeon peas), and enough cold beers for the group, and then hang out all afternoon. 

“It’s literally on this hill with a waterfall, and it’s the most picturesque thing you can ever see, just sitting there eating a ton of pork in the jungle,” she says.

Pollos Scharneco

1050 Av. Juan Ponce de León

Like in many countries around the world, whole roast chicken is popular all over Puerto Rico, cooked over open flames on roadside shacks or served with more fanfare and actual tables and seats at higher-end restaurants. López likes his from a place somewhere in the middle, Pollos Scharneco, a newish corner restaurant in San Juan that clearly has ambitions of a franchise, with red cartoon roosters stenciled onto stark, clinically white walls, a walk-up fast-food-style counter and menu board, and fast-food style counter seating and stools that perfectly match the brand’s bright red-white-yellow palette. Even the food is delivered on bright red plastic trays that could have come from a McDonald’s circa 1980.

It’s also a good place for arroz con gandules, López says, which is the perfect dish for a well-rested, luscious roast chicken. The rice, loaded with little popping pigeon peas, lends a sofrito-driven richness and complexity that complements the juicy chicken.

Having grown up on the island, López still associates the side dish with his childhood. “My grandma used to have a pigeon pea tree in the back of her house, and back in the day you would go back there, fill up one bucket with the pods, and then your family would sit in the house and pop the peas out and throw the pods into another bucket, then wash the peas and cook them,” he says. “I remember the first time I saw pigeon peas in a can, I was like, ‘Why would you do that? You’re supposed to go get those in the backyard.’”

Celeste

100 C. Pelayo, San Juan

Ceviche is a popular dish in Puerto Rico, though Puerto Rican ceviche doesn’t get as much attention outside of the island as mofongo or tostones. At Celeste, the owners, two brothers, take each day’s catch and work wonders with it in a small, reservations-a-must space in an old San Juan building with tall, arched windows and a simple but elegant aesthetic of white plates on white tablecloth that lets the seafood itself take the spotlight.

“They nail the leche de tigre [the mixture of lime juice, onion, chiles, and other ingredients used to cure ceviche], using fresh coconut milk, sometimes passion fruit dressing on top or ají amarillo, or Valencia oranges when they’re in season,” López says.

Cocina Al Fondo

658 C. San Juan

James Beard-winning chef Natalia Vallejo opened Cocina Al Fondo in the Santurce barrio of the city. López likes her selection of fricasés, or stews, though the exact type can vary by what’s in season or at the market—López is fond of the goat.

“You’re talking about this really hearty stew, which at the base is the sofrito, and then she layers on the other vegetables and flavors,” he says. “By the time it gets to your table, the meat has still got a bite, along with your carrots, your potatoes—it’s really a comfort food for us.”

Vallejo designed her restaurant to look like an old-style Puerto Rican mansion filled with plants and understated artwork that are muted compared to the colors of the foods on her plates.

“You feel like you’re in an old casona, an old palace, with high ceilings, rustic wood, and nothing modern about it,” López says. “The seats are low, the plates are vintage ones she sourced in Puerto Rico, and when you’re sitting at the outdoor tables, you’re sitting on vintage seats on gravel.”

Santaella

219 C. Canals, San Juan

Seafood is a serious passion on the island, and beautiful, upscale Santaella is the place to get dishes like whole fried snapper with a side of tostones with mojo sauce or a starter of alcapurrias, a fritter of mashed taro and green bananas stuffed with meat or seafood. 

“They understand balance in food so well and have access to the freshest foods that come into the market at La Placita,” López says. “If it’s mango season, then you’ll eat diced mango and cilantro and a little oil and have that brightness throughout your dish.”

Bodega Esquina Gastronómica

Esquina Baldorioty, 6 C. Celís Aguilera, Caguas

About half an hour’s drive south of San Juan, in the seemingly untouched old town center of the sleepy town of Caguas, is Bodega Esquina Gastronómica. There, the chef-owners have earned a reputation for excellent locavore Puerto Rican food that's drawing in food lovers from all over the island. It’s much needed patronage in a town that, in recent years, has been battered by hurricanes and earthquakes and is still, much like the rest of Puerto Rico, slowly recovering.

“The crazy thing is that you step out of the restaurant and you’re in Old Puerto Rico—you have one of the old bakeries from the 1930s next to the restaurant, and then next to that, they sell birdseed,” López says. “And yet they’re bringing in clientele from San Juan and other parts of the island, building back their community and their town.”

The pink-and-white, sweet-16-cake exterior belies the sleek, modern scene inside, with softly yellow–backlit cocktail bar and shelves of liquors, executive boardroom-style upholstered seats, tables of dark wood, simple but elegant tableware and a hip, young, enthusiastic clientele clearly keyed into the cutting-edge food scene of the island. 

López especially likes it when they have octopus on the menu, as he finds the notoriously tricky seafood is done extremely well at Bodega. It’s braised and seasoned with smoked paprika and paired with confit potatoes.

“You cut into the octopus and it has a little bit of resistance, but when you bite into it, it’s super soft, just masterfully done,” he says.

Via Lactea

1353 Av. Juan Ponce de León

Finally, you could finish off the day with “desserts that are just out of this world” at the nondairy ice cream shop Via Lactea, López says.

“One fruit ice cream they’ve got is soursop, a great, green globe with pointy things coming out of it that’s one of the best fruits in the world,” he says. 

Using a base of coconut milk, the soursop ice cream, which smells like pineapple but tastes like a heavenly combination of strawberry, apple, and citrus, is “one of the most intense you can eat.” 

Paired with a black cone made from activated charcoal, the contrasting white soursop ice cream makes for “great optics” and memorable Insta pics.

¡Buen Provecho!

“Buen provecho!” is something you say to dining companions at the start of a meal—or even to a stranger you've made eye contact with on your way out of a restaurant. More than a simple “enjoy your meal,” it’s a signifier of community and manners and acknowledges the connection you and that person share as human beings and as two people both reveling in the bounty that is the island’s food scene.

“It’s a very local thing to do, but locals enjoy it when visitors to Puerto Rico say that to them,” Gascón-López says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, I’m in your space but being cool about it.’”

“It’s cool to partake in that,” López agrees.

So go visit Puerto Rico and enjoy its rich, diverse food culture—and buen provecho!

Founded by conquistadors as a base from which to extend European rule but now one of the brightest hubs of proud South American culture, Santiago is a venerable city that has reinvented itself several times over. Nestled among beautiful but inhospitable mountains, it's a bustling urban oasis that has absorbed wave upon wave of immigrants from all over the world to create one of the most eclectic food scenes in the world.

A city of parks and libraries, Santiago is an easy place to get lost, whether wandering through colorful vegetable markets, past briny-smelling fish stalls, or alongside graffiti-covered walls of modern apartment buildings with first-floor cafés that spill out onto awning-shaded sidewalks. Bulbous colonial towers and sky-high palms loom over plazas packed with impromptu markets, the vendors laying out their wares of secondhand clothes and tin cookware on brightly colored blankets. And everywhere you go, people are happily munching on New York-inspired hot dogs or hearty empanadas, or lugging home boxes of freshly shucked oysters on beds of ice for a weekend family get-together.

So when it came for the second round of Serious Eats’ Global Eats—a series of insider guides to the food capitals of the world—Chile’s capital city was a no-brainer. And who better to guide us in our exploration of Santago’s streets and eats than Santiago’s own Isidora Díaz, a Serious Eats contributor and recipe developer, cookbook author, and the director of the Chilean food and wine magazine Revista Fondo. (You'll find the first Global Eats series here.) 

The Skinny on Chile

Santiago can’t escape the geography of the country it officially leads. Chile is long and skinny, running nearly 2,700 from north to south along the Pacific coast of South America—almost the width of the continental U.S. or the distance from Denmark to Italy—yet averaging only 110 miles in width. It's hemmed in by the Andes to the east, the bone-dry and often exceedingly hot Atacama desert to the north, and a subpolar region in the south that sets Chile closer than any other nation to Antarctica.

“Chile, geographically, is very unique and very long, and usually people look at Chile on the map and don’t realize how truly long it is,” Díaz says. “The result of that is our food variety, which is why we have many different things to eat in many different places in Chile. So what you would eat in the north is very different from the things in the south.”

The capital city of Santiago, which sits midway from north to south, is where everything in the country flows to, at least food-wise, making for a “very rich and very vibrant food culture.”

That, of course, is layered on top of the fact that what is now Chile had diverse food cultures long before colonization—from the agriculture of the Incas in the north to the foraging traditions of the Mapuche farther south. After the arrival of the conquistadors, waves of immigrants from Spain, England, France, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Palestine, China, Korea, and Japan brought elements of their own culinary traditions to the country.

“If you go to Santiago to have tea, you get kuchen and strudel along with it,” Díaz says. “It’s common to find dolma and Middle Eastern sweets because we have one of the biggest Palestinian communities in the world. Lately, we have a lot of Peruvian immigrants, so Santiago is full of Nikkei restaurants that use Chilean seafood and fish to make Peruvian-Japanese dishes.”

A Food Day in the Life of a Santiago Local

In Santiago, a typical food day might start in the morning with a modest breakfast of bread, avocado, and coffee or tea. Lunch, the big meal of the day, is commonly a hearty stew of some sort, like a charquicán of beef, winter squash, corn, peas, diced carrots, and onions seasoned with paprika, cumin, and black pepper, then thickened with chunks of red potatoes until it’s the consistency of mashed potatoes. That usually comes with more bread with a little butter or hot sauce on the side. A less formal work lunch might be Chilean completos—two Chilean hot dogs smothered with fixings.

Following lunch is "once" (pronounced “ON-say,” as in the Spanish word for “eleven,” the original time to take it), related to the elevenses of various countries or English afternoon tea but now often taken between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Bread once again features here, along with a piece of ham, cheese, or avocado alongside cake, cookies, kuchen, or strudel. For many families, once takes the place of dinner.

When Santiaguinos have dinner, they have it late, usually between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. “Americans coming here planning on making reservations for dinner at 6 p.m. need to know that’s not going to happen here,” Díaz says. “The earliest they’ll do to cater to tourists will be 7, 7:30, but then it’ll be no one else in the restaurant but you and other Americans, probably.” Dinner is lighter than lunch but heavier than breakfast or once. It might consist of a seafood or meat dish, soup, and, of course, bread, possibly followed by sweets.

Bread, as you’ve probably gathered, is a big part of Chilean cuisine, and is heavily influenced by the French. Two of the more popular types are pan francés, which is like a soft, small baguette, and hallulla, something like a small, dense brioche.

Another common misconception Americans have about Chilean food is that it’s spicy. “Chilean food is not spicy at all,” Díaz says. “Though you usually have a hot sauce or diced hot peppers on the side and can add that to your food.”

Restaurants

Fuente Antigua

Av. Alameda Libertador Bernardo O'Higgins 58, 8331084 Santiago, Región Metropolitana

Hot dogs have been a passion in Santiago since the 1920s, when an enterprising Santiago chef came back from a trip to New York City and opened Chile’s first hot dog restaurant in Santiago’s main square called Quick Lunch Bahamondes. Díaz’s lifelong exemplar for classic Chilean completos comes from Fuenta Antigua, a restaurant that almost resembles a vaguely Bavarian-themed diner, with a wraparound wooden counter lined with barstools.

“I was going to Fuente Antigua in downtown Santiago with my dad a lot—there’s a classical concert musical venue nearby, and we’d go there after,” she says. “There’s a superweird German vibe, and the ladies are dressed in uniforms that almost seem clinical, with everything clean and stainless steel, almost like a cafeteria.”

The tradition at this decades-old institution is that all the cooks behind the counter are women, and they're stationed at huge griddles with all their ingredients lined up nearby and ready to go. You get in line behind the local workers and regulars and an increasing number of tourists who’ve been clued into the place, go up to the counter, order your food, and they griddle the meat in front of you, then load your sandwich or hot dog with heaps of typical Chilean toppings, such as avocado, sauerkraut, and mayonnaise.

“It’s in and out: You go, ask for your sandwich and a beer, and then quickly eat. It doesn’t even have tables—you can sit or stand at the counters against the cooking area or the walls,” Díaz says.

Though Chilean hot dogs were inspired by New York dogs, they have grown to enormous proportions compared to, say, a relatively anemic Nathan’s at the Coney Island boardwalk. First of all, the bread is sturdier and chewier than the easily soggified rolls Americans are used to. And the actual wiener has, in many ways, become besides the point.

“The sausage is not the most important thing in Chilean hot dogs,” Díaz says. “We love toppings and lots of them. The classic would have sauerkraut, tomatoes, mayonnaise, and sometimes what we call salsa Americana, which is ground-up pickles that are vinegary, not sweet like American relish. Other favorite toppings are mashed avocados—like one avocado per hot dog—and then mayonnaise, mustard, and hot sauce.

Fuenta Antigua’s matter-of-fact but over-the-top completos—”a truly Chilean experience”— are what Díaz had in mind when she developed her own completos recipe for Serious Eats. Her recipe includes instructions for making the sturdy, hoagie-like buns from scratch since a typical American hot dog bun can't hold up to the heft and moisture of a truly thick pasting of mayonnaise along with avocado mash, sauerkraut, and tomatoes.

La Flaca

Av. Apoquindo 2730, las Condes

Charquicán is deeply tied to Chilean culinary identity and holds a special place in Díaz’s family memories.

“My grandma, when she was still alive, would invite us every Wednesday to have lunch, and one of her preparations was charquicán, a winter dish you can also eat in summer with tomatoes, when it’s called tomatican,” she says. “It’s a very homey dish, and everyone grew up eating this at least once a week in Chile because we have potatoes all along the country and the rest is adjustable to what you have on hand.”

A good charquicán is one that showcases the quality of its individual ingredients, all working together to create a new whole. Díaz likes the way the dish is prepared at La Flaca, a relatively new, higher-end place that packs loads of enthusiastic fans into tablecloth-covered tables in a brightly lit dining room set within a Santiago food court. 

The secret to the best versions of the dish, whether from a restaurant or homemade, like Díaz's own charquicán recipe, is the sofrito, the aromatic vegetable base that’s the foundation of many dishes across the Latin world. “A good sofrito is the soul of charquicán,” she says. Hers includes onions, bell peppers, carrots, ají de color or sweet paprika, cumin, and oregano. 

Besides the sofrito, this thick stew also needs the right potatoes, which shouldn’t be surprising considering the root vegetable originated in the Andean mountains. “A good charquicán shows all the flavors of the potatoes and veggies and sofrito, all well-integrated,” she says. “You have a bite and it tastes like charquicán and not like potatoes that you’ve added the seasoning and beans to later. Because everything has different cooking times, you have to layer the ingredients into the pot so that everything has cooked just enough for you to mash them, with the beans still a little al dente so you get those colors.”

Ostras Chiloé

Del Monje 10530, 7700336 Lo Barnechea, Región Metropolitana

Ostras Bilbao

Avenida Francisco Bilbao 2946, Av. Las Condes 7164, 7500000 Santiago, Región Metropolitana

Seafood is a big part of eating in Chile, and for special occasions or weekly family get-togethers, it’s common to order raw oysters from places like Ostras Bilbao or Ostras Chiloé, seafood stores where the staff members shuck the shellfish for you, put them in a big box, and then either deliver them to your home or pack it up for you to take out. “This is a very common thing in Chile, just ordering oysters on a weekend or for a celebration or a party—like for my birthday, when I order 200 oysters,” Díaz says. 

You call the seafood store the day before, putting in an order for at least 50, and then pay in cash when you pick them up or they’re delivered. The bigger Chilean oysters are called ostras japonesas, which are less delicious. The small oysters, victoria, are the ones you want, especially if they’re from Chiloé Island to the south. 

“The oysters in Chile are super briny and tasty, and we eat a lot of them,” she says. “You serve them with lemons and a nice sauvignon blanc, and it’s an experience people can do when they rent an Airbnb or stay at a hotel”—just bring the oysters back to wherever you're staying and go to town.

La Calma by Fredes

Av. Nueva Costanera 3832, local 2, 7630357 Vitacura, Región Metropolitana

For a fancier Chilean seafood experience that you don't take home with you, Díaz recommends La Calma, which is renowned for its generous seafood platter of oysters, sea urchins, scallops, clams, razor clams, sea snails, sea squirts, and sashimi. The star here is the sea urchin, especially the ones from the north, according to Díaz.

“This has a relatively small tongue, very creamy with a bit of resistance, but a flavor that’s super intense,” she says. “It has a lot of iodine, and you don’t have to eat a lot of it to feel it—it’s more intense and tasty than a lot of other uni.” The sea urchin is served raw and straight from the shell, and Chileans often mix it with a salsa of diced white onions, cilantro, lemon juice, and hot sauce, mixing it with the flesh and eating it with bread.

La Calma is a modern, white-tablecloth place with nearly floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the street all the way around the front and side—this is the place to go to impress a potential business partner or future spouse (or their parents).

Los Ciervos

Av. Tobalaba 2113, 7500000 Providencia, Región Metropolitana

In Chile, empanadas—those half-moons of chewy dough filled with a juicy, stew-like filling of diced beef or other ingredients—can serve as a big once or a whole lunch. The best beef empanadas, of course, are the ones your mother or grandmother makes at home, but Díaz says that the ones at Los Ciervos are pretty much as close as you can get to homemade. 

“The filling contains paprika, cumin, and black pepper and is a good balance of the three seasonings with a light hand on the cumin,” she says. “The dough is fatty like the ones that my mother and grandmother made.” That dough, in fact, is close to the one Díaz recreates in her recipe for pequenes, a vegetarian version of empanadas based around an onion instead of a beef filling.

Los Ciervos is a venerable takeaway place, like an American deli with bakery ovens in it, and it’s the kind of spot where you can do your shopping for cold cuts, pickles, fresh bread, or even oysters, ordering empanadas to eat on a bench at the park nearby. Its clientele is a combination of older locals who’ve been coming regularly for decades and young, food-loving hipsters.

“The filling in their empanadas is juicy, fresh, and very close to homemade,” she says. “It’s very homey, with a dough that’s thick enough to hold the juicy filling but still thin enough to be crunchy on the sides when it’s baked—it’s an art.”

Chillin' in Chile

Santiago has the kind of eclectic food culture that you could spend days sinking into, and whether you end up prioritizing mayo-topped completos, oysters and sea urchins, a hearty charquicán mash, or empanadas like grandma made, you ought to find plenty to tickle your palate and fill your belly in Chile’s central city.

When it comes to the food of Jamaica, too many of the two million or so Americans who visit the Caribbean island every year think no further than the buffets and hotel restaurants they frequent between sunbathing sessions on the beach at their gated, all-inclusive resorts.

But they’re missing out on a whole country’s worth of delectable cuisine, the ever-evolving product of a vibrant food culture that’s a mélange of the island’s African, British, Spanish, and Taino inhabitants, spiced up with contributions from Portuguese Jews, French Huguenots, Syrians, Lebanese, Germans, Scots, and Irish immigrants—all built upon Jamaica’s agricultural bounty and access to both reef- and deep-sea fishing.

It’s also a deeply family- and home-based food culture, and visitors from the U.S.—where dining out is the norm—can be taken aback by the lack of sit-down restaurants outside the resorts, even though incredible food is everywhere.

“The one thing that visitors to Jamaica need to understand is Jamaica does not have a restaurant culture focused on places with seating and menus and websites,” says Michelle Rousseau, a Jamaican cookbook author. Instead, she says, the authentic Jamaican food scene, especially outside resort areas catering to tourists, is one that’s spread out in family kitchens and dining rooms, in street-food stalls, and in the everyday interactions of Jamaicans going about their day-to-day lives.

White tablecloths or not, Jamaica and its capital have become exciting centers of the culinary world, especially within the Caribbean, with laid-back island families “liming” in beachside shacks over cold lagers and freshly caught, freshly fried snapper fragrant with Scotch bonnet peppers and thyme; older men laughing it up late at night over white rums and stamp and go fritters at patio tables in the city; beloved street vendors who’ve been selling spicy pan chicken out of oil-drum grills for decades; and simmering pots of red bean stews in the home kitchens of Kingstonian families as they welcome neighbors in for a little gossip and a traditional Saturday soup.

For our second round of Global Eats—a food lover's guide to the culinary capitals of the world—our guides to the Kingstonian (and Jamaican) food scene are local acclaimed cookbook authors, caterers, and food TV personalities, Michelle and her sister Suzanne. (You'll find the first Global Eats series here.)

A Day in Food in Kingston

For Jamaicans, food is a simple, practical, and fuss-free affair. Breakfast still reflects the island's history of slavery, when morning meals were meant to be easy and caloric enough for a long day out in the fields. Today, that often means a porridge made at home or picked up at a porridge shop or from a street vendor on the way to work; a bowl of ackee and saltfish; or some sort of fritter with a bammy (cassava bread) or something similar. Breakfast usually comes with “tea,” which isn’t necessarily the hot beverage made with tea leaves, but can also include coffee, hot chocolate, or malted-powder drinks like Horlicks or Milo.

Either lunch or dinner can be the big meal of the day, and can be taken away from a cookshop—a blanket term for an informal order-and-go establishment—or made at home. It might be a hearty chicken- or pork-based soup, pan chicken, fried escovitch fish, goat curry, or other meals with sides such as yams, spinach dumplings, or plantains, along with bammy or hardo bread, a dense, moist bread made with lard. Traditionally, the island was a heavily pork-based food culture, not uncommon among Caribbean islands, but the 20th and 21st centuries have seen the rise in popularity of different proteins.

“It’s evolved to become a more chicken-focused culture,” Michelle says. “And in the 1930s and 1950s you started seeing more fresh fish, more fresh eggs. The diet of today is different from its original form, but the old ways are still beloved.”

In fact, Jamaicans have developed a longstanding fascination with the U.S.'s KFC, which they’ve come to regard as an almost local institution. “I think it’s better-cooked here,” Suzanne says. “More seasoned and tastier. There’s no time of day or night where you go into KFC and there isn’t a line of sometimes two hours.”

On weekends, it’s a big tradition to have “Saturday soup,” where you put on a big pot of soup and essentially have an open house where friends, family, and neighbors drop in and out all throughout the day to catch up, chat, and hang out. The soup might be a stew of red beans or gungo beans (pigeon peas), pumpkin soup, or a callaloo-based pepperpot style of meal, typically served with hardo bread.

Where to Eat

Juici Patties

Multiple locations

The king of comfort food in Jamaica is the beef patty, seasoned ground beef in an unmistakably yellow, flaky suet crust. “The filling isn’t dense or thick; it has to be perfectly liquidy, a little bit stew-y with enough viscosity,” Michelle says.

“There’s an element of Scotch bonnet and thyme and scallion in there, a classic flavor profile,” Suzanne adds.

“For me, it’s the crust, which should be crunchy and flaky, to the point that you’re dusting the flakes off your clothes,” Michelle says. “That’s got to be the marker: If you’re eating a patty and nothing is flaking off all over your clothes, it’s not a good crust. And, for my sister, it has to be burn-the-roof-of-your-mouth hot.”

“Piping hot!” Suzanne exclaims, laughing.

In Jamaica, beef patties make their way into every peckish moment of your life. “You’d get them for the breaks at school instead of pizza. You get mini ones as hors d’ouevres at cocktail parties. You get them when you need something quick to eat and don’t have time to make something for the kids,” Michelle says.

And, surprisingly, perhaps the best place to get a proper Jamaican beef patty, the sisters agree, is actually a fast-food chain called Juici Patties, where you walk into the clean, almost antiseptic, and brightly lit store, order at the counter, pick up your order, and take it away to munch on.

Though the patty is the star, there’s a key supporting character, a semicircular, once-folded sweet bread made with coconut and butter.

“A typical way to eat them is inside coco bread, a piping-hot patty in coco bread right out of its paper bag with any kind of ginger beer—it’s literally the best, the most iconic Jamaican food.”

“Brushing them with melted butter and folding them into quarters makes a sort of pocket that, when baked, is a perfect vessel for stuffing or making sandwiches,” the sisters write in their own coco bread recipe.

Northside Pan Chicken

11 Northside Dr., Kingston

No website

Though the world has inextricably tied Jamaican food culture to jerk, the Rousseaus say Jamaicans are far more likely to pick up pan chicken for a weeknight meal, typically sold by street-side vendors who use grills cut out of oil drums in every corner of the island.

“Typically, a pan chicken vendor comes out at about 7 or 8 p.m. and then works through the night,” Michelle says. “You go after a party, they grill the chicken and give it to you in foil with a slice of hardo bread and sauce and ketchup, which you sprinkle over the top. And you eat it straight out of the foil like that on the side of the road.”

For their pan chicken recipe for Serious Eats, the Rousseaus were inspired by the Northside Pan Chicken man, who’s set up shop in a shack across from the U.S. embassy for three decades. He presides over an always-smoking oil-drum grill blanketed with seasoned chicken parts gradually turning from pink to reddish-white, brown, and black, and a crude, unfinished counter made of plywood boards across which is scrawled in red paint, “North Side Pan Chicken.” His pan chicken comes out hot and spiced, but not as hot as jerk chicken—he brushes the chicken with a dressing of scallion, thyme, and ginger instead of soaking the meat in it, meaning that you get more juicy chicken flavor with pan chicken than with a typical jerk.

“Pan is far less intense, less smoky than jerk, and doesn’t have the pimento wood they use for jerk,” Suzanne says of the traditional smoking with allspice (pimento) wood that is a defining characteristic of true jerk.

PeppaThyme

152 Constant Spring Road
Kingston

Of course, if you’re just visiting Jamaica, you probably will want to have a jerk experience at least once. Though chicken is the popular meat for jerk in the U.S., in Jamaica, “real” jerk is jerk pork and has grown from something you'd likely get from small, independent roadside vendors dotted around the country to more built-up cookshops that have managed to stay true to traditional methods of jerk.

One of the Rousseaus’ favorite jerk places is PeppaThyme, near a golf course in Kingston. “It’s a cool, interesting place and is a proper, modern, built-out restaurant where you go up to the counter, order, and pick up and go out to sit under thatched huts to eat,” Michelle says.

A key differentiator between jerk and pan chicken is that jerk always has allspice berries (“pimento” to Jamaicans) in its marinade. It adds a rich panoply of spice flavors spanning cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and pepper, and packs an extra punch in addition to the fiery Scotch bonnets and fragrant thyme. Finally, jerk pros often burn pimento wood for the grill, adding that extra smokiness to the pork from the oils in the wood. And, as with many meats barbecued using a low-and-slow method, you will often see a smoke ring inside the pork.

“The pork should have some heat like they do [at PeppaThyme], with crusty edges with a lot of the flavorings on it,” Suzanne says. “I want it smoky, I don’t want any white pieces of pork that haven’t been seasoned long enough.”

Porridge Shoppe

114-116 Constant Spring Rd Shop 11 Oaklands Commercial Centre

Humble but filling, porridge is a staple of Jamaican breakfasts, the descendant of the African fufu made from cassava or green plantain that was pounded into a paste, and a common food among enslaved Africans on the island. Today, a Jamaican cornmeal porridge like the kind the Rousseaus grew up on is creamy, steaming hot, and always—always—stirred aggressively until it’s free of lumps, then drizzled with as much condensed milk as you need to make it as sweet as you like.

“Our grandmother made this every day of our life, and we typically had it every morning before school,” Suzanne says. “Today, you’re hard-pressed to find a bad porridge shop in Jamaica.”

The one the Rousseaus recommend is called, fittingly enough, Porridge Shoppe, on the second floor of a commercial center at the end of a dead-end street in a mostly residential neighborhood in the north of Kingston. It’s a small, clean, brightly lit place that doles out the kind of sweet cornmeal porridge that they still associate with the Jamaican mornings of their childhood.

Crystal Edge Restaurant

Main Rd Irish Town, Kingston

According to the Rousseaus, ackee is one of those dishes that everyone on the island agrees is a universally beloved Jamaican dish but that everyone also makes slightly differently. Flavored with saltfish and onion, bell peppers and Scotch bonnets, fresh thyme and a hint tomato, the result has something of the consistency of scrambled eggs with ackee’s mild, nutty flavor, but a lot more punch from everything else.

“I think of my maternal grandmother, Mawmaw: Whenever we would come home from school or university, she would make a big lunch for us, and ackee was always mixed in, whatever else she did,” Suzanne says. “Today, we still have it with my kids for the big Easter Sunday brunch.

One place to get good ackee and saltfish is by driving up (literally) to the hilltop village of Irish Town. There you will find Crystal Edge, a standalone restaurant up a steep highway that will actually pull out the white tablecloths for special events but also hosts less formal Sunday brunches within its red- and green-painted walls. When they have the windows open, you can even sometimes get warm breezes off the hills, carrying the scent of coffee growing nearby. It’s a bucolic, agricultural setting only about an hour from Kingston but seems like ages away from the city.

Triple Tz

Annette Cres, Kingston

A key Jamaican word to learn and understand is “liming,” which refers to the popular activity of hanging out and doing nothing while enjoying the companionship of friends and family. It’s a simple concept but almost an art form in Jamaica, where certain places are considered perfect liming locations to have a meal, then stay into the wee hours entertaining a constant flow of buddies and cousins over cold beers and hot, fresh appetizers like stamp and go (crispy, savory, battered saltfish fritters).

“My dad had a crew of old guys he would meet every Friday at Triple Tz in the middle of the business district, though it was not fancy and you could go in shorts or business attire,” Suzanne says. “You eat something and then stick around and drink rum, chatting in a leisurely way into the night.”

Stamp and go is a classic Jamaican snack, eaten at breakfast or with drinks, but it started out as a humble “peasant-like concoction of flour batter, fish, and seasoning,” Suzanne says. Now, it fills seemingly every food niche of the day.

“They’re something you could eat at breakfast, something you could serve as hors d’ouevres at a cocktail party, something to pick up at a cookshop on a busy work day. Even though it’s very humble in origin, it cuts across all these social experiences.”

Often served with tartar sauce or simply ketchup and hot sauce, stamp and go must be served fresh from a hot oil fryer to be appreciated properly. “It should be crispy and hot, salty and spicy,” Michelle says.

At places like Triple Tz, which has a large dining room of sturdy-looking, dark-wood tables and chairs and a jungle's worth of potted plants, the business luncheons during the weekdays may give way to groups of people liming over beers, rums, and old stories at night, but the stamp and go will always be a constant, the sisters say.

Aunt Merl Fish and Lobster Restaurant

Hellshire Beach, Jamaica

For generations, it’s been a tradition of Kingstonians to venture the 20 or 30 minutes southwest outside of the city to the little fishing village of Hellshire. It’s got a beach for locals, not tourists, but is now more popular for its food than for its badly eroded surf and sand.

“They’re open, rough-hewn shacks on the beach, lean-tos really, made out of flat pieces of plyboard and facing the water, all crowded up together, some painted with their own little signs. Your table is literally a piece of ply on two stilts,” Suzanne says. “The fish comes in fresh, and you pick your fish out of a cooler, and then they fry it for you on an open wood fire, and they bring out your food on melamine plastic trays like from the ‘60s, piping hot, with a big jar of pickled onions with vinegar and Scotch bonnets.”

“And there’s dancehall music blasting from the sound systems,” Michelle adds.

Every family in Kingston is loyal to their own Hellshire fish shack among the dozen or so there lining the beach, but the Rousseau’s choice is Aunt Merl’s, which sits partially over the water midway on the southern side of the point of Hellshire that juts into the Caribbean—you know you’re there when you spot the bright yellow facade and the oval sign with a picture of a dish and a lobster dancing happily with a bottle of Pepsi. It’s bigger than many of the other shacks, and the red-and-yellow picnic benches inside sit directly on the sand.

A classic meal to have at Aunt Merl’s might be the cassava bread bammy alongside escovitch fish fried directly in a big, rectangular pan propped up by cinderblocks over a hot wood fire. Though Hellshire fish typically don’t come battered, the Rousseaus went with an airy batter for their own escovitch fish recipe for Serious Eats. The escovitch is the briny sauce of cane vinegar, Scotch bonnet pepper, pimento, onion, chayote, and carrot that imparts the distinctive pickle-y flavor of the dish. Both at Hellshire’s fish shacks and in the Rousseau’s recipe, the fish is finished by adding “a tart and aromatic pickle poured over top.”

Finding the Treasures of Jamaica in Kingston

Once you’ve set aside your expectations of a U.S.-style, restaurant-based food culture, Jamaica offers a rich and diverse cuisine that could redefine your sense of what’s possible with food.

“A lot of the places that are the best in Jamaica aren’t going to look pretty or sophisticated or even be sit-down,” Michelle says. “Sometimes you’ll have to walk, and sometimes you’ll have to wait in a long line. Sometimes the service will be slow and not so good. But it’s part of the charm. Let yourself just chill and enjoy the ambience and the food and flavor without worrying about the tables being turned or the waiter explaining what the fried cod’s flavor profile is.”

"You’ll have delicious foods that are the treasures for us in Jamaica,” Suzanne finishes.

When travelers who love food think about taking trips to Southeast Asia, they inevitably look at destinations like Bangkok, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, and Bali. Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, is often overlooked—it's the place to go for a connecting flight, not a prolonged culinary tour.

But those people are missing out on a vibrant city—home to both skyscrapers that tickle the clouds and centuries-old neighborhoods, where the maze-like streets seem to hold the stories of countless families, told in dozens of languages over many generations. And the food! A glorious, dizzying table drawing from nearly every culture in Asia, then layered with influences from Europe, the Americas, and beyond.

“KL is like a middle child who went to study overseas,” says Serious Eats contributor Alia Ali. “There’s something kind of like wanting to prove herself, but she also doesn't realize she’s already cool. We’re surrounded by places that are more popular and touristy, like Thailand and Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. People are like, ‘Where is Malaysia?’”

Alia is a native Malaysian and chef who’s contributed more than a dozen recipes to Serious Eats, and she knows Kuala Lumpur inside and out. She is our guide to the “Muddy Confluence” (the city name’s literal meaning in Malay) for our second round of Global Eats, a food lover's guide to the culinary capitals of the world. (You'll find the first Global Eats series here.)

Malaysian Melange

Originally founded as a tin-mining camp in the mid-19th century, Kuala Lumpur has since grown rapidly into a major metropolis of nearly 100 square miles and more than 2 million people. When it comes to the KL food scene, it’s the people that have made all the difference, with a Malay majority buttressed by substantial enclaves of Chinese and Indian KLites. Over the past decades, it’s seen a huge influx of construction, manufacturing, and service workers from all of Southeastern Asia and South Asian countries, including Pakistan and Sri Lanka. That diversity is reflected in the food, which is not so much a melting pot as it is an all-you-can-eat buffet.

“Trying to pin down what Malaysian food is is really, really hard,” Alia says, adding that while in some places there's a focus on assimilation, in Malaysia, there's more of a focus on diversity. 

More recently, Kuala Lumpur has become home to a rapidly growing number of Westerner expats, who—along with global influences like social media—have turned the increasingly sophisticated Malaysian capital into the gateway between the rest of the country and the rest of the world, especially when it comes to food. “It’s absolutely the place where trends filter down from,” Alia says. "The whole Instagrammable café culture started in KL and went out from there. Everything trickles down from KL.”

When you’re in town, remember that Kuala Lumpurians see no problems eating whenever they want, no matter what the clock says, with only vaguely set times for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and no taboo against, say, deciding to eat a giant bowl of noodles at 3 p.m.—or 3 a.m.—just because you feel like it. “We love eating,” Alia says. “In Malaysia, eating is a sport.”

Restaurants

Village Park

5 Jalan Ss 21/37 Damansara Utama, Petaling Jaya 47400 Malaysia

In Kuala Lumpur, getting a bite to eat usually means street food. And that even applies to what’s considered Malaysia’s national dish, nasi lemak, a coconut rice that’s typically served with dried anchovies, fried peanuts, a boiled egg, and sambal. As with any prominent dish so closely associated with a national culture, ranking the best places to get nasi lemak is a subject of eternal and perpetually unresolved debate. (If you want to see Malaysians argue for an hour, ask them to recommend the single best roadside nasi lemak vendor.) But the answer is usually an older Malaysian “auntie” who sets up shop along a well-trafficked street with a nondescript cart loaded with aluminum trays and bowls of her ingredients.

You can tell who the popular, and generally best, aunties are by the number of cars and motorcycles parked on the side of the road as their drivers line up for their turn at her stall. The auntie will ladle a heaping serving of the fragrantly coconutty rice onto a banana leaf, wreath it with your desired toppings, and wrap it up for you to take back into your car. (Ask for “nasi lemak bungkus”—“bungkus” is Malay for “wrapped.”)

“Recommending a single nasi lemak place is like telling the world you have a favorite child,” Alia says. “I love to eat nasi lemak in suburbs like Ampang and Petaling Jaya, near the housing estates around 7, 7:30 in the mornings, where they have these aunties who set up stalls on the side of the road so you can pick up a couple packs of nasi lemak on the way to work. These aunties are home cooks, and their nasi lemaks are usually unparalleled.”

But the nasi lemak aunties pack up as soon as they’re sold out and don’t return until the next morning. So if you’re not into getting up at dawn and driving out to the suburbs on your vacation, Alia suggests going to Village Park, a restaurant in Petaling Jaya that’s part of what Malaysians call a shop lot, a multistory building with a commercial property on the ground floor, forming a kind of urban strip mall. 

“A very famous place for nasi lemak is Village Park, and a lot of people think they're wonderful,” Alia says. This will save you a trip to the suburbs, but you should still go in the morning: “There’ll be a line on weekends spilling over onto the sidewalk—you have to get there earlier or the chicken thighs will run out.”

Though the restaurant has a giant, wooden sign and bamboo roller blinds on the front, it’s a mostly utilitarian affair inside, with glass display counters where you point to what you want to eat, collect and pay for your food, and then push your way through the elbow-to-elbow crowd of Kuala Lumpurians waiting for their turns to order at the counter in search of a table to eat.

“I like my nasi lemak savory, as it’s the main flavor hit, and my favorite is to order a dish of paru goreng, or fried beef lung, to go with it, fried with spices like coriander and cumin," Alia says.

For her own nasi lemak recipe, though, Alia drew upon a combination of the dishes served both by roadside aunties and places like Village Park, along with memories of being her mother’s garlic- and onion-grinding sous chef in the kitchen.

“My mother would make nasi lemak sometimes on the weekends, but her sambal did not take as long—the sambal in this recipe takes several hours, and my mom’s version is fresher and more bright red than dark red. The sambal I developed for this recipe was more in line with the kind of sambals they sell at stalls and restaurants, cooked for a long time and bordering on smoky—the kind of sambal that people look for when they come to Malaysia.”

Mark's Asam Laksa

Wisma New Asia Lot 106 and 107, 57 Jalan Raja Chulan, Bukit Ceylon, Ampang

If nasi lemak’s all but the official national dish of Malaysia, noodle soups are the heir apparent, waiting in the wings and ready to take the top spot. And among the noodle soups, or laksas, of Malaysia, it’s asam laksa, or “sour noodles,” that is arguably the first among them. Though laksa traces back to the Peranakan Chinese, the first wave of Chinese settlers to Southeast Asia, asam laksa is today thoroughly identified with the tiny but populous city-state of Penang on the country’s northwest coast. 

“Asam” is the Malay word for both “tamarind” and “sour,” and asam is the defining—but by no means sole—characteristic of this complex, brothy meal that balances the fishy saltiness of mackerel or sardines with the peppery freshness of Vietnamese mint, and of course that mouth-puckering, molasses-y tamarind.

“I was very much homing in on a rounded sourness instead of sharp tang, and I wanted it to be as generous as possible with the fish while also as fragrant as possible,” Alia says of her take on asam laksa. “So it has lemongrass, galangal, Vietnamese mint, regular mint, and the fish to make [the dish] briny and a little spicy with that well-rounded sourness.”

Mark’s Asam Laksa, an unassuming restaurant that caters to office workers in the city center, has been the high water mark for Alia when it comes to eating the dish when out—so much so that she had them cater her engagement party.

“It’s not quite in a food court, but it’s popular with office workers for lunch, so if you get there at 1 o’clock, you’re not going to get a seat,” she says. “So when I go there, I have to show up at either 11 or 3 o’clock.”

What Mark’s Asam Laksa lacks in décor—think about the layout of your typical airport fast-casual place, with an L-shaped counter, a three-by-three grid of two-tops jammed together, and the meat- and rice-filled plastic containers arrayed in a ready-to-go fleet behind the glass—it makes up for with the cheek-crimping superbness of its asam laksa. Its thick, chewy noodles come in white plastic bowls, and are topped with a veritable forest of mint leaves, blooming with red chile slices, and emitting heady plumes of steam from the tamarindy-fishy broth.

Bangsar Fish Head Corner

No. 18, Medan Selera Lorong Ara Kiri 3 Lucky Garden Bangsar

For important occasions—or when they simply want to have a really good weekend brunch with the family—Malaysians like to go big with a fish head curry, a blend of South Indian and Malay food traditions that results in a rich, fragrant stew of whole fish heads swimming in an orangey broth dotted with bright-red blotches of spice-infused oils. 

“If you order fish head curry, it’s like, ‘Wow, are you celebrating something?’” Alia says. “If you’ve got that giant pot of fish head curry at your table, people will be looking at you enviously.”

Even though it’s a special-occasion kind of meal, fish head curry—which is typically something everyone at the table digs into from that big, communal pot—isn’t the one to wear your fanciest clothes for.

“It’s very much an eat-with-your-hands type of deal, and I wouldn’t recommend eating fish head curry with cutlery because then you’re not going to be able to get into all the nooks and crannies and suck on the cartilage to get every last bit of fish,” Alia says. 

An open-air restaurant that started as a modest stall in the 1980s, Bangsar Fish Head Corner is a KL culinary institution that has since grown into a sprawling collection of indoor and outdoor tables. It always seems to have a long line of people leading up to the counter that's covered with big, bubbling cauldrons of saffron-hued curry. As the name implies, fish head curry’s the specialty.

“If you were Sylvester the cat, you’d be floating in the air just smelling it,” Alia says. “It’s got a really good, strong, spicy flavor and smell, and they tend to use a very meaty fish for a complex spiciness that’s iconic when it comes to fish head curry.”

When Alia developed her own fish head curry, Bangsar was at top of mind, though she had to make concessions to the realities of the home kitchen.

“I would have loved to have made it that thick, but I have a feeling they do some kind of roux, and if you’re making a spice mix by yourself from scratch, it’s not super easy to get it right,” she says. “And I would say that the curry powder in my recipe is the minimum amount. I would easily double the curry powder if you want to make it as strong and complex as Bangsar.”

Pin Qian Klang Bak Kut Teh

Lot 10 Shopping Centre, Lot 10, Hutong Heritage Food Village, LG Floor, No. 50, Jalan Sultan Ismail, Wilayah Persekutuan

A Hokkien Chinese contribution to Malaysian cuisine, bak kut teh, or Malaysian pork bone soup, is a favorite late-night nosh for many KLites, a hearty meal redolent of a variety of Chinese herbs. 

“It’s super hearty and super rich because they tend to use cuts of pork from the belly or the rib, so you get the deep flavor from the bone and the fattiness from the belly, and all these Chinese spices that make you feel good and nourished eating it,” Alia says.

Alia and her then-collaborator developed their version of the recipe based on her collaborator's grandmother’s family recipe, which used spices like star anise, fennel seeds, cloves, and cassia bark along with Chinese medicinal herbs to bathe the pork cubes, which become mouth-meltingly soft while adding silkiness and richness from collagen to the dish.

“If you’re a Kuala Lumpur city person and you eat pork, there will absolutely be a time in your life when you’re out partying after midnight and you’ll say you want to go to Klang and get bak kut teh,” Alia says. “You’ll go to a place with the usual white, fluorescent lights, plastic tables, with the heavy smell of pork soup in the air and people speaking different dialects of Chinese around you. And these places are not air-conditioned, so on a hot, humid night, you’re sitting there sweating and eating a hot bowl of soup, and it’s great.”

Luckily, you don’t have to venture all the way to Klang, about an hour outside of KL, to enjoy bak kut teh. The Lot 10 Hutong food court right in the middle of the city—and not terribly far from the Petronas Twin Towers—specializes in Chinese food venues, most of them branches of famous citywide Chinese street food stalls but in a single convenient, central, and air-conditioned place. This is a great place to try out a little bit of the ethnic Chinese cuisine of Kuala Lumpur, ordering dishes from the various stalls and then taking them back on a red plastic tray to one of the small Formica tables in the communal seating areas throughout the space. Among the stalls here is Pin Qian Klang Bak Kut Teh, which, as the name states, focuses on Klang-style bak kut teh. It may be the easiest way to recreate the classic KLIte youth rite of passage of a late-night, post-clubbing food road trip—without the clubbing, late night, or road trip.

Nyonya Colors

Various locations

Central to learning about Malaysian desserts is the concept of kuih, sweet-and-savory finger snacks that must never require more than two bites each. Alia describes them as the “Venn diagram of tasty and iconic and approachable” in Malaysian cuisine.

“The daintiness is the point, because it reflects on the refinement of Nyonya culture,” Alia says, using the term for married Peranakan women.

Usually made with some kind of rice flour, kuih are an inescapable part of—of all things—office culture in the Malaysian government, and you can often find evening aunties (as opposed to the morning nasi lemak aunties) crowding the sidewalks near government buildings, selling a dazzling variety of the sweet treats for office workers to take back to the office or nibble on during their commutes home.

“Kuih is emblematic of government office meetings,” says Alia, who’s experienced her fair share of them. “If a government meeting is at 10 a.m., 100% they will have kuih, and they usually get legit aunties to cater for these things.”

Though there’s a wide variety of kuih to choose from, Alia’s kuih recipe for Serious Eats is for onde-onde, a sweet palm sugar dumpling in a soft coat of coconut shavings. The outer shell of pandan-scented rice dough embraces a gooey palm sugar center, so that when you bite through the coconut and not-too-thick, not-too-thin pandan-flavored rice dough, you’re hit with a juicy, caloric blast of palm sugar inside.

“Kuih is not easy to make, but onde-onde, compared to other kuih, is much more forgiving,” Alia says. “Even if you end up with a very thick skin and not much filling, it will still be very tasty, so even if you screw this up, it’ll still be good.”

For your own taste of onde-onde that isn’t merely “still good”—as well as a glimpse at the vast variety of other kuih out there—Alia recommends going to a branch of Nyonya Colors, a kuih chain with several modern, brightly lit, and vividly colored locations around Kuala Lumpur. They’re mostly inside malls, and some offer seating or more substantial meals, but they all prioritize offering a hearty variety of kuih.

“It’s very much like walking into a gelato shop with the bright colors where you go in, figure out what flavors you want to have, and get a little of this and a little of something else,” Alia says.

Tips on Eating Out in KL

As with any city you’re new to, there are unspoken rules about where and how to eat. Here are Alia’s suggestions for getting the most out of a food tour of her city.

• If you want to eat like a local, don’t go anywhere with tablecloths on their outdoor tables. “If you’re going to eat in the middle of the city, there’s this famous street filled with different restaurants called Jalan Alor," she says. "If a restaurant here has tablecloths on their outdoor tables, your food’s going to be marked up and catered for tourist palates. If you want to eat how we eat, look for places that don’t have tablecloths. I can guarantee you locals aren’t eating at the places with tablecloths.”

• Wear comfortable clothes you don’t mind getting dirty. “The best thing you could do is bring stretchy pants,” she says. “And I wouldn’t recommend you wear something you’re precious about—you’re going to spill something on yourself and there’s a lot of turmeric and chile and oil.”
• Mealtimes are a suggestion. “The only reason a lunchtime place is crowded is because of work lunch hours," she notes. "But people who are not confined to work lunch hours will absolutely eat at 11 or 3, and you can get food at any time of the day for almost any kind of craving.”

Low-Key KL

While everyone else you know takes that well-trodden foodie path to Bali or Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur’s still a relatively low-key food lovers' paradise that offers the diversity of Southeast Asia cuisine in a single, relatively easily traversed city. Foodwise, KL’s a city that doesn’t have to prove itself any longer.

I grew up in the sweltering heat of Thailand, where temperatures rarely drop below the “light sweater” mark. As a result, I developed something of an obsession with the cold; the idea of four seasons was thrilling to me. I pored over my well-worn copies of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge books and was captivated by the cozy activities the mice got up to in their tree stump village: organizing winter balls, steaming up Christmas puddings, and putting their little feet up in front of roaring fires. 

While I have yet to discover the utopian commune of my dreams here in New York’s Hudson Valley, where I now live, I have wholeheartedly embraced cold northeastern weather, as well as the hardy produce that comes with it. One of the cornerstone pieces of produce from the colder months is winter squash, though its season extends well beyond the actual winter season—butternut squash and other hard-skinned pumpkins begin to appear at local markets in the late summer and can still be found piled up at farmers markets many months later, in the early spring. It's the perfect vehicle for this baked squash curry, which is a welcome meal at least three out of the year's four seasons. Inspired by traditional Thai hor mok, a type of steamed curry, it features sweet, nutty squash with a kick of heat from red curry paste.

Hor mok (ห่อหมก) is more of an approach than a specific dish: The term describes a traditional cooking method where a mixture of fish, fresh herbs like Thai basil and makrut lime leaves, and spices are wrapped up (hor; ห่อ) in a banana leaf, then buried (mok; หมก) in the ashes of a cooking fire to bake slowly. (Hor mok has close cousins in the cuisines of neighboring countries, like Cambodia’s amok, a steamed fish curry.)

While regional variations abound, the most common version of hor mok in Thailand today is made by combining minced fish, red or yellow curry paste, eggs, and coconut milk. (Shredded vegetables like cabbage are sometimes included for texture.) The mixture is wrapped in banana leaves or foil, then steamed on the stovetop or baked in an oven. The dish is essentially a savory, spicy custard. While hor mok can differ in size, they are generally made in single-serving packages so they can be eaten with rice as a solo meal or as part of a dinner spread for a larger group. 

A few years ago, I was browsing through several hor mok recipes in preparation for a private dinner I was cooking. I came across one in Momluang Terb Xoomsai’s Ratanakosin Dishes 1982, an out-of-print cookbook that showcases a number of refined, modern recipes from one of Thailand’s foremost culinary experts. Unlike many hor mok recipes, which have you incorporate whole beaten eggs, Xoomsai’s spin involved beating egg whites on their own until light and fluffy, then folding them into the rest of the ingredients, producing a lighter version of classic hor mok. Its texture reminded me of a butternut squash soufflé I made at a restaurant many years ago as a prep cook—and so, I decided to create a vegetarian riff on traditional hor mok using Xoomsai’s technique. 

The result is a luxuriously creamy custard that’s boldly flavored with butternut squash and red curry, with a light, airy texture similar to a French soufflé.

The Key Techniques That Make This Recipe Great

Beat the eggs well—but don’t overwhip them. It may be tempting to whip your egg whites on high speed, but I recommend whisking them on medium, which will take a little longer but result in a stronger, more stable foam and minimize the risk of your egg whites overwhipping. Overwhipped egg whites don’t hold their air well, and will likely result in a soufflé that deflates quickly. To ensure all your hard work doesn’t go to waste, gently fold the whipped egg whites into your custard base. The longer and more aggressively you stir, the more air bubbles you’ll lose, resulting in a dense custard that won’t rise.

Use a sweet winter squash. I opt for sweet, earthy butternut squash in my recipe below, since it’s widely available in many US grocery stores. If you can get your hands on honeynut squash, though, they have a more concentrated flavor than butternut squash and make an excellent alternative (just note that honeynut squash are much smaller than butternet, so you'll need more of them to get the same weight). 

Roast the squash first. To incorporate the squash into the soufflé mixture, it’s essential to cook and purée it first. There are many ways to prepare squash, including boiling, steaming, and microwaving. Roasting the gourd at a high temperature, however, concentrates the squash’s flavor by driving off moisture and allows the Maillard reaction—a series of chemical reactions that occur when proteins and sugars are transformed by heat—to take place, resulting in squash with a much sweeter, more complex flavor.

Store-bought curry paste is fine. You can make your own curry paste, but for this, store-bought red curry paste is perfectly fine, since the flavors in the paste play a supporting role to the sweet, nutty, earthy squash. For the most aromatic base, I start by sautéing the curry paste, which blooms the spices, releasing fat-soluble flavor compounds that infuse more fully into the dish. (Keep in mind that most traditional Thai curry pastes contain shrimp paste, so be sure to check the ingredients if you are looking to keep the dish vegetarian.) 

Top it off with coconut cream, makrut lime leaves, and slivered red peppers. The dish is great as is, but is especially delicious when dressed up with thickened coconut cream, a chiffonade of zesty makrut lime leaves, and spicy red chiles, which is how many Thai eateries serve traditional hor mok. The coconut cream balances the spice of the curry, the makrut lime leaves add a refreshing pop of fragrance and brightness, and the red chiles give it a spicy kick. Look for a hot red chile like bird’s eye, Fresno, or jalapeño—but if you’d like to keep it mild, matchsticks of red bell peppers or lunchbox peppers work too.

I love this dish served with plain rice, but it’s also good as part of a bigger spread; for instance, served with other Thai dishes like a zesty salad or a meaty stir-fry. I’ve also found it to be a great non-traditional side for a roast chicken as well.

For the Squash: Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat oven to 400°F (205°C). Toss squash with oil and salt, then arrange on a rimmed 13- by 18-inch baking sheet, making sure to not overcrowd. Roast, stirring occasionally, until squash is tender and beginning to brown, 30 to 45 minutes. Remove from oven and set aside. Reduce oven to 375°F (190°C).

For the Curry: In a wok or large sauté pan, heat coconut oil over medium heat until shimmering. Add curry paste and cook, stirring constantly, until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add roasted squash, stirring to coat it with the curry paste. Add salt and soy sauce. Continue cooking over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture slightly darkens in color, 3 to 4 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low and gradually add half the coconut milk (200ml; about 3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon). Simmer, stirring and scraping bottom and sides frequently, until sauce is thick, pudding-like, and has reduced by 1/3, about 5 minutes. Season to taste with additional salt and soy sauce as needed and let cool for 5 minutes.

In a food processor, purée curried squash mixture smooth. Let cool for 5 minutes. Add yolks and process until thoroughly incorporated. Transfer mixture to a large mixing bowl.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, whip egg whites on medium speed until stiff, glossy peaks form, about 5 minutes. Using a flexible spatula, add about 1/3 beaten whites into squash mixture and gently fold to combine. Gently fold in remaining whites until mixture is smooth and no streaks remain. Carefully scrape mixture into an ungreased 8- by 8-inch square baking dish. Bake until the soufflé has puffed up by about 1 inch and the top is just firm to the touch, about 30 minutes.

In a 2-quart saucepan, bring remaining 3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon (about 200ml) coconut milk to a simmer over medium heat. In a small bowl, whisk cornstarch and cold water until smooth. Stream cornstarch mixture into coconut milk, whisking to incorporate, and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 1 minute. Remove from heat and set aside.

Top curried squash with coconut milk, leaving a 1-inch border around the edge. Garnish with makrut lime leaves and chile and serve with jasmine rice.

Special Equipment

Rimmed 13- by 18-inch baking sheet, wok or large sauté pan, food processor stand mixer, 8- by 8-inch baking dish, 2-quart saucepan

Notes

Refined coconut oil or neutral oil like canola or vegetable can be used in place of unrefined coconut oil.

Tamari can be used in place of soy sauce.

Fresh makrut lime leaves can be purchased at Southeast Asian grocery stores. To remove the tough ribs of Makrut lime leaves: fold the leaf in half lengthwise so that the rib is exposed to one side, then slice it off with a sharp knife. If you can’t find makrut lime leaves, you can garnish the soufflé with fresh zest from one lime.

While I prefer Fresno chiles for the bright color and moderate heat, you can substitute red bell peppers for a milder flavor or bird’s eye chiles for more heat.

Make-Ahead and Storage

The squash can be roasted and even puréed up to 3 days in advance and refrigerated in an airtight container.

The squash curry can be baked and refrigerated up to 1 day in advance. The curry will have deflated slightly, but will still taste good. To reheat, bake curry at 375ºF (190ºC) until warmed through, about 15 minutes. Garnish with lime leaves and chiles and serve. 

Like many busy folks with packed schedules, I make a point to prioritize easy dinners—and especially love meals that are light on prep but don't skimp on flavor. Usually, this is some variation of chicken and vegetables, as chicken is wonderfully versatile and can be easily paired with whatever ingredients I have on hand. Below, you'll find my favorite chicken and vegetable recipes—including sheet-pan roasted chicken and crispy braised chicken thighs—that make weeknight cooking feel like a breeze.

Pan-Roasted Chicken With Vegetables and Dijon Jus

Crackling, crispy-skinned chicken and charred tender vegetables, all made in a single skillet? Sign me up. Deglaze the pan with chicken stock to gather up all the tasty browned bits and chicken drippings, then turn it into a rich, flavorful gravy brightened with lemon and Dijon mustard.

Sheet-Pan Roasted Chicken, Sweet Potatoes, and Brussels Sprouts

Sheet-pan dinners are easy to prep and clean up, making them a go-to weeknight meal for many people. For a dinner that pops with both color and flavor, pair bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs with sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, and shallots, then top it all off with a spicy, sweet gochujang mayonnaise.

Sheet-Pan Chicken Thighs With Potatoes, Fennel, and Mustard-Beer Sauce

Juicy chicken thighs, cheesy potato-fennel gratin, and a mustard-beer sauce with just one sheet pan? Yes, it's possible. Arranging the chicken thighs around the baking sheet's perimeter—where the heat is the highest—helps brown and crisp the skin, while also protecting the potatoes and fennel from scorching.

Chicken Souvlaki With Tzatziki Sauce and Greek Salad

A simple zesty vinaigrette works double-duty as both the marinade for the chicken and dressing for the Greek salad, making this a minimal-effort meal. Pile your juicy, char-grilled pieces of chicken onto a pita with fresh vegetables and garlicky tzatziki sauce, and you'll have yourself a Mediterranean feast.

Takeout-Style Kung Pao Chicken (Diced Chicken With Peppers and Peanuts)

Former editor Kenji's spin on kung pao chicken has everything we love about the umami-packed Sichuan classic: tender marinated chicken, crisp peppers and celery, crunchy peanuts, and fiery chiles stir-fried with a sweet-sour-savory sauce. The best part? It takes just 15 minutes to cook.

Hainanese Chicken Rice Set

The secret to deeply flavorful chicken rice with ultra-tender chicken? Poaching the chicken until each piece registers the ideal temperature on an instant-read thermometer to keep the meat moist, then using that same poaching liquid and any rendered chicken fat to cook the rice and vegetables. Each bite is infused with rich poultry flavor, making it the ultimate chicken dinner.

Chicken Cacciatore With Red Peppers, Tomato, and Onion

Chicken cacciatore has all the flavor and depth of a slow-cooked dish but is ready in a little over an hour. It's totally doable—even on a weeknight. Using thigh and drumsticks ensures the meat stays tender and juicy, and skipping the flour dredge that some recipes call for lets the bright, fruity flavor of the bell peppers and tomatoes to shine through. For a heartier, earthier take on chicken cacciatore, try this version with mushrooms.

Biryani-Style Roast Chicken

This one-skillet chicken dinner combines everything we love about a gorgeous roast chicken with fluffy basmati rice and a fragrant blend of toasted spices. A generous layering of zucchini, potatoes, and caramelized onion adds texture and makes it a complete meal.

Easy Weeknight Chicken Pot Pie

This easy skillet pot pie takes just about 10 minutes to prep and comes together in a single cast iron skillet, making it a meal that's light on both effort and clean up. It's loaded with vegetables and tender chicken, and topped with a crisp, flaky crust. In other words: It's the ultra-comforting meal we all need.

Buffalo Chicken Salad

For the perfect Buffalo chicken salad, you have to start with the right chicken—in this case, it's boneless, skinless chicken thighs marinated with lemon juice and Frank’s Red Hot. A combination of blue cheese dressing and Buffalo sauce evokes the taste of classic Buffalo wings while crisp, fresh vegetables and creamy avocado provide a cooling counterpart to the hot sauce.

Grilled Lemon-Garlic Chicken and Tomato Kebabs With Basil Chimichurri

This satisfying weeknight dinner can be prepped in the time it takes to light a chimney of charcoal and preheat the grill. While the grill preheats, you'll marinate the chicken in with garlic, oil, lemon juice and zest, and maple syrup, then make a punchy chimichurri sauce for drizzling over the skewers.

Gỏi Gà Bắp Cải (Vietnamese Chicken and Cabbage Salad)

This classic Vietnamese salad is ideal for a light supper on a warm night. The combination of tender shredded chicken, crisp cabbage, sweet carrot, pickled onion, fresh herbs, fried shallots, crunchy peanuts, and aromatic dipping sauce offers a delightful mix of textures and flavors in every bite.

Chicken Salad With Avocado, Corn, and Miso Dressing

Miso paste, mirin, and ginger give a decidedly Japanese twist to traditional chicken salad. Scallions, fresh corn, and creamy avocado take the place of celery, red onion, and mayo while Japanese mustard and shichimi togarashi add a spicy kick to the dressing.

In my fast-paced life as a food stylist and writer, I'm always looking for ways to make meal prep at home more convenient. A few things that have helped dinner get on the table quickly include my nonstick skillet, my spice grinder, and the cutest mini food processor from Cuisinart, which was one of our winners in our review. While tiny, this gadget makes it incredibly easy to get all my food prep done.

Why I Love My Cuisinart Mini Food Processor

I’ve tried in vain to be the type of person who meal preps in advance. So, a mini food processor that chops, blends, purées, and crushes in seconds is a lifesaver after a long day of work on my feet. Instead of spending time breaking down ingredients with multiple knives and cutting boards, I can quickly chop everything with a few pulses. A mini food processor can even blitz hardy ingredients like carrots in seconds.

I also use it to whip up a quick dressing for a salad, blend ginger-garlic paste for my go-to chicken curry recipe, and coarsely chop nuts for granola. When I want something sweet, it’s my go-to for pulverizing crackers or cookies for a crust for key lime or banoffee pie. The reverse function of the blade ensures no chunks are left behind. With only two buttons, chop and grind, it's easy and efficient to use. It’s quick to set up, too: Simply attach the bowl by swiveling it on the base, insert the blade, and put the lid on. 

In addition to being versatile, the Cuisinart Mini Food Processor is also compact by definition. I can easily tuck it away in my small New York City kitchen. Not to mention the bowl is dishwasher-safe, which I love, since the last thing I want to do is spend extra time cleaning multiple dishes at the end of my evening. That said, I hand-wash the blade since the dishwasher can dull it—plus, it takes mere seconds to clean. 

Why We’re The Experts

• Namrata Hegde is a food writer. When she is not creating recipes or cross-testing them, she makes food look pretty for the camera for various brands, editorial publications, and cookbooks.
• She has worked in the food industry for over 10 years in different capacities and is also a passionate home cook. 
• She uses the Cuisinart Mini Food Processor for weeknight food prep.
  

We get it: Some days you just want to cook breakfast on a nonstick skillet so slick that your egg will slide right off the pan, mess-free. Our favorite tool for the job is the OXO ceramic nonstick skillet, which also happens to be non-toxic—it’s a win-win. Food glides across its surface, and we can confirm that the pan doesn’t have any hot or cold spots. If you’re ready to replace your flaking nonstick pans with a new set, the whole trio is on sale for $76.

Why It Won Our Review

It’s Super Duper Slick

Over-easy eggs can become a sticky mess in some pans, but not with the OXO ceramic skillet. Maneuvering eggs and delicate crepes on this pan was smooth as can be. We were also able to get under omelets without any trouble in order to fold them. We especially appreciated the rounded rim, which makes transferring food hassle-free.

It’s a Great Non-Toxic Option

The pan’s natural ceramic coating is made of sand and enhanced with diamonds. It’s PFAS-free, so it won’t release fumes or leach chemicals at higher cooking temperatures. It also heats well, as proven by the crepes that came out uniformly browned across the bottom.

It’s a Tough Skillet That’s Comfortable to Use

We scraped it with metal fish spatulas and steel wool (gasp!) to see how it would hold up. We don’t recommend using metal cooking utensils with nonstick pans in general, but we had to put it to the test, right? This pan passed the durability assessment with flying colors. No new scratches were found after quite a bit of tapping and scraping. The stainless steel handle on this pan is comfortable to hold and provides a stable enough grip for swirling crepe batter around. It also stays cool during use to prevent burns.

Why We Recommend It

OXO Enhanced Ceramic Nonstick Skillet, Set of 3

This trio of OXO ceramic skillets on sale is a deal worth grabbing. For $76, you can get our favorite nonstick pan in the 8-inch, 10-inch, and 12-inch sizes. If you want a trustworthy, non-toxic option to use on days when you just don’t want to pick up a cast iron or stainless steel pan, it’s a good time to hop on this sale.

Why We’re the Experts

• An Uong is a writer for Serious Eats.
• An has been testing kitchen equipment for Serious Eats for over two years.
• She loves OXO kitchen tools and can attest to the quality of the brand’s cookware, too.

Amazon’s Big Spring Sale may be ending on Monday, March 31, but there is still time to grab some fantastic deals on some of our favorite tested kitchen gear. I pored over thousands of deals to find the best discounts on items that I, a professional gear tester, think are worth buying, especially on sale. Some of my top picks include the best Breville air fryer toaster oven, our favorite Lodge cast iron skillet, and a Yeti cooler that’s actually easy to move.

The Best Air Fryer Toaster Oven: Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro

This editor-loved air fryer toaster oven is fast, efficient, and versatile. It crisps up French fries as readily as it toasts bread, and you can even roast a chicken in it. We know because we’ve done it, with gloriously golden, juicy results. This kitchen countertop multitasker is on a steep discount at $80 off. 

The Best Budget Meat Thermometer: ThermoWorks ThermoPop 2

An instant-read thermometer is a game changer: Gone are the days of cutting into a chicken breast, hoping it’s cooked through. Poke the probe in and you’ll know exactly how your food is doing. Our favorite budget-friendly thermometer from ThermoWorks is fast, accurate, and pocket-sized, making it a great starter option. And, it’s currently 20% off for Amazon’s Big Spring Sale. 

Our Longtime Favorite Cast Iron Skillet: Lodge 10.25-Inch Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet

Cast iron skillets are indestructible pans that’ll last a lifetime. They get ripping hot, ensuring a proper sear on steak, chicken, or even a slab of cauliflower. We’ve long loved this affordable option from Lodge, and now that it’s 50% off, it’s an even sweeter deal. (Plenty of our other favorite Lodge cast iron cookware is also on sale.)

The Best Air Fryer: Instant Pot Vortex Plus Air Fryer

The Instant has been our favorite air fryer since we first tested it three years ago. It produces some of the crispiest, crunchiest results we’ve ever tasted, thanks to the large basket that ensures proper air circulation. If you haven’t bought an air fryer yet, now’s a great time since this machine is nearly half off.

The Best Budget Food Processor: Cuisinart 14-Cup Food Processor

A food processor is a kitchen workhorse that pulverizes, purées, and pulses with aplomb. Want to make hummus? It’s up to the task. Need to dice onions and carrots for mirepoix? It’ll do so in a flash. The Cuisinart food processor has been one of our favorites for years for its simple interface and more than capable blitzing ability. It’s a budget-friendly—but still powerful—option that’s currently $50 off. 

A Great Stand Mixer for Most Bakers: KitchenAid Artisan Series 5-Quart Tilt-Head Stand Mixer

KitchenAid’s stand mixers are hard to beat. They’re durable, powerful, and come with a variety of attachments to ensure proper whipping, creaming, and kneading. This tilt-head stand mixer comes with a 5-quart bowl, making it a great option for most casual home bakers. It’s nicely discounted right now, too. 

Our Favorite Dutch Oven: Le Creuset Enameled Cast Iron Signature Round Dutch Oven

Dutch ovens are great for braising, frying, searing, and stewing—what more could you want in a single piece of cookware? Our longtime favorite Dutch oven from Le Creuset does all of this, and does it well. In our tests, pork shoulder seared to golden brown perfection and was fall-apart tender after braising. Le Creuset’s enamel is darn tough, too, so this Dutch oven will last decades.

The Best Hard Cooler: Yeti Roadie 48 Wheeled Cooler

We love a Yeti hard cooler: Its cold retention can’t be bested. Add a pair of wheels to it, and we can’t help but proudly roll this along to a tailgate or the beach. It’s also spacious and can fit 76 cans or 54 pounds of ice. And while we love Yeti coolers, we love them even more when they’re on sale—grab our go-to for $70 off for a limited time. 

The Best Coffee Grinder for Most People: OXO Brew Conical Burr Coffee Grinder

Freshly ground beans equate to a better pot of coffee, and this affordable (and discounted!) coffee grinder from OXO ensures a proper brew every time. It’s consistent, easy to use, and an editor favorite. 

A Fast Sous Vide Machine: Anova Culinary Sous Vide Precision Cooker Pro

Sous vide cooking promises properly cooked, moist results every time. The Anova delivers on that promise with superb accuracy. It’s quick, too: In our tests, it brought six quarts of cool water to 190°F in just over half an hour. We also like the app-compatible machine’s easy-to-program user interface. And, at 50% off for Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, we think this is a fantastic deal. 

The Best Budget Stainless Steel Skillet: Tramontina Seattle Tri-Ply Clad Stainless Steel 12-Inch Large Frying Pan

Stainless steel skillets are quick to heat and responsive to temperature changes, making them great all-around pieces of cookware. This budget-friendly pick from Tramontina excelled in all of our tests, heating quickly and evenly and getting a nice crust on salmon. It’s currently on sale for nearly half off. 

The Best Flat-Bottomed, Carbon Steel Wok: Yosukata Carbon Steel Wok

A flat-bottom wok is essential for stir-frying, allowing you to toss ingredients and imbue them with wok hei. The Yosukata has been one of our favorite woks for a long time, capturing our hearts (and holding our grains of rice dear) with its heat responsiveness and durability. Grab it while it’s on sale for Amazon’s Big Spring Sale. 

A Customizable Rice Cooker: Cuckoo Micom Rice Cooker

This rice cooker made the best basmati rice in our extensive tests. It’s also compact (and cute!) and incredibly customizable: You can choose how long you want the rice to soak, the cooking time, and even input a specific temperature. It’s currently 30% off.

The Best Budget Steak Knives: Messermeister Avanta Forged 5-Inch Fine Edge Steak Knife Set

A good steak knife is sharp, effective, and effortlessly cuts meat. This set of affordable steak knives from Messermeister delivers on all counts. They also have a classic steakhouse look to them, with a wide blade and wooden handle. At 20% off, you can have your steak and cut it cleanly, too. 

A Snazzy Smart Blender: Vitamix A3300 Ascent Series Smart Blender

In our tests, this supercharged blender pulverized smoothies without a hitch. It has a dazzling touchscreen display and, while it lacks the presets of the A3500, it’s still a great blender that will get the job done. It’s over $150 off for Amazon’s Big Spring Sale. 

A Powerful Hand Blender: Vitamix Immersion Blender

An immersion blender makes blending soups, emulsifying mayonnaise, and even beating eggs easy and fast. This one from Vitamix is super powerful. The bundle, which includes a whisk attachment and case, is on sale for a limited time. 

The Best Electric Multicooker: Instant Pot Pro

While Instant Pots aren’t the hot new item they once were, we still adore them. They cut cooking times way, way down. (You can even turn dried beans into tender legumes in less than an hour.) They also come in clutch when you have a hankering for braised meat in a flash. Our favorite Instant Pot, the Pro, aced our tests and was super easy to use. It’s worth checking out now that it’s on sale at Amazon.

A Great Mini Food Processor: KitchenAid 5-Cup Food Chopper

While a mini food processor doesn’t have the oomph of a bigger one, it comes in handy when you want to make smaller amounts of things, like some chimichurri or salsa verde. This one from KitchenAid is compact and easy to store.

The Best Budget French Press: Coffee Gator French Press Coffee

Ah, the humble French press! The Coffee Gator was our top budget pick, resulting in a balanced, fragrant pot of coffee. We liked its double-walled construction, which helped keep coffee piping hot after brewing. It’s under $30 for Amazon’s Big Spring Sale. 

FAQs

When does Amazon’s Big Spring Sale end? 

The last day to shop the sale is Monday, March 31, 2025.

Do I have to be a Prime member to shop the Spring Sale? 

You don’t have to be a Prime member, though there will be deals exclusive to Prime members. If you’d like access to those member-only discounts, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Why We’re the Experts

• Grace Kelly is a senior editor at Serious Eats, where she’s been testing kitchen gear for almost three years. 
• We’ve extensively tested thousands of kitchen products and love a good deal on a great piece of equipment. 
  

For years, Lodge cast iron pieces have been our affordable pick for essentials like Dutch ovens and bread ovens, but there are times when they’ve even beaten out more expensive competition. In fact, the brand topped our grill pan review and its cast iron skillet has been our absolute favorite for six years and running. Already reasonably priced on any given day, it’s now $14—the lowest price we’ve ever seen.

Why It Won Our Review

It Excels at Searing and Baking

This cast iron skillet sears a golden-brown filet mignon and bakes the most uniform cornbread. It’s a standout in conducting and maintaining heat across its cooking surface without any hot or cold spots. It also gets hot fast. In our tests, we reported a whopping 53.4% increase in temperature after just a minute over medium heat. That kind of high heat is what helps you achieve a crispy crust on tofu steaks or breakfast hashes.

It’s Impressively Slick

This Lodge skillet comes pre-seasoned straight out of the box, so we were able to get a fried egg to slide right off the surface with its first use. The pan’s seasoning only gets better the more you use it, so it’s a great non-toxic cookware option for those who still want a nonstick experience.

It’ll Last for Ages

So durable that it’s often a favorite among campers, the Lodge cast iron skillet lasts virtually forever if you maintain it well. Just don’t let it sit in a wet, dirty sink overnight. Even if it does accrue some rust (no judgment!), cast iron is quite forgiving, usually able to cook like new after some restoration. Our editors have used the Lodge in their own kitchens for years.

Do We Recommend It?

Lodge Cast Iron Skillet

Look, our favorite cast iron skillet of all time is on sale for just $14. We’d be doing you a disservice if we didn’t tell you about it. If you want to develop great flavor in your cooking and hope to hang onto a piece of cookware for years (and years, and years), this is the skillet to snag while it’s 59% off. It’ll deliver the best one-pan chicken dinners and festive chocolate cakes.

Why We’re the Experts

• An Uong is a writer for Serious Eats.
• An has been testing kitchen gear for Serious Eats for over two years.
• She uses her Lodge cast iron skillet every day for nearly every meal.
  

Coffee and chocolate have long been a popular pairing: The bitterness of the coffee enhances the chocolate’s fruity, bittersweet notes, adding a pleasant depth of flavor. This affinity is why you’ll often see a teaspoon or so of instant espresso or coffee in brownies and chocolate mousse. My favorite way to enjoy the combination, though, is the most obvious: as a mocha. The espresso has just enough bitterness to balance the rich sweetness of chocolate and milk, making it a luxurious beverage. That flavor profile is especially delicious in desserts. But why stop at a teaspoon of espresso powder in a dessert when you could just make the whole thing mocha flavored?

That brings me to the tres leches cake, which typically consists of a vanilla cake generously soaked in whole milk or heavy cream, along with sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milks, then topped with whipped cream. The cake soaks up the dairy, becoming incredibly moist and almost custard-like. The vanilla cake in classic tres leches has a neutral flavor that makes it a great base for other flavors, and I decided to riff on it by incorporating the flavors of a mocha. The bitterness of the coffee and chocolate complements the rich milky flavors of tres leches cake, and helps temper the dessert’s intense sweetness.

Instead of going the traditional vanilla route, I  make my sponge cake with a combination of cocoa powder and instant espresso, then soak it in a mixture of heavy cream, evaporated milk, and sweetened condensed milk—all  flavored with instant espresso. The final touch is a blanket of whipped cream and a light dusting of cocoa powder and cinnamon. 

3 Tips for Making a Stellar Tres Leches Cake

Make a light, fluffy cake. I like to use a chiffon cake as a base for my tres leches cake, as it has an airy crumb that’s perfect for soaking up liquids. Its light texture comes from whipped egg whites that are gently folded into the batter. So, to make a sturdy meringue, it’s crucial to whip the egg whites at a low speed for a long time instead of quickly whipping them at high speed. As Serious Eats senior editor Genevieve touches on in her chocolate mousse recipe, the air bubbles in egg whites become smaller and more stable the longer they’re whisked, resulting in a meringue that’s less likely to deflate—and a delightfully light cake. 

Reach for Dutch-process cocoa powder. As former editor Stella Parks notes in her guide to the best cocoa powders, the ingredient is typically categorized as either natural or Dutch-process. According to Stella, most natural cocoa powders come from poor quality cocoa beans “that have had almost all of their cocoa butter removed,” resulting in a bland powder lacking rich chocolate flavor. 

On the other hand, most Dutch-process cocoa powders come from better beans and have twice the amount of fat as natural cocoa powder. This results in “a slightly alkaline cocoa powder that’s higher in fat, lower in starch, and more aromatic all around, with a mahogany color and a flavor profile that emphasizes cocoa’s darker, nuttier, earthier tones.” So for a cake with maximum chocolate flavor—especially one like this in which all of the chocolate flavor comes from cocoa powder‚ it’s crucial to reach for a good-quality Dutch-process cocoa powder.

Use instant espresso powder. There are many ways to incorporate coffee into a dessert, including brewed coffee or espresso, coffee extract, or instant espresso powder. Here, I reach for instant espresso powder, which is made by freeze-drying concentrated espresso. Its concentrated flavor makes it ideal for incorporating into desserts, as it brings bold coffee flavor without introducing a bunch of liquid to the cake batter.

This tres leches cake comes together fairly quickly, but then it needs to soak for at least three hours or up to a day. This lengthy soak means the cake is easy to make ahead; that and the fact that the cake serves 15 people makes it perfect for parties.

For the Cake: Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat to 325°F (160°C). Lightly grease a 9- by 13-inch baking pan with vegetable oil.

Using a fine-mesh sieve, sift flour, baking powder, and cocoa powder into a medium bowl; set aside. In a small bowl, combine milk and instant espresso powder. Whisk until espresso powder is dissolved, then stir in vegetable oil. Set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, combine egg whites and salt. Whip on medium speed until egg whites begin to froth, about 1 minute. Then, with mixer continuing to run at medium speed, slowly and steadily pour in sugar. Continue to whisk until meringue is glossy and reaches stiff peaks, about 8 minutes. Add yolks and beat until just combined

With the stand mixer running on low, sprinkle in about 1/3 of the flour mixture, then drizzle in 1/3 of the milk and coffee mixture. Repeat with remaining flour and milk, and mix, using a flexible spatula to scrape the bowl and beaters as needed, until batter is well combined, 3 to 5 minutes. Using a flexible spatula, scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake until a toothpick or cake tester inserted comes out clean and cake springs back when gently touched, 30 to 35 minutes. Set the pan on a wire rack and cool completely, about 1 hour. (Clean mixer bowl and set aside.)

For the Soaking Liquid: In a medium bowl, combine heavy cream, evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, instant espresso powder, and salt, and whisk until espresso powder has dissolved, about 1 minute.

Run an offset spatula or butter knife around edges of cake to loosen. Invert cake onto a cutting board. Using a serrated knife, carefully remove top of cake to level it; set scraps aside for snacking or another use. Return the cake to the pan and, using a skewer or fork, poke holes across surface of cake. Pour half of the soaking liquid all over the cake. Let liquid fully absorb, about 5 minutes, then pour remaining liquid over cake. Loosely cover baking pan with plastic wrap and refrigerate until fully chilled, at least 2 hours and up to 24 hours.

To Assemble: In the now-clean bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, combine heavy cream, confectioners’ sugar, 1 1/2 teaspoons cocoa powder, and salt. Beat on medium-high speed until medium-stiff peaks form, 2 to 4 minutes. Using a flexible or offset spatula, spread whipped cream over cake to cover.

Using a fine-mesh sieve, sift remaining 3 tablespoons cocoa powder and cinnamon mixture over whipped cream. Slice and serve.

Special Equipment:

9- by 13-inch baking pan, fine-mesh sieve, stand mixer, flexible spatula, toothpick or cake tester, offset spatula or butter knife

Make-Ahead and Storage:

Once baked and cooled (through step 4), the cake can be tightly wrapped in plastic and refrigerated for up to 1 week or frozen for up to 3 months. 

The cake should be served within 24 hours of soaking.

This summer, I spent five months living and working at Camp Denali, a wilderness lodge in Denali National Park, Alaska. Backcountry hiking is the main attraction, and on each outing, our naturalist guides carry more than 10 pounds of gear, including a slew of emergency preparedness supplies. But the item that I find most important isn’t truly an “essential.” It’s a thermos full of hot chocolate. 

Our guides carry Stanley thermoses on every outing into the park so guests can enjoy a hot beverage after a long day of hiking. Ranked as one of the best thermoses in our review, the Stanley Classic Legendary bottle keeps beverages steaming hot for many hours—but most impressively, the thermos is basically indestructible. In fact, Camp Denali has used the same thermoses (cleaned after every use, of course) for over 30 years. 

What's a Thermos Good For?

If you like to bring hot drinks on the go, a thermos is an excellent option. It keeps the contents hot (and out of the “temperature danger zone” where bacteria can grow) for up to 24 hours, eliminating the need for refrigeration or reheating.

What’s the difference between a travel mug and a thermos, and how do you know which one best suits your needs? “Compared to travel mugs, thermoses are bigger (usually at least one liter compared to 16 ounces), have thicker vacuum insulation, and have screw-on, leak-proof caps without a sipping port,” explains former Serious Eats writer Jesse Raub in his review of thermoses. “They’re better at retaining heat for longer periods than travel mugs, and most are secure enough to toss into any bag without fear of coffee (or iced tea) leaking.” 

Pack a thermos full of hot chocolate for a family trip to the ice rink, or tote a carafe of coffee to the office. No fear of spillage, and no need for reheating. (PS: If you want a thermos to keep your lunch warm, check out the best food thermoses.)

What Makes the Stanley Thermos Great?

There are two primary ways to judge a thermos’ effectiveness. First, its insulating properties: Does it keep the contents at the desired temperature (warm or cold), and for how long? Most of the thermoses in our review—including the Stanley Classic Legendary bottle—passed this trial easily, maintaining a temperature of at least 170°F (hot enough to burn most people’s tongues) for eight hours. 

The Stanley bottle performed exceptionally well in the hot and cold retention trials, but so did plenty of other thermoses, including ones from Zojirushi and MiiR. The most distinctive factor, then, in determining the quality of a thermos is its durability. This is the area where Stanley distinguishes itself: It has survived more than 30 years of heavy use in the Alaskan backcountry.

Manufactured in 1987, Camp Denali’s Stanley thermoses have weathered all kinds of heavy use—jostling around a backpacking pack, rolling around the back of a bus, tumbling down a gravel hill, etc. They’ve certainly endured exterior wear and tear—most of the original green paint has chipped off, revealing the stainless steel body—but they still work just as well as new. 

That’s because Stanley thermoses are built to last. They’re constructed from 18/8 stainless steel, with double-wall vacuum insulation that keeps heat in and prevents spills. As long as the vacuum still seals properly, an older thermos will continue to perform. The vintage thermoses reliably keep water steaming hot for more than six hours, so after a long day’s trek, I’m always rewarded with a hot cup of tea or cocoa.

In addition to its impressive durability, there are a few design details I appreciate about the Classic Legendary thermos. The thermos itself is tall and thin—easy to slip into the water bottle sleeve on a backpack—and it comes with a collapsible handle, making it comfortable to carry. (If you prefer one without a handle, that’s an option, too.) The bottle’s lid doubles as a drinking cup, so it’s easy to pour yourself a hot beverage on the go. Beneath the lid, a twist-and-pour stopper minimizes the risk of spillage and further limits the liquid’s exposure to the elements, keeping it hotter for longer. Plus, they last a lifetime—just ask the guides in Alaska.

FAQs

How much liquid does the Stanley thermos hold?

The Stanley thermos comes in four sizes: 1.1 quarts, 1.5 quarts, two quarts, and 2.5 quarts. We use the 2.5-quart model, which holds 10 cups of liquid, to serve hot beverages to 10 to 12 people.

How long will the Stanley thermos stay hot?

According to Stanley, the thermos will stay hot for 24 hours. In Serious Eats’ tests, the Stanley thermos maintained a temperature of at least 170°F for eight hours and 135°F for 24 hours.

How do I know if my thermos’s vacuum seal is broken?

If your thermos is leaking, that’s a sure sign that the vacuum seal is no longer effective. If you open your thermos after a couple of hours and the contents are no longer hot, that’s another indicator that the vacuum seal has been compromised. If you’re using the thermos exclusively for hot beverages like coffee, the primary risk of a faulty vacuum seal is leakage—annoying, but not necessarily dangerous. If you’re using the thermos for food storage, however, a compromised vacuum seal can result in potentially hazardous bacteria growth.

Why We’re the Experts

• Zoe Denenberg is a chef, baker, and food writer. 
• She has spent the past five-plus years working in kitchens across the country, including an artisanal ice cream shop in Birmingham, Alabama, and a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City. 
• She is currently the executive chef at Camp Denali, a wilderness lodge in Denali National Park, Alaska, where the Stanley thermos has been a reliable hiking companion for decades.
  

There’s no way around it: If you want to cook, you need a good knife (or two, or three!). My team at Serious Eats has been testing and reviewing them for years, and we’ve noticed a common theme: Great knives don’t often go on sale. Although a well-made blade is worth the investment, I’ll never turn down a nice knife deal. This year, I went on the hunt, searching through pages and pages of Amazon’s Big Spring Sale in search of great discounts on kitchen knives. I found 10 outstanding deals on Serious Eats-approved knives, including chef’s knives, paring knives, and accessories, like honing rods and sharpeners, up to 48% off at Amazon’s sale.

One of Our Favorite Western-Style Chef’s Knives: Mercer Culinary 8-Inch Genesis

Mercer is a tried-and-true brand of tools and knives in culinary schools. The Genesis has long reigned supreme as a winner in our chef’s knives review. I have no complaints about the blade—it’s sharp and durable—but it’s the handle that really delivers. Made from a combination of rubber and plastic, it’s comfortable to hold, giving the cook a confident grip. Right now, it’s discounted by almost 40%.

A Workhorse Petty Knife: Victorinox 6-Inch Fibrox Pro Chef’s Knife

Petty knives are sized between 5.5 and six inches, making them just as useful as chef’s knives but a bit more nimble. They’re a must-have upgrade for cooks who want a knife with outstanding versatility. This one from Victorinox is a winner in our petty knives review. It’s really sharp, and the blade is slightly curved. This makes it useful for chopping in addition to more traditional petty knife tasks, like slicing tomatoes and maneuvering around chicken joints.

A Beautiful, Sharp Paring Knife: Shun Classic 3.5-Inch Paring Knife

Shun knives are favored by pro cooks—they’re meticulously crafted, hold an incredible edge, and look beautiful. They’re also rarely on sale, which is why I enthusiastically encourage you to take advantage of this 20% discount. Normally $125, this 3.5-inch paring knife is the right size for intricate, precise tasks, like segmenting citrus.

A New Haven-Style Oyster Knife: Dexter Russell 2.75 Inch New Haven Style Oyster Knife

Oyster knives are single-purpose tools, but they deserve a place in your utensil drawer. When you need one, nothing else will do. This one, which has a slightly curved blade, is ideal for cracking into deep, large oysters—not something all knives can do. My colleague Grace, who lives in Rhode Island and is our team's oyster expert, highly recommends it. It’s a great price right now; buy it once and never be without the right tool for oyster night again.

A Super Sharp Slicing Knife: Victorinox Fibrox Pro 12-Inch Slicing Knife with Granton Blade

The dimpled edges of this long, elegant knife make it ideal for slicing meat. In fact, we named it the best slicing knife in our review. Its non-serrated edge is wicked sharp, and the 11-inch blade makes it a great choice for large meat, like brisket. It’s a good buy any time of year, but during the Amazon Big Spring Sale, it’s just about 30% off. 

A Steal of a Deal Carving Knife: Mercer Culinary 10-Inch Carving Knife

A proper carving knife should have a tapered tip for finagling around bones. This one from Mercer is the right size and shape and is especially nimble. It’s made from the same steel as another Serious Eats-favorite carving knife from Wüsthof, but retails for a lot less.

A Solid, Sturdy Set of Steak Knives: Zwilling Steak Knife Set

Amidst ones that cost hundreds, this set of four blades wowed us during our review of steak knives. They easily sliced through skirt steak and filet mignon. Although the blades are lightly serrated and will dull with time, it’s hard to beat the price, especially when it’s $15 off.

Rock-Solid Kitchen Shears: Kershaw Taskmaster Kitchen Shears

If you want a pair of kitchen shears that can snip a handful of chives and effortlessly spatchcock a chicken, this is the one for you. They were named the most durable kitchen shears in our review and have a few fancy extra features (who doesn’t love a nutcracker and screwdriver tip add-on?). Normally over $40, they’re on sale right now for about $25.

A Versatile Honing Steel: Zwilling Kramer Accessories 12.25-Inch Double-Cut Honing Steel

Typically, a honing rod isn’t all that helpful when your knives are dull—they’re best for quick touch-ups. But this one has coarse and smooth sides, so you can get a sharp edge, and then maintain it between chopping sessions. The rod itself is 12 inches long, helpful for spiffing up extra-long blades. The $20 discount is impressive, considering this is a trusted brand and a high-quality tool.

A Pull-Through Knife Sharpener for Beginners: Zwilling J.A. Henckels 4-Stage Pull Through Knife Sharpener

Our team prefers whetstones and electric sharpeners over pull-through sharpeners (you can read more about why here), but I’ll be the first to admit that a pull-through option is often the type I recommend to new cooks. It’s easy to use, doesn’t require any special skills, and costs lots less than electric sharpeners. In fact, this sharpener from Zwilling is the only roll-through model Serious Eats recommends. It offers both coarse and fine sharpening options and can accommodate Japanese knives and Western-style knives.

FAQs

When is the Amazon Big Spring Sale in 2025?

It runs from March 28 through March 31 this year. If you want to shop more kitchen sales, you can check out our other favorite deals here or Amazon’s spring sale hub.

Why We’re the Experts

• Rochelle Bilow is an editor at Serious Eats.
• Rochelle is a culinary school graduate and former line cook. Previously, she worked at Bon Appétit and Cooking Light magazines. 
• At Serious Eats, we have tested hundreds of knives. We regularly revisit our reviews to make sure our recommendations and findings are current. 
  

Perched in Aroostook County at the very top of the state, the St. John Valley is nicknamed “The Crown of Maine.” This remote region that borders Canada is home to Maine’s Acadian population, who are descended from French settlers who arrived there in the early 17th century. Having endured centuries of upheaval and persecution, Acadians continue to make their home in Maine and the Maritime provinces of Canada today, where they seek to preserve and honor their unique heritage. One of the essential dishes stemming from that heritage is ployes. 

Ployes (rhyming with “boys”) are a unique pancake-crepe-crumpet-flatbread hybrid beloved in the Acadian community. These versatile flatbreads are served with every meal of the day. The most traditional way to serve them is to spread them with butter, roll them up, and dip them into soup or stew. But you can also serve them with fruit, maple syrup, or molasses for breakfast or dessert.

It’s easy to see why they’re so popular in this region. The pancake-like batter takes only minutes to prepare and cook ( a cast-iron pan or griddle is best). They’re made with locally abundant buckwheat flour, and are a quick-cooking, economical accompaniment to any meal.

These buckwheat pancakes are so cherished in the area that the town of Fort Kent holds a ploye festival every year, where intrepid cooks work together to make the world’s largest ploye (thus far measuring 12 feet in diameter!). But you don’t need to visit remote Northern Maine to enjoy them. I tested my way through piles of ployes to come up with my recipe below. It requires just three main ingredients and only a few minutes to cook. Hot off the griddle, these ployes are a delectable savory stand-in for a dinner roll, or a sweet treat when sprinkled with cinnamon-sugar or dunked into syrup or molasses. 

The Best Buckwheat Flour for Ployes

Though I grew up in Maine, I wasn’t very familiar with ployes before deep diving into their history when developing this recipe. Luckily, Bouchard Family Farms, a French-Acadian farm in its sixth generation, not only grows the buckwheat needed to make ployes from scratch, but also sells a pre-made mix (the only commercially-available ploye mix in the world!).

I ordered a bag of buckwheat and whisked up a batter from the mix to see this pancake in action. I heated up a cast iron pan, spooned on the batter, spread it into a thin round, and watched in awe as hundreds of tiny bubbles formed on the surface of each distinctively yellow pancake. In just over a minute, the ploye was cooked through and ready to serve straight from the pan. I made sure to cook it on just one side—the Bouchards and other Acadian sources are emphatic that you never flip a ploye. Instead, you cook one side, allowing the bubbles to boil and burst, leaving pillowy air pockets. It had a balanced earthy, slightly nutty flavor from the unique type of buckwheat flour in the batter.

Traditional Acadian ployes use Tartary buckwheat, a specific variety of silver-skinned buckwheat that grows in the St. John Valley region in Northern Maine and Canada. It has a lighter, less assertive flavor and green-yellow color that's much lighter than American, French, or Japanese buckwheat varieties, which are typically a deep purplish brown. And while these other varieties of buckwheat are readily available at many grocery stores across the US, to make true ployes, I strongly recommend seeking out Maine-grown light buckwheat from growers like Bouchard Family Farms or Maine Grains brands. But if you substitute with other another buckwheat flour, know that the ployes will have a dark purplish-brown color rather than yellow, and the pancakes will have a stronger buckwheat flavor.

Finding the Right Ratio of Ingredients for Ployes 

Buckwheat is in fact not wheat at all, but the seed of a flowering plant that can be ground into a flour. It’s naturally gluten-free, but ployes need a little bit of gluten formation in order for them to keep their shape and have a pliable texture. I tried Acadian recipes for ployes that called for varying amounts of each type of flour, and ultimately settled on a ratio of two parts buckwheat flour to one part all-purpose flour. This creates pancakes with a balanced earthy, nutty flavor and the ideal pliable structure. 

A tablespoon of baking powder gives the flatbreads their signature holes (known as “les yeux” or “eyes”), and enough water is added make the batter the right pourable consistency to spread easily into a thin flat disc, like a crepe (but don’t call it a crepe!). 

Unlike other pancakes, ployes contain no added fat and aren’t traditionally cooked in fat. So to ensure the pancakes release easily from the skillet when cooked, it’s important to preheat the empty pan. A well-seasoned cast iron skillet is the best— and most traditional—option. Because the pan is heated while empty, I don’t recommend using a nonstick or ceramic pan, as this can damage the pan’s coating over time. 

Once cooked they can be served both savory or sweet in a variety of ways: They can be served savory, spread with cretons (a Quebecois minced pork spread), filled with other meats, veggies, and/or cheeses, or simply buttered and rolled to dip into stews, soups, or baked beans. Or, for a sweet and easy breakfast, swipe with butter and sprinkle of cinnamon sugar, roll and dip them in molasses or maple syrup, and/or fill with jam, berries, or whipped cream.

In a large bowl, whisk together buckwheat flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt to combine. Add water and whisk until a smooth batter with the consistency of half-and-half forms. Let sit until slightly thickened and bubbly, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat oven to 200°F (90°C). Set a wire rack in a rimmed baking sheet and transfer to oven.

Preheat a 10-inch cast iron skillet or griddle over medium heat until hot, 3 to 4 minutes. (If your pan is well-seasoned, then no cooking oil will be necessary; if it's not, add 1/2 teaspoon neutral oil to the pan as it heats and use a wadded up paper towel to spread it into a then layer before proceeding with the recipe.)

Whisk batter to recombine. Using a 1/4-cup dry measuring cup, pour one 1/4 cup portion of batter into center of skillet. Using the bottom of measuring cup or back of a metal ladle, spread batter into a very thin circle, about 7 inches in diameter.

Cook until holes form and batter sets, top is dry with edges beginning to curl, and bottom is golden brown and crisp, 1 to 2 minutes. Use a spatula to transfer to wire rack in oven to keep warm or serving plate to serve immediately. Repeat cooking with remaining batter. You should have 12 ployes. Serve with your preferred sweet or savory accompaniments, such as butter, maple syrup, berries, cretons, or meats.

Special Equipment

Whisk, rimmed baking sheet, wire rack, 10-inch cast iron skillet or griddle, 1/4-cup dry measuring cup, spatula

Notes

I recommend using Maine-grown light buckwheat from growers like Bouchard Family Farms or Maine Grains. If you substitute with other buckwheat flour, the ployes will be a dark purplish-brown color rather than yellow, and the pancakes will have a stronger buckwheat flavor.

I’ve tested dozens and dozens of chef’s knives, so I know a thing or two about what makes a good one. Sure, there are personal preferences—I like a compact handle—but there are also some objective truths: A good chef’s knife should be sharp, balanced, and easy to use. It gets bonus points if it’s affordable and easy to maintain. With these criteria in mind, I got my hands on the reasonably priced Misen chef knife, ran it through a litany of tests, and used it in my daily cooking routine to see if it was any good. 

The Tests

• Edge Sharpness Test: I ran the knife through the Edge-on-Up Professional Edge Tester three times and averaged the results to get an idea of the knife’s out-of-the-box sharpness. 
• Paper Cutting Test: After running the knife through the sharpness reader, I used it to slice vertically through a piece of paper, noting if it tore or cleanly cut through. 
• Onion Test: I used the Misen to dice an onion, noting if it made clean, neat cuts. 
• Carrot Test: I used the knife to julienne, dice, and chop hardy carrots. 
• Tomato Test: Tomato skin is rubbery, so if a knife is dull, it’ll see-saw across it or mash through it. I put the Misen up to the challenge by using it to slice and dice a whole tomato.
• Pineapple Test: I used the Misen to trim, core, and dice a whole pineapple to see if it could do it deftly. 
• General Use Test: I continued to use the Misen chef’s knife for a few weeks, noting if it stayed sharp and was versatile. 

What We Learned

The Misen Chef’s Knife Was Sharp 

Right out of the box, the Misen was sharp. It took an average of 118 grams of pressure to cut through the wire on the edge tester, which falls into the “double-edged razor blade” sharpness category according to this chart. While a sharpness reading isn’t the be-all-end-all, it still often indicates a knife that’ll cut through food readily. And that the Misen did, too: It slid neatly through tomato skin, which can cause trouble for a duller blade. Carrots were dispatched without cracking, and using the knife to peel, core, and dice a pineapple was smooth and precise. 

It’s also nice that the Misen is made of stainless steel. It’s a good introductory blade that doesn’t require as much care as carbon steel, which is more brittle and prone to rusting. A blade edge that can be honed back into shape is a bonus, too. 

It Has an Achilles Heel

Enter my biggest qualm with the Misen: the heel. It protrudes, kicking out and stopping the rock-chop motion short. Since the blade has a strong curve, it makes it even more jarring when the heel suddenly hits the edge of the cutting board—it feels like the stroke is incomplete. This isn’t unique to the chef’s knife; I’ve tested multiple Misen knives and have had the same issue.

Another qualm: While I like a longer chef’s knife—I love the 8.2-inch Misono UX10—the Misen’s blade felt gangly. Paired with the protuberant heel, the cutting motion was stilted and off-kilter. I think this is because it has a slightly taller blade, nearing two inches at its tallest point. 

The Handle Was Comfortable 

Negatives aside, the handle was lovely: compact, sleek, and with a matte coating that made it easy to grip. It let me feel more in control and get good purchase even when breaking down a tough pineapple. Editor Rochelle Bilow, who has owned and used the Misen, concurs. “The Misen knife's handle is one of the best I've used—it's grippy enough that I can confidently chop and slice, even when my hands are damp,” she says.

The Verdict

The Misen sliced and diced neatly, cutting through onions, carrots, tomatoes, and hardy pineapple without hitching. I liked the composite handle, which had a matte texture that helped me get a good grip. However, I found the chopping motion stilted due to a long heel, wider blade, and sizable curve. While this is a decent knife, at $98, I think there are other, better, similarly priced options out there, like the Misono Gyuto. That said, if you want a solid stainless steel blade that’s easy to maintain, the Misen is a good choice. 

The Pros 

The blade was sharp right out of the box, and deftly chopped onions, diced carrots, sliced tomatoes, and peeled and cored a pineapple. I also quite liked the composite handle, which stayed grippy even when wet. It has a Goldilocks weight of 8.3 ounces—neither too heavy nor too light. It’s a good-quality knife for less than $100, and its stainless steel blade requires little upkeep.

The Cons 

The curve of the blade, its height, and the large heel made the chopping motion feel stilted. The heel hit the cutting board quickly during each stroke, halting the motion suddenly—I was not a fan.  

Key Specs

• Material: Santoprene and polypropylene handle, stainless steel blade
• Blade length: 8.25 inches
• Handle length: 4.25 inches
• Weight: 8.3 ounces

Why We’re the Experts

• Grace Kelly is a senior editor at Serious Eats.
• She’s been testing gear, including tons of knives, for more than three years. 
• For this review, she used the Misen chef’s knife to cut, slice, and chop a medley of ingredients and integrated it into her daily cooking routine.

Whether you’re investing in a buy-it-for-life piece of cookware like a Dutch oven or eyeing a specialty carbon steel wok, you’re in luck. The Amazon Big Spring Sale kicked off on Tuesday, March 25, and will run through midnight on Monday, March 31. It’ll be hard to resist the shopping itch over the next five days of sales, especially when cookware like our favorite Le Creuset Dutch oven, Tramtontina stainless steel pan, and Lodge cast iron skillet are all on sale. By the way, there’s editor-loved bakeware on sale, too (the best ramekins are just $2 apiece!). We managed, somehow, to narrow it down to the best 23 deals, which are up to 50% off.

Le Creuset Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven

Tender beans and ragù Bolognese practically stew themselves in a Le Creuset Dutch oven. Its flavor-building prowess is evident in many of our Dutch oven recipes. We’ve recommended it for years due to its impeccable heating ability and durability. We even knocked a metal spoon against the rim and it didn’t chip once.

Lodge 4.5-Quart Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven With Lid

For fall-apart pork shoulder on a budget, we like the Lodge enameled cast iron Dutch oven that’s able to achieve the same browning in braises but costs a fraction of the price. Right now, the 4.5-quart version of our Lodge pick is only $59. It also bakes crusty bread with impressive oven spring (I use mine nearly weekly for sourdough loaves).

Lodge 10.25-Inch Inch Cast Iron Pre-Seasoned Skillet

This $17 cast iron skillet from Lodge is a longtime winner in our books. It sears superbly and produces fluffy cornbread. From chicken piccata to crispy Brussels sprouts, this do-it-all frying pan lasts practically forever and is virtually nonstick—no fried egg messes here. 

Tramontina 10-Inch Nonstick Frying Pan

If you can’t part with nonstick (we get it!), we recommend you grab an affordable one since they need to be replaced every few years, anyway. This $32 Tramontina nonstick pan is super slick, easy to clean, and heat responsive.

Lodge Cast Iron Rectangular Reversible Griddle

A long stovetop griddle is the rare piece of cookware that actually reduces the amount of dishes you have to wash later. Instead of using multiple pans for a big breakfast, grab this Lodge reversible griddle that fits up to six pancakes at once. Use it to simultaneously cook eggs and sausages or flip it to grill crispy chicken skewers. 

Tramontina Tri-Ply Clad Stainless Steel 12-Inch Frying Pan

For $40, this stainless steel pan packs quite the punch. It can sear pork chops, sauté vegetables, and fry eggs without a hitch. The tri-ply construction conducts and maintains heat well while being responsive to temperature changes. If you don’t want to spend hundreds on stainkless steel cookware, this is the best budget pick.

Yosukata Carbon Steel Wok Pan

Be it fried rice, stir-fried greens, or eggs, this Yosukata carbon steel wok aced all our tests with flying colors. We love that it has a helper handle and that the long wooden handle stays cool while cooking. It also heats up lightning fast, boiling water in just nine minutes. 

Kyocera 12-Inch Ceramic Nonstick Fry Pan

For a non-toxic, nonstick fry pan option, we like the Kyocera ceramic skillet. Its coating survived a metal fish spatula without any scratches or chips. When we fried eggs on it, the pan was practically a slip-and-slide.

Staub Cast Iron 12-inch Square Grill Pan

This enamel cast iron grill pan from Staub has deep grill grates that impart impressive char marks on burger patties and zucchini slices. Available in an array of eye-pleasing colors, the pan’s sleek enamel makes cleanup a breeze.

Lodge 12-Inch Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet With Dual Handles

Some cast iron cookware is admittedly heavy, which is why this editor-loved dual-handled skillet comes in handy (pun intended). It provides more stability while carrying and sears just like our other favorite Lodge cast iron pieces.

Lodge Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Double Dutch Oven With Loop Handles

This bread oven is technically a Dutch oven, but when we tested it as a bread cloche, it earned high, crispy marks. Bread came out springy and golden brown, and the piece was lightweight enough to comfortably move into and out of the oven. The lid also doubles as a skillet, so you get two cookware pieces for just $49.

All-Clad Specialty Stainless Steel Fondue Set

If you’re looking to add a bit of whimsy to your kitchen, we recommend this absolutely splurge-worthy fondue set from All-Clad. It cooks over an open flame (lovely ambiance!) and the double-boiler design keeps cheese and chocolate creamy.

Le Creuset 3.5-Quart Enameled Cast Iron Signature Braiser

This cast iron braiser has shallow sides and a large base, perfect for cooking meatballs without overcrowding them. The cast iron sears foods to a crusty golden brown and the enamel resists staining and chipping. In our review, we called it "the Cadillac of braisers."

Weber Stainless Steel Vegetable Basket

With grilling season coming up, you’ll want a grilling basket for charring vegetables, seafood, and other delicate foods that might slip through the grates to be lost to the flames forever. This one from Weber is lightweight and chars vegetables beautifully. It also has curved handles that provide a stable grip.

Duxtop Whole-Clad Tri-Ply Stainless Steel Saucepan With Lid

This budget-friendly stainless steel saucepan might not rock your world, but it will be there for you every morning when you make creamy oatmeal. It simply gets the job done right, from making fluffy rice to browning butter. Its curved sides promote stirring for a smooth hot cocoa, too.

Emile Henry Made In France Flame Tagine

We spent 12 days braising meats in tagines to find the best one, and this Emile Henry tagine was our favorite of the glazed ceramic models. It cleans up quickly and can withstand higher temperatures, up to 500°F. The 3.7-quart capacity is also large enough to cook for a family without overcrowding food.

Cook N Home 16-Quart Stockpot With Lid

Every kitchen needs a large stockpot for cooking broth, boiling pasta, or making a crawfish boil. We firmly believe that while you could spend hundreds on a stockpot, it doesn’t mean you necessarily should. This affordable one, which is now even cheaper, excelled in our tests. It boils water at lightning speed, simmers flavorful stock, and has grippy rubber handles that protect your hands from heat.

Tamagoyaki Pan Square Japanese Omelette Pan

Do you ever get a craving for super soft tamagoyaki? We sure do. The Japanese-style omelet is best made in a rectangular tamagoyaki pan that’s designed specifically for cooking and rolling the egg. We love the balanced handle on this one, which has an inclined lip for scooching your omelet right off the pan onto a plate.

Dowan 4-Ounce Ramekins, Set of 6

We love ceramic ramekins so much, we have a love letter dedicated to them. They hold snacks, help with mise en place, and bake single-serve desserts. This set of six classic fluted ramekins is on sale for $12, bringing them to just $2 apiece.

HexClad Hybrid Nonstick 8-Inch Frying Pan

HexClad pans are a hybrid of stainless steel and ceramic coating. They deliver the sear of stainless steel while remaining nonstick enough for scrambled eggs. Some of our own editors have used HexClad cookware for years, and this 8-inch skillet is discounted for Amazon's Spring Sale.

USA Pan Bakeware 8-Inch Square Cake Pan

Make the best fudgy brownies and one-bowl coffee cake without worrying about any stickiness using this nonstick USA square cake pan. Its non-toxic silicone coating releases food without trouble and the aluminized steel bakes uniformly.

Nordic Ware 9-Inch Springform Pan

Never stress over cheesecake again with this springform pan that closes securely for a leakproof baking experience. The extended base provided a stable grip when transporting bakes and the nonstick coating resisted scratch marks when cut with a sharp knife.

Emile Henry Modern Classics Pie Dish

With all this warm weather, we can’t help but think of summer barbecues, which bring with them summer pies. If you’re looking to wow your cookout guests this year, the Emile Henry pie dish is the way to go. The slanted edges release pie slices easily and lining it with dough is a cinch.

FAQs

When is the Amazon Big Spring Sale 2025?

It’s happening right now! This year, Amazon’s spring sale event started on Tuesday, March 25, and will run through Monday, March 31.

What is the Amazon Big Spring Sale?

Think of it as a springtime Prime Day lasting seven days, when you can stock up on kitchen essentials and make upgrades for the new season.

Do you have to be a Prime member to shop the Amazon Big Spring Sale?

You don’t! Anyone can access Big Spring Sale deals, but Prime members get free shipping and additional member-only discounts. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial here. 

What other Big Spring Sale deals should I grab?

We rounded up the best Big Spring Sale kitchen deals to explore. Our finds include the best rigorously vetted cookware, appliances, kitchen tools, and more.

Why We’re the Experts

• An Uong is a writer for Serious Eats.
• An has been testing kitchen equipment for Serious Eats for over two years.
• She loves tamagoyaki and will most definitely be grabbing this tamagoyaki pan for $19.