Of course, it is a well-known fact that there’re 35 lines in Jurmala, which, if you look at the map, dissect the town up to the sea.

But there’s one more behind them – a bonus/secret one – the 36^th.

Drive into the woods, in a car with no roof, through pines and bilberry thickets. The looping road takes you to the sea where you face the bay-parking lot packed with luxury cars. Back when the Wave was around, there was a full-on festival in here: Rolls-Royces and McLarens were hardly able to pass each other. Now, everything’s more democratic.

However, celebrities of various caliber are still hiding from the crowd of gawkers on the huge verandah of Lauris, the proprietor/owner. He knows them all by sight and name.

“Oh, what a fucking achievement – he knows everyone from TV and there’re lots of Rolls-Royces, aha!” you’d say.

Indeed. But, besides them, for some reason, it is also you whom he know by sight and whose name remembers. There was a friend of mine who came there in a year after my birthday party and he unmistakably arranged for her a dish of oysters “in the exact way she asked it last spring” (c) – so this is a true achievement.

Despite the luxury look form the outside, inside you’ll find some understandable, not very expensive, and, most importantly, a very tasty and honest food based on local produce.

Herring, beetroot, salmon, new potatoes, flounder, eel, sea buckthorn, orange milk mushrooms, venison, rhubarb, fennel, honeysuckle – all of them come together with minimal-style Baltic horizon views. What else to wish for?

The only thing that gets on my nerves are the huge portions. But it’s just impossible to stop chowing.

Just like that. A pot of Baltic sushi: half of a new potato, homemade herring on top, sour cream and green onion – goes perfectly well on the sly and with samogon (Russian moonshine).

Unstoppable.

Sea bass, deer, smoked fish with currants, all kinds of meat, and even the Caesar salad – nothing remains on our plates, no matter how much we order.

Oh yeah, of course, the local star: cold borscht with double yolk – it’s the shit!

The shit 2.0 is rabarber cake. Thanks god, it’s seasonal – because before you finish up licking the whole million kilocalories up to the last crumb, the waiter won’t be able to pull off the plate from you.

Do enjoy!

Oh yeah, Nepal certainly isn’t about the food. That is slightly truer than absolute truth. Of course, we can hold forth on the “enlightenment” (surprisingly enough, one actually does feel relieved right upon the arrival). Still there’s a need to eat and preferably to eat deliciously.

But there’s almost nothing to eat there. Ok, they have tasty mangos almost at every corner, also watermelon juice. But that’s it.

Yet there’s an alternative. Head to the mountains.

In the second hotel of Dwarika’s resort located at a two-kilometer height, packed with awesome views, milky air, wild yellow raspberry, which is as tall as a linden, fogs, sweet montane garlic and super swimming pool, where you get enough sleep for 100 years ahead and where the cats are silver, they’ll finally feed you really well.

The food isn’t complicated. Yet tasty. With no amendment to Nepal.

Everything’s local. As they say, all of it comes from the mountains: raspberries, yak cheese, chicken, herbs/spices.

Perhaps, this is the reason it tastes so damn good.

The pictures are attached as a bonus.

Do enjoy!

Those outside Japan usually believe that Japanese eat only sushi 24/7.

It’s approximately as true as the fact that bears in ushankas are walking around the Red Square together with Russians, who are skating there with vodka and pelmeni.

It can take really long to list all kinds of food that Japanese eat most. Perhaps, it’s ramen. Actually, there’s a great variety of Japanese food starting from gyoza up to shabu-shabu. Yet there’s a particular sort of event, which is very different from all the rest: Japanese haute cuisine – kaiseki.

Frankly, with all my maniacal love for Tokyo – this isn’t my thing.

This “parade-allé” consists of 20-30 micro courses, but the rule “everything on the plate is edible” isn’t fucking applicable in this case.  So, first you have to find out what is “food” and what is “aesthetics” on your plate, but then, even if you have done that, you aren’t insured against a bowl with alive baby fishes or some “fish feet compote” ™. Really, just not my thing.

It’s curious though!

Therefore, there’re light versions for “gaijins” ™. One of them is located on the third floor of ANA Intercontinental, where Japanese for the sake of beauty (you can’t enter there, just look through the glass, beautiful eh?) threw a garden, a pond with carps, sakura, maples, bridges and a waterfall – from outside you would never expect to find anything like that there.

It’s better to come for lunch. It’s safer that way.

And you’d better choose the set. There’re different kinds: sushi/sashimi/tempura/wagyu/etc. Everything’s strictly seasonal. What if, heaven forbid, they served you green soup in autumn or an orange one in spring – how vulgar (c).

All the sets, even those for lunch, look more like some kind of art installations than food. They don’t bring everything at once, there’re certain stages and zero extreme, so you kill two birds with one stone: it’ll be delicious, safe, beautiful and you’ll get to try the true Japanese food.

The quality of the produce is undeniable. Anyhow, the taxes and drinks are included in the price that is around 10K Yen per person. This isn’t expensive for such an experimental approach.

Do enjoy!

I spend a lot of time in Japan. And, of course, I try a lot of different Japanese food.

But marbled beef shabu-shabu was sort of not my thing: in the “beginning of my career”, having decided to play a gourmet, I had this solemn dish several times but the restaurant was never suited for such a purpose. I didn’t enjoy it and figured out that “cooking some vague meat on your own for 5000 Yen was way too much”.

So, I dropped it. For about 10 years. There’s plenty of food in Tokyo besides it.

But then my Tokyo friend took me to the target restaurant on the outskirts of Roppongi.

We enter a windowless semi-basement. The design is traditional Japanese. There’s traditional staff and traditional Japanese VIP-guests: a woman in kimono with accessories, who looks like the head of a yakuza clan, and men in suits, who look like some ministers.

The woman casts a bloodthirsty glance on us and the hostess takes us to a table away from all prying eyes.

Everything is expensive in the menu. From the first page up to ice cream. There’s a lot of everything. Not just meat. But, of course, that’s what you’re here for. And also for super melon.

Meat sets start at 7000 Yen, which is already immodest enough, and get up to the cosmic 30 000 Yen. And more than that – you get 3 pieces for these money, just like in the photos, THREE PIECES OF MEAT for $70-300.

Anticipating your outcry I shall immediately say: YES, IT’S TOTALLY WORTH IT!

This is a fancy restaurant. If you want to enjoy yourselves, make sure you have about $700 for two people (for a dinner with some simple wine). Just mentally write this money off so that you don’t think about it and don’t count anything. For you just to enjoy.

And indeed you will – if your taste buds don’t fail you.

There are two types of sets: kushiyaki and shabu-shabu – a grilled one and a boiled one. And it’s really weird but you should go for the boiled one. Yup, for some boiled meat in the broth. That’s it. Who would have thought?

The set consists of various courses: the meat itself, tofu/vegetables/mushrooms, noodles, and finally the broth in which the girls cook the meat for you right at your table.

There’s a gas cooker, a pot with broth (perhaps, it’s all about broth). A waitress-girl takes a lace-like slice of beef (I don’t go for the most expensive/the fattest one, I usually get something in the middle of the price range), and dips it for about 15-20 seconds in the boiling broth. You watch the fat being instantly melt as it releases the pure meat, and then she gives it to you.

YES, FUCKING PLAIN BOILED MEAT WITHOUT A THING.

When for the first time I skeptically put it in my mouth, I experienced a gastro-shock: instead of flavorless boiled meat something inconceivable exploded inside my mouth. I mean, it had sort of a concentrated meat flavor which was flowing over the palate in gradients, like a perfect model of the meat taste, like a beef simulation.

So I fucking sit there, befuddled and silent, and the sweet waitress is laughing in muted voice, Japanese style.

Just like this.

Oh yeah, there’s a specially bred super melon for dessert. All that has been said about the meat can be applied to this melon.

If someone ever tries to persuade you that marbled beef is “just for showing off and a waste of money”, be sure there’s a pretentious jerk™ in front of you or a person whose taste buds fail him.

Everything is not what it seems in here, just like almost everywhere in Nepal.

It’s a huge hotel. Half of it is located in a historic building, the other half in a sort of symbiosis of a Korean wedding hall – with granite floors and white walls – and a health resort of the CPSU Central Committee: endless corridors and uncomfortable interiors, many meters high halls that are flooded with cold white light, and fancy staircases. All that makes you wanna leave.

But all of a sudden: you push the door into the soft darkness, slightly stabbed by spot light, a panoramic fireplace is ready to be lit up, only a couple of tables are occupied…

You sit down. You read the menu that seems to be French. And all at once Nepal tunes in:

Chicken Kiev

Beef Stroganoff

Borsch with sour cream

WTF??! How come there be fucking borsch in the Himalayas?

The borsch was proper in the output – no pampushkas though, but sour cream came in a cup and dill was chopped. Chicken Kiev (I have to admit, it was very-very nice) was the size of a main dish plate…

Afterwards you finally find out that it was our ballet dancer Boris Lisanevich who opened Nepal to the world. Actually, the very same Boris’s signature dishes remain in the menu of the restaurant that he started 40 years ago. And as you know it, everything more or less falls into place.

However, at first a black man in a white shirt with a porcelain tureen and a sour cream cup, majestically floating through the dark hall in the middle of Katmandu, leaves an indelible impression indeed.

The rest is alright: steaks, salads, etc. Moreover, it looks really posh and grandeur if you compare it to the overall Nepal standards.

++ The Atmosphere – it’s terrific!

Do enjoy!

It’s a rare occasion when a place is not really about the food. Well, the food is tasty, “usual and tasty”™. However, by standards of Nepal, a country that doesn’t place much emphasis on gastronomy, it is very tasty indeed.

But it’s about something else. Namely, the teleporter.

Therefore, this is a complex service. Besides food, you get a very special mood, and that’s worth a lot.

You make your way through dusty (well, not all that dusty as they warned), tight, multi-colored, sizzling and beeping Kathmandu. Everything around is quite the same when suddenly, behind a huge brick wall in an arch with beige vases/fountains… something STRANGE flashes.

A window to Imaginary Europe.

There is a perfect garden. It has careful lines, a pond, a sea of flowers, cascade terraces, huge trees, and squirrels with striped backs. But it isn’t just a garden. There’s an incredible tranquility in the static warm air. You unplug slowly, and note by note everything sweeps out of your head. Pheeeewww, silence arises and feather grass quietly and slowly undulates inside your brainpan.

Couples are lying on the lawn that looks like a carpet, with flowers all around, in the shadow of trees. Someone speaks on the phone in French; in general, you can hear many different languages being spoken around in conversation. The whole scene looks absolutely unreal, reminiscent of the cinematic idea of an equilibrium future, if you remember the last luxurious quarter of London in the film “Children of Men”.

“Anton! Come on! YOU’RE IN FUCKING KATMANDY, IN THE HIMALAYAS! Look at the peaks above the trees, aha!”

Ok. Now about the food.

There is also, of course, a restaurant. At once you realize that the expats have built a nest for themselves in here. The menu has everything you might wish for, from Zagreb chicken to T-bone and Salade niçoise including Nepalese specialties. “There’s everything in there” (c).

Everything is of equal quality without any discoveries. But again, use your imagination and put yourself on this terrace in front of the pond, in the evening, with the squirrels flickering and birds chirping in static everlasting May air.

Really, do enjoy!

PS: Oh yes, ribeye is the most expensive dish (quite edible), $18.