FIVE THINGS TO EAT BEFORE YOU DIE

Starting a new entry so we can start collating the entries for the Must Eats Before The End.. Come on, the rest of ya! Wei's selection: 1) Sashimi at the Tokyo Fish market at 5am in the morning. I didn't watch all those discovery travel shows for nuthin'. 2) Special adult version chocolate chip cookies or brownies, like the ones they have in Amsterdam or similar, with an extra ingredient that I will not spell out in public. 3) Paella in Spain. Cos I want to go to Spain. 4) A meal at Tetsuya's in Sydney. 5) Fried chicken skin from one of the beachside restaurants in Krabi, Thailand. Incredibly addictive, forget the calories. Here's Gnat's Top Eats (though this one busted the limit of five in a big way) * Bebek Betutu at Crossroads Cafe in Ubud, Bali.This is a smoked/fried duck dish with plenty of Balinese spices stuffed into the lil un. It's considered a speciality of the island. We've had a couple of versions of this dish, even at the famed Dirty Duck restaurant which is supposed to serve the best version of the dish on Bali. Nah. Stick to Crossroads Cafe which is just a few steps away from the main market there. Oh, ps, if you're on that beautiful island, try out the babi guling too - roasted piglet. Yums.Well, you also have to go to La Luciola, on Seminyak Beach if you're in Bali and looking for a good meal. It's not cheap and its Italian fare, but hey, the restaurant sits on a beach and you can see/hear the tide crashing just metres away. 10 points for ambience, maybe 8 for the food now - still good, but it seemed better four years ago. * Cloudberries in Sweden. Fairly rare, since they only grow at certain times in the Artic. But we had these at a *gasp* Michelin Star restaurant in the town of Malmo, in the south of Sweden. They're small, yellow when ripe and a bit tart, sweet and bitter all at the same time. perfectly complemented the vanilla ice cream though - yes, it was real vanilla and hand-churned ice cream - all the lovely pod bits in the ice cream. Decadent but amazing.This restuarant also had this amazing cold soup with warm salmon bits in it. The melange of flavours and the contrast in textures, taste and yes, temperatures, was quite out of this world. * La Carbonara in Rome, Italy. This is a restaurant that's been around since 1912, and supposedly, came up with the original version of... you guessed it, carbonara pasta. This one was just coated with cheese and egg yolk - none of this creamy sauce thing that somehow became associated with the dish. Of course the extremely fatty pancetta - ham - bits were quite heavenly. Each small tiny piece glistened with a large layer of lucious fat. Yums.I can't show you what the dish there looks like, but here's a map of where it is, at least.PS: dress up. And nicely.They are all Italians dining in the restaurant, and they wear three-piece suits to lunch, and you really don't fit in with jeans and ugly jackets. * Real gelato from a gelateria in Italy. Preferably in a small-ish town, like Bolzano, where there ain't that many tourists. * Coke Chicken in Chiang Mai. I have no idea what this woman puts into the stuff but its a small stall near the night market. It's supposedly coca cola, but it's soooooo addictive (we kept going back repeatedly for this stuff in our four days there) that I have to wonder if its the other sort of coke. It's a spicy noodle soup dish, and I MEAN spicy, and the nice old lady and gent running the store cannot speak a word of English. But wha, must try it once before you die - definitely. * "Maguro Steak" in some suburb of Tokyo. Yes, it was tuna and cooked lightly in some sauce; fua.... eyepopping flavour in this absurdly small little place. It was recommended in the Lonely Planet - suspect because its the only one in that area that had a menu in "English" that you could point at to order and the proprietors didn't mind stupid Gai Jin walking in and fumbling up all the proper etiquette for food. I can't remember the name because I don't have the Japan Lonely Planet with me, and there's no way I'll find it on the Net. * Harbor View restuarant in Pepin, Wisconsin. This small little restaurant has fans who will fly in from New York etc etc just to eat there. It doesn't take reservations, just show up and take your chances. It also opens and closes at very specific hours. Its menu changes regularly - but what I had was simply superb. A friend had fish that melted right in your mouth, and I had a huge chicken dish. It sits right in front of the mighty Mississippi, but is in a town so obscure and the position so remote that you'll definitely need a GPS to find it. * Le Dalat in Bangkok's garlic king prawn. You get one prawn but man oh man is it big. And the garlic on top. Fuaaaaaaa. * Cow and Chicken pho in Richmond, Melbourne. It has a name, but this shop is better known for the cartoon characters it puts up in its window. The cow looks suspiciously like the laughing cow trademark used by a brand of cheese, but anyway, the beef in the pho is fantastic and the broth it comes with is amazing. Stuff in a couple of springs of basil, squirt lots of Siricha hot sauce - this garlicky chili sauce - and you've got a meal that you'll want again, and again and again. * This is a bit esoteric - but a "meal" to have before you die? Take a safari tour out into the plains of Botswana, settle down for sundowners, have some antelope jerky and a stiff, oh sooo stiff G&T. Eh, but some of the best things can be found here man! Once at least before you die: pig trotters at East Coast Parkway food centre. They sell out damned super fast and there's a looong queue. But good lah.