This is what the Defector staff enjoyed eating in 2024.
Lobster Bisque Infused With Crab And Cheez-Its
Soup is something that you look at with disdain in your youth, mostly because your systems are so adaptable that you could eat preschool Legos in syrup and not even notice the pain at the end of the process. In time, though, you find out that soup can be just about whatever you want it to be—from the misery-at-the-bottom-of-the-pan dregs of a cheap ramen to Empress gin-and-tonic minestrone, depending of course how you view vegetables drenched in cry-for-intervention alcohol.
Here, the discovery of choice is lobster bisque, a modest enough entry in and of itself unless you model the finest lobster-based food trucks in the world and dump huge chunks of actual lobster in the soup to start. We mention this because as you doubtless know, you are not sociopaths like our Chefector comrades and aren't making the actual soup yourselves. You're strictly on the demand end, and your culinary intervention must surely be minimal.
Still, you want your soup to stick to the ribs of your neighbors, so we scrape in an indiscriminate hunk of crabmeat to make it a seafood festival, and in lieu of oyster crackers in a low-grade attempt to make it seem like clam chowder, a smattering/fistful of smoked cheddar Cheez-Its. These provide important levels of heft and disapproving looks, plus those two vital food groups: artificial orange coloring and thiamin mononitrate. In other words, this is best eaten when your loved ones, friends and associates (presuming you have any) are all safely S.E.
Somewhere Else.
We have no idea where this bowlful of liquefied spackle lies on the nutrition scale, but it heats easily enough and will carry your appetite through the dangerous post-dinner snacking hours, so if you're not getting enough nutrients on the front end, at least you're not eating Froot Loops out of the box for dessert. Small victories. - Ray Ratto
Tamale At Regards
I like trying new things, but not quite as much as I'd like to like it. When we make dinner at home, I enjoy going back over things that I know I like to cook and eat, because I enjoy them and because I want to see how good I can get at making them. It's also not especially novel, and in some sense is probably just a jumped-up middle-aged-guy version of a little kid demanding dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets for dinner every single night, with the obnoxious aspect being my insistence on rating the flavor and presentation of tonight’s nuggies versus yesterday's. "A bit more piquant this go-round, maybe," I mutter from my high-chair, nug fragments clinging to my bib. "But overall quite nice."
The average weeknight dinner means more to me than it should, for reasons that I wrote about here but also because I am an idiot. I take our comparatively infrequent dinners out probably too seriously, too, but in a different way. I like to be tricked, there, to enjoy something that is the product of more craft and more time and more work than I am capable of doing myself. Again, I am aware that there is something of a little kid clapping his jelly-covered hands together in a high chair to all this, both in the abstract and honestly also in practice. When we went to Regards, one of our favorite places to eat in Portland, Maine, a few days before Christmas, there was a very mild struggle between wanting to order the stuff we’d had there back in July with whatever seasonal ingredient tweaks had been made in deference to the fact that it was 80 degrees colder on the day of this visit than our last and wanting to try some stuff that we hadn't gotten before. A restaurant this good will tend to present that problem: You know enough to trust that whatever they do is going to be great, but you (and, more to the point in this case, we) also have been thinking about whatever it was you had there during your previous visit more or less since you left, and would please like to eat it again as soon as possible.
We split the difference, which is why I can report that the same magic trick has now worked on me twice. I don't even know if the tamale is my favorite thing that I've eaten in either of those visits—in the summer, it was probably a simple-seeming prawn taco, and last week it was definitely some astonishing skewers of grilled maitake mushrooms, a totally vegetarian dish that was the most satisfying meat-eating experience I had all year—but it is the one that has left me most happily baffled and snowed by the amount of technique and attention and flavor at every level and in every bite. It both is and isn't showy—a yielding and flavorful little masa pillow served over a molé and under a cream of cotija cheese, an artful small plate on a menu full of artful small plates. But on both visits it has left me and my wife doing everything short of hooting and high-fiving, and not really very much short in either case.
Even going in with the foreknowledge of what we were getting, it was astonishing and delightful just how much was going on in every corner of each bite. There are things we get at restaurants that inspire me to try (and try, and try) to make them at home, or at least to take some lesson to heart in cooking the stuff that I try to cook, and then there are ones that I can only admire—an idea I wouldn't have, executed with care and craft I can't touch, in a way that is both satisfying and incomprehensible. At home, I want to get as good at the stuff I know how to do as I can get; at restaurants, I am happiest and most awed getting something that I could not make and would never have thought of even trying. This is the thing that astonishes me about high-level cooking, the ways in which flavors wind up in different spaces or levels, and in these startling conversations with each other. There’s no lesson for me to try to learn from it, which is kind of humbling but also kind of a relief. I’m a house painter looking at a Monet. All you can do is clap. - David Roth
Ganjang Gejang
Raw crabs, dunked in soy sauce and garlic and chili and ginger, left to bathe there forever, then served cold. That's the theory of ganjang gejang, my favorite dish in Korean cuisine. Before I found it, I had yet to eat a crab that hadn't been boiled or fried. I wasn't even aware that they could be coaxed by salt and time into something this subtle. Rather than using heat to shock the crab flesh into a white and flaky texture, the salt in the marinade patiently infiltrates it, breaking down its resolve, softening it into a translucent and umami-rich goo that looks lush on a steaming hill of rice. Imagine if a whole entire crab shell was filled with an even, sweet flesh—in the neighborhood of uni, but less fussy, simpler and more abundant and more amenable to seasoning.
For those who enjoy the meditative process of eating crabs, you get that here, too. The only difference is that instead of forking out the discrete flakes and hunks of crab, you spoon up and squeeze that smooth flesh out of its shell. Grab a crab leg and do unto it as you would a toothpaste tube. You can get in a briny flow state spelunking every joint and crevice, because every remote part of the crab gets infused by this spa soak, and is vastly improved by it. I've never been all that stoked about tomalley in a boiled crustacean, but even that stuff becomes sublime after it has done its time in this marinade. It doesn't seize up and get pasty, but instead relaxes it into something as creamy and savory as yolk. Put a few spoons of rice directly into the carapace and mix it up with all that good stuff.
Over two weeks in Korea this summer, my father-in-law and I explored the upper bound of survivable sodium intake by eating many of these crabs. I'd had ganjang gejang a handful of times in the U.S., but it had never been so cleanly and confidently executed. I swear we didn't seek the dish out daily, and yet when we were halfway through our dinner, more often than not, those incriminating crab shells were sitting there, quartered and eaten clean. It didn't get redundant, either. By tweaking the components of the marinade, you get a slightly different dish. Sometimes the sugar and the brightness of apple or pear pierce through the salt and it's springy, almost lively. Sometimes it turns dank and dark with a headier soy sauce, plus ample slices of green chili and onion. Always you get some interplay of sweet, salty, spicy, funky that is unlike any other crab you've met. What I'd give for some of that goo right now. - Giri Nathan
Anthony's Pizza
It's fitting that for the last restaurant meal I ate with my dad, we went to my favorite pizza place on Earth. It was the middle of the day on a weekday. No one else was in the main dining room. We got the special: pepperoni, mushroom, and sausage. It was as good as it ever was. There's not much about Connecticut that I'm all that nuts about but, on this afternoon, I got to enjoy the two things I love most about the state: my folks, and that pizza. I’ll always smile when I think about that lunch. Love you, Dad. - Drew Magary
Houjicha Kakigōri
This October, I spent a weekend in Providence at a hotel just a few blocks away from what immediately became my favorite tourist attraction: Maruichi Japanese Food & Deli. The store had exactly what it advertised: groceries, snacks, and a little deli surrounded by wooden tables. My partner and I ate here every day, and each time we stared at a promotional flier stickered to the deli counter, advertising kakigōri, a kind of Japanese shaved ice, made with Kuramoto Ice. I have eaten many shaved ices in my life, but none had ever advertised the origin of their ice. It seemed a little excessive, I thought, to import ice all the way from Japan! But the image of the ice on the flier was so alluring and decadently fluffy. The first two times we ate at the grocery store, the timing was not right for kakigōri—we were either in a rush or had arrived just before closing. But one afternoon, we knew it was kakigōri time. We asked for the yuzu, but they had sold out, so we opted for hojicha. When our shaved ice emerged, it erupted from its bowl like some frozen cathedral topped with a swirl of whipped cream. The toasted nuttiness of the hojicha was a revelation paired with the pillowy shards of ice, drizzled with sticky condensed milk. We split the whole thing and debated ordering another, perhaps a new flavor. Mango sounded good. But we had dinner plans and didn't want to spoil our appetites, so we left. When we returned late at night, Maruichi had closed. On our last morning, we swung by Maruichi to pick up food for our Amtrak back, and I had to remind myself one could not carry a heaping half dome of shaved ice on a 20-minute trek to the train station. The next time in Providence, I'm scheduling my daily shaved ice in advance. - Sabrina Imbler
Omakase
I have been putting off writing about sushi for as long as I have been working with my current band of idiots/super-talented coworkers. One of the first things they learned about me was that I hated sushi. This was a hard-earned hatred, in my defense. I had tried a variety of sushi … things (you will learn in this blurb that I do not know much about sushi, sorry!) and never found it appealing. I just accepted that this was something that I wouldn't like; I wouldn't say I’m a picky eater, because I'll try whatever at least once, but I am definitely a stubborn eater, and rarely change my mind once I don't like something.
And then I tried an omakase. My partner loves sushi, and for her birthday in 2022, we ended up going to an omakase in Queens that had as much of a shot of converting me as anything else. Sushi On Me is, from what I can gather, not a typical omakase place. It is silly and loud and features all-you-can drink sake, as well as what I would consider "weird" courses. My friend Avery had mentioned that she went to Sushi On Me and loved the experience, and I figured even if the food didn't quite hit for me, at least I could get a nice buzz while listening to Pitbull and LMFAO at ear-splitting volume.
Something strange happened, though. While I did get a nice buzz and also listened to those artists plus Limp Bizkit's Mission: Impossible theme, I found that most of the courses were pretty simple and up my alley. Here's some fish, here's some rice, have fun. I was shocked at how much I enjoyed that 2022 trip, and more so that the experience was just as good when we went back for my partner’s birthday in 2023. This had become a tradition I never saw coming.
By her birthday in 2024, we had moved to Philadelphia, and there was no Sushi On Me to fall back on as an easy birthday dinner option. Still, there were plenty of omakases, and after some research, we settled on Kichi. While not at all the same vibe—whereas Sushi On Me is proudly obnoxious, Kichi was more reserved and, for lack of a better explanation, more grown-up—the concept was the same. A lot of fish, a lot of rice, and a lot of sake (in this case, it was BYOB).
While I had fun at Sushi On Me almost independently of finding out that I did like some sushi (sashimi? Again, not great with the terms), Kichi blew my mind with the food first and foremost. It made sense; in not spending too much time worrying about the rowdy experience, Kichi seemed more laser-focused on providing an excellent meal, and though I can't remember much of what we ate—I did have some eel sashimi, and loved it so much that I will now get it from Japanese restaurants alongside my traditional sushi-hater dish of steak teriyaki—I do remember immediately making plans to come to Kichi again, and maybe more frequently than once a year.
When my dad was in town for my birthday in June, I decided to return to Kichi with him. And you know what? It was even better! Maybe I am just adapting to liking sushi as I try more and more of it, or maybe it was just a better chef on a better night, but in about two-and-a-half years, I went from someone who jokingly threatened to blog "Sushi Is Bad" on a slow day at Defector to someone who looks forward to what I hope will now be biannual visit to Kichi for as long as I live in Philadelphia (and as long as it stays open; I am doing my part by not gatekeeping the name). I still won't eat whatever a California Roll is, though, and my taste for sushi (sashimi???) is very basic, but who knew that combining two things I love, fish and rice, into a fancy presentation and ritual would be a hit? Actually, I think everyone but me knew that, but I'm glad to have finally figured it out. - Luis Paez-Pumar
Poutine In Montreal
The train from New York to Montreal can feel like the Polar Express if you take it in winter (or, uh, April), but unless it runs perfectly on time, it can also be a real drag. Particularly after crossing the Canadian border, that hunk of metal crawls. There was beauty in the glistening white voids out the window, but when we finally reached our destination, I was itching to get to the hotel, drop my stuff, and hurry to the nearest poutinerie. I hustled stomach-first through the pretty rues on a quiet night until I reached Dunn's, a mostly empty diner that had the closing minutes of the Canadiens loss on TV. In the mood for some heat, I got the buffalo chicken poutine and read Dune while I waited.
The smoked meat poutine I got at La Banquise two days later might have been superior, but nothing can compare to the way I inhaled my first Montreal meal. Poutine is the perfect treat for the weary—salty, fatty, savory, special—and it was extra decadent when the traditional fries, gravy, and cheese shared space with spicy chicken in the plastic red bowl. Heaven is a diner in an unfamiliar city. - Lauren Theisen
Eggs On Eggs On Eggs, At The Modern
I am not generally a fancy-restaurant guy. It's less a question of being frugal than it is of being easily satisfied; I am perfectly delighted by a well-made diner cheeseburger and will talk about it for weeks. But on the occasion of a round-number birthday, I found myself at The Modern, a two-starred restaurant overlooking MOMA's sculpture garden and offering a $275 prix fixe that featured Eggs on eggs on eggs, the joint's signature dish. The titular eggs would be: a poached egg and sturgeon caviar, sitting in a fried egg sauce. You might say, That's a lot of eggs, and it is a lot of eggs. You might think, That's too much eggs, and you'd be wrong. It is the exact right amount of eggs to create something that's balanced in saltiness and sweetness and drowning in fat. It is high-class goop. It is decadent; Caligula would've loved Eggs on eggs on eggs; he might've made it consul.
It remains intensely annoying to me any time something prohibitively expensive proves to be worth the money—I would much rather go on pretending those grapes are sour—but this eggasm is the sort of dish that explains why places that serve them exist in the first place. - Barry Petchesky
A Sri Lankan Lunch In London
In January, my mom and I went to London for a week—nominally for her work, but really to investigate the city's claims to unmatched Indian food. Claims: verified. We encountered tasting menus! Elaborate cocktails! Variety! A far, thrilling cry from the yummy but boring Mughal fare served at most Indian restaurants in the U.S.
On my own for a late lunch one day, I stepped out of the cold and into a cozy Sri Lankan restaurant packed with straggling office workers. A pot of Ceylon tea warmed me up fast. It dawned on me, as I bit into a crispy vada-like banana blossom fritter, that Sri Lankan cuisine bore a strong resemblance to the South Indian food cooked by half my family. I drenched big slabs of rice in a thin pumpkin curry, small piles of mustard seeds floating in its bright orange pools of oil. The meal came with a side of chopped green beans stir-fried in curry leaves and shreds of dried coconut, which I spooned atop my rice. Here was South Asian food as I loved it best: not in separate courses plated finely, but mixed into one perfect, hearty bowl of lunchtime slop. Mmmm. - Maitreyi Anantharaman
Sweet Potato Ice Cream
Few things in life live up to billing. Maybe it's me. Tell me how miraculous something is before I get around to experiencing it—a movie, an album, childbirth, etc.—and chances are real good that when I get around to it I'm only gonna pooh-pooh it.
Counterpoint: the ube ice cream at the UDairy Creamery in Newark, Del.
I got my first taste in late October. I'd been hearing about the purple sweet potato–flavored ice cream with vanilla wafer pieces sold at the student-run cafe for a couple months by then, ever since my kid started his first semester at the local university. He gushed more about his dessert discovery than any other part of his college experience. I had been eating well and had skipped sweets after he left home for school. But when I visited him on campus on the way home from Defector's Atlantic City retreat, he advised me to break my treat fast. I'm so glad I followed his guidance. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a new-to-me food as much. Talk about love at first bite!
I'm not good enough with words to convey just how delicious this stuff is. But my boy was so sure I'd fall as hard for ube as he had that he captured our introduction on video, so I can show you with pictures. Watch below.
"Damn!" indeed. I want more. - Dave McKenna
French Butter
At some point in November—either during the dread of what was to come or its arrival, who can be sure—a friend gave me the best advice one person can give another about France: Just eat all the butter. Specifically, she told me to go to a fromagerie, buy butter, and put it on bread. That's it. Don't do anything else, she said. Don't put more stuff on the bread, and don't try to get creative with the butter. Just butter on bread. She recalled eating French butter on French bread as one of her happier memories of Paris.
Like a good reporter, I listened and took notes. I bought a baguette at a boulangerie and French butter from a grocery store—which I know is not ideal, but they still had an impressive selection—then carried them up the four flights of stairs to my Paris apartment, cracked open the bread, and slathered on the butter. Was this a work of fine dining? Hardly. The butter application was, to be polite, uneven. The baguette looked torn apart by hand, because my own hands had done just that.
I stood there, a mouth full of bread and butter, and told my husband this was possibly the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. Because I'm American, I said this with food still in my mouth. (Because he's vegan, he did not partake. His loss!)
This became a running theme between me and my friend over the month. Everything is horrible here in the U.S., she would tell me, but please tell me you are eating all the French butter. Oh don't worry, I'd reply, I am eating my weight in butter. I probably did.
The internet is full of writing about the superiority of French butter, all executed by writers far smarter on the topic than myself. Even Wikipedia has weighed in and agreed that the French are better at butter. It's quite likely that you, the reader, already knew this! I can't pretend this is anything other than a new-to-me moment. But every time I would sit around and happily chomp away at the buttered baguette, I would marvel at its delicious simplicity. Not all progress needs to be forward, and perhaps not every invention is the magical one that will elevate humanity. The robots will talk and the cars will drive themselves soon enough, but those advances will never replicate the simple pleasure of le beurre français. - Diana Moskovitz
Chinese Breakfast
What I miss eating the most from my three weeks in China is breakfast, and I rarely eat breakfast. I've written before about my favorite category of Chinese breakfast that also happens to be readily available to me, but being in China contextualizes the rest of it: unsummarizable and highly dependent on one's regional occupancy, but almost all better than American offerings, and that's speaking as a New York–New Jersey bagel supremacist.
If there exists a summary of Chinese breakfast options, it'd be the hotel offerings, which don't necessarily reflect regional tendencies of the cities (Beijing, Qingdao, Shanghai) but do offer a variety. An incomplete list of the available food: There is always the aforelinked dynamic duo of youtiao (fried dough) and doujiang (fresh soy milk, for dipping or drinking or tea-making, sweet depending on your taste). Occasionally there is doufunao. There is usually a selection of classic American breakfast staples—bacon and/or ham, eggs, fruit, yogurts—and Chinese carb staples—meat baozi, mantou, sweet potato, shanyao, scallion pancakes. There is sometimes Yakult. And, most importantly, there is always a noodle station, where a cook will, on order, boil your choice of noodle with a simple broth, and give you the opportunity to add other condiments and toppings to your discretion: various vegetables, soy sauce, black vinegar, sesame oil, cilantro, thinly chopped strands of fried egg, and the necessary trifecta of chili oil, scallions, and zha cai.
The issue with having spicy soup-based dishes for breakfast is that it's hard to go back. The hearty breakfasts we ate at our family's places were good substitutes. There we had some selection of carb staples of sweet potato, gao (basically baozi filled instead with sweet, chewy filling made from glutinous rice flour and water), millet porridge, jianbing, scallion pancakes, and dumplings; along with a variety of dishes, either leftover or freshly made, like celery fried with pork, shredded carrots with rice vermicelli and some of the most potent garlic you'll try in your life (Shandong garlic hits different), fried flat fish (not a technical term; I still don't know what type of fish it was, done in by the one-two punch of proper noun translation and regional terminology), and shrimp; eggs; various simply fried vegetables. And one can never deny the layered carb-in-carb appeal of street breakfasts like jianbing guozi, which can, on occasion, supersede the desire for something spicy and soupy to start your day.
But the simple bagel and cream cheese, or even a more complex protein-enhanced breakfast sandwich, is not even fighting in the same division as a bowl of noodles or, especially in Shanghai, wontons. Wontons! And noodles! For breakfast! Forget about being a breakfast person—if there were a breakfast place within walking distance where I could order a bowl of noodles or wontons at the front, pay, then sit down at a table (possibly across from a stranger I will not speak to), receive my food, and then eat, all easily within the span of 20 minutes, I'd even turn into a morning person. - Kathryn Xu
Ramen At Pickerel
There's a tiny ramen place in my neighborhood in Providence called Pickerel that's so unassuming from the outside that it took us months to finally try it out after moving here. Ramen is like pizza: Even bad ramen is still pretty good. But people raved about Pickerel, so one evening we put our names in and waited at the bar across the street until they had a table ready. What I consumed after was nothing short of a MASTERPIECE. We started with fish fritters and then each got a bowl of ramen that was topped with chashu pork that was so tender, it was practically liquid. We got a blondie with corn ice cream for dessert that I still think about. It is now the only place I want to eat. - Alex Sujong Laughlin
Tsi'ikbil Wakax At Ix Cat Ik
There is absolutely nothing I love more in the world than to go out to dinner. In all the dreams I had about being an adult who lived in a big city, I was out to dinner: reading a book at a bar while eating a delicious dip, laughing across a table while a martini sloshed all over my hand. Sometimes, now, when I am out to dinner with a group of friends and something magnificent has just hit the table, I feel a rush of emotion. I am so lucky to get to eat out, to be an adult who can afford to eat out in an era when American dining has maybe never been better, to live in a place so rich in food.
My runners-up list is obscene this year. Everything I ate was so good. I ate delicious, crunchy, nutty hispi cabbage at Kubri in Paris. Jasper and I ate the opulent salad at Via Carota. Alex, Rachelle, Se'era, and I split a smoky mozzarella at Nowon Bushwick that was to die for. There were perfect clams casino at Angeloni's Club Madrid in Atlantic City. I shoveled a fresh poke bowl into my mouth on the north shore of Hawaii and a perfect stuffed tomato at Chez Denise in Paris. I was surprised by homemade saltines at Holeman and Finch in Atlanta, and at home in Philadelphia, I ate just as well. I gobbled up the best cutlet I've ever had in my life at Palizzi Social Club. I devoured late-night opulent hot dogs in the summer at Royal Tavern and the delicious arancini my friend Liz makes at her restaurant Scampi, that are giant and have a shrimp hidden inside. If this all sounds like a brag, it's because it is. I had a great year eating. It was ambitious and exciting and filled with wonder.
In part, I wrote that last paragraph to remember all of my options, all the many incredible dishes that I ate this year that could have been in this top spot. The race was very close, and it is an honor to be nominated. On another day, in another mood, any of those dishes could have been the one I thought was best. But today I choose: the Tsi'ikbil Wakax at Ix Cat Ik in Valladolid, Mexico.
We went to Valladolid kind of on a whim. The trip was to visit my sister in Tulum, but we wanted to see Chichen Itza, which is a long enough drive inland from the coast that it felt worth it to stay overnight in the small city nearby. Valladolid is beautiful the way all colonial cities are: big town square, excellent esquites on the street, colorful buildings. We stayed in an obscenely beautiful hotel with a courtyard attached to a perfumerie, and for dinner we traveled across the city to eat at one of the only remaining traditional Mayan restaurants.
Ix Cat Ik is a big restaurant, and I imagine that during the high season it is very crowded with tourists and local diners. But because we went on a weeknight in the low season, it was only us and a few other tables. We were in a great mood: warm and relaxed and excited. We did not really know what to order, so we followed our waiter's guide and ordered too much. But the thing I remember best is the second thing that hit the table. Its name was Tsi'ikbil Wakax, and I loved it. There was a fried corn tortilla on the bottom made from fresh masa, and a pile of meat on top. The Mayan cuisine cooks giant hunks of meat in a hole in the ground topped with leaves and fire. We sat right next to the oven hole at our dinner, and the shredded beef on the corn tortilla was unbelievably juicy, melty, and beautiful. The dish is cold and the meat was still tender, interspersed with something crunchy I can't remember (a radish maybe, or a cabbage) and topped with plenty of lime and cilantro. It was so hot outside, and the cold delicious meat felt like a treat. I will remember it hopefully forever. - Kelsey McKinney
A Meal At Nektario's
I spent half of October in Greece and about half of that time period on Crete, a perfect horizontal strip of land situated roughly halfway between the Eurasian mainland and Libya. As Crete is an island, most of my time there was spent inside of or adjacent to the sea, eating various small and large fishes. That was great, as was every other part of the Cretan culinary experience. None of it was all that surprising to anyone with a passing knowledge of broader Mediterranean cuisine: olives in every conceivable form, crumbling massifs of cheese, enough yogurt to make Giri Nathan blush. But the best meal I had was the furthest from the sea.
While driving across Crete's rugged saddle from the populated northern coast to the sparser southern side, we stopped for lunch in a village named Askifou, at a sleepy little cafe called Nektario's, or, Νεκτάριος if you want to be Greek about it. It was 3:00 p.m., so we were the only people there to eat. A large Greek guy and two ornery cats greeted us, and when we sat down, the man went inside while someone we were to learn was his daughter came out to greet us. She told us that Nektario, the recently displaced lounging guy, was going to cook for us, and that there wasn't a menu and that he was just going to rock with it. He did, and it was perfect: a generous pile of macerated fava, hunks of oregano-crusted lamb, the reddest tomatoes I'd seen on the whole island, course after course until both we and the two cats were immobilized. If you are ever in the middle of Crete, go see Nektario and let him rock. - Patrick Redford
