Eat Your Heart Out

That first meal in the contemporary Art Deco dining room of L'Arpège in Paris was an education. I thought I hated eggs until Alain Passard's virtuoso coddled egg with sherry vinegar and maple syrup brought me to my senses. We ate so much salt-grained Breton butter that the waiter wrapped up half a kilo for us to take home. It was the first time we got ecstatic over a chive or truly understood that a tomato is a fruit.

L'Arpège has been around long enough that the sherry-maple egg and the stuffed tomato dessert are almost as iconic as the Eiffel Tower. But Passard's creativity is never greater than when he's reinventing himself. He once made his reputation for meats — meticulously pan roasted for hours on the stovetop instead of in the oven — then quit cooking red meat to focus on vegetables. A cauliflower en croûte gets carved up table side with the ceremony once reserved for the noblest roast beast.

Passard is the jazz sax minimalist of post-nouvelle French cuisine. His improvisations become instant classics; his menus play like concept albums. He has the culinary equivalent of perfect pitch.

St. John
London
After so many haute couture veggies, it's time for some real meat. Near Smithfield Market in London 's once-gritty Clerkenwell district is a Georgian town house formerly used as a smokehouse and the headquarters of Marxism Today. Its latest incarnation is St. John Restaurant, a bistro dedicated to offal, politely known as "nasty bits."

St. John's institutional chic dining room is part 19th century lunatic asylum, part abattoir. The menu reads like a butcher's list by Monty Python: chitterlings and dandelion, warm pig's head, venison heart, crispy pigs' tails, blood cake, deep-fried squirrel. This is no place for the squeamish. Even my husband, who grew up on boiled pig's snout, found braised spleen tough to swallow. The signature bone-marrow and parsley salad is one of the tamer and most delicious choices.

Culinary adventurer Anthony Bourdain of Kitchen Confidential characterizes St. John's Fergus Henderson as "George Washington, Ho Chi Minh, Lord Nelson, Orson Welles, Pablo Picasso and Abbie Hoffman all rolled into one." St. John attracts its share of macho eaters who talk big about yak blood and snake wine. It dares to charge City bankers $26 for pig guts. But it's also a wake-up call to a mad-cow world that has forgotten that there's more on the hoof than supermarket sirloin. It's hard not to acknowledge where meat comes from when it is staring back at you. St. John might make some people seriously consider going vegetarian, but it also rekindles the pleasures of going the whole hog.

Le Calandre
Padua, Italy
My pocket was picked outside the great basilica of St. Anthony of Padua, but the thief kindly left enough for dinner at Le Calandre. So on we went to the next stop on our Padua pilgrimage.

The most astonishing thing about Le Calandre is not that Massimiliano Ajalmo was the youngest chef to win Michelin's three-star ranking, but that he did it in such an unlikely location — the hilarious Hotel Maccheroni, a glorified motel decorated with dried pasta, on a suburban strip of faucet warehouses and commercial offices. It takes youthful bravado to cook contemporary adventure food in Italy, where everyone quite correctly insists that Mama is the best cook in the country.

The stars haven't weighed down the Ajalmo sense of fun. Like the family hotel, the kitchen doesn't take itself too seriously. The grand classics are light and lighthearted: a frothy cappuccino of squid in its ink, or maybe a perfect risotto jazzed with licorice or coffee powder. Alberto's birthday "cake" walked straight out of a Fellini fantasy. And after midnight, when the chef's own birthday celebration spilled out of the kitchen, everybody in the dining room joined in. Food good enough to make us forget the pain of a stolen wallet — and another birthday — is just short of a miracle.

Mugaritz
Errenteria, Spain
The Basque country surrounding San Sebastián, with its passion for seafood and proud gastronomic traditions, is one of Europe's tastiest places to get lost. Good thing, because most people searching the maze of hilly rural roads for Mugaritz probably will get lost, at least without night-vision goggles.

LUIS LOPEZ DE ZUBIRIA

BASQUING IN IT Aduriz is a key player in Spain's brave contribution to gastronomy

Eventually they'll come upon a stylish restaurant nestled in a hillside herb garden. Inside, Andoni Luis Aduriz cooks like a prodigy and talks philosophy like an enlightened zealot. His cerebral dishes play down the sci-fi pyrotechnics he learned at El Bulli in favor of a primitive, heartbreaking beauty. Plants long lost to gastronomy like oxalis, hazel and cucumberish salad burnet haunt Mugaritz's menu.

His food has a way of being both soothing and startling. A circle of teardrop-shaped peas glows pale green under a melting gel blanket scattered with purple blossoms. Sauces are often infusions, pure aroma in liquid state. Saint-John's-wort steeps in oil in the sun for a month before marrying a scallop in a puddle of leek chlorophyll. Funny how boiled date pits taste a lot like Pedro Ximénes sherry when poured over pillows of hand-smoked foie gras. It's like eating in a post-fallout Garden of Eden. These are the elegant meditations of an ingenious hermit, a refugee from modernity.

Beauty is always ephemeral, but food is the most fleeting art of all, and the most intimately mortal. You can't just buy a postcard or go to a museum. Right now, incredible meals are being cooked all over the world. They will all disappear by tomorrow, yet the lingering flavors of a truly memorable meal become part of us like no other cultural monument can.

That tower in Pisa has been tilting for almost 800 years, but it looks good to last a little longer. That masterpiece on a plate will not. Go on, eat it while it's hot.

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