When we are not on the road or travelling for our job, we are at home in Antwerp. One of the best parts of being home is that you can cook your own food, eat your own breakfast or dinner. When you want, what you want. Recently we got an assignment from Food & Wine Magazine to cook 10 easy & quick recipes from Grace Parisi and shoot the result.These 10 recipes are very straightforward and not complicated. They don’t break the bank and they are great for during the week or even when you are having friends over. Read more »

Slow Food is above all linked with its charismatic founder, Carlo Petrini, but from the very beginning, Vito Puglia equally pulled his weight. Twenty years on, this true pioneer doesn’t reside in a busy head office in northern Italy, but under an olive tree at his exceptional restaurant Perbacco in southern Italy. Only ‘noses’ and insiders know where it is. This restaurant is the playground of Vito Puglia, born and raised in Cilento, a little known region of southern Italy. Vito grew up to become one of the first pioneers and founders of the Slow Food movement. Read more »

Why go to an ordinary restaurant if you can taste the real Italian cuisine presented by a proper Mamma at her home? Thanks to the Home Food project every traveller to the land of la dolce vita can now experience a real, Italian evening in the company of a real, Italian famiglia. You can do just like us and pick any location in Italy, whether it is a town or even on the countryside and see if there is a mamma, a cesarina, willing to cook for you. Our Home Food experience is with Leda di Timoteo and her husband in the charming town of Sulmona in the hinterland of Abruzzo. Read more »

Escape Stockholm and get away from the city to taste the real Nordic food at David at Home. The Swedish chef David Enmark was tired of working in big kitchens and decided it was time to go back home. His house is located on Tranholmen, a quiet island with no cars where only 300 people live permanently. Read more »

In the old days they were smartly build wooden fishing installations battling with the fierce sea along the coast of Abruzzo. Nowadays these trabocchi are the most charming seafood restaurants in Italy. They look a bit alien with the silhouette of a giant crab walking on its thin, fragile stilts along the shores of the Adriatic coast. Most tourists in a hurry will barely notice them. Others travel from far away just to come and eat here. Tell any Italian that you plan to have some frutti di mare on a trabocco, and you are guaranteed to get many wide smiles. Read more »

The most promising chef in Europe might have Viking blood and long hair but he is nothing but a sheep in wolf’s clothing. To demonstrate, the 28-year old Magnus Nilsson of restaurant Faviken puts on his furry wolf’s coat before he heads out in the freezing cold of North-Sweden. Temperatures of minus 30C won’t stop this young chef or his kitchen team to go out foraging. Underneath meters of thick snow they look for fresh juniper branches, still green and aromatic and burried under the icy landscape of Jamtland. We’re talking mid-winter when the sun barely is seen above the horizon and subzero temperatures that make you quickly head for a warm place, preferably next to a roaring fire. Read more »

Life can be sweet, especially if you live in Antwerp and you swing by restaurant Het Gebaar owned by top-patissier Roger Van Damme. To set the mood, the restaurant looks like a gingerbread house found in the small botanical garden in the city centre of Antwerp. Van Damme takes deserts and sweet dishes to a new level and got rewarded for this with a first Michelin star in November 2010. This young chef has also a soft spot for Japan. It all began when he first visited Tokyo for a culinary get-together with ex-El Bulli chefs from around the world. Read more »

Close your eyes and imagine Empress Dowager Cixi roaming the century old dwellings of the Summer Palace in Beijing, Wurthering Hights style. If you don’t fancy Chinese concubines, then stay anyway at the magical Aman at Summer Palace, one of the most charismatic hotels in Beijing. This 51 rooms hotel occupies the former dwellings of the Summer Palace and offers a secrets door to access this famous World Heritage Site when “normal” (read: ten thousands of gymnastic, eating, singing and partying Chinese) visitors are not allowed to enter the park. Read more »

What is the strangest food you ever ate while traveling? Strange maybe for you but not for the locals who lick their fingers for a glass of brennevin and Icelandic rotten shark or plate of raw octopus just caught right out of the Med and slammed to death on the spiky rocks. For us, it all began with some percebes, or goose barnacles, in an empty restaurant on a beach near Sintra in Portugal. Read more »