He Ate Well

Jamaica: Jerky's Jerk Chicken Shack

I cannot explain why it took me 42 long years to visit Jamaica (okay, I had an excuse during childhood). What was I thinking? A film festival invited me in the last minute. The call came in on Friday, I flew down on Saturday morning for two nights in Negril. Short, yes, but it did the trick: I was smitten.

On the way to my hotel from the Montego Bay Airport I made my driver a proposition: I'd buy lunch if he took me to a real-deal jerk chicken shack, sans tourists. He was game, and deftly navigated a 20-seat minibus - with me the only passenger - into the tight parking lot of Jerky's.

I ordered the chicken combo with "festival," a lightly sweet deep-fried cruller the size, shape and color of a Hostess Twinkie, stuffed with chicken meat. We proceeded to a long open counter to pick up our order. On the other side a cook in a red tee-shirt and dark sunglasses, and heavy beads of sweat glistening on every exposed square centimeter of his skin, worked a wood-fired grill. Chicken quarters spiced with ginger, thyme, nutmeg, allspice, and fiery Scotch Bonnet peppers sizzled, covered with a sheet of corrugated metal. The tenderest pieces rested on branches perpendicular to the grill, to prop them away from the flames. A sign explained that jerk chicken was good for your health -- and "peppers were the right food for people seeking a nutritional diet." That may be, but as I bit into the spicy, red-colored meat that delicately fell off the bone, I had other, more sublime, thoughts.

Barcelona: Catalan Cookin'

I just visited Barcelona to write a piece about taking a family vacation there. I traveled solo, but imagining my reader - spouse and cheerful kids in tow - I filled my trip with touristy to-dos: bus tours, walking tours of both the Gothic and Modernist quarters and visits to Gaudi's magnificent buildings, cathedral and gardens. I had a blast.

I could, however, stomach just one museum, the old royal shipyards, where Aragon kings built galleys to conquer the Mediterranean. My audio tour said slaves on these boats were chained to their oars for months; it was so bad, the narrator noted, "you could smell a galley two miles away, even before you could see it." Okay, let's talk about the food.

Like other oft-visited cities, like New York, I knew Barcelona existed in parallel worlds: tourist city and real city. And like New York I knew there were "real" neighborhoods outside of the traveler's orbit, and areas where both shared the same physical space. I found authentic, wonderful restaurants and shops across the city, tourist area and not. Here are a trio of favorites:

Lunch: At the Office of "Spa China" Magazine, Shanghai

Back before the Economic Miracle, companies and factories in China catered lunch for their employees as a matter of course. Peddlers arrived with stacks of tin buckets filled with freshly cooked, homey fare. Workers gathered to munch, gossip, kibitz, laugh. In today's Shanghai -- home to the latest Jean-George restaurant -- this quaint ritual has gone the way of the Mao jacket. Well, almost. My friend Fifi Kao, who runs Spa China Magazine, invites her employees to lunch together every day. The tin canisters are gone; now the meal comes in clamshell Styrofoam. You tear the white rectangle in half, one side for the rice, the other for the cooked food. But notice which staff stops to eat, which works through lunch.

Here's how Fifi described it: