Piedmont, Italy
Nestled in the north-west corner of Italy is the region of Piedmont, with rolling green hills that rise into secluded snowy mountains.
The region’s capital of Turin is a picturesque cosmopolitan city known for its superb chocolate makers, who put on a two-week chocolate festival every year in early spring. The area is rustic-glam, with village cottages and a host of intimate grandma’s kitchen-style restaurants.
Turin is also famous for wine production. The Langhe hills are home to two great wine-producing villages. Asti, a town of medieval ruins with 100 towers, is the birthplace of spumante, Italy’s fizzy white wine (an alternative to France’s champagne). Neighbouring Barolo produces robust, red wines from its small but scenic vineyard landscape. You can take various tours of wine cellars to
sample the tipples in this region.
Bra, located in the province of Cuneo, is the world capital of the Slow Food movement (slowfood.com), where Carlo Petrini founded the non-profit’s international HQ in 1986. With a focus on sustainable, quality food, the organisation has created a gourmet community built upon the region’s natural food products. Take a stroll through local farmers’ markets for some of the most eco-conscious produce in the world.
You can then head away from the villages into the countryside for a truffle-hunting adventure: the region is renowned for its white truffles (see the prize-winning one pictured), which feature on local restaurant menus nearly as often as olive oil.
There’s more to Piedmont than food, too – it’s home to the Italian royal family and was modern Italy’s first capital. When the capital moved to Rome in 1871, the region slipped back into a pastoral pace, and has since been regarded as Italy’s little secret, where Italians go for their own holiday.
In a region where the harvest festival gets crazier than Carnival, you can’t go wrong looking for memorable, high-class eats.
Fez, Morocco
A thousand-year-old spice trade has made Fez’s flavourful cuisine a thing of legend, and the food capital of northern Africa.
Couscous, beef, lamb, and chickpeas are staples of the cuisine, featured in the midday meal — the Moroccans’ main meal of the day. Traditional dishes are spiced to perfection, packed with flavour you won’t find anywhere else.
Eating a kebab never felt more posh.
Napa Valley, US
Known for its wine, California’s Napa Valley is a gourmet haven of local organic produce, prime meats and cheeses.
An hour outside San Francisco and its international port, fresh seafood is abundant in restaurants and farmers’ markets. You know it’s good when world-renowned chefs, such as Thomas Keller and Masaharu Morimoto, come here to open their own restaurants.
Singapore
Singapore tops gourmet-getter lists for great multicultural cuisine. Serving everything from barbecued stingray and chilli crab to fried carrot cake and sweet noodles, the Singaporeans are passionate about their food.
The island incorporates surrounding flavours of neighbouring Asian countries to create a truly unique cuisine, which features most prominently at open-air food complexes filled with more stalls than even our stomach can handle.
Lima, Peru
This coastal capital serves as a jumping off point to Cusco and Machu Picchu for many adventurers, but its unique ecological and climatic multiplicity makes it a destination for foodies searching for fresh produce and a diverse cuisine.
Foods from the coast, the highlands and the jungle combine in Lima to unfurl fusion dishes that draw on Andean, Amazonian, African and European techniques. It’s also believed to be the birthplace of ceviche.
