Gourmet essentials
The rest is tourist. The rest (holidays, queues, towels and air conditioners, I can't with air conditioners in penguin mode) is feed for the chickens. The sad wheel of a happy hamster with his iPhone and his Zara gayumbos. Let me be honest: I hate tourists. A sincere, visceral and unbent hatred. An immaculate hatred and even with its point of tenderness if you look beyond the snub and the slap with the glove in the face of the summer hiker (that's right, you). You and your photo albums on Facebook in front of Machu Picchu and the Louvre. Well okay.
However, if LadyViolet I said that "I can be as contradictory as I please" I will not be less. So here are a handful of tips and tasks for the most recalcitrant enjoyment. Objective of this roadmap: get away and eat and drink and not look back.
A good travel bag. It seems obvious—well, it isn't. We talked about travel bags as God intended at the time Good Men : A good leather bag, whether it's a leather Vuitton Carryall (the 911 of weekenders) or any other brand that works with leather with care, if it's good it's worth what it costs and it barely depreciates over time. You don't have to spend three thousand euros on one. For the price of an iPad, you can have a more than decent bag that says "this guy takes care of his stuff."
A good travel bag, important
A handful of books. I'm not talking about recipe books (for God's sake) but about gastronomic literature, which there is. Wow if there is. Three essential works would be Parada y fonda by Víctor de la Serna, To drink or not to drink by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán or the Alexandre Dumas cookery dictionary. And to give you the gastro-hipster smarts: Marinetti's Futuristic Kitchen.
Journals . Paper. Ink and black on white. Sheets you can fold, scribble, and even use to wrap fish. Kinfolk is beauty, Fool (Swedish gastronomic notebook behind which are Lotta Jörgensen and her husband Per-Anders Jörgensen, photographer of Mugaritz or Noma) excellence and Apicius is avant-garde, the essential haute cuisine notebook published by Montagud editores since 2003 from the hand of Javi Antoja and Guillermina Bravo. Love for pittance on every page.
A camera, a notebook and a pen. And no, we don't use the iPhone and Evernote (which we love). A notebook - Smythson's are wonderful - to plant on the tablecloth and a pen with which to write down each idea, every essential dish and every suspicion . Software can never match the beauty (and immediacy) of the sound of the mine scratching a blank page.
A Michelin guide. Despite 50 Best (we have our buts), despite so many fantastic blogs that we applaud from here (such as Observación Gastronómica by our good friend Philippe Regol), despite the democratization of guides and the “dictatorship of the brother-in-law” of Tripadvisor. Despite everything: Michelin. The truly gourmet's bible ; the most independent, severe and timeless of the guides. The only one that will survive us.
A corkscrew. Without a corkscrew I don't leave the house.
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