NPR : Magazine Picks Top 50 Restaurants in the World

I am beginning to develop a theory - it's just a hint of a theory at this stage, you understand. But I am beginning to wonder if the sorts of people who go in for certain types of gourmet food aren't perhaps simply aged versions of the sort of little boy who sticks slimy creatures into the faces of little girls to see if they can gross other people out. Honestly, the sample menu provided in this write-up (use title link) on the restaurants recently voted Best in the World by Restaurant Magazine seems the sort of thing designed to create illness, not pleasure. Twenty mostly-gruesome-sounding courses and roughly $200 later, I can't believe you'd really be better off after the experience. I just can't. It almost has to be some sort of 'I can take this even though most people can't' sort of thing, the more I look at it.

Not that I don't like some semi-fancy food, mind you. I (ahem) developed an unfortunate craving for duck a l'orange during a period of my life where my job required me to have lunch with businessmen or do the occasional short public speech to civic groups. (Mostly along the lines of 'we have this really great program and we'd really like your help and/or money, please, thanks' sorts of speeches. Very character building, begging in public is...).

Anyone who has faced the daunting prospect of eating a whole or half duck in public will understand my dilemma, I think. That I was on the speaking occasions perched at the head table (on display as it were) when I was eating made it that much worse. And yet, there I was, faced with the choice of ordering something easy to eat - something that posed no challenge to coming across as a lady, in other words - or ordering duck with all its bones and sticky glaze, etc., and I rather perversely craved duck. Augh. It's like it was a curse or something. It didn't help any when I realized that every chef seemed to have a different idea of what duck a l'orange was, and it became a game to compare one restaurant's version against another's.

And then there's the recurring temptation, so far successfully resisted, to succumb to the moving images out of British classics and old films, and try to cook a goose for Christmas. But that's another story.

Use the title link to read the menu for Restaurant Magazine's favorite/favourite restaurant, The Fat Duck in Bray, Berks, England, and to see what the others are on the Top 50 list. (The top place would be a restaurant called The Fat Duck.)

For an extensive list of duck a l'orange, aka orange duck, recipes, see the Orange Duck pages at cooks.com. As of post time, there were 61 recipes listed, starting with The Governor of Wisconsin's Roast Duck with Orange Sauce.