Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski on the Meals He Still Thinks About
Antoni Porowski has one rule for finding good food in an unfamiliar city: look for a grandmother in the kitchen. “If it’s a little restaurant with six tables and you see a grandma back there cooking, it’s probably going to be damn good,” says the Polish-Canadian chef, model and Queer Eye star.
Food comes first on his travels, he told the BBC, with his itinerary built around meals rather than sights, and his best discoveries tend to come from simply wandering rather than following Instagram tips. That instinct drives his new National Geographic docuseries, Best of the World with Antoni Porowski, which takes him through London, New York, Paris and Mexico City. Here are some of the meals that have stayed with him.
In Maine, his pick is The Clam Shack in Kennebunk, home to what he calls his favourite lobster roll — half a lobster on a sweet potato bun, cooked in ocean water “so it’s beautifully salty.” He once drove five hours each way with his dog and two friends just to catch the seasonal spot before it closed for winter, following the meal with a stop for wild Maine blueberries eaten by the basketful on the beach.
A family trip to Warsaw with his father and partner Zach introduced him to the Polish version of steak tartare at Stary Dom, an old-school, folk-style restaurant. Hand-chopped rather than ground, he says, “the steak tartare there just melts” — and it doubled as his partner’s very first meal in Poland.
Mexico City delivered a “twofer”: chef Elena Reygadas’s restaurant Rosetta and her nearby bakery, Panadería de Rosetta. A guava pastry there left such an impression that Porowski — not usually one to repeat a restaurant — returned for three more meals during the same trip, eventually settling on Reygadas’s rosemary ice cream with an herb salad as the single dish he’d choose above all others.
A fleeting one-day visit to Paris during Fashion Week yielded just a single meal: soft scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and a croissant at the Hôtel de Crillon, eaten in a windowless, velvet-lined room he later learned was where Marie Antoinette once took piano lessons — within sight of the square where she was executed.
On Mykonos, a cash-only shack called Kiki’s Tavern, reachable only after an hour-and-a-half wait and a swim in a cove once used by Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, surprised him with an unlikely standout: a honey-glazed pork chop, grilled by the restaurant’s sole proprietor, Vasilis. “It was one of the best bites I’ve ever had in my life,” he says. And while filming in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna with actor Justin Theroux, the two shared a clay-baked guinea fowl stuffed with figs and lard at a small hillside hotel near Piacenza — a meal Porowski still counts among his most memorable.
Source: BBC News