Unusual Restaurants Around the World—A Retrospective

By Supriya Savkoor

I love this topic, even if I don’t quite know which restaurant to write about in detail. My first thought goes to…

… the fabulous gay bar in New York City where I spent my birthday, thanks to our de facto blogmate Lina Zeldovich and her big-hearted other half. It was 4 a.m. on my birthday, when they had the waiters belt out Happy Birthday to me, in between fabulous renditions of Broadway showtunes. What could beat that?

Oh…

There was the bottle of champagne we shared just before that at the revolving restaurant in Times Square, way up in the glittery sky, separated only by a piece of glass from the rest of Manhattan, where even the scaffolding looked glamorous. In front of us, the city; behind us, a fountain of chocolate, and in front of me, two absolutely fascinating people. (Did we really discuss both Thomas Pynchon and the Sierra Club that night??)

But then….

I remembered other offbeat places…

…another New York bar, this one called Hogs and Heifers, a country western bar in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, where patrons danced on the bar and sang Dixie to Dwight Yokum’s soulful crooning…

…a plain little joint in a Houston strip mall that served mighty tasty gator nuggets (as in deep-fried alligator meat)…

…a fast-food joint in Pune, India, called Burger King (no relation to  the famous franchise) that served perhaps my most bizarre meal, a subway sandwich with an extra long piece of tongue—cow’s tongue—stuffed between a standard subway bun, slathered with mayo...

…a tavern in the historic catacombs of Vienna, Austria, where the waiter brought out, hands down, the best bread I’ve ever tasted. He must have noticed we’d filled up on as much bread as we could eat, so he quickly whisked off our basket leftovers to the next table over. And we thought the skulls and broken kneecaps would make us lose our appetite.

…Zola’s bar for a nightcap after an evening of intrigue above the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

…the first class car of an Italian train, where hubby and I enjoyed a bottle or so of cheap but delicious wine just for the luxury of sitting in first class…

…an island restaurant in the Aegean Sea, where I ordered “grilled prawn,” only to receive the largest *deep-fried* shrimp I’ve ever seen—legs, head, tail, and all.

…Augustinerbrau, the monastery-tavern in Salzburg, Austria, where monks served us the local brew at a lovely outdoor picnic that was vaguely reminiscent of a July 4^th picnic in the States...

…the fancy restaurant in Genoa, Italy, with authentic pesto and a hole in the ground for a toilet…

And our favorite…

…Café du Nord, a hotel restaurant in Interlaaken, Switzerland. Exceptional in every way, from the fresh air and sounds of tinkling cowbells outside our window (hold the steak), to the fried raclette and complementary welcome drinks, rimmed with sugar, a great start to the most delicious meal I’ve ever had. I hardly remember what I ordered the two times I visited, though I still consider this my all-time favorite restaurant of them all.

Pearls, Princesses, and Perspective

Way back when my book idea first started taking shape, it took me a while to figure out how to frame it, even whether to write it as fiction or nonfiction. If it were fiction, I figured, it would probably be of the literary sort, because that’s mostly what I read back then, plus I knew I wanted to pluck interesting details from history and current affairs to layer my story. Then I stumbled across a unique mystery series by Sujata Massey, and it changed everything.

I wish I could remember which of her books I’d read first. It may have been Zen Attitude or The Samurai’s Daughter. I don’t remember now because after I read that first one, I devoured the rest of the series in a matter of weeks. The series follows Massey’s protagonist, Rei Shimura, a hip, twenty-something Californian with a Japanese father and American mother, on her adventures between San Francisco and Tokyo, two worlds in which she is equally comfortable, as she hops between jobs and love affairs across the continents. 

Along the way, Rei gets swept up in various intrigues, mostly involving murder, and readers get to learn about all kinds of interesting stuff—from antiquing, diplomacy, pearls, tropical storms, homophobia abroad, war crimes, age-old Japanese customs, and so much more. Massey’s writing is always a treat. I was sorry when in 2008, she ended her successful series with the tenth installment, Shimura Trouble. (On the upside, she has a forthcoming historical suspense novel set in India we can look forward to. Can't wait.)

I hadn’t read many mysteries before these, but soon I began devouring other mystery subgenres, such as police procedurals, cozies, thrillers, historical, and futuristic. And yet Massey's series still stands out. She featured a main character who essentially grew up in several cultures and so approached life and crime-solving from her own unique perspective. As a reader, I loved the ease with which her protagonist moved from one world to another and how Massey was able to cover so many elements through this type of fiction that I too wanted to write—cultural themes, obviously, but also generous dabs of historical context, societal issues, travel, and of course, lots of adventure and mystery.

It’s taken me a while to find other authors who bridge such cultural divides, but they’re out there. My favorites are the Scandinavian authors. Of course, most everyone’s heard about, if not read, Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s runaway-bestselling thrillers. But there are quite a few fine novelists from his part of the world whom you should not miss.

One of my favorites is Icelandic author, Arnaldur Indradason, and in particular, his book, The Draining Lake. It features a detective investigating a crime that connects two cultures I knew very little about—Iceland, of course, but also communist-era Leipzig, Germany. Don’t let the remoteness of either place put you off. It’s an incredible story that weaves readers between the present and the Soviet era and two fascinating cultures that will leave you wanting to know more about each of them.

Henning Mankell connects crimes that take place in his native Sweden to events around the world, using settings as compelling as China, Eastern Europe, and across Africa. Norwegian author, Karen Fossum, wrote a novel called The Indian Bride that I found especially intriguing because it gave me a balanced view on how rural Norwegians view both immigrants and India.

Another of my favorites is Lisa See’s fascinating Red Princess Mystery series. Her powerful, intricate thrillers center on a pair of main characters—one an ethnic Chinese raised in the States and another an American who moves to China—caught up in international intrigue. See weaves in cultural and political topics seamlessly.

What books have you enjoyed, mystery or otherwise, that gave you a glimpse into life in other countries?