How do places become engraved in our mind’s eye? It’s a question we pose as we unveil the results of The Readers’ Choice Awards. You, the readers, voted in your hundreds of thousands – for your ultimate hotels and your most-loved countries, cities, islands, villa fixers, expedition cruises and much more.
While a dream hotel is more than the sum of its parts, each person values certain aspects over others (whether that’s the charisma of staff or an obsession with room service). For me (like Proust, who was prompted into a “remembrance of things past” by the act of dipping a sweet petite madeleine into a cup of tea), it’s all about food.
Last year I spent a few days in Kasauli, in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, at Amaya, a 15-room hotel designed by the architect Bijoy Jain. The sun shone brightly but the air was crisp, cold and dry. Under tall pines and deodar trees, I ate one of the most exciting Indian meals I’ve ever had, a modern take on the Himachal Pradesh dham, a nutritious feast for special occasions prepared in an open fire pit.
Chefs Prateek Sadhu and Prerana Bandal placed each dish in front of us, explaining their origins and interpretation. They served pillowy rice balls stuffed with smoked trout; a terroir broth; greens and beans with cornbread doused with ghee; smoked boar with black sesame and chilli crisp; and fried rice with chorizo. Sadhu, deeply concerned with sustainability and authenticity, is part of a new generation driven to revive regional Indian cuisine.
I also spent some time at a homestay there: Mayascrest, run by textile designer and artist Usha Hooda, whose daughter built this sun-drenched mountain home for her, wanting somewhere for her mother to get over a long illness away from the pollution of the city. With no experience in architecture or design, she brought the outdoors in: sunrises and sunsets were a spectacle of light and colour; clouds seemed to enter and waft through the cheery rooms bursting with paintings, books and curios. I grew up in a coastal city and this perfectly matched my fantasy of the mountains.
In the afternoons, Hooda would make us a 20-minute cake with instant coffee, cocoa powder, condensed milk and eggs. The ingredients were by no means artisanal, but the taste was sublime. We ate it with cups of masala chai at breakfast, then again with cognac and whisky by the fire after dinner.
The scent of food permeates the pages of this issue: female Bahraini chefs’ modern spins on the Kingdom’s culinary traditions; a Melburnian cult restaurateur and her vegan steak nights; and the women changing the face of Scottish single malt. For those, like me, for whom food nostalgia and travel are intertwined, there’s a raft of future eating and drinking memories waiting to be created: more reasons to make places memorable.
Andrew Urwin
