Away

Writing from the Road

Some stories don't fit on a menu.

The restaurants on this site are Reno-Tahoe's best. But the perspective behind them comes from somewhere larger.

For more than two decades, I have been chasing the world's great tables — from Osteria Francescana in Modena to the chef's counter at Frantzén in Stockholm, from the Clove Club in London to SingleThread in Healdsburg. I have eaten at more than 40 three-star restaurants on four continents. Not as a critic, but as someone who believes that eating well is one of the most sincere ways to understand a place and the people behind it.

That experience is why the Essential 20 exists. When I tell you a table in Reno is worth your time, it comes from someone who eats here because these tables are genuinely worth it — not because there's nothing better out there, but because great food doesn't require a passport or a reservation six months in advance. Sometimes it's a taco off a truck, or a bowl of scampi at a dive bar in Sparks on a Friday night.

This is where I write everything else. The Basque shepherds who came down from the mountains and built something that's still standing. The low-country cooking of Charleston — savagely good, stubbornly itself, impossible to forget. The meals in Stockholm, Tokyo, Modena and London that shaped how I eat and what I look for when I walk into any room, anywhere.

These are essays, not reviews. They are not all Reno stories. But they are very much part of the same story.