I’m cooking my first Thanksgiving dinner from start to finish on Thursday. What I’m thankful for this year: my guests won’t have to eat in front of the TV. After months of searching, I finally found the perfect dining table that fits my budget. I wanted it to be modern but made of rustic wood. Ideally, the legs would come off for easy transport. Like the answers to many New Yorkers’ prayers, I found the table on Craigslist. Or more appropriately, I found the carpenter there. Jed from Silo Tables built the table from reclaimed pine wood that’s loaded with character, with all kinds of quirky knots and even a few visible nails. The simple legs are made from reclaimed carbon steel and they screw in easily to the mounting plates under the table. Bonus: Jed delivers for no extra fee.

Included on my Thanksgiving menu: 

• Roast Guinea Hens with Cumin-Date Sauce: With only four meat-eaters at dinner, I’m opting for smaller birds—I’m going to make F&W Marcia Kiesel’s clever, delicious Guinea Hen recipe using Cornish hens.
• Root Vegetable Gratin: With barely any cream, this gratin is all about the sweetness of the root veggies. Plus, it’s an elegant dish for vegetarians.
•  Bay-Steamed Broccoli: I love the peppery, herbal flavor of bay leaves with juicy steamed broccoli, and this dish takes no time to make.     
• Spiced Upside-Down Apple Bundt Cake: Because it’s just fabulous.

 

Late that night after dinner at Vetri, we hit the road towards New York City. I hated to skip over my native New Jersey without even a single stop, but six days was a long time to be away from my wife and newborn son, and I missed them both. It was time to go home.

By way of summing up the experience, it's hard to pick favorites. I learned more than I thought I would on this trip, and was glad I had members of my team with me to share in the experience. We all found fresh inspiration in the people we met along the way, all of them committed in one way or another to good food: whether growing it, catching it, distributing it, or cooking it. I enjoyed the chance to form deeper relationships with Anson Mills and Rappahannock River Oysters, and feel that in Cane Creek Farm, Culton Organics, and Samuels & Son I've discovered new suppliers whose products I'm excited to use in my restaurants.

And so, at the end of this six day journey, there's only one question that remains in the back of my mind. Where should I go next?

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Although I've been friends with Marc for years, this was my first time eating at his acclaimed restaurant Vetri. It was well worth the wait, and I came away thinking that his impossibly thin, buttery pastas and tender baby goat could hold their own against any I've had.

As has been the trend during this trip, our menu featured several of the items we saw earlier in the day at Culton Organics and Samuels & Son. Line caught fluke became an amuse of fluke crudo with Culton Organics' Spitzenberg apples and lemon. Swordfish was mixed in with paccheri pasta and tomatoes, basil leaves, and fries cut from Culton Organics eggplant.

Tom Culton's cauliflower was transformed into a flan, served with house cured guanciale and quail egg. His squash became the filling for agnolotti with amaretto cookies and sage. A side of his Brussels sprouts, charred and served with shaved truffled pecorino cheese, accompanied our baby goat course. Tom's cardoons made it into a deconstructed Bagna Cauda, served in a warm bath of anchovy sauce with baby vegetables and salt cured egg yolk.

 

Inspired by a trip to Italy during which she walked and ate herself silly, Moira Campbell (a friend of mine, full disclosure) quit her job in restaurant PR this past summer to form Rum & Blackbird, a company that gives tasting tours in New York. She began taking groups around her Hell's Kitchen neighborhood last month, visiting stops like Xie Xie for seven courses' worth of food. This holiday weekend, the food will be inspired by Thanksgiving, with dishes like turkey empanadas with cranberry salsa from Empanada Mama, sweet-potato bourekas from Gazala Place and cranberry orange biscotti from Biscotti Di Vecchio. Next month she'll start having guest chefs along for the ride, including Alexandra Guarnaschelli and F&W Best New Chef 2001 Anita Lo, who will be on the December 5 tour at 3 p.m.

 

On the advice of my stellar colleague Kristin Donnelly at F&W, we had our first dinner in Buenos Aires at Standard, and it was the perfect introduction to the country. Cheesy, flaky empanadas and braised beef croquetas started off our meal, but the clear winner of the night was a dish better suited to breakfast than dinner: gran revuelta gramajo, a mix of house-made sausage, jamón, cheese and eggs, topped with ultra-thin fried potato strings. (It even beat out the “12-hours ribs,” which looked like something out of The Flintstones.) But my favorite Argentinean meal was a lunch at La Cabrera, where we shared cheese cooked on the grill (dangerous) and bacon-wrapped steak and pork (lethal). The best part was the amazing array of sides, from mustard-seed-spiked mashed potatoes and sweet poached pears to creamy lentils. 

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Anyone who has ever spent time in a fish market can attest to them typically being pretty smelly, messy, old-fashioned places. So, I was more than a little bit surprised when we pulled up to Samuels & Son's headquarters. Samuels just moved out of Philadelphia's historic fish market and into a brand new $20 million facility that was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

The new facility was clean, spacious, and brightly lit, with fish of every variety you can think of stacked neatly in boxes row by row. Everything from the cutting rooms to the loading bays was temperature controlled at a constant 34 degrees. With the help of refrigerated trucks, that meant that a fish can be kept super cold (but never frozen) from the moment it gets plucked out of the ocean to the moment it arrives at a restaurant, an innovation which makes a big difference in freshness terms.

Even more state of the art was the facility's ozonated water system. Ozonated water has antibacterial properties, allowing the fish cutters to constantly sanitize both their work surfaces and the fish itself without introducing any chemicals.

The facility is a big step forward in the way that seafood is processed, and I was impressed by how much Samuels & Son was willing to invest in providing their customers with a better product.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

When it came time to decide where we should stop north of DC, my first call was to my friend and fellow chef Marc Vetri. Marc has two highly regarded restaurants in Philadelphia, Osteria and Vetri, and I knew that he'd have great suggestions for food producers to visit in the area. Number one on his list was Culton Organics, a family farm in the heart of Lancaster County which supplies fruit and vegetables to his restaurants. Marc loved the place so much that offered to join us if we visited.

So, on the morning of day six we were Pennsylvania-bound. I invited the chefs of my three New York restaurants, James Tracey, Shane McBride, and Lauren Hirschberg, thinking this would be a good opportunity to spend a day together outside the kitchen.

Culton Organics is run by a guy named Tom Culton. Tom took over his family's 55 acre farm when he was 20 and has been working it for the past nine years, only growing as much as he, his grandfather, and his girlfriend can handle. Currently that means just half of his acreage is in fruit and vegetable cultivation, but Tom is not interested in growing his business, insisting that bringing on extra help takes the joy out of farming for him.

We took a walk through Tom's fields, which were amazingly lush considering that he doesn't use pesticides, weed killer, or man-made fertilizer. He doesn't even irrigate. Tom keeps the land fertile using crop rotation, growing a wide variety of produce (from cardoons to artichokes to fraise de bois) on land that has been farmed by his family organically for the past 100 years (yes, you read that correctly, and it is a very rare achievement). Tom also takes frequent research trips to Europe, studying a new crop or farming method in Italy or France in order to apply it to his own farming.

The icing on the cake of our visit to Culton Organics was when Tom invited us back to his 19th century farmhouse for a hearty lunch: pig's stomach stuffed with pork sausage, new potatoes, and celery, accompanied by homemade apple sauce. It was one of the best home-cooked meals I've had in recent memory.

Catesby Holmes, one of our colleagues at sister mag Travel + Leisure, weighs in on this unlikely collaboration:

“Naked Chef” Jamie Oliver has teamed up with Match.com in the UK, the original online yenta, to establish a forum for food lovers to meet, mingle and turn up the heat (and not just on their stainless steel ranges). Jamieoliver.com/dating has related articles like "Making the First Meal for Your Partner" and "Food to Make You Fall in Love." Hey, even if you don’t find The One, at least you’ll get a good meal out of it.

Our stupendous food intern, Molly Adams, recently cooked up some very special burgers for us lucky editors. Here, she reports:

The premium burger just got a little more attainable. Pat LaFrieda—the butcher who supplies custom meat blends to Shake Shack, Little Owl and other restaurants known for their burgers—is now selling three types of patties to home cooks: beef brisket, beef short rib and original beef. (Unfortunately, they’re only available to NYC cooks, since the burgers are sold by the grocery-delivery service Fresh Direct.) The secret to these ultra-juicy patties is in the grind—or should I say chop? LaFrieda only chops small batches of whole-muscle Black Angus beef from Creekstone Farms and ensures the meat is not crushed or overworked, which can make burgers tough and dry. Last week, with the help of Kitchen Assistant Brian Malik, we cooked up a dozen LaFrieda burgers. The unanimous favorite: the brisket burger, which was incredibly moist and flavorful ($6 a pound; freshdirect.com).

 

Buenos Aires's San Telmo market bustles on Sundays with shoppers scouting vintage finds. After wandering the stalls, my friends and I were led by our noses to the corner of México and Defensa, where locals were queuing up for lunch at grills set up in the gated parking lot. We ordered some massive choripanes (sausage sandwiches) and vacipanes (steak sandwiches). I was a little nervous about the sausage—it had clearly been hanging from a tree branch, unrefrigerated, all day—but in the end, its subtle spiciness helped it win out over the chimichurri-covered steak. If only I could get a similar lunch in midtown New York for $2.50!