Seoul's largest market is Noryangjin Fish Market, a 700,000 square foot facility that houses over 700 shops selling the most insanely diverse product from 15 fishing ports around Korea. The complex includes numerous restaurants, an auction floor, and an adjacent produce market but everyone comes for the fish. Octopus is a popular delicacy here and is eaten cooked or raw. If eaten raw, it is either eaten whole (and very much alive) or it is sliced up, its tentacles still wriggling as it goes into your mouth. You'll also find local flower crabs, prawns, abalone, clams, oysters, sea snails, sea cucumber, sea slugs, and sea squirts. And of course, live fish can be seen swimming in tanks all over the complex. You point at the fish of your choice and the seller weighs it and informs you of the price. You can take the fish home with you whole or have it gutted and cleaned. On the floor above the Fish Market, you'll find several seafood restaurants. You can buy your seafood from the market and bring it upstairs or have it delivered upstairs for your dining pleasure. Awesome. The restaurants will provide the side dishes, liquor and prepare hot soup from the carcass of the recently deboned fish. Of course, if you don't want the hassle of doing it yourself, you can just order at the restaurants and the ladies will yell your order downstairs and it'll be on your table in a couple of minutes. I love this place.

Koreans love spoiled and fermented foods, and have developed fermented food recipes in order to preserve foods that would provide essential nutrients throughout the lean winter months. Fermented foods are healthy (think sauerkraut!) and they show the wisdom of ancestors who sought the secret of longevity. Fermented sauces made of soybeans were created, kimchi was made and stored for winter when it was hard to grow vegetables, and fermented seafood was developed as a way to deal with the all the food that comes from the sea and couldn't' be consumed immediately. Now hong uh wae is fermented skate, left to rot at room temperature for several days before being eaten raw. Skate spoils faster than almost any other seafood and because the animal is loaded with uremic acid and pees through its skin the flavor the rotted skate flesh makes other rotted seafare taste like cotton candy. Yummy. But I loved the kimchi in Korea and got to eat plenty of it with every meal, as well as big piles of all my other fave fermented foods.

o Jangajjis - A dish of dried or salted vegetables and herbs pickled in bean sauce or bean paste or peppered bean paste.
o Ganjang - Korean soy sauce.
o Doenjang - Fermented soybean paste. Doenjang is made from the solids left over after Gangjang is drained from its fermentation vessel.
o Gochujang - a hot paste made from soybean powder fermented with boiled rice, flour, and sticky rice powder and seasoned with salt and spicy peppers.
o Cheonggukjang - a fermented soybean paste that contains whole as well as ground soy beans.

Everyone in Korea dines out and it is a common habit for people in Seoul, so there are thousands of restaurants scattered throughout every neighborhood. Unlike restaurants in the US where you pick a meal off a large menu with endless choices, restaurants in Seoul tend to specialize in one or two certain foods. Eating out is a group activity and you don't see many people dining alone. You want soup? Go to a soup restaurant. Want BBQ? Hit a BBQ joint, and Korean BBQ is superb.

I made sure to check out a Sutcama, a sauna emporium where you bake in a hut heated by hundreds of pounds of wood and charcoal. Friends go here together for a sweat and then a shower. Afterwards, you eat the house specialty: 3-second pork belly. The pork is placed on a grate and put in the coals and cooks in seconds.
I also went to a BBQ restaurant in Seoul for intestine, ox-liver and omasum (pork stomach). All these extremely popular restaurants have grills set into the table and each specializes in a certain kind of meat. Typical choices are beef (bulgogi), beef ribs (galbi), pork (samgyeopsal), or chicken (dak) but there is a type of BBQ joint to suit every taste.

There are many unusual soups and stew eateries in Seoul. Since soups and stews are such a big part of everyday eating, and the majority of restaurants in Seoul specialize in amazing meals in a bowl. I even got to try a soup called Dead Body Soup ... dont ask!
I made sure to try as many other soups as I could and here is the list:

o Loach soup
o Sunji Haejangguk (clotted-blood soup)
o Potato with pig backbone stew
o Knuckle bone soup
o Ox tail soup
o Tripe soup
o Sea mustard soup
o Doganitang - soup made with jellified cow's knee cartilage
o Haejangguk -- a favorite hangover cure consisting usually of meaty pork spine, dried cabbage, coagulated ox blood, and vegetables in a hearty beef broth
o Seolleongtang -- ox leg bone soup simmered for more than 10 hours until the soup is milky-white. Usually served in a bowl containing glass noodles and pieces of beef.
o Maeuntang -- a refreshing, hot and spicy fish soup
o Gamjatang ("pork spine stew") -- a spicy soup made with pork spine, vegetables (especially potatoes) and hot peppers. The vertebrae are usually separated. This is often served as a late-night snack but may also be served for a lunch or dinner.

o Cheonggukjang jjigae: a soup made from strong-smelling thick soybean paste containing whole beans

o Samgyetang: a soup made with Cornish game hens that are stuffed with ginseng, a hedysarum, sweet rice, jujubes, garlic, and chestnuts

But here is the best advice I can give you. Head to Seoul, and see for yourself. You will love it. Especially the food.

We landed in Tanzania after a crazy airplane journey from halfway around the world that had me sitting on the tarmac for 6 hours in Khartoum in the Sudan. "Please stay away from the windows at all times," said the voice of the flight attendant over the loudspeaker, a chilling reminder that air carriers based in the USA are not welcome sights on some tarmacs, especially in Northeastern Africa. Anyway, I ended up not getting shot at and spent the rest of the day flying into Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, shooting there for a week, flying to Kampala, Uganda, shooting there for a week and then moving on to Tanzania. We were tired, and we all missed home, and 3-week, 3-show shoots in third world countries are the hardest trips imaginable. There are no days off, no time off and endless days of shooting and living in some very harsh conditions. I love it.

But boy was I psyched to land in the relative peace and quiet of Arusha, and overnight in an actual hotel after crawling out of the Uganda jungle on fumes. There was a lot of great storytelling to be had in Tanzania but we eschewed all of them in favor of spending the majority of our time living in a tent city on the rim of the Ngorogoro Crater, living and hanging with the Massai and watching the great migrations of exotic African animals parade along the crater floor.

The crater itself is steep and impenetrable except for several cut outs through which the animals migrate. The hills around the crater are thousands of feet high, cold and damp and windy up top, warm and humid on the crater floor. Savannah below, forested temperate jungle above. We spent our first few days in the crater, standing next to an endless parade of zebra, warthog, wildebeest, lion, hippo, elephant, orangutan, assorted monkeys, birds, snakes, lizards and every other animal you can imagine.

The rest of the time we spent chilling with Edward Ngobi and his tribe. These are not the Disney version of the Massai, this was the real thing. Up early in the morning, tend the herds, release the herd from the corrals, repair the things in the village that need fixing, hunt, collect wood, corral the animals and eat dinner. We beaded with the womenfolk, weaned goats with the men and got plenty of warrior training in on the side. Remember these are the guys who kill lions with spears and their bare hands and are ritually circumcised at an age when you remember it for the rest of your life. Ouch.

Breakfast was fresh cow's blood, hot millet porridge and 2-week-old sour milk, curdled. Lunch was a reprise of breakfast and dinner was arguably the best BBQ I have ever taken part in or eaten. You see for as unimaginative as a Massai breakfast cook is, the guys who cook dinner really know how to bring it in the kitchen. The recipe? Butcher one goat, one lamb and one cow. Save the skin for tanning into leather and making their world-famous beds. Save the blood, bones and tendons for other uses. Eat the liver and kidneys raw. Skewer all the primal cuts on green sticks and grill it all over a white hot bed of mountain hardwood coals, squat, slice and serve, charred rare.

So I have spent the last 6 months trying to pitch the idea of an all-you-can-eat, kill your own, Massai-style whole animal BBQ chain. Anyone else but me think this is an idea long overdue? A carnivore's IHOP for the 21st Century? You betcha!

If there is a greater pleasure than spending a week shooting a TV show of your own in your Dad's adopted hometown, a place you visit all the time, have friends living there that you have known for 30 years (Samantha and Don Lindgren, the owner of Rabelais book store, the best cookbook store in New England), eating your way through a few acts with your son, and visiting some of the best restaurants in the country ... well, I don't know what that would be. I love Maine. And we got to shoot there last summer and make a great show.Sadly my fave moments of the show wound up on the cutting room floor, like my dinner at Fore St, one of my fave eateries on any continent, and the only place I eat at EVERY time I am in Portland. Sam Hayward is a god. Anyway, from chowder at the Porthole to the glassed-in fridge and live fire kitchen at Fore, from Rob Evans inspired cooking at Hugos to Rabelais' books, from Duckfat to the lobster rolls at Five Islands Lobster Company to the fried clams at Day's, food in Maine is as complex and locally inspired as any food in the country. I also love eating at 555 and Back Bay Grill when I hit Portland, and Big Fish in Kennebunkport is a place we always stop in on the way up to visit Dad, ditto the Clam Box, both of which make the drive from Boston to Maine more enjoyable.

So I thought maybe I should let you know about some restaurants closer to home that you should check out. This list is not a complete one, just the last few months I have gotten around a lot locally and wanted to clue you all in to some slick places in your neck of the woods.
Palm Beach: Café Boloud at the Brazilian Court ... maybe the best restaurant in Southern Florida, the food is amazing, the service and the setting (the gardens of the Brazilian Court Hotel) are second to none. Too Jays Deli has the best Pastrami sandwich in town, and it saved me from fine-dining overload.

Chicago: Paradise Pup and Hot Dougs for amazing burgers and sausages, second to none. Blackbird and Avec are superb restaurants, and I have been going to them for years, but last week I had a meal at Blackbird that was one of the best in recent memory. At over a decade old, this restaurant is still supremely relevant, and that is saying a lot. The sepia noodles with snail caviar and the braised pork belly rocked me. As did the $150 cup of rare Pu Er tea I snarfed down as a digestive.

Phoenix: Pizzeria Bianco, worth the three-hour wait, go sit next door in his wine bar and relax. The pizzeria might be the best VPN style pie shop in North America. Seriously that good, and Chris is always behind the counter, slinging dough. The tomato-garlic-oregano pie was about as good as pizza gets.

Seattle: Serious Pie, which is Tom Douglas' newest eatery, is just a few years old. He cooks his pies 200 degrees colder than most VPN joints, but his duck pate, ribbolitta, calamari salad and pizzas are out of this world, a top-10 coast-to-coast pie house for sure. Douglas owns Etta's Palace Kitchen, Lola etc and is one of the best chefs in the country, but this little pizza joint of his is my current fave.

Los Angeles: In Los Angeles the hottest eateries are humble little joints that forego napery, fine silver or tasting menus. Palate, Osteria Mozza and Gjelina embrace communal dining, wood-fired farm-to-table peasant cookery and humble ingredients.

Montreal: The hottest trend here is in postage-stamp-sized chef-driven cafes that take more pride in a well-turned-out sandwich than in a five-course meal. Martin Pird's Au Pied du Cochon on Duluth Street is my fave, but McKiernan's (lunch counter in the daytime/wine bar as the sun sets), Buvette Chez Simone and a half dozen others all follow the same playbook.

Minneapolis: the best new restaurant in town is Barrio, a small tequila bar serving upscale Mexican cuisine at bargain-basement prices; don't miss it next time you roll into my city.

The cuisine of Sicily is uniquely different from any other Italian region, strongly influenced by the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the French and the Spanish, each conqueror and wayfarer have strongly left their influence on the foods of Sicily. These foreign civilizations converged on Sicily throughout it's history and brought with them new ingredients, customs and food traditions that remained long after they left. Blend these foreign techniques with simple ingredients and the traditional respect for seasonal eating and you know all you need to about Sicilian cuisine.

We hit the Vucciria and Ballaro Markets first, food freak heaven. Bottarga, babbaluci,stigghiole (braided grilled innards of all kinds, mostly intestine), caldume, and cento pelli, all the the little offal treats that the Sicilians cant get enough of are on display. But form an eaters standpoitn the fresh lemons, the tomatoes the tuna, the grilled baby pigs, the artichokes, the bread.....can you feel me? How a bout the scincifone, a thick, spongy Sicilian pizza topped with tomato sauce, onions, salted sardines and caciocavallo cheese, baked in large rectangular tins and sold by the piece in the streets. Or the smell of grilled fennel sausage on every corner...wow.

Later in the afternoon we checked out some some traditional Sicilian fried foods from a Friggitoria: everyone loves aracine, those little rice balls, but the frittola is what I remember most. Sometimes these are the scraps from the butcher, the cartilage and the calluses, the fat trimmings, but from good stuff, veal or pork, boiled in rendered fat at a very high temperature. Then they open a tap with a sieve in it, and all the fat is drawn off and all the little pieces of meat that remain get pressed into large, round cakes. The vendor then slices these cakes and heats them up in a frying pan. Another version is simply to fry all the scraps and throw a blanket over them so no one can see what you are eating. They even spoon it into your hand, which is great for the napkin haters out there. I love it.

We ate lunch at Ferro di Cavallo Restaurant for some typical Sicilian cuisine. Spaghetti with Squid Ink, Sardine Balls, and La Golla Della Mucca (throat of the cow) a dish that is made of poached neck parts with loads of wild celery. This restaurant is packed all the time, the food is exquisite in the most rustic sense and I could eat there every night of the week.

We had dinner in an ancient building housing a killer eatery that is a serious food lovers Valhallah. Osteria Dei Vespri is located in the old historical center of Palermo near Piazza Rivoluzione. The chef-owner served up a degustation of nerves of cow mouth with veal tongue, dome of egg fondue with prawns from Mazzara, smoked pork jowl in a prawn bisque, hot cakes of mushrooms & Nebrodi cheese with candy lemon chips and ravioli neri filled with mussels and potatoes, seared refdish with sea urchin and tomato sauce...somedays my job is better than others.

We journeyed the next day to check out Cerda's most famous vegetable and a staple in Sicilian cuisine, the artichoke. This thistle is celebrated every year with a festival that mixes art exhibits and other artichoke-themed entertainment with live traditional bands and parades through the town. More than 10 percent of the world's artichokes are grown in Sicily, and during the festival, artichokes are used in every course of a meal. They are fried, sautéed, grilled, marinated, pickled, fresh, and creamed in soup. My favorites from the festival: Torta di Carciofi (Artichoke pie), and Carciofi Alla Giudea (Deep Fried Artichokes with baby squid) , but the topper was the artichoke gelato with lemon. Addictive.

The next day, in the remote fishing village of Marzanemi, I got a once in a lifetime opportunity to go night fishing with local fishermen. In Sicily, most fishing happens at night with lanterns in hand made boats, a tradition that has occurred for several generations. We went out again at dawn and caught a little bit of everything from 3 miles of nets we laid out.

On the way back to the fishermans house we stopped off at a bottarga processors. Bottarga is known to locals as "poor man's caviar" and its the salted and dried roe of tuna or grey mullet, or sometimes swordfish. Bottarga is massaged by hand to eliminate air pockets, salted for weeks and then dried for up to 2 months The result is a dry hard slab, which is often coated in beeswax for keeping. In Salvatore's shop I got a chance to eat La Lattume (the sperm sac of the tuna which is considered a delicacy in this part of Sicily). Salvatore's family has been making products like these since 1854, for five generations....so when he says the sperm is good, who am I to argue.
We drove on to Salvatore's home for lunch and his wife and cousins made us

Bottarga Antipasti, Tuna Sperm Linguine, Pachino Tomato and Squid Ink Sauce, a delicious sauce made with squid ink, local Sicilian tomatoes, herbs and extra virgin olive oil served over pasta. Sicilian Pachino tomato sauce is the best in the world and eating all the local pickled peppers, olives and cured lemons from Sal's wife's garden was the icing on the cake.

On our last day we cooked and ate lunch with Eleonora Consoli, the Julia Child of Sicilian cuisine, who teaches courses in her huge Mediterranean kitchen in her home on the slopes of Mount Etna. She is a former food journalist and she teaches in her home, a typical Sicilian house of the 18Th century. The house is set in a yard filled with orange and lemon groves, just down the mountain from vineyards producing DOC wine (the red, rosé and white wines of Etna), fanmous since Roman times. Having her walk me through the preparation of Rane a Brodetto (frogs soup) and Coniglio al Cioccolato (rabbit with vegetables and chocolate) and to see her make cured anchovies from scratch is something I will never forget. We hit it off, and the bloopers on the web site prove it.

I know that Florence, Venice, Milan and Rome are awesome. I have spent a lot of time there. I know how hip Capri and Ischia are these days, I love those islands, but Sicily is special. It feels like another world, which may be why every Sicilian always reminds you, "eet eeze not eetal-ee, eeze Sicily!"