Travel & Leisure

(and other lessons learned riding shotgun through Asia’s culinary hot zones with chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten)

The streets of Old Bangkok glisten with rain, giving the narrow Portuguese-built trader lanes a clean, freshly showered appearance.

For a moment, the city seems content to enjoy the calm. Men linger in doorways to smoke cigarettes. Women peer through blinds before emerging on stoops. And intermittent beams of noonday sun cast random spotlights on noodle carts, spice stalls, and, briefly, a Frenchman holding two fistfuls of aniseed to his nose.

He looks enraptured, as if seeking transcendence through scent.

“Smell this!” he says, his slight French accent adding flavor to his words as he immerses my snout in the star-shaped spice. I inhale deeply, allowing the aniseed’s licorice-drenched bouquet to overpower the sweeter scents of turmeric, galangal, and cumin that drift up from nearby sacks. “You can buy these ingredients in New York,” explains chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, dropping the aniseed and digging into a bushel of cardamom, “but they might as well be different spices. Honestly, can you smell how fragrant these are?” It’s the olfactory equivalent of experiencing music live versus listening to it on your iPod: The smells are bolder, crisper, louder. As the cardamom’s gingerlike aroma penetrates my skull, I understand why the excitable chef once bought 80 pounds of Szechuan peppercorn and smuggled it from Shanghai to Manhattan: Between Asia and the United States, the depth and variety of Eastern flavors often get lost in translation.

I’m still brushing the cardamom’s auburn-colored dust from my face when Vongerichten calls from the sidewalk. “Come on!” he yells over a throng of shorter Thai shoppers, causing them to turn their heads all at once. Vongerichten has always been one to stop and smell the spices, but today he’s on a mission: Just four blocks separate him from what is rumored to be the best bowl of tom yum in Thailand, and the thought of the fragrant lemongrass soup—a dish that, 28 years ago, inspired him to branch out from his French training to explore a new world of Asian ingredients—has added an impatient spring to his step.

It’s our second day in Thailand, and for Von­gerichten, it’s the culmination of a five-nation tour through the wildest markets and finest restaurants in Asia. Arguably the most respected chef in the United States, Vongerichten is also one of the few to achieve the ultimate culinary trifecta: the praise of critics, the admiration of peers, and the bounty of commercial success. Indeed, no other chef in history has won the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Chef and Best New Restaurant awards in the same year. “He’s hugely impactful,” says chef Mario Batali, whose sentiment is shared by three-star Michelin chef Eric Ripert of New York’s Le Bernardin restaurant. “Ours is an ego-driven industry,” says Ripert, “and Jean-Georges transcends that pettiness. He’s an icon that every chef admires.”

Discover the four-course menu the legendary chef created exclusively for Best Life .