I first had this extraordinary dish 15 years ago at the Tong Sheng Xiang Restaurant, across from the Bell Tower.
It's testament to the wonders of this extraordinary dish that it's been reinterpreted and bastardised in so many ways, but even more so that most versions actually work surprisingly well.
For me, the most extraordinary dish over two lunches, over two days, was simply a deep pot containing roughly cut-up potatoes cooked with local olive oil and garlic in the oven.
It was an extraordinary dish, at once bracing and comforting, a giant ceramic crock of sturdy chicken broth with pork, scallops, cellophane noodles, salty fish balls and fist-sized chunks of Napa cabbage.
Among the many extraordinary dishes – salads prepared from sun-blessed ingredients, grilled fish, herbed and roasted meat — is a "leopard cake", a version of a dish served in di Lampedusa's The Leopard.
Now that I have a career in food in my sights, I wish more than anything that I could go back and write down everything I saw go into those extraordinary dishes.
I've lived in India all my life, eaten everywhere from Leh to Cochin, tasted extraordinary dishes by the humblest chaat-wala and the fanciest chef, but nowhere in my land, not in Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, Hyderabad or Kolkata, have I eaten so well, so cheaply, so grandly and with so much joy as in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.
Here, there's no menu and an entire staff of three manages to produce a succession of extraordinary dishes – swordfish involtini stuffed with mollica (Sicilians' favourite breadcrumbs), raisins, pinenuts and teeny explosions of fragrant lemon peel; crisp fritters of neonati (splinter-sized baby fish); sensational chewy pasta with clams and the local teeny red prawns.
We asked chefs to come and make extraordinary dishes with as little energy as possible.
We ate smoked salmon and mozzarella, risotto al limone, and linguini alla Santa Lucia (an extraordinary seafood dish) with a bottle of Aspino, a local white wine, for 140,000 lira (£46).
I have an extraordinary scallop dish, in which the membranes from the shellfish have been retained and treated as if they were tripe and prepared in the rich, Florentine tomato-based sauce familiar from those smoky hole-in-the wall cafes I once patronised.
