The story behind this Maine restaurant sounds straight out of a romcom: a young woman divorces, becomes depressed and loses everything, moving to a trailer in her parents' backyard until she finds her future restaurant, an old mill, in a town called Freedom. She starts cooking, does well, and people from all over the world send her postcards to get a reservation. That’s right - they don't phone or email. If you want to try the halibut Niçoise, the bass with corn, cherry tomatoes and capers, or the polenta cake with grilled peach, honey and cream, you'd better sharpen your pencils. It might sound like the stuff of Hollywood, but it’s Erin French’s real life story. And you guessed it - the story was so good it’s been made into a TV series, on screens as of 2021.

How does he do it? We thought Jan-Hendrik van der Westhuizen was settled in Nice, France. We knew that South Africa had lost two of its best chefs, and that others had to switch concepts between lockdowns and opening restrictions. So M. van der Westhuizen has caught us off guard with this restaurant in the middle of the Kalahari desert, not far from a game reserve. At a time when few people are travelling, he’s giving us the ultimate culinary destination: a restaurant we explore by eating, but also by moving around the space, from a desert view to the farmhouse then the underground cellar, an Aladdin’s cave of dried and preserved local produce four meters under the sand. Expect expansive menus showcasing French expertise and carefully chosen South African ingredients.

Maori cuisine. Hiakai serves the cuisine of New Zealand’s indigenous people, though they call their home Aotearoa. As a child, chef Monique Fiso learned to cook with her Samoan grandmother, but what she turns out today has evolved far from those dishes. Though Fiso takes the core ingredients and techniques from her homeland, such as traditional cooking methods like the hāngi “earth oven”, the rest is all hers. You might say she is developing a modern version of Maori cooking.

Much more than a restaurant, FarmLore opened in summer 2021 on a 37-acre farm on the edge of Bangalore. It has not one but three famous chefs, led by Mythrayie Iyer, formerly of Noma. The mango and coconut farm has been developed to create a sustainable farm-to-plate dining experience and dishes depend on the harvest, perhaps Malabar scallops with local berries and ferns, pork belly with apricots, coorg coffee and charred greens, or barramundi with moringa and butter beans.

As if the Maldives aren’t a special enough location, Fresh in the Garden brings you the most spectacular mise en scène of any restaurant, with diners seated high above the Soneva Fushi gardens around a central open kitchen, like a magical treehouse in the treetops. Danish chef Mads Refslund is currently there for a 12-month residency, catering for all diets from plant-based to gluten-free. His interpretation of New Nordic cuisine with local produce includes sprouted coconut and caviar, grilled squid with braised seaweed, and sour banana parfait.

As a master of fire cooking, Alexandre Carausu has a profession that no longer exists in France. La Calypso is a French-style asador, unique in Brittany, and Carausu grills turbot, red mullet, sardines and sea bream in the large fireplace of his traditional Breton house. Asadores are grilled meat restaurants in Spain, some very famous. Order the lobster and your wallet will feel it, but the food is really worth it.

Spaghetti with baby plum tomatoes, capers, black olives and lemon zest, ravioli with lemon, butter and herbs, potato gnocchi with Castelmagno, steak from local Fassone cattle which are as muscular as a professional boxer and produce meat with little fat but lots of flavour. In short, this little inn near Florence combines all the qualities of la bella Italia, even if purists might say the food sometimes leans towards France and Sicily. Great ingredients, fine cooking, uncomplicated food, a good wine list and friendly service. What more could you ask for?

You can see the sea from the terrace at Güeyu Mar, but if it swims and it’s edible, it’ll soon be on the grill. Oysters, angulas (baby eels), every shellfish in the book, not to mention the historic tuna with tomatoes and onions. A bastion of gastronomic pleasure with extraordinary natural produce.