Looks Good Enough to Eat

Crystal has a new video series with celebrity chef Jon Ashton that's more about traveling than it is about dining. In the 12-part series, Ashton travels to different Crystal port cities where he meets up with a local dining expert and then samples the local cuisine at several local favorites. These aren't the high-end restaurants where Crystal customers would normally dine. These are the places only locals know about. But he samples the flavors that really define the city and then interprets those for a new dish on Crystal Serenity.

In the first episode, Ashton is in Los Angeles where he meets up with Chef Katsuji Tanabe of Top Chef fame, who takes him to his favorite local places for tacos. The first is open only one day a week, with the chef getting up in the middle of the night to cook and by mid-afternoon they are sold out - and the tacos are served on his back porch. The next place looks most like a fast-food restaurant and probably serves the artsy-ist tacos, and the last place is in a gas station, which Ashton just can't get over. In each, he loves what he has to the point of having multiple food-gasims. He's right; it all looks delicious and you can almost taste those tacos.

The complete story appeared in the March 7 issue of Cruise News Daily.