Here's taste of what you'll find in Gastro Obscura's guide to unique places to eat and drink: a gilded tower full of gin, a stew that's been bubbling for decades, restaurants suspended in trees, submerged underwater, inside temples, and much more.
LessIn 2019, the Pacaya volcano became the first pizza place in the country of Guatemala, and one of the first on earth, to use lava caves as ovens. Pizza Pacaya founder Mario David García Mansilla was inspired after seeing guides invite tourists to roast marshmallows over the cooling lava.
The Indian Pueblo Cultural Center sits a patch of Native American land in the center of the Albuquerque. The complex of stucco buildings is an important arena for the preservation of Native American crafts, music, and ceremonies. It's also a place where all-too-rare pre-Columbian cuisine is sustained and celebrated, on the menu at Indian Pueblo Kitchen.
Not many get to attend the yearly Nobel banquets, as that's reserved for geniuses, humanitarians, and Swedish nobility. But if your invitation got lost in the mail, never fear. With a chunk of change, you can feast like a Nobel prizewinner in the cellars of Stockholm's City Hall.
One of the most acclaimed eateries in Arkansas is a two-table diner on the ground floor of a family home. James Jones’s family recipes are the same ones that his father and grandfather have used since at least 1910.
Run by a team of nuns and volunteers, the kitchen of this Bay Area Buddhist temple dishes out vegetarian versions of all your favorite Vietnamese classics.
Once the site of a fisherman's post, this restaurant sits atop a rock on Michamvi Pingwe beach. It's perched on a tidal island that rises above the sand at low tide, but becomes an island at high tide. Depending on the time of day, voyagers arrive on foot or by boat.
If you were to drive by El Vilsito during the day, you'd find mechanics working on cars. But come nighttime, this humble garage becomes home to several spinning spits of some of the finest marinated meat in Mexico City.
In 2000, the government of North Korea bought a 175-year-old brewery and moved it from a town in southern England to a cabbage field in Pyongyang. The Taedonggang Brewing Company names their brews pragmatically, from “Beer Number One” (a light pilsner) to “Beer Number Seven” (a chocolatey dunkel).
Ray Turner’s smoked eels, which he brines in salt and dark honey and sells out of a wooden shack at the end of a dirt road in the woods, are the stuff of local legend.
Leftovers are always better the next day. Or, in the case of Wattana Panich, the next generation. The restaurant's giant pot of neua tune, a Thai beef stew, has been simmering for more than 45 years.