Food: Michelin Stars, France: Aubrac

Restaurants: Bras: Glorious greens, in the French countryside.

Though you don’t hear a lot about Michel Bras in the U.S. (or, at least, I hadn’t), he’s really one of the founding fathers of the movement to eat only what you can grow and/or gather from the land around you. While Jay and I were driving the four hours it took us along steep, windy country roads to reach his restaurant, Bras, in Laguiole (pronounced “lah-yol”) in the Aubrac region of France (really, the middle of nowhere, east of the Dordogne and west of the Northern Rhone), I remarked that we were really making a foodie pilgrimage, and that the trip had better be worth the effort it took to tear ourselves away from Provence, where we could have been lounging all day by the pool.