Shanghai Expo 2010 - France

French food can be incredibly fussy and artistic, or it can be good, hearty peasant food. I love both for what they are. The restaurant in the French Pavilion featured neither, instead taking a middle-of-the-road approach with the sort of food you'd expect at a nice wedding, or on a business class flight (trust me, I'm not fancy - Cathay occasionally bumps me up on crowded flights).

I had the shrimp starter....

....the steak main....

... and the peach cobbler dessert.

Does that look like a French dinner to you?

Expo Wrap-up: It's a pity we ended up spending so much time in the European pavilions. New York boasts stunning representatives of all the national cuisines we sampled, and I've traveled to most of the countries to boot. The timid, indifferent efforts on display at the pavilions couldn't hope to compare.

Nonetheless, it was fun to wander around the grounds and gawk at the fanciful architecture of the various pavilions. It was also nice to see so many people gathered together to broaden their cultural horizons. Heartfelt thanks go out to the Lee family and entourage for their incredible organization and hospitality.

Shanghai Expo 2010 - Italy

Italian is my favorite absolute cuisine. I don't think anyone else has mastered the carbohydrate quite like the Italians. For breads, you've got pizza crust, ciabatta, focaccia, panettone, etc. For rice, risotto. And pasta..... ah, pasta - a staggering array of shapes and sizes, in preparations limited only by the imagination.

New York certainly has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to fantastic Italian restaurants. Batali alone accounts for eight outstanding establishments.

The food I had when I was in Italy itself was fairly mediocre - didn't know where to go, I expect. (Though the tomatoes blew me away. You can really taste the difference when a tomato is naturally ripened in the sun. Pure bliss.)

The Italian Pavilion was, sadly, closer to my actual Italian experience than my New York Italian experience. We started with a ho-hum salad and a cured salmon dish with olive oil, orange segments, olives and capers.

We also had a potato and salt cod (baccalà in Italian) dish that confused me because I associate it so strongly with Spanish cuisine.

The lasagne was gummy and goopy. Mine is leagues better.

Very poor form, Italy.

Shanghai Expo 2010 - Spain

We had dinner at the Spanish Pavilion. The architecture of the pavilion itself was awesome. It was sort of free-form and Frank Gehry-esque. The entire exterior was textured with "shingles" of woven rattan.

The food was... pretty pathetic. The table wine was barely drinkable. We got a sad waterlogged salad to start, some rubbery meatballs and soggy patatas bravas to follow, and a slice of some pie or other to finish. If you know me, you'll know that a pie has to be pretty damn bad for me to forget what the flavor was. [Postscript: This meal ended up being the worst one we had at the Expo.]

The dinner cabaret show was likewise feeble, though listening to the MC speak Chinese with a heavy Spanish accent was a suprisingly enjoyable novelty.

Shanghai Expo 2010 - Norway

My crazy uncle-in-law (my dad's sister's husband's brother) found a loophole in the Expo queue system: if you make a reservation in the dining room, you can tour the main part of the pavilion directly after your meal. (Those Expo lines were no joke. The line for the Saudi Arabian Pavilion ranged from 6 to 9 hours.)

We started with lunch at the Norwegian Pavilion. The food (prepared by fursetgruppen.no) was excellent - seafood imported from Norway, skillfully prepared and presented in that spare Scandinavian way. It didn't look like a heavy meal, but it was deceptively rich and filling. [Postcript: Norway ended up serving the best meal we had at the Expo, completely eclipsing the offerings of traditional culinary countries like France and Italy.]

This is salmon prepared four ways (smoked; with lemon oil; with sliced almonds; cured) and some soft scrambled eggs.

Seafood chowder, roasted potatoes, salmon with beurre noisette and Asian-influenced cod with braised mushrooms. That chowder was thin, but a real umami powerhouse.

This is cod main - pan-fried, topped with an apple-fennel salad, with spinach purée. Also very tasty. We somehow ended up with an extra one of these so I ended up eating one and a half mains. (What? I'm on vacation.)

Dessert: fruit, a lovely lemon sorbet and a chocolate mousse. I also had a glass of aquavit. It's... an acquired taste. (I could easily imagine it being used to de-grease an engine.)

I'm happy to report I was able to fight off the food coma for an afternoon of pavilion-touring.