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that lightly disheveled look that passes for well groomed among the English in-crowd. The trendiest of the local watering holes is a spot called Providores, renowned among London foodies for its New Zealand variant on jet-set fusion cuisine. I think Sir John would have liked the place, especially the Tapa Room (it is decorated with a large Polynesian tablecloth called a tapa). It is a rambunctious space vibrating with percussive laughter, where aromas of distant tropical gardens waft from the passing dishes.
    Kiwi chef Peter Gordon has actually visited the places mentioned in Mandeville’s medieval travel guide. The restaurant’s website credits the New Zealander’s extensive travels through Southeast Asia, India, and Nepal as the source of his culinary inspiration. Gordon, like many of his generation, is a television celebrity; he’s a draw at charity events across the land and a consultant on at least three continents. He epitomizes the globe-trotting style that has become the standard upper-crust cuisine from Miami to Bangkok. It, too, is spicy, if in a different style from the dishes eaten by the lords and ladies of Sir John’s Europe.
    Still, the exotic flavors of the Providores kitchen titillate as much as the stories Mandeville brought back from his fictional voyages through the Indies, and in much the same way. Here, too, the exotic Orient is repackaged for its Western consumer. Where the itinerant knight gave his audience stories of industrious pygmies in the employ of the Chinese emperor, the traveling chef gives us crab laksa, a spiced crab cake aswim in Thai curry sauce. And in place of fantasies of wife-swapping inhabitants of an unnamed isle, we can indulge in the flavors of an imaginary land where French-cooked fish are served on a bed of Indian-spiced vegetables. But the food here is as much of a fiction as Mandeville’s tales. The exotic tropical flavors spirit you away from the English drizzle to a far-off isle where the sun is always shining and azure water laps gently on rosy coral shores. We, too, want our paradise. And if we can’t board a plane to get there, at least we can sip a Caribbean cocktail and nibble a spicy Balinese hors d’oeuvre. It’s a quest I think Sir John would endorse.

     

     

     
    I A NTICHI
     
    What I remember best from that dinner on Campo San Maurizio are the canoce, a tangle of milky pink sea creatures spilling across a great silver platter. And Luca, looming in the low kitchen doorway, in an outfit of leather pants, royal blue velvet blouse, and Day-Glo orange boots, a huge grin splitting his satyr’s face as he paused dramatically to hold up the dish so that we might admire his succulent prize. Canoce are about the size of a fat man’s index finger and belong to the same family of tasty exoskeletal sea life as shrimp and saltwater crayfish; however, they are distinctly more buglike in appearance, lacking the bright color and exuberant claws of other crustaceans. In flavor, though, they are far more delicate, infused with sweetness and brininess in exquisite balance. When they arrive at the table, I give up on my knife and fork so that I can methodically rip each luscious beast apart to extract its sweet belly and slurp on my fingers to secure each salty drip. I try to remember the instructions from a pamphlet on etiquette published in 1483, when everyone ate with their hands: “Eat with the three fingers, do not take morsels of excessive size and do not stuff your mouth with both hands.” Success is elusive.
    Like most Italian cooking today, the canoce recipe is simple: the crustaceans are bathed in a little olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper. It is Venetian food at its most elemental, a dish that comes from the bounty of the lagoon that fed local fishermen long before Venice became Europe’s pepper dealer and continued to do so long after the city was washed up in the spice trade. The pepper is still there, but there’s not even a trace of the other