Hi, it's Mark Bitman, and welcome to Food.

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ever more fabulous, The Bitman Project delivered straight to our inbox at bitman project.com. We'll get back to that conversation in a minute, but first I want to talk about

something that lots of people ask me about when it comes to global cuisines.

There is something magical about eating a cuisine in the place where it originated.

One of the reasons for that is that the dishes that define a cuisine are built around the produce that's native to a place.

It's why the feta and tomato in a Greek salad tastes so perfect in Athens,

or the artichokes in olive oil in Rome are to die for. They have a certain sweetness and tang that

you can get close to but not easily replicate. And not surprisingly, one of the best ways to

get a sense for how something should taste is to visit a region of the world

and sample a dish in several forms from lots of different neighboring areas.

Then you can appreciate the local variations as well. And the most

efficient way to do that, for me at least, is the first-class experience of

Regent Cruz. I was able to do that on our recent all-inclusive tour of Asia. I had a

hankering for seafood, well I always do, seafood that you don't get easily in the

U.S. and I had just an incredible experience in the fish markets of Busan, just overwhelming varieties of fresh seafood.

With more than 500 destinations worldwide, Regent's options are endless.

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