Hi everyone,
Today’s topic is food.
I love food and
I love to try the local specialties whenever I travel somewhere. Throughout the
years, I have racked up an interesting list of food experiences that include,
among many others, a horse burger (Slovenia), deep fried haggis (Scotland) and kangaroo
kebab(Australia). Aside from the many one-off experiences you have when
travelling around the world, there are certain staples that you will encounter
in pretty much every place you go to. It was therefore that I decided to write
a story on what I consider to be the 5 basic food groups in the world:
Mexican
Indian
American
Asian
Pizza
The dishes that I chose appear in totally random
order and I would like to state that all these meals are excellent and I would
recommend that you go out of your way to try them, should you ever find
yourself near any of them.
Kicking off our culinary tour around the 5 basic
food groups, and representing the Indian subcontinent is..
Paddy Murphy's Irish Pub in Rotterdam.
While some of you may be surprised at finding an
Irish pub in Holland representing India, those who have eaten there will
understand this selection. When Paddy Murphy's opened its doors in 1997,
an eager crowd of locals, Irish and expat Scots soon made it their home away
from home. To keep the crowd fed while they were watching football
and chugging down their pints, a pub grub menu was soon put in place, offering
the crowd home staples like bacon and sausages, tuna melt and, for the
Dutchies, bitterballs. The reason why Paddy Murphy's is in this story, however,
is their take on Indian cooking, and one of my favorite dishes of all times,
their famous chicken tikka. Diced
chicken, marninated overnight in a combination of spices, was served in a
crusty bap with mango chutney and a special sauce. I have eaten chicken tikka
hundreds of times, but never as good as there. For years I tried every brand of
Indian sauce and combination of spices I could get my hand on, but I could
never
get it quite right. One day I walked into the pub and found
the cook sitting at the bar with a pile of papers and pictures of Irish
parafernalia. When I enquired what he was doing, he told me that he was working
out the new menu. I had a look at the beta version of the new menu and remarked
that he had forgotten the chicken tikka. Without looking up from his work, he
informed me that the chicken tikka would disappear from the menu.
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This was bad news.
Even though there was only a limited quantity available
every day, the chicken tikka sandwich was one of the staples of my diet. Not
having a weekly kick of my favorite dish would be a serious disappointment.
After I had digested the bad news with the help of a pint of Cork’s finest, I
decided to try a different strategy. I ordered another beer from the cook and
while he was pouring it, I asked him if, since chicken tikka was no longer on
the menu, he could ofcourse give me the recipe. ‘Sure no problem’ he said, and
wrote the ingredients and cooking instructions on the back of a beer mat. The
beermat was above my desk in my apartment in Rotterdam until I moved to Ireland
a couple of years later and I cooked it often. I still could not get it quite
as good as it was in the pub, but it was still very good and I still make it
every now and then. It’s just a shame that it’s not available in the pub
anymore.
Pizza
Taking the
honor of representing pizza on this list, is a tiny pizza place in Rotterdam.
It took me a long time to decide on the pizza for this story, mainly because
pizza is one of those things that when it's good, it's fantastic and even when
it's not really that great, well, then it's still pretty good. Several
candidates were in the running for this honorary position. Arguably the best
pizza I ever ate arrived on a tray at Lombardi's in New York's Lower East Side.
I had read about Lombardi's before setting off for New York and accidentally
arrived in the area in the middle of an Italian street festival. Lombardi's is
one of only 10 places in the USA that use a wood burned oven and this gives a
very distinctive taste to all pizzas. The pizza was thin, crispy and
topped just with mozarella, tomato, oregano and pepperoni. It was amazing.
Pizzas at the Porterhouse in Dublin also rank high on my favourites list. The
thin crust pizzas are delicious and on sale in 3 of their 4 pubs in the
Dublin area (the 4th one doesn't sell pizza because the kitchen is on the 4th
floor and it proved impossible to get a full size pizza oven up there without
taking the roof off) and also attract attention because of the out-of-the-ordinary
toppings on offer. Your Italian friends would probably cringe from the idea of
pizza topped with chicken curry or bacon and sausages, but I like them very
much. The reason I chose the place in Rotterdam to represent pizza is not just
the excellent pizza they sold at very reasonable prices, it's also the great memories it brings back when I
think of them. The last apartment I lived in in Holland was a really nice
place. We were 5th in line for a viewing but for some reason, the first 4
people on the list never showed up, so when I was the first one to show up (my
friend and flatmate Samantha was at home being very ill) the by then very
bored rep of the housing corporation was more than happy to give me the
apartment if I would just say yes and sign a paper confirming the deal was on.
His restlessness proved a further advantage the next day when I went over to
the corporation offices to finalise the paperwork and found that the office
Christmas party had already started. The rep stuffed all the papers in a folder
and then in the archive, thereby conveniently overlooking the fact that a vital
piece of information that I did not have was missing. He wished me luck and
walked off towards the drinks trolley and I walked out with a validated lease
and 2 sets of keys. I never heard of it again.
We moved in the next week and decided that pizza
would be a fitting meal after a day of carrying furniture around so we walked
over picked up a couple of pizzas, and found that they were excellent. The shop
was run by 3 Turkish brothers and their pizzas, especially in spring and
summer, became a regular fixture in my life while living there. Our living room and adjourning
balcony were to the South, which happily made for extended hours of sunshine.
My ritual would be to go to the pub on Sunday afternoons to watch the football
and at the end of the afternoon, when I went home, I would order a pizza just
before getting on the subway, conveniently located next to the pub which is at
the back of the World Trade Centre, and when I got off the subway at my end of
the line, I would pick up a piping hot pizza, fresh from the oven, walk the 30
seconds home and set myself on the balcony with the hot pizza and a cold beer
to see the sun sink behind the horizon. It was bliss.
The father of
the guys running the shop showed some remarkable memory skills about a year
after I moved to Ireland. I was staying at a friend’s place and decided to
order a pizza from my old neighbours for old times’ sake. When the pizza
arrived, the delivery guy looked at me quizzically for 3 seconds and then said
‘I thought you lived at Schoonveld 17?’ Quite amazing, as I hadn’t been
anywhere near the shop in a year and I was standing in a darkened doorway about
2 miles from where I used to live.
America
Representing America in the story, perhaps
surprisingly after Irish chicken tikka and pizza from Dutch Turks, is America.
And ofcourse it is a hamburger that takes the cake, so to speak. Hamburgers
were never very prominent in my native Holland until Mc Donald's and -a little
bit later- Burger King started opening franchises around the country. The idea
of cheap food that was ready to eat within a minute took Holland, like many
other countries, by storm. This had the big advantage(in the mind of a child)
that McDonald’s was everywhere, but the disadvantage that the big chains pushed
smaller chains and local independents out of the market. There were 2 burger
places near where I grew up, a Wimpy and a local place called Lion’s Garden. I especially
have fond memories of Lion’s Garden, a very cool place in a deep, spacious,
building, with white stuccoed walls and tables set up on low platforms covered
by pergolas. There was a garden to the back of the restaurant, with a climbing
frame, a seesaw and a sandpit. The highlight, however, was an old tram that had
been fitted with booths and a soda fountain and was available for birthday
parties and other special occasions. It was the dream of every kid in the area
to be invited to a birthday party in the tram. Unfortunately, I never got to
experience this privilege because just when I had devised a strategy to
pursuade my parents to let me have my next birthday party in The Tram,
McDonald’s opened a franchise across the street. Wimpy’s went out of business
within 6 months and Lion’s Garden followed a couple of months later. Perhaps
this is an explanation of why I have a fascination for public transport and
always ride the tram, wherever I travel, even if the tram goes in a direction
where nothing interesting is to be found. For a brief moment, I considered
Lion’s Garden for representing The
American Way, but I quickly rejected this notion because I was only 8 or 9 when
it closed and, in any case, the mists of time have clouded if the food was
really THAT good, or that it was just the excitement of my grandma taking me to
the cinema at the end of the street on Wednesday afternoons and afterwards
taking me to Lion’s Garden where I could choose anything I wanted. It’s still a
nice memory to both my early youth and my grandma though.
But No, back to the Harsh Reality of the 21st century
and the best burger I have ever eaten. For this magnificent burger, we go to my
beloved California and, more specifically, to Los Angeles. I had set off early
in the day in a Dublin that was in a state of mild, soon-to-be-spring weather,
had a stop over in Chicago that, from the air, looked like the South Pole with
only the top of Sears Tower protruding from the snow and finally arrived in a
20* LA summer. As you may imagine, I went out for a drink and had a hotdog for
dinner. The next day, after having a pancake breakfast, I walked around
Hollywood Boulevard and happily spent the day soaking up the California sun and
local beer. When night fell, I realised that I was very hungry and went in
search of a place to eat. If you have
never been in Hollywood, just to give you a picture, Hollywood boulevard is
populated, in roughly equal measures, with bars, restaurants, tattoo parlours
and souvenir shops. This gives the hungry traveller a great choice of LA food,
so I was walking around like a kid in a candy store, trying to decide where to
eat. I eventually decided on a hamburger place called Lucky Devils, which stood
out for both their big red sign featuring a devil’s head, and the fact that I
noticed 15 different draft beers behind the bar. I set myself at a table and 2
minutes later was looking through the menu and sipping a cold Craftsman 1903
lager. I read through the menu a couple of times and eventually settled on the
Diablo Burger, a mighty tower of juicy beef, white cheddar,
double-smoked bacon, avocado, wild arugula, house 1,000 island, & devil hot
sauce.
Yes, I looked up the toppings on the
website.
I ordered a bowl of sweet potatoe fries
on the side and another beer and dug into my meal. The sweet potatoe fries, I
am not afraid of admitting, were the BEST damn fries I ever ate in my life.
They were amazing. I never thought that something as generic as fries could be
so delicious. After coming down from my initial fries-induced high, I took a
bite of my burger. It was the best hamburger I ever ate. Each ingredient complemented
the other ones perfectly. I had another bite and sat there, digesting my burger
and happily staring in the middle distance. Somewhere midway through this meal
fit for a king, I realised that the place was now half full, while it had been
empty when I came in. I had been so engrossed in my hamburger and fries that I
had completely missed about a dozen people entering the restaurant. Having reluctantly come back to reality, I
finished my meal and my beer. The bill for this fantastic meal, including 2
pints of craft beer, was only just North of $25,-. If you are going to eat only
1 more hamburger for the rest of your life make sure it’s this one. 10 out of
10.
Asian
Representing Asian food, is a small restaurant in Sydney. I
can't remember the name of the place, but I can walk straight to it when I'm in
Sydney, so if you ever run in to me in Sydney and feel like Malaysian food, let
me know. The place I'm talking about specialises in Laksa, a dish I had never
encountered before and haven't seen since here in Europe. For those of you that
don't know what laksa is.. Well, it's a dish that is roughly halfway
between curry and soup. I placed my order and, given the modest price of $7, I
expected a soup bowl size dish. When my food was ready, however, the waiter
brought me a bowl about the size of the Stanley Cup. It was huge. Because of
the consistency of the dish, I was a little unsure as to what kind of cutlery
to use. I went for chopsticks at first. Now I don't know if you ever tried
eating soup with chopsticks but it is a bit of a challenge. I tried one of
those earthenware Asian soup spoons instead but that didn't quite work on the
bigger chunks of chicken and vegetable. In the end I settled on the compromise
of eating the solid parts with my chopsticks and the liquid with the spoon. By
this time, ofcourse, the area of the table surrounding my plate looked as if
someone had lobbed a snooker ball into my bowl from considerable
distance. The food was excellent, which is ofcourse the main thing. The
meat was juicy, the vegetables crisp and fresh and the liquid it swam in was
appropriately spicy. I spent a happy half hour negotiating my way through my
laksa and in the end experienced that great feature of South East Asian food of
feeling full and satisfied without actually feeling stuffed. I would recommend
this place to anyone who likes Asian food..
If only I could remember the name of the place.
Mexican
The Irish Independent advertises itself variably as Ireland’s
best selling newspaper, the country’s number 1 news source and with several
other inflated self-promoting slogans. The reality, however, is that it’s not
really that good. I get the paper for free at work, which is the reason that I
read it with some regularity, but when you browse through it, you find that the
first 30 pages are filled mainly with man-bites-dog type stories about small
town life in the Irish countryside and a string of articles about B-list
celebrities. It is not until you reach the midsection of the paper that you
find anything that is not about Ireland or Britain. The final 30 or so pages
are filled with sports, most of this about Hurling, horse racing and other
typically Irish passtimes. What you will also notice when you have a closer
look at the paper, is that everything
that is not about something particularly Irish, is copied verbatim from the
Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper that is part of the same parent company. By
now you may wonder why I have spent a whole paragraph in a story about food
discussing the pros and cons of an Irish newspaper, but the reason I bring this
up is the one distinguishing feature of the Independent, its listings magazine, Night&Day. They
have unfortunately moved it into the Saturday edition of the paper these days,
but for the first four years of my stay in Ireland, it was my little Friday
ritual at work to pick up the Independent and read through the magazine while
having breakfast. My favorite section was a page called Barfly, which consisted
of a restaurant review and a pub review. Through this magazine, I came across
many interesting pubs and restaurants. I first heard of the Woolshed through
this magazine and there are several other interesting places I found out about
through Night&Day. And here we arrive,
in a roundabout way, to my inclusion of the paper in this story, which is that
I first read about Boojum Burritos here.You may not be surprised to hear by now,
after nearly every food group being
represented by the wrong continent, that Mexican food is represented by Dublin.
Boojum Burritos got 4 out of 5 stars and a glowing review from the normally
extremely picky restaurant reviewer so I knew I had to check it out. Some
research revealed that Boojum was first founded in Belfast, of all places, and
that they have two restaurants there. Dublin is the third one and was very
eager to check it out.
I set off to get a
burrito and was welcomed by the same smiling face that I had seen in the
newspaper review. I ordered a shredded beef burrito and a bottle of Mexican
beer, grabbed a bottle of hot sauce and sat down to my meal. After 2 bites, I
pinched myself to see if I was actually awake. It was arguably the best burrito
I had ever eaten. The beef was extremely tender and juicy, the beans, rice,
sour cream and cheese complemented the beef and hot sauce supremely and the
guacamole I had ordered on the side was creamy yet not greasy and nearly made
me salivate. I have been to California
several times, but even there I was hard pressed to find a better burrito. I
was in love with the place before my burrito was half finished. I have eaten there many many times since and
have been awarded for my loyalty by the always smiling staff, who gave me a
t-shirt when I had my 40th meal. I know decent Mexican food can be
hard to find on this side of the Atalantic, but you don’t need to look any
further than Dublin’s Millenium Walkway. I have tried all the other burrito
places in Dublin, but none is anywhere near as good as Boojum. If I had to
nominate something as my favorite food ever, it would be this.
So there we are, the 5
basic food groups covered. I hope you try to take the time to try them out if
you are near any of them, believe me it’s worth it
Cheers for now,
Lennard
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