"Try this, darlings. Do you like it? OK, let"s put some on the buffet."
It was more like attending a large family dinner party than going to a restaurant. Ismail beamed at the noisy chatter and sounds of appreciation from every table.
"That"s the way I want it, darling", he told us. "This is food my grandmother used to cook. It"s family food."
After hours of watching the food being prepared, I was starving - all the more so as I had missed out before. We joined the queue and loaded our plates with fresh popiah, curries and salads - all to be eaten, of course, with our right hands.
"Ihadbreakfastalready b.u.t.thisissogood Icouldjustkeepeating. LOL", Lex mumbled through her umpteenth spring roll. I did not understand a d.a.m.n word she was saying, but I knew exactly what she meant.
"Thanksfor askingmealong", she smiled.
"No problem, love. What are uncles for?"
Crouching Down for Pho with Uncle Ho I am happy to share with you a very successful technique for staying alive in Hanoi, Vietnam, when confronted by the thousands of motor cycles that fdl the streets and shoot down the alleyways at an alarming speed twenty-four hours a day. You can thank me when you go there.
Never be ashamed to use a local as a human shield.
The locals have in-built instincts about when to cross a busy road and at what speed. If you cross when they do, you have a chance. If they get it wrong, at least it is them who will be hit first. I am not proud, but I will admit that if it is between me and a doddery old woman in the road survival stakes, granny"s going down.
My quirky guesthouse in the Old Quarter of Hanoi appeared to be the Vietnamese equivalent of Boys Town, with half the male teenage population of the city asleep on blankets laid on the floor of the reception. I left Big Red and went straight out for something to eat, immediately bringing into play the survival technique above, while scooters shot either side of me as I walked along the alleyways towards Hoan Kiem Lake in search of breakfast.
Vietnamese food has become increasingly popular in the West in the last twenty years. In part this is due to ma.s.sive emigration during and after the Vietnam War, which brought sizeable expat communities to America, France, the UK and particularly Australia, and with them came their cuisine. But more than this, the light, clear flavours of Vietnamese food, combined with its use of fresh ingredients, small amounts of protein and little fat fits well with the current Western obsession with healthy eating.
The most famous dish of all is pho, a noodle soup, which is good any time of the day but a must for breakfast. Pre-cooked noodles are placed in a bowl with slivers of meat or seafood, sprinkled with spring onions and fresh red chilli and then topped off with ladles of hot beef or chicken broth. As I walked down through the Old Quarter, the air was already filled with the smell of pho being prepared and, using the trusted adage that the best and safest street food is to be found at the busiest places, I selected a crowded spot, pulled up a small plastic stool and pointed to a bowl of beef soup, indicating that I wanted the same. Less than a minute later, I was presented with a steaming bowl filled to the brim and topped off with a freshly cracked egg softly poaching in the hot broth. Every spoonful had layer on layer of flavour and texture. I spiked the broth with chilli paste and added a dash of fish sauce for salt. It was as good a dish as I had tried in a long time, and I knew that for my few days here breakfast would be taken care of No one would ever call Hanoi an attractive city. It suffers the attendant problems I had seen in so many countries on the trip: pollution, dirt, poverty and decaying infrastructure, in this case made worse by the strict Communist regime, which has neither the finances nor the inclination to do anything about them. But it still has plenty to offer and is made enjoyable by the sheer energy of its locals, who appeared cold at first but over time were very welcoming.
I spent the day in search of Vietnam"s most famous son. Ho Chi Minh, to this day revered in the country as the greatest hero and liberator, known to everyone as "Uncle Ho". His body was mummified, against his dying wishes, and in true Communist leader style housed in a mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square. I made my way around the square to the entrance, guarded by young soldiers who barely looked old enough to carry toy guns, let alone real ones. Surprisingly, there was hardly any queue at all.
and I joined the small line, handed my camera and bag over and filtered respectfiilly along in front of the body of Vietnam"s great leader. He was in better shape than I imagined - owing to the fact that he apparently goes on a two-month holiday to China every year for a bit of a wash and brush-up. The quiet tears of the older people in the line made for an unexpectedly moving experience.
On my journey from the airport to the city I had shared a cab with a young man from England called Darran, and we had agreed to meet up later for a drink. By his own admission he was not that experienced when it came to food, but he was willing to try anything, and over the next couple of days before he had to join his own travel party, he became my wingman as we went in search of things to eat.
All over the Old Quarter signs were posted offering "bia hoi" for sale. The three main Hanoi breweries, as well as making their bottled beers, also produce barrels of fresh beer made with no preservatives. The beer won"t last more than a day, so it is sold for a few pennies a gla.s.s at shops all over the city, where you hunker down on small plastic stools to sip the refreshing brew. After a few gla.s.ses Darran and I felt as though we could conquer the world, and we agreed that the next day we would fmd our way to La Mat, also known as "Snake Village", the place in Hanoi to eat our slithering friends. Viewed through the bleary goggles of "bia hoi", the idea had sounded good to us. The next morning, when Darran arrived at my hotel bleary-eyed, he looked a lot less certain, as indeed did I.
We found a cab for the short journey out of the city only to find, when we turned down a small side-street, that we were suddenly surrounded by a posse of men on scooters, each employed by a different snake restaurant and screaming at the driver to bring us to their establishment. When the driver finally disgorged us, we were almost immediately surrounded by people trying to persuade us to eat in their restaurants. I was not ashamed to admit that I was having second thoughts.
T don"t fancy this much, mate." I looked across at Darran, who looked back with a grateful look in his eye. "Me neither."
We walked around the neighbourhood for a while, trying to convince ourselves that we had done the right thing as we saw the shops filled with snake medicine and wines until we found another cab to take us back to the city. That night we shared a last beer, but inside I felt lousy. I had turned down this unique eating opportunity because some nasty men on bikes shouted a bit. As I said my goodbyes to Darran, I went back to my guesthouse feeling like a fraud.
The next day I had booked myself onto a cookery course at the ultra-smart Metropole Hotel, another remnant of French colonial times, where Graham Greene had lived when writing The Quiet American. It was a fabulous day. The young woman chef who led the course was a delight and, after a visit to the famous Cho 19 market, we spent the rest of the morning watching and taking part as Thuong Thuong, our teacher, showed us how to make everything from fresh salads using the hearts of banana flowers to whole fried fish and, of course, the small, delicate spring rolls for which Vietnamese cuisine is famous. Afterwards we decamped to the hotel restaurant and helped ourselves to the buflet, a collection of nearly a hundred dishes, made in small portions to maintain freshness. 1 sat with my fellow students and enjoyed the meal, but I kept thinking back to my failures at La Mat and that somewhere there was a snake with my name on it.
I had arranged to go on a tour on my last day in the city, but when I awoke, I still had snake on my mind and decided that Halong Bay could wait. I had to go and right my wrong. I girded my considerable loins and caught another cab, this time making sure he dropped me ofl" about ten minutes walk from La Mat so that I could pick out a likely candidate without ha.s.sle, and found myself entering a restaurant called Quoc Tien. It was more sedate "han I imagined, and far from the gloomy den of iniquity I had antic.i.p.ated, being light and airy with a smart terrace.
As for the meal, well, after selecting a snake from the tank as one would a lobster, I watched as it was killed and its heart was placed in a gla.s.s with some spirit laced with a little blood. I drank it down in one gulp of burning alcohol, but the heart reminded me of an oyster and I remained convinced throughout the meal that I could feel it beating. I drank the bile that had been milked from the small glands of the snake, which was bitter, and I ate the rest of the snake, which was, thankfully, served in rather more ordinary preparations - soups, stir-fried with vegetables and in dainty spring rolls.
What did it taste like? I hate to say it, but it tasted like ... well, you can finish the rest of that off yourself A Filler in Manila Few places on my trip surprised me as much as the Philippines. My expectations were low, and my impressions of the country had been gleaned from Western media horror stories of crime, corruption and crippling poverty. It was only the intervention of my Filipino aunt Evelyn in New York that changed my mind and my itinerary, as I decided to bypa.s.s Cambodia and Laos and head to Manila instead.
The Philippines are hardly on the tourist radar of South-East Asia. Its government has been seriously lacking when it comes to promoting just how beautiful and varied this archipelago of over 7,000 islands is. They have also failed to promote the range and quality of the cuisine, leaving people to a.s.sume it consists entirely of adobo, the famed dish of pork and vinegar, lumpia, the local versions of spring rolls, and lechon, barbecued suckling pig. Add to this the fact that it is not considered a cheap or a safe option for travellers, and it is easy to see why the security-wary and budget-conscious often give it a miss.
Evelyn rea.s.sured me that Manila was a worthwhile city to visit, that the food had great variety and, most important of all, that she would be in the country at the same time.
"You have lots of cousins there. I will make sure they look after you." I was sure they would. Few people ever say no to "Auntie Evelyn".
I had also been contacted by a terrific food writer called Robyn Eckhart, who runs a website called Eating Asia. She got in touch to give me some helpful hints about Malaysia but, in pa.s.sing, had mentioned that she thought Fihpino food was one( the "undiscovered treasures of Asia". That was enough for me.
There is no doubting that Manila has many problems. The! traffic is chaotic, and going even the shortest distance takes mu planning; and, of course, with the traffic come the problems i noise and pollution, made worse by the stifling humidity. Povertyand the uneven distribution of wealth are readily apparent too," as the shanty towns cl.u.s.tered by the runways of the airports give I way to the luxury hotels and private houses, all in secure com-j pounds. With poverty come its unhappy bedfellows drugs andj prost.i.tution: the area around my business hotel in Makati wasj surrounded by girly bars and ma.s.sage parlours, all catering for thej grim recreational desires of fat middle-aged men. However, as l] knew from my travels, these were the problems of any developing! nation, not just the Philippines, and despite them there was muc to recommend the place to the potential visitor.
You have to begin with the country"s greatest a.s.set, its peop who swamp you with their hospitality and goodwill. The che greetings of the staff at my hotel were genuine and followed with hand-drawn notes showing me where to find the best food.^ The drivers of Manila"s plentiful and cheap taxis were, after gentle bout of haggling, trustworthy and another useful source! of information, and stallholders, restaurant staff and shopworke could not have been more helpful.
Then there is the beauty of the country - not Manila, whic is as ugly as a rejected set for Blade Runner, but head a few hot outside or to the far reaches of one of the islands, and the scene is breathtaking. Most of all, for me, however, it was the foodii had not been prepared for the bewildering variety on offer or I enthusiasm, bordering on psychotic obsession, with which fo was treated by just about everyone I met, including my relatives. ] was an obsession 1 had not encountered since I had been in Mexic which, given the fact that the two countries were both ruled 1 the Spanish and the fact that many governors of the Philippir came from Mexico, should not have come as a surprise.
There appears to be no such thing as a quick meal or a small meal, and when the Filipinos eat, they like to indulge in their other great obsession, talking. They talk about anything and everything and have an opinion on everything and any subject, even if they know nothing about it. It is more important to have an opinion and to express it than for that opinion to have any basis in knowledge. We had a lot in common.
They are most opinionated about food, as I found out during my first meal with my cousin Carlo Tadiar at a restaurant called Abe. Laconic and with a dry wit, Carlo, like many Filipinos, had a slight American tw.a.n.g to his English, which he explained was a legacy of the era of American "protection" after the Spanish left the country. So indeed was the shopping mall in which the restaurant was situated. The Filipinos love malls, and at times you would think you were in Kansas rather than Manila.
Carlo was the editor of a popular men"s lifestyle magazine in the Philippines, and, as he talked to me, he was also ordering food and shouting in Tagalog, the local language, into his mobile phone at the same time. Between conversations he managed to take me through the plates of food that kept appearing on the table. Delicious and deeply savoury, each dish was packed with astonishing new combinations of flavours.
A slow-cooked kare kare stew of oxtail was cooked so that the bones released their gelatin and thickened the sauce. Then there were chunks of bangus fish "cooked" in lemon juice and palm vinegar and topped with chilli; roast chickens stufled with Filipino rice and dried fruit; lechon, the legendary suckling pig, served with a sauce made from the pig"s liver; camaru, a bowl of crunchy, deep-fried crickets served with sharp raw onions; and finally a bicol express, an a.r.s.e-threateningly hot dish of pork, coconut milk and fiery green chillies. It was wonderful, the sort of food that raises taste buds from a jaded torpor - sharp, clean flavours, savoury, delicious stews and the crunch factor that Filipinos demand from at least one dish every meal. I adored it.
As I dived headlong into bowl after bowl of food, Carlo-^ explained what was planned for me during my visit. I grunted in understanding as he listed where I would be going and who I would be meeting, but in truth I wasn"t really listening. I was too busy focusing on the plates of food in front of me, to make sure that he and our two dining companions did not take my fair share of anything. He might just as easily have told me that I was about to have a hydrochloric acid enema on live TV the next day and I would have given him the same nod of enthusiastic agreement, as I pierced another piece of suckling pig with my fork. If this was how good it was going to be, I could hardly wait for the next few days.
On the Thursday Carlo collected me in a car and announced that we were heading out of Manila on a two-hour drive to the city of Angeles, in the Pampanga region. He had decided to include an article about my trip in his magazine and to combine it with a "meeting of minds" between me and a famous local artist and gourmand, Claude Tayag.
Claude, Carlo told me, was one of the most noted gourmands in the country and had agreed to prepare a meal for us at hisj home, a bale dutung or "house of wood", worth seeing in its own right, he told me, as it had been constructed entirely by Claude , himself from remnants of local churches and farmhouses.
A true polymath, Claude Tayag was a painter, sculptor, writer, musician and cook, who had not only laid every wooden plank in the house but also made every piece of furniture, all in a traditional Filipino style, with the living quarters elevated and thtf side panels removable so that air could flow through on humid" summer days. He led us out on to a large deck overlooking a. garden in which half a dozen of his sculptures, made from old. ploughshares, were standing, and seated us around a table (whic he had made, of course) to begin the meal.
It is hard to describe just how good this meal was. I sat in i attention as Claude and his wife brought out dish after explaining how each was prepared. A salad of crunchy paco 1 served with pickled quail"s eggs came with a dressing made of duck egg yolks. It was followed by bulanglang, a seafood stew with guava and fresh prawns, with heads so large that Claude instructed us to rip them off and allow the fat to dribble into the soup as a thickener. Fried hito fish came next, served wrapped in mustard leaves with balo halo, a condiment of fermented rice, which of course Claude makes himself and sells under his own label. And there was yet another version of the kare kare stew I had tried before, but this time made with fish.
Most simple and most delicious of all, adding the necessary crunch, was a bowl of bagnet, deep-fried belly pork. There was rice too, of course: no meal in the Philippines happens without rice. I was staggered by it all, the generosity and the food. This was one of the best meals I had eaten, ever.
After the meal Claude shepherded us towards his car for the short drive into the city. He wanted me to taste perhaps the quintessential Filipino dish - sisig. Created in his home town of Angeles, this is the dish that every Filipino loves to have with a cold beer. It is made up of left-over bits of pig - cheek, nose and ear - chopped up finely with chilli and cooked on a hot plate to form a crunchy layer on the bottom. It is served communally so that people can fight over the crispy bits as they talk. It was deliciously savoury, and I am sure I could still taste it as we headed back into Manila.
Over the next few days of my stay I set out to explore what else was on offer, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of yet another cousin, Ethan. He was a huge teddy bear of a man, with a deep laugh that peppered his conversation. I liked him immediately.
"Man, I hear you have been doing some good eating? Heh, heh", he boomed at me in his baritone voice. "Let"s see if we can"t do even better. Heh, heh."
And we certainly tried. We ate lechon at Salcedo, the weekend market for middle-cla.s.s Manilans. "It"s from Cebu", he told me knowingly. "They don"t serve it with the liver sauce. They say if you need sauce, there is something wrong with your lechon."
We tried sinigang, the FiUpino equivalent of Jewish chicken soup, soured with tamarind and flavoured with pork, beef or seafood - in this case with a huge hunk of corned beef simmering in the broth.
"It has to be sour, man or its not sinigang," Ethan advised as he slurped up another mouthful.
We tried crispy pata - yet more pork, but this time braised, hung up to dry for up to twenty-four hours and then cut into chunks and, you"ve guessed it, deep-fried. And we tried pork skewers. "My favourite", Ethan said, joining a long line for them at the market. He emerged from the queue brandishing four meaty examples.
"One"s never enough", he said, without any argument from me.
He really was a man after my own heart attack, and thanks to him. Carlo and my aunt Evelyn, I enjoyed my time in Manila more than I could have possibly imagined. 1 was delighted when she joined us for a last meal at the enormous family home. Prepared by Carlo, the main course was perhaps the best-known dish of all, adobo - pork and chicken marinated in chillies and vinegar. For many Filipinos it is the ultimate comfort food.
Ten of us sat around the table and ate, drank and, of course, talked for over five hours until the small hours of the morning. We talked mainly about food, about how things should be done "properly" and about how so many young people now took short cuts. Everyone shook their heads mournfully. I felt totally at home, and I could not have been happier. I had "discovered" a new cuisine, and one that could not have been more suited to my taste for hot, sour and crunchy. And best of all, I had discovered a new family, a family who shared my own obsession for food. My next stop was to discover my old family.
I was off to India.
India: Crazy, Beautiful Nothing you have ever experienced prepares you for India.
First, the negatives: the a.s.sault on every sense, the noise, the smell, the pollution, the poverty, the fdth-strewn streets, the bewildering number of people and the shattering of every value and belief you hold as normal.
And the positives? India seems unstoppable, not just tapping at the gla.s.s ceiling placed above developing nations by developed ones, but head-b.u.t.ting it with increasing ferocity. It could soon be the most populous nation on earth. It could soon overtake many countries in the West in terms of its GNP, and it is already at the forefront of medical and technological development.
The capacity for inspiring awe and irritation in equal measures is the hallmark of a country where you can be stunned by the vast landscapes and the remnants of ancient history but still queue for two hours at immigration because they have not printed enough landing cards, and you can see a large neon sign outside a bank that reads: "24 hour ATM (except between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m.)".
Perhaps I should just concentrate on the food, which cannot be bettered anywhere in the world in terms of variety, range and quality. There are seven union territories and twenty-eight states in the Republic of India, from Kashmir in the north to Tamil Nadu in the south, from Maharashtra in the west to Bengal in the east. Each has its own distinct cuisine, born out of the geography and political history of the region, from the north, where Mogul invaders brought grilling and the subtlety of cream and almonds, to the south-west, where the cooking of Goa shows Portuguese influences of garlic, chillies, tomatoes and vinei It is no easy matter knowing where to start with India. But" then it is no easy place for me to know where to start with being Indian. If indeed, that"s what I am. So instead, let me start with my father, Pratip Majumdar, or Baba.
Baba first moved to Britain in the mid-i950s, primarily to complete his medical training as an orthopaedic surgeon but also to escape the expectations of his father that he would join the family homeopathic practice back in Calcutta. My grandfather was, by all accounts, a brilliant and well-respected man, a member of the Indian Communist Party and part of the intelligentsia that pushed for independence from Great Britain after the Second World War. But his relationship with my father was an uneasy one, punctuated by long periods of non-communication, which resulted in my father"s all too infrequent returns to India and the fact that I never met him.
My father is an extraordinary man, and I am very much his son. He has never suffered fools - a trait I share - and while we are both intensely loyal to those we consider friends, we cut those who cross us out of our lives like a malignant tumour. I have many reasons to be grateful for his strength, generosity and support over the years, but the unwelcome side-effect of his fall-i with my grandfather has been a profound lack of ident.i.ty.
I joke that I am half-Welsh, half-Bengali, but in reality I hi always felt half-non-Welsh, half-non-Bengali, not particulai comfortable or welcome in either camp. I speak neither language and while my glistening olive skin may be a surefire with the ladies (not a word), it has led to me being called "P; in Rotherham (the double whammy being both racist and g( graphically incorrect) and a "half-caste" in India. I wasn"t-exp( ing an epiphany, but India promised to be interesting, and just for the food.
New Delhi is to India what Washington D.C. is to the USA/ It"s not the most exciting city, but as the administrative heart it makes a decent starting-point and reasonably sane place to begin an introduction to the most insane country in the world. I use the word "reasonably" with caution, however, because this is still India we are talking about.
On my first morning in the city after arriving fi-om Manila, I flagged down one of Delhi"s infamous auto-rickshaws. Yellow and black, thousands buzz around the streets of the capital like angry hornets. They are fun, if extraordinarily dangerous. Above all, they are cheap: as you haggle with the driver over a fare, you have to keep reminding yourself that the amount you are arguing about is loose change that you would not stop to pick up if you dropped it on the streets back home.
I asked the driver to drop me at the Red Fort, the centre of the Mogul ruler Shah Jahan"s new capital, which takes its name from the miles of red brick that formed its outer wall. On previous visits nearly every tourist I had seen had been a foreigner. Now most of them seemed to be from India itself, a sign of the country"s burgeoning middle cla.s.s. It is an impressive place, but I was more moved by my next stop, the home of a woman many still consider the mother of modern India: Indira Gandhi. Since her a.s.sa.s.sination in 1984, the simple but dignified bungalow she called home has become a museum to her life and a shrine to her legacy. At the rear of the house in a neat garden is the path along which she walked to meet the man who turned out to be her a.s.sa.s.sin. It has been covered in gla.s.s to protect her last steps in the gravel, and the point at which she fell is now marked.
By now I was starving and had my auto-rickshaw buzz me to the heart of Old Delhi. There is a romantic notion that street food always tastes better than equivalent food in restaurants. This is, of course, complete and utter rubbish. The mere fact that you eat food while standing at a street corner does not give it any niore intrinsic quality and, of course, you add to it the Russian roulette element of not knowing whether you will make it back to your accommodation before your a.r.s.e explodes. I often meet travellers along the way who wear their encounters with dysen-.tery as a badge of honour.
"Oh yah, I only eat on the streets. It is where the real people eat", they would proffer. "That"s why they all die at fifty", is an; obvious reply.
I had, of course, already eaten food from roadside stalls in China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand, but I had taken great care to head to places crowded with locals, with the view that a rapid turnover would mean fresher food and less chance of me spending the night heaving into the porcelain. So far I had been lucky, but I was less inclined to take the risk in India, for two reasons. The first was that the locals here seem to have stomachs that can cope with anything at all, from the fieriest chillies germs that would have biological terrorists shaking their head in ] disbelief The second is that, of all of the Asian countries I visited,, India has easily the lowest standard of hygiene. Old ingredients!] covered in flies can be cooked in old oil served on plates washedj in the same murky water for days on end. I just knew there was a dodgy meal there with my name on it, so instead I based myj research around local restaurants.
Karim"s in Old Delhi was highly recommended and, as I] sat down at one of the communal tables in one of four rooms] surrounding a courtyard, the smells coming from the kitchen] reminded me of why it would be impossible do a world tour and] leave India off the list. There was the unmistakeable whiff of grilling meat, ghee, onions and spices to set the heart racing. As I looked at the menu, a young man sitting opposite began chatting to me, introducing himself as Sunit. He turned to the me board on the wall, saying, "They are famous for their mutt dishes here, but try the b.u.t.ter chicken. It"s excellent." - b.u.t.ter and chicken together - 1 liked the sound of those odd When the waiter arrived, we both ordered it and my new frien Sunit, added a side-dish of mutton kebabs, which he insiste I should share. We were both presented with large bowls chicken in a gravy made with tomatoes. On the top was a slit of melted ghee and to the side a sliver of green chilli. It was every bit as good as Sunit claimed and, like him, I ate with my hands gnawing the chicken bones and mopping up the sauce with fresh paratha bread, occasionally turning my attention to take big bites from our side-dish of kebabs.
It is at moments like this, when food this good is put in front of you, that you can forgive India all its craziness. At the end of the meal Sunit insisted on paying the bill. By local standards it was not expensive, but it was still an incredibly generous gesture and one that made me feel all fuzzy inside. I only hoped that the b.u.t.ter chicken would not do the same.
On my final day in Delhi I decided that it was time to have one of my occasional blow-outs and to spend my entire daily allowance in one high-cla.s.s restaurant as a counterpoint to the cheap and homely places that were my normal destination.
After a morning visit to the moving memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, I had my auto-rickshaw drop me off in front of the Sheraton Hotel, where my chosen restaurant was Bukhara, regularly featured in lists of the best restaurants in the world. It is no surprise to find that Bill Clinton was a fan, but more of one to discover that he is joined by Vladimir Putin of Russia, who insisted on eating here every time he was in Delhi. Their dishes come from India"s Northwest Frontier, where intense flavours from tandoor-grilled meats and creamy, slow-cooked dahls combine to produce an intensely robust effect.
A waiter appeared and wrapped a bib around my neck, explaining that since I had ordered the house speciality of tan-door chicken, I would need it to protect my clothing. When a platter containing the whole bird was brought out of the kitchen, the smells preceded it and I was s...o...b..ring before it hit the table. Tandoor chicken appears on the menu of every Indian restaurant *n the world, and in principle it is one of the more simple dishes to make. Marinate the chicken in yoghurt and spices and grill it. But getting it right is so much harder than it seems. Too much "Marinating makes the meat spongy, too little and it dries out.
Here it was as perfect as I have had anywhere. This is not a dish to nibble at politely - you vacuum it up, chomping loudly with no thought for the mess you are making on the table, your hands or your clothes. Thank G.o.d they gave me the bib.
The chicken was so good that I almost forgot to turn my attention to their other signature dish, the Bukhara dahl, a version traditionally made by allowing urud lentils to cook in milk and spices overnight in the embers of the cooling tandoor. To it are added onions and garlic, spices and so much b.u.t.ter that each serving should come with its own defibrillator. It is so good that the handful of fluffy paratha breads with it scarcely seemed enough, and I found myself looking around and then picking up the bowl before licking it clean. I would have got away with it too, if it had not been for those pesky waiters.
Returning to collect the plate, one of them said, "You have a stain on your face sir". I turned to the mirror by my seat to see my reflection with a tell-tale ring of sauce around my face from the lip of the bowl.
"Don"t worry, sir", he said calmly as he handed me a hot towel. "It happens a lot."
I am sure it does. I wondered if it had ever happened to Billy Jeff or Vladimir before. I was pretty sure it would happen to me if I went there again.
Mumbai the Unstoppable Delhi may be the capital, but it is to Mumbai that everyone looks to lead the way in India. With well over i6 million people and seemingly as many cars, the sights, sounds, noise and smells of Mumbai make it India to the power of ten.
Mumbai crackles with a raw energy that seeps out of every open sewer and explodes with every "parping" horn from the black and yellow taxis that churn out enough pollution to make your eyes weep the moment you set foot out into the decaying streets. No trip to India would be complete without a visit to a city where you feel as though you are riding on the world"s fastest roller-coaster without a harness.
There is, of course, much to deplore about India"s cities in general, and this one in particular. The gut-wrenching poverty is heart-breaking, and the decay of the crumbling buildings and roads seems to suggest that, when the British left, they took all their tools with them. The stench that fdls the air from the fdth-strewn streets and clogged gutters makes even the most seasoned traveller cover his mouth and nose. It is a challenge to every Western value and an a.s.sault to every sense. At once exciting, vibrant, challenging and appalling, Mumbai is truly one of the world"s great cities, and it doesn"t really care whether you approve or not. You get the feeling that, if you were to mess with Mumbai, Mumbai would just turn around and kick your a.s.s.
Nowhere is this more apparent that when it comes to food. Mumbai has a reputation as the best city in which to eat in India and perhaps in the whole of Asia. Its staggering variety is made possible by the influx of people from every corner of the sub tinent. Its coastal location made Mumbai "the gateway to India"," and here you will fmd Muslim sitting down with Parsi, Bengali sitting down with Jain and Tamil sitting down with native Maharashtran for meals ranging from local favourites of phav bhaji or bhel puri to parsi dhansaks, Bengali sweets, tandoored^ rolls and kebabs, konkani seafood cookery from the south-west coast or creamy korma from the north, all washed down with juices from fresh fruits and sugar-cane or a long, cold beer, as* taste and religion dictate.
Mumbai is not, however, one of India"s great sightseeing destinations. Once you have looked at the deeply unimpres-, sive Gateway to India and sailed out on a rickety old ferry the Elephanta Islands, you have more or less "done" Mumbai.. But that leaves plenty of time to explore what Mumbai is really about, with visits to Crawford Market or Chor Bazar producing j eye-popping sights both to astonish and to disgust and trips tm Chowpatty Beach to watch Mumbaikars at play and doing what! they do best: eat.
I had just a few days there and knew that I was not going i able to try everything, but with my own research and e-mail I had received from locals I had already made a plan. My hotel] was just around the corner from a true local inst.i.tution, VithalBelwala, where for generations they have been serving one of j Mumbai"s signature snacks, bhel puri, consisting of pufled rice] mixed with a combination of sev (sticks of fried flour), onions,! potatoes, tomatoes and chilli, dressed with chutneys of tamarindj or coriander. It"s a great introduction to the area, and after twc large platefuls of their "special dry bhel" I was ready to walk it of on the way to the location I had in mind for supper.
Mumbai is well known for its konkani seafood cuisine orig nating in the south-west of India, and one of the best restati rants is the small and recommended Apoorva. Like so mar neighbourhood places in Mumbai, it doesn"t appear desperate welcoming at first, being mainly a place for working men INDIA: MUMBAI.
come for a drink and some food after work. The hghting was dim and the only air-conditioning a rattling fan above each table. But the food was fantastic, with a cla.s.sic dish of prawn ga.s.si -small, sweet shrimps cooked in a spicy sauce of coconut milk soured with the juice from the kok.u.m, a native fruit renowned for its medicinal properties.
They place a knife and a spoon on the table for you, but in India people seldom use them. Here it is all about the hands. Eating with your hands has many benefits. You are able to combine the ubiquitous mound of rice with the sauce of the dish you are eating so that each grain gets a proper coating. It also just tastes better. Don"t ask me why, it just does. So, as I scooped fingers full of spicy rice to my lips and spooned up the sauce with a crispy appam - a bowl-shaped pancake made of fermented rice flour - my cutlery remained untouched.
I asked the waiter what was in the sauce. In the USA, if you are silly enough to ask such a question, they can easily spend more time describing a dish than the chef did cooking it. "It"s an infusion of milk from a cow called Doris from Johnson State Farm, with Meyer lemons from the second branch from the top, mixed with cilantro picked at midnight while we all sang "76 Trombones" from The Music Man. The chef used his right hand while preparing the dish and laced the final emulsion with two tears shed while thinking of his mother."
"It"s a gravy", my waiter responded.
"Yes, but what"s in it?" I pressed, and he headed off" to ask someone who might know. Returning, he announced proudly "It"s a red gravy" and went off"to serve other tables.
The next day I set out to visit two of Mumbai"s most famous shopping districts, Crawford Market and Chor Bazar. I returned to my hotel about thirty seconds later, the scurry of a rat over my open-toed sandals having persuaded me that a good pair of solid walking boots might be a better option.
By this time in the trip I was beginning to be a bit marketed out, but India"s markets are something else. The stench makes Chinese markets seem hke a basket of roses, and when I saw 4 cage truck laden with white-feathered chickens - most of th dead but some still struggling as they were dragged out quickly dispatched with a rusty knife by a bored-looking wor - I decided that I would probably do something of a vegetaria nature for breakfast.
Phav bahji is traditionally a lunchtime dish or an evening snac but a nearby stall was already serving this cla.s.sic Maharashtr dish to market workers who had been at it for hours. It is cur in a bun: a mixture of potatoes, chilli, tomatoes and pepp mashed together on a large metal hot plate and then served a bun. It is laden with fat, and the soft, white bun is the stuff < atkins="" nightmares,="" but="" it="" is="" entirely="">
By mid-morning the city was in full flow. I dodged the 1 to head to the Maidan, the much-needed parkland lungs oft city. It was already fdled with crowds of men playing cricket.", much more than just a sport in India, cricket truly is India"s on unifying religion, with star players being worshipped like deitifl or reviled like demons, depending on their performances, ar with cricket matches attracting crowds that would make Bili Graham jealous. Every spare inch of newsprint or minute airtime is dedicated to discussion shows about the successes more often, the failures of India"s national side. Even away froiJ the parks any spare stretch of street can be turned into a pit with makeshift stumps and bats. As you walk, you need to constantly vigilant as the words "ball, ball, ball" are shrieked warn of a missile coming your way.
On my last night I had plans to head to one of Mumbai"s mar excellent smart restaurants after a visit to watch the Mumbail in relaxation mode. During the day Chowpatty Beach, a stret of sand at the top of Marine Drive, is deserted, but as 1 arrive in the early evening, it was already kicking into action. Itiner astrologers fought for my attention with ear cleaners and hav ers while crowds descended on the snack stalls selling bhel puriwhich they were busy scooping into their mouths with the helINDIA: MUMBAI.
of more of the flat, fried bread. There was plenty of action, but my sightseeing there was done, and I took a cab for the short journey down Colaba Causeway to what I was reliably informed js the only legally sanctioned street stall in Mumbai, Bade Miyan, considered one of the best in the whole of Mumbai. Even if I had not known the directions, I would have found my way there because of the incredible smells and the crowds of eager diners. At an early hour the streets around the stall were packed with customers, and cars were double-parked as people came to eat or to get food to take away.
A young man with an official badge around his neck handed me a short menu, and I ordered a mutton roll. He dived again into the throng and reappeared a few moments later with a small parcel containing my pre-supper snack. I turned in the direction of my dinner destination, unwrapping my kebab as a nice little pre-appetizer appetizer. I took a bite and stopped dead in my tracks. It wasn"t just good, it was sensational. So good in fact, that I stood rooted to the spot until I had finished every last shred of the spicy meat wrapped with onions. All thoughts of my planned supper were gone. I turned on my heels back to Bade Miyan and spent the next two hours there working my way through the menu until I realized it was past midnight.
The taste of those kebabs stayed with me until I arrived back at the hotel. In fact, if I close my eyes, the taste stays with me still. But that is true of so much about Mumbai. It stays with you and, despite its savagely unforgiving elements, you leave thinking that you have barely scratched the surface of this unstoppable city.
After leaving Mumbai, I carved a s.p.a.ce in my schedule to recharge my batteries and to catch up on some much-needed sleep. I wanted to eat well, of course, but I didn"t have any plans.
I chose Goa, the former Portuguese colony on the south-west coast of the subcontinent, which only became part of India in 1962. The north of the state is highly developed with resorts and now overcrowded with tourists from all over the world, but primarily the UK and, increasingly Russia. It was not for The south, however, remains relatively unspoilt, and I chose basic but pleasant-looking resort in Cavelossim and arrived the on an early morning flight.
The difference from Mumbai was striking the moment I le the airport. It was quieter, obviously - anywhere would see quiet after Mumbai - but more than that, the whole pace of liwas much more gentle. The Portuguese legacy still remains ijthe faces of the people and the names on the shops and buildir we pa.s.sed en route to the hotel. It is also in the architecture, wit] as many church steeples on show as there are temples.
The hotel was basic but would suit my needs down to ground. It was moments" walk from the beach, so I quickt changed into flip-flops and pottered out along the rice fields i see what was on offer. The beach was the stuff of a holiday br chure photographer"s dreams. Stretching on for miles in eit direction, the sweeping sands, waving palms and blue seas we^ broken up only by the occasional beach shack serving food to 1 few people around at that time. I flipped off my flops and sp the next hour walking on the hot sands before choosing one > them at random and sitting down for my first meal.