INDIA: THE KARIM OF THE CROP IN DELHI

After the relative ease of South East Asia, arriving in India really is a shock to the system and, even though it is not my first visit, I had forgotten what bloody hard work the country in general and Delhi in particular, is.

An hour wait at immigration because they had “run out of forms” reminded me quickly that things work differently here and this was added to by the no show of my airport pick-up and a stressful taxi journey where the driver tried to take me to another hotel because mine was closed “because of fire, sir”

Of course, it was no such thing. He wanted to take me somewhere where he got a commission for every mug punter he brought through the door. Just one of the hustles that form part of the visitor’s lot in a country where you rapidly come to the conclusion that you are no more than a walking dollar sign.

You have two options. You can either rage against it which gets you nowhere as you are faced with complete indifference from those attempting to separate you from your money. Alternatively, you can just go with the flow and accept that in India there really is little concept of customer service and everything is done in such a half arsed fashion that you want to suggest they replace the Ashoka Chakra on the flag with a single buttock.

Once you give in to it, realising that the amounts you may be haggling over are the equivalent of sums you might not stop to pick up if you dropped them on the streets of London or New York, things become a lot easier and you begin to concentrate on the incredible things about India not the negative.

At the top of the list, for me at least on this journey, is the food. That is certainly not half arsed in any way and Delhi provides an excellent introduction to the next five weeks of travel around the land of my fathers.

Given that I still have long months of travel ahead of me (Africa and Europe to come), I have played it safe so far and steered away from the street food here and concentrated on the restaurants. In part, hygiene is of course and issue. More, however it is that, after a few weeks of the relatively gentle spicing of South East Asia, I don’t want my body to rebel by kicking it up a notch in a fashion that would make even Mr Lagasse give pause.

Despite that, I have eaten rather well, I feel and began at famous Delhi eating hole, Karim’s in the frenetic city of Old Delhi where local food fanatic, Sunit had the bad luck to share a table with me.

We got chatting and he guided me away from my first choice of mutton towards his own particular favourite of Butter Chicken served with romali roti and a side order of chicken seekh kebab.

As we both ate our identical meals, sopping up the gee rich sauce with torn off hunks of fresh bread, Sunit explained that even here where things were well maintained “hygiene is a compromise when you want delicious food” Remember that all you restaurant owners next time Health & Safety pay you a visit.

In an act of generosity that is becoming embarrassingly common on the EAT MY GLOBE trip, Sunit insisted on picking up the tab. Things like that do a great deal to warm you to a country.

Last night’s meal at ParK Baluchi in the South of the city was memorable for three things.

The journey there, which should have taken half an hour but took nearly two hours as the driver got lost. At one point he gathered a crowd of nearly twenty people to look at the tatty piece of paper upon which the hotel receptionist had scribbled the name. I would have got out to help but, as I studied the map trying in vain to find the place, I suddenly realised that I was rolling out into the face of ferocious oncoming rush hour traffic because the driver had not put his handbrake on. I was only saved by a group of onlookers running out and pushing the car back to safety as the driver argued on oblivious.

Secondly, as I appeared at the door of the restaurant and asked for a table for one, the host said “not to worry, we get many lonely people here eating on their own here, sir” A summation of my life in one sentence.

The final reason is , at least, about the food. I ordered Murgh Potli, a creation of their own where layers of chicken breast surround spicy minced mutton in cricket ball size spheres cooked in a tandoor and brought to the table on a rather unnecessary flaming skewer.

They made the effort of getting there and facing my own solitary demons well worthwhile.

I decided on my last day in the city, before heading to Mumbai, to blow my daily budget on a meal at Bukhara a restaurant oft cited as being one of the best in Asia and which appears regularly in the lower reaches of Restaurant Magazines Top 50 in the world.

They are famous for their grilling and tandoori cooking and the quality of the meal makes up for the silly seating of dwarfish stools made of upturned logs, which make you squat down like you are playing “tea time” with a five year old niece.

Once again, I opted for chicken. I obviously my body’s telling me something. This time, a whole bird so succulent and spicy that it distracted my attention from some excellent papads served with a salad of onions dusted with a dry mango spice mix.

They give you an ugly bib to wear which I realised made sense as the juices from the chicken dribbled down my chin.

With the chicken, a bowl of their famous “Dahl Bukhara” in reality a Makhani Dahl made with black urud lentils and cooked with so much gee each serving should come with its own defibrillator. I scooped it up with pieces torn from a flaky, rich paratha and was glad of the finger bowl they provided at the end of the meal.

£36 for lunch is, to put it in context, what I paid for a week’s accommodation in Hanoi, but it was worth every last penny and I can see why Bukhara is so popular with Billy Jeff Clinton and Mr Putin alike.

So, I may not have been particulary adventurous on this my first city of the Indian leg of the tour, but I have eaten well and think I am rather going to enjoy the journey.

Please feel free to remind me I said this next time I start moaning.

MANILA: A THRILLA WITH THE FILLA IN THE PHILIPPINES

“It’s not safe and the food’s crap”

That was the reaction I got from just about everybody I spoke to when I said I was adding Manila onto the EAT MY GLOBE itinerary.

Of course, none of the people who said that had ever been here, but I don’t blame them. My own thoughts about Manila had been coloured by western press reports and horror stories of corruption, crime and the poorest food in the region. Relatively, it is also more expensive than the rest of SE Asia, so has fallen off the map of most travellers. A shame, because with 7,107 islands to choose from, it would make for a great adventure

I only added it to my own particular adventure when my Filipino aunt, Evelyn said that she would also be there in February and that she would make sure that I was well taken care of.

Well, one week later as I prepare to head to India, I can tell you that, while The Philippines and Manila in particular have all of the problems associated with developing nations (poverty, drugs, prostitution, chaotic traffic etc) there is a great deal to recommend the place to potential visitors.

Primarily, it is the people who almost swamp you with their hospitality and goodwill. The cheery greetings of the staff of my hotel in the business district of Makati were genuine and followed up with hand drawn notes showing me where to find the best food. The drivers of Manila’s plentiful and cheap taxis were, after a gentle bout of haggling, trustworthy and another useful source of information and stall-holders, restaurant staff and shop workers could not do enough to help.

Most of all, it is about the food. The majority of people I spoke to in the UK could come up with Lechon (whole roast suckling pig) and, at a push, maybe Adobo (pork and chicken cooked in cane vinegar) and Lumpia (local spring rolls) but to them, as indeed to me, the rest remained a blurry mystery.

A food writer friend in KL, Robyn Eckhardt, told me that Filipino food was one of the undiscovered gems of SE Asia. She was right. There is a genuine passion for eating here that I have not seen since I was in Mexico. In fact there are a lot of similarities with Mexico, given that the Spanish ruled The Philippines via that country and its first governors were Mexican.

There are also a lot of similarities with America. No surprise given the fact they were under the “benign” supervision of our US chums for decades until 1946, and Manila, in particular, would feel very familiar to any visitor from the West with its love of chain restaurants housed in extraordinarily lavish malls.

The interest in food goes beyond obsession. There is no such thing as a small meal or a short meal. Even at lunchtime the Filipinos like to sit down and indulge in their two favourite pastimes, eating and talking. Lord, how they talk. The Filipinos seem to have an opinion on everything from Lewis Hamilton’s poor defensive tactics to Barack Obama’s haircut. Strangely, I fitted right in.

However, above all, they like to talk about food. What’s right with it, what’s wrong with it. Where to get the good stuff and the dread shame of providing bad stuff to friends or, even worse, relatives.

Much of the conversation focuses around pork , the main meaty staple, and around the many and varied ways of serving it most of which seem to involve deep-frying to the point where they meet another Filipino prerequisite, crunchiness.

Like the other, Bengali, side of my family, the Filipinos think food is as much about texture as taste and demand a crunch with every meal. Be it crispy fried Hito (mudfish) slabs of Bagnet (deep fried belly pork) or Cicerones (fried crispy chitterlings)

Alongside the crunch is the love of things sharp and sour. The local soup, Sinigang comes with a broth soured with tamarind which takes a lot of getting used to but provides the perfect combatant to the stifling humidity.

They also like the bitter with bitter gourd considered a universal panacea to all ills and even the hot chocolate at People Watch Central, Café Adriatico, being dense, smoky and sharp.

Alongside the discoveries of food, I also discovered a whole new branch to the family with aunts, uncles and cousins popping up at regular intervals during my stay and it was they who made my trip such a success with visits to favourite local restaurants, day trips out of town and family meals where the noise was deafening and there was no circumstance in which you were going to leave the table unless you had to be rolled away.

They were fiercely and quite rightly proud of their food and introduced me to a bewildering variety of dishes all of which were strongly savoury and all of which were deeply delicious.

My cousin Carlo, editor of a local style magazine, decided to do an article about the EAT MY GLOBE trip and drove me up to the city of Angeles in the Pampanga province to meet with famous Filipino artist and foodie, Claude Tayag. Claude prepared a memorable meal and, as we ate on the open terrace of his lavish home, he expounded the virtues of Filipino food and particularly the dishes he had prepared.

Boulanglang, a soup filled with pork and local river shrimp whose heads gave up dribbles of fat to thicken the stew as you chomp them.

Kare Kare Dangat, a seafood stew made with the belly of the bangus fish

Fried Hito wrapped in crispy, fresh mustard leaves smeared with Balo Balo (rice fermented with shrimp)

Paco fern salad, where young shoots like fiddleheads were tossed in a sour dressing and topped with sweet tomatoes and pickled quails eggs.

After our meal, he drove us to Angeles itself to try Sisig, a combination of bits of animals minced up with lime and chilli before being served on a sizzling plate, which creates a crunchy base. This dish is like crack cocaine to the Filipinos and no glug of beer should ever pass your lips without a forkful of Sisig.

Another cousin, Ethan, and his wife Francis took me to Salcedo Market on Saturday where we ate Lechon from the Cebu region which comes without sauce (like Texas BBQ the people of Cebu argue, if your Lechon needs sauce, there must be something wrong with it) and skewers of BBQ pork so addictive that both Ethan and I had to be dragged away kicking and screaming. He really is a man after my own heart attack.

Finally, on my last night, Carlo and my “new” family, cooked a meal for me at their home in Quezon City. Wine and beer flowed and the star course was an Adobo made in the proper style so that large chunks of pork and chicken had been marinated in cane vinegar and then cooked until dark and golden before being served with red mountain rice.

As demanded, I ate and ate until I was almost blind and had to be led to the car by the hand by a five-year old niece who kindly informed me that my face was “a funny colour”

The next morning, As I sat in the business lounge in Manila’s appallingly chaotic airport, one of the staff, who I was asking to help me put names to photographs of dishes, placed a large bowl of crispy pork belly in front of me “to keep you going”

I think that says it all.

I will be back.

HANOI: CROUCHING DOWN FOR PHO WITH UNCLE HO

Hanoi was cold. Damn it was cold, about 10o which, to someone coming up from Singapore and dressed in shorts, thin cotton shirt and flip-flops came as a bit of a shock to the system.

Fortunately, my shivering journey to my guesthouse was a short one and I was soon changed into something altogether more suitable and out eating my first of many restorative bowls of steaming pho.

My experiences of Vietnamese food to date had been limited to London’s mix of Viet-Chinese offerings on The Kinglsand Road and some better examples in Melbourne.

My first taste of the real stuff here in Hanoi showed me that I had been sipping pho, through a glass darkly to this point. A mound of flat noodles topped with a broth and slivers of herbs is finished with a small portion of protein (either chicken or beef) before being served for you to spike with chilli and lime as your tastes require.

It is one of those dishes that you can actually feel your body thanking you for as you eat it, particularly when you are crouched on a small plastic seat at a roadside stall shivering from an unseasonal cold spell courtesy of weather sweeping in from China.

That’s true of the food of North Vietnam in general. It may lack the high profile public image of its Thai Neighbours, but it is good and it is very cheap which helps to explain the huge numbers of backpackers who use Hanoi as a base to explore the region eking out their budgets on meals the cost of which would not buy you a daily paper back in London

I don’t agree with the wisdom that a version of a local dish served by a toothless old crone from a shabby stall is better than its equivalent served in a higher end restaurant. I don’t believe it simply because it is not true. Often the restaurant version, cooked using better ingredients and prepared to order gives you a tastier and less bowel challenging experience of local food.

However, in Hanoi, I would have to say that my most memorable experiences of classic favourites such as the pho, nem (spring rolls) bun cha (small pork patties) and bahn my (a Vietnamese sandwich served in their crunchy, airy baquettes) came when I was squeezing my ever increasing butt into a plastic chair designed for a small child.

All of these are washed down with the local “moonshine” beer Bia Hoi which is poured straight from the barrel for about 10p a glass.

For all that, the highlight of my trip came when I signed up for a day’s cookery school at the grand old Metropole Hotel, another famous colonial hotel known for playing host to Charlie Chaplin when on his second honeymoon of many, inevitably to Noel Coward who stayed at just about every grand hotel in the region and, most impressive of all, Graham Green when he was writing meister work “ The Quiet American”

The course began with a tour of the local Cho 12-19 Market where our guide and chef explained showed us the bewildering variety of ingredients from which local cooks can choose. She also took great pleasure in showing us the stalls selling crispy dog ,which did not particularly bother me having seen it, and indeed eaten it, in China.

The course itself was more demonstration than hands on, but well worth the money as we saw 6-7 classic dishes being produced including banana flower salads, skewers of chicken marinated in turmeric and lemon leavers, fish steamed with herbs and more Nem cooked in the three Vietnamese styles. The course included eating not only the food we prepared during the day but a belly busting lunch from the hotel’s extensive and impressive lunchtime buffet. All of which made the £30 cost seem pretty good value even if it did equate to the price of all of the rest of my eating in the city put together.

There is relatively little stir-frying in Vietnamese cooking, particularly in the North where steaming, grilling and deep frying hold sway. Despite that, the use of hundreds of types of herbs and vegetables and small amounts of protein make this one of the freshest, healthiest and most delicious countries I have visited on my journey to date.

With The Philippines to come in all its deep fried porky glory and, after that India, it is probably no bad thing to give my body a bit of a break.

Next Stop Manila

P.S - Anyone for Fanny Ice Cream?

SINGAPORE: NEITHER HERE NOR THERE

Singapore is one of those places that few people aim to spend time in for its own attractions, which are, to be honest, pretty limited if the idea of a night safari does not grab you. More, it offers a pleasing place to pass a few days on the way to somewhere else, usually Australia or New Zealand.

For me, on this leg of EAT MY GLOBE, it provided exactly that opportunity as I headed South from Malaysia and waited to work my way back North to Vietnam.

The obvious attraction is the food. Singapore has an astonishing amount to offer with contributions from its Chinese, Malay and Indian communities combining to offer one of the very best eating experiences anywhere on the planet.

Nowhere is that see to better effect than in its hawkers markets where former street sellers are banded together to provide a one stop opportunity for gorging at little or no cost. There are tons of the things dotted all over the city from the food courts in the towering shopping malls to the famous markets of Newton and Maxwell Rd.

On my first full day, I was shaken awake by a 5am call to prayer from the Sultan Mosque close to my quirky little backpacker’s accommodation in Arab St so headed off on a long walk down to Chinatown and the nearby Maxwell St Food Market for an extended breakfast.

You really are spoiled for choice and I spent half an hour wandering around the stalls being barked at by the owners until I decided to try two local specialities. The first, a plate of black carrot cake made from turnip tossed with garlic and egg and the other, curry puffs, filled with sardine and egg and served piping hot from the oven

Washed down with a long glass of sour plum juice, these snacks just took the edge of my appetite enough to head over to an Indian stall for a full breakfast of fried chicken with dahl, rice and vegetables.

A lot of the local Chinese places were still closed for New Year, but many were beginning to reopen after the festivities and the roads were filled with flatbed trucks carrying bands of men with dragon costumes for hire to local businesses performing dances to bring them luck for the Year Of the Rat. Quite off putting when you are face down in a plate of Hokkien Mee.

However much I am enjoying the trip, which I am, a great deal, there are times when I need to avoid sitting on small plastic stools while slurping noodles or spooning rice into my mouth and head somewhere a little more salubrious in search of my other great love, a decent cocktail.

In truth, so far, the mixing has gone from barely adequate to actively disgusting and I was beginning to despair of ever getting a drink that was not one of the local strong but gassy beers. A bit of research however, found me at No1 Rochester Park, a collective of high end restaurants in an old colonial mansion a few stops away on the efficient MRT.

There, a bartender with the unlikely name of “Sugarman” made me a few very passable drinks and also offered up plate after plate of some of the best bar snacks I can recall. Dried, salty fish mixed with dried garlic and chilli is the way forward in the cocktail world, I think. Bar owners in London, take note.

Of course, if you want to have a drink in Singapore, the one place you have to head to is The Long Bar at Raffles. Of course, it’s horribly over priced and touristy and of course the famous Singapore Sling is a disgusting concoction suitable only for white mini-skirted girlies out on a Saturday night in Leeds city centre. But, for all that, sitting in the panelled room on wicker chairs while nonchalantly discarding the shells of roasted peanuts piled in bowls on each table is as agreeable a way to pass the last night in Singapore as any. Particularly in the company of my new chum, Ida who rather liked the drink. But, then she is a girly

Next stop Hanoi.