The Dubai Guzzler

The Lost Interviews, No. 1: Jean-Christophe Novelli

2012-02-06T17:00:00.004+04:00

In a short series of 'forgotten interviews' that never saw the light of day, here's one from 2008...

Jean-Christophe Novelli

Jean-Christophe makes women swoon, men jealous and everybody hungry. But it hasn’t all been sweetness and light for the French chef and TV personality. He went bankrupt in 1999, losing all of his London restaurants. On the bright side, the same year, he was voted “the world’s fifth most alluring man” by Harpers & Queen magazine. James Brennan spoke to him about his financial meltdown his image and his unfortunate spat with Sunday Times food critic Michael Winner.

Tell me about the Novelli Academy.

When I lost everything about nine years ago, it took me about a year or two to get back on my feet. And I thought to myself, I’ve been in the trade now for 30 years, and I wanted to be more involved with the trade, with food, but in my own way. So I got the kitchen table from the garden, brought it inside the farm and started inviting people. I did it for my family and my friends - they could come into my kitchen and it was fantastic. But I started from the age of 14 and learnt everything I could for myself - so I thought it was time to pass that on. It became very popular, so I had to get another table. The more I taught them, the more I leant, and I enjoyed that. I used to go to work for 14 hours a day, six days a week, and I said I didn’t want to do that any more.

How did you get into such severe financial trouble in the late 1990s?

I grew very quickly. You see, the secret in business is to make sure you’ve got money when you start the business. But I started with 500 quid. Then I became popular and opened seven (restaurants) in one go on my own. The day I left the kitchen it was a big mistake. I was acting like a chef rather than a businessman - with emotion, and making the wrong decision. Nothing was calm, everything was affected. And I couldn’t cope (laughs)! I learnt - if it had been one or two places, then fine. But it was too much. After that I bought a fourteenth century farmhouse and let people come to my kitchen. And I’m just about to sell the format in Los Angeles.

How badly will the global economic crisis affect restaurants?

It’s tough, very tough. Nobody knows what’s going on. And especially now people are more involved with food, they can cook. Before, a lot of people could hardly cook an omelette! Now they are miles away - with so much more experience. There’s a different way of surviving, and I think it’s going to be hard, but I don’t know anybody who’s not affected. I know people who are thinking of closing on Mondays, all day, and opening on Tuesday for lunch. But I knew something like this would happen - I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m very sensitive because of my mistakes. And when there is terrible weather (in the UK) also, it’s awful.

What did you learn from working with Keith Floyd in the ‘80s?

I learnt to interact with people, actually, to come out of your shell. And not to act too intense with your cooking. I learnt his sense of humour. And don’t forget that before I worked with him I was his friend - before I came to the UK. It was a good relationship - in fact, I’m the only one he never sacked!

Does your heart-throb image ever get in the way of the food?

Ah, I don’t think it does. If it did, do you think I would be able to work like I did all my life? When I was in Paris, I worked every day doing 200-300 covers at lunchtime. And my dream was to come to Great Britain, and then America one day. And I stuck to my dream. I just came back from Los Angeles and I just finished my TV series, which is coming out next year, in February. It’s going to be massive. And that’s why I’m going to start my cookery school over there, to expand it.

You famously barred the food critic Michael Winner from one of your restaurants. Why was this?

To be criticised is one thing, but it has to be constructive. It has to be fair. I don’t like to waste my time with anybody like this. I’d always had time for him and treated him like a customer, but one day there was a picture of this chap in front of one of my establishments saying how bad it was. How would you feel? Frankly, I couldn’t even be bothered to argue with him. Then he came back years later - ha, ha - and I jumped on him. I’d organised photographers outside, and kindly stopped him. It was not for me, it was for the people he had hurt. He tried to demolish my staff and myself. My new receptionist did not organise things when he walked through the door and he went bananas! My restaurant manager was in tears - in fact, he left. He was one of the best.

What do you think of food critics?

I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but I have been reviewed by hundreds and hundreds of people, food critics, journalists, the lot. And I’d never been criticised like this in my life. I’ve had far more great reviews by people who I have never even met. Journalists come to my restaurant and they give false names. Matthew Fort (food editor for The Guardian)? I thought he was ex-army. I cook for customers, not food critics. Actually, I spoke too long about it - that’s not good. I’ve wasted my time and your time (laughs).

You have restaurants in the UK and more in the pipeline - any lans to expand in Dubai?

I don’t know because the problem I have is my farm, my academy is doing a lot better than I thought. It’s unbelievable. And think there’s something in people coming to your house, your farm, to you. It’s an extraordinary feeling. I love it. But I don’t know - Frankly I have to be very cautious with my time. I have just bought some land in Spain to get my own olive oil. I I’m looking at getting cooking into rehabilitation, for drug addicts, alcoholics, anorexics. Anyone with a problem. I think cooking is great therapy.

Image 'borrowed' from www.jeanchristophenovelli.com

Supra nova - the new Georgian cuisine

2011-04-28T19:27:00.002+04:00

Fusion cuisine gets a lot of bad press these days. In some restaurants, the very word ‘fusion’ is about as welcome as the words ‘rat droppings’ and ‘AA Gill’. It is a little hackneyed, I suppose. After all, you have to go back to the 1970s - when chefs mixed French with Chinese and came up with twisted classics like bird’s nest bouillon and coq au rice wine (maybe) - to realise fusion cuisine’s potential for pretentiousness and horror.

Nevertheless, most countries go through their fusion phase, melding their traditional wares with ingredients and techniques from whichever foreign cuisine seems to be en vogue at the time - which usually means Japanese (*whisper* I’m convinced the only thing that prevented Nobu from giving his food a Japanese twist rather than a South American one was the fact that it was already Japanese).

Anyway, now it’s Georgia’s turn. That’s Georgia the country - in Europe - not the American home of Coca Cola and REM, and nowt to do with Ray Charles, either.

Traditional Georgian food is typified by the ‘supra’ or special feast, which is presided over by a tamada or toast master, and involves a huge table strewn with a multitude of brilliant dishes, from kachapuri breads and shashlik kebabs, to khinkali (heavy dumplings stuffed with ground meat) and nigvziani badrijani (aubergine stuffed with ground walnuts). As feasts go, it’s a real heavyweight.

A traditional supra: note the celebratory hats, and goat skin wine bag.

This is probably the bit where most hardened and cynical restaurant-goers will recoil in terror, recalling such fusion faux pas as ‘tandushi‘ (tandoori sushi, seen in Abu Dhabi) and ‘sashimikraut’, and foreseeing a culinary train full of cheap Taiwanese fireworks crashing into a nuclear power station. But you should keep on reading, because here is a rare example of fusion that really, really works.

It’s by a talented female chef called Tekuna Gachechiladze, and I was privileged enough to try it at Vong, an Asian restaurant in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. I say privileged, because not only were we dining with one or two distinguished members of the Georgian media and political establishment, but it was also the night that the Georgian football team beat Croatia 1-0 in a Euro 2012 qualifier. Oh, and some of the dishes were being served for the very first time. An historic occasion. The mood was buoyant.

The amuse bouche - a gazpacho of tkemali (a traditional and rather tart cherry plum sauce) with the sweetness of grape to balance it out - set the tone. It was followed by a triumphant tuna tartare with jonjoli (a kind of Georgian pickled flower with a flavour not unlike capers) and rainbow trout ceviche marinated in orange juice. Podgy king prawns in tarragon sauce came next, followed by the night’s first true revelation - the dolma.

Shrimp dolma.

Stuffed vine leaves are familiar all over the Middle East, Mediterranean and the Caucasus, but not vine leaves stuffed with shrimp, and served with a raita-style yoghurt sauce with mint and ginger - a combination as devastating as Smith & Wesson.

Ham-wrapped quail in pomegranate sauce.

This was followed by roasted quail wrapped in cured ham, slathered in a thick pomegranate sauce - a rich, smokey-sweet blast of gamey flavour and moist textures. I sucked on about four of these like Kojak after a lollipop shortage, and then things got even more interesting.

The khinkali arrived at the table like Katie Melua dressed in a kimono. Instead of the bulging, tumescent and hearty dumplings of the traditional Georgian supra table, they had been given a Japanese makeover; a twist on the gyoza dumpling, made lighter, more elegant and refined but no less delicious. The time-honoured Georgian flavours flooded the palate, but they didn’t have to fight their way through inches of dumpling dough to do it.

Badrijani and foie gras.

Let me assure you, if I’d dispatched as many traditional khinkali as I did the new gyoza-style version, I’d have needed two seats on the plane home. And probably a triple heart bypass. But home couldn’t have been further from my mind when the badrijani with foie gras turned up. I must confess to having one or two misgivings about the samey textures and smokey-sweet flavours of the walnut-stuffed aubergine and foie gras. They were unfounded. The combination worked like a dream - a dream with great lobes of perfection-seared enlarged goose liver in it. The only word I could muster at the time to describe its magnificence was “Waaarg.” It was that good.

Badrijani and foie gras - again.

I’d been taught a lesson about fusion cuisine. It may be a jaded concept in the trendy restaurants of New York or London, where nobody wants to gatecrash a party right at the end. But in Georgia, fusion is less of a fad and more of a process. Traditional Georgian food in itself is fusion food, after all - were it not for the Mongolians there might not be khinkali at all; and the Ottoman Empire may have something to do with Georgian dolma. Conversely, the rest of the world might have a debt to pay to ancient Georgian viticulture - thought to be over 7000 years old - for inventing wine as we know it.

Tekuna Gachechiladze plans to open a New Georgian restaurant in Tbilisi and, in the future, New York (personally, I think ‘Supra Nova’ would be a great name for it and I’m not asking for payment, just a shedload of badrijani with foie gras). There she might just mash up those stuffy preconceptions about fusion food and serve them back up with a nice ponzu sauce. But in the Georgian food story, her inspired ideas are merely the latest chapter. Just forgive me for revelling in the prose before I turn over the page.

S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants 2011 - Rene Redzepi and Heston Blumental

2011-04-21T00:49:00.000+04:00

"I want more children - that's what I really want." Rene Redzepi, April 18th, 2011.

The restaurant world had its napkins flapped by the San Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants awards 2011, on a balmy April evening in London. El Bulli, which is to shut down in July, was out of the running this time, leaving the way clear for Copenhagen's Noma to triumph for the second year running. I caught up with a very relaxed (if a little broody) Rene Redzepi on the 50 Best stage, minutes after the Noma team had celebrated their win by prancing around in viking helmets and swigging champagne from the disgorged horns. Did he think his restaurant would now get a third Michelin star, and did he have any plans to open a second venue? Meanwhile, Heston Blumenthal saw his restaurant The Fat Duck drop two places, down to fifth place, which prompted him to declare: "Molecular gastronomy is the most misunderstood title in food."

Santi Santamaria

2011-02-17T12:52:00.009+04:00

The sad death of Santi Santamaria had me reminiscing about meeting and interviewing the great Catalan chef. It was 2009, he'd just opened Ossiano, the stunning seafood restaurant in Atlantis, The Palm, and I'd been invited to dine with Santi and a number of other guests. The food was as great, as you'd expect, incredible Spanish seafood cooked with heart. Santi was very keen to learn about the restaurants of Dubai, but I'm not sure if he ever had time to explore the places we talked about. Either way, he was a fine host with a genuine passion for food, and in particular, his food.

I interviewed him before dinner. It had been one of those interviews where we forgot the dictaphone was running, and just talked. Of course, Santi didn't speak English, and my Catalan was rusty, so an interpreter was on standby. The bulk of the interview was about molecular gastronomy. Santi was in vociferous opposition to it, and while he respected the work of fellow Catalan chef Ferran Adria, he was a passionate advocate of a more natural style of cooking.

The excerpt below is nothing if not passionate, but it was also very prescient - the following year, Adria's El Bulli restaurant was knocked off the top spot of the San Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants list by Noma, a restaurant that's dedicated to the use of natural, locally sourced ingredients.

Take it away, Santi...

“I really think that this style of cooking (molecular gastronomy) will destroy the brains of the people. People who eat this will end up with something like mad cow disease. It’s not honest to take a chemical powder and put it in food that people eat. It’s not a natural ingredient. This is a big mistake. You don’t need chemical gimmicks to make good food. When you eat natural products you really understand what they are, the fish or the vegetables, you understand where they are from and why they have the flavour.

When somebody asks you what is the best cuisine, you would probably say it’s the cuisine you remember - it’s the one your mother or grandmother made for you. It has a personal connection. But in following molecular gastronomy we will kill all the traditions that our mothers and grandmothers knew. In the future the people’s food of memory will be chemical food. I want to pass my cultural richness onto my sons, and their sons. We can always add creativity in cooking natural ingredients. I am always open to finding new ways of treating and cooking natural products, I’m open to innovation. But I will always respect the natural products.

I’m afraid that molecular gastronomy can go on for generations because there’s a lot of money behind it. Martin Berasategui, the chef from San Sebastian with three Michelin stars, said last week that the magazine (Restaurant Magazine) which named El Bulli the best restaurant in the world is only made by a handful of people. It’s a marketing operation. The people who vote for the moleculars might know that they are not the best, but there is such a marketing pressure behind this that they are not interested to say otherwise. It is very sad that the chefs need a gimmick to make themselves noticed by these people.

In the past, when chefs acquired three michelin stars, there was a mutual respect between all of them. It was like a professional standard or qualification, like a doctorate. But for some chefs that is not enough. In the past there would be sixty or seventy in Europe. But there were some chefs who said they wanted to be the best of the best. There was a marketing push to name the best of the three-Michelin star chefs. And they created a lobby or pressure group, who are a danger to the real cuisine, because they are saying the best are the moleculars.

I respect the desire of molecular gastronomes to evoke memories and emotions in food. But I do not respect the method. I’m really against the (Spanish) government, which gives money and subsidises molecular gastronomy. When the government of Spain takes molecular gastronomy and says this is the representative cuisine of Spain, it’s about marketing, money and publicity - from only one way. The government doesn’t represent me, or many other more traditional Spanish chefs. Any cuisine can represent Spain - the traditional, the classic, the modern - but not just one, it is a mix. From my point of view, I am really upset about this.

In my cuisine, what’s most important is the product and the way it is cooked, the precision, the details. With molecular gastronomy, they substitute the chef for machines. With traditional cooking, a chef invents a dish, he believes in his creation, he cooks it and he puts it on the plate. To make this recipe, you need a chef. With molecular gastronomy you don’t need a chef, you just need someone who puts the powder in a machine, who injects a chemical solution. It’s industrial. It’s like a factory.

Haute cuisine of the future will not be molecular gastronomy. We will go back to the respect of the products, respect of the fisherman who catches the fish, respect of the farmer who grows the vegetables, respect of the butcher who cuts the meat and so on. In too short a time so many things have happened, and it’s getting out of control. We need to settle things down. It can not go on like this. It’s all about money. What is killing the cuisine is the fact that these chefs are celebrities, and they all want to make it big to get as much money as possible.

I have respect for the people who create the dishes, who mix this with that to make something new. But after that it becomes a copy of a copy of a copy. It’s always the same - where is the art, where is the creativity? It’s like a musician appearing every night but having the same tape played back. The stage is set, there are fireworks, it all looks very nice, but behind the curtain is a tape machine. It’s always the same. Molecular gastronomy is playback.”

Benihana vs. Blogger: a kerfuffle in Kuwait

2011-02-01T16:54:00.007+04:00

“Waiter, where's my pie crust?”

“It’s a soft opening, sir.”

The “Kuwaitgate” restaurant blogger saga has prompted me to say a few words on food bloggers and restaurants.

In case you didn’t know, a blogger in Kuwait (www.248am.com) wrote a slightly unfavourable review of newly-opened Benihana, the well-known Japanese restaurant chain. The restaurant responded by taking legal action. You might be in favour of the blogger, or even the restaurant, but in my opinion both are at fault to some extent.

Let’s look at it from the blogger’s side first. If a blogger is serious about reviewing restaurants and wants people to take those reviews seriously, he should never review a place that’s just opened (unless invited to do so). Wait at least a month before going in there and letting off your six-shooters.

The reason I say this is because almost every restaurant in the world needs at least a few weeks to get up to speed - just like you probably did in every job you started.

As someone who’s reviewed restaurants professionally, I have occasionally been sent to a restaurant too soon by an editor. The verdict was always the same - there were teething troubles, it might get better, it might not. It was a pointless exercise.

There was no sense at all in reviewing the place, since it might improve over the coming weeks - or it might even get worse - but the review would remain online for months, perhaps a year, without a clear and definitive judgement. Or with an unfair one.

Better to give the restaurant a short grace period, then any judgement you make will be based on a restaurant that’s functioning as well as it’s ever likely to.

Newspapers like the New York Times give a restaurant a grace period before reviewing. They’re a reputable outfit, wouldn’t you say? If you want your blog and reviews to be taken seriously, you should perhaps do the same. In the Kuwaiti blogger’s defence, he did state that the restaurant was newly opened. But he carried on regardless.

You may argue that if a restaurant has opened to the public, and it’s charging full price, then it’s fair game. Perhaps. As someone who’s been to far too many brand new restaurants, I know to avoid a newly opened place for at least a month, whether I’m reviewing it or not.

You may call for the restaurant to charge a reduced rate if it’s on a ‘soft opening’. Maybe you have a point. In fact that would be a good idea. But remember those first weeks in your job? Did you work for half your salary? So why expect a waiter to do that, or a chef, or a restaurateur? There’s a case to be made for restaurants - especially ones in the Middle East - to train their staff properly, so that they can hit the ground running. I support that. But I’ll be giving any new restaurant a few weeks to get its act together all the same if I’m reviewing it - and especially if I’m paying for it.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of today’s society: we all want instant gratification, we want everything now. Be smart - resist all temptation to visit a new restaurant in its first month. Leave that to corporate lunchers who can slap it on expenses.

I think I’ve stressed the point enough.

Which brings us onto the restaurant. Benihana Kuwait might feel aggrieved that a blogger can say nasty things about its food just after it’s opened. But blogging is just the modern-day equivalent of word of mouth - it just shouts louder. Just think what all the other people who dined at Benihana in its opening week thought about its food, and told their friends.

The way to deal with this was not by threatening the blogger, who has a perfect right to say whether his meal was good or not. They should have left a message on the blog, explaining that they weren’t quite up to speed yet, and inviting the blogger back to the restaurant once things were better. The blogger would no doubt have returned, written a much more favourable update, complimented Benihana on its excellent customer service and everybody would have lived happily ever after. Blogs can help restaurants too, you know.

Instead, Benihana have decided to drag this through the courts and drag its own name into the mire in the process. It will not win itself any friends by doing this. It has already won itself a load of negative publicity, when it could all have been so different. Conversely, the blog has had great publicity out of this.

It’s an example of disastrous PR. Yet all food bloggers and restaurants can learn from it.

Benihana should drop their case immediately, say sorry and invite the blogger back to the restaurant for a slap up meal. We all know passions run high in the restaurant world, but it’s time to cool off. In fact I invite them onto this blog - neutral ground - to initiate the peace process. Prove to everybody that - like all restaurants - all it needed was a few weeks to start firing on all cylinders. Then you’d have a happy restaurant, a happy chef, a happy food blogger and a happy social networking community.

Everyone’s a winner.

Tsukiji Fish Market, Tokyo - the eighth wonder of the world

2010-12-20T20:29:00.012+04:00

Welcome to Tsukiji, the world's greatest fish market. Although market is probably the wrong word - this place is nothing short of a wonder (next to Tsukiji, Machu Picchu is a mound of bricks on a hill, etc).

The 57 acre site is a city of seafood, where over 2,000 tonnes of the stuff is displayed and shifted each day - that's over 700,000 tonnes a year across more than 1,500 stalls. Over 60,000 people call Tsukiji their place of work, and very few of them can ever claim to have a dull day.

That's because Tsukiji is an explosion of vivid colour, clattering sound and heady ocean scents that grabs all of your senses at once, shakes them up in a giant conch shell, tips them into a polystyrene box full of ice and sells them to a sushi chef.

Pull on some shoes that you no longer love, and come wade through the fish guts, as we tour the myriad bonkers sights of Tsukiji.

Baby squid taking a nice bath with some ice cubes and some black ink.

Eels do it in blood-sullied water.

Huge octopi brazenly showing off their tentacles.

More cephalopods than you can shake a squid at.

When the going gets weird, the 'geoduck' turns pro.

The Tsukiji barbershop singing troupe turns up for morning practice.

'Salmon in a box' doesn't quite do this pic justice, does it?

"I'm sure I left a white polystyrene box around here somewhere."

Pfffft...your guess is as good as mine.

"Hey, I can see your brain from here."

For the life of them, Toshiro and Dave couldn't work out where the fishy smell was coming from.

There's nothing better than a bucket of eels, is there?

"One day I'm gonna get me an R2D2 unit like Haruki's."

Three men, an ancient looking cart, and a ready-made photo opportunity.

"Mom, which knife should I use to disembowel the nosey Englishman?"

Don't you just hate it when a prawn burrows into your neck?

"Aren't you glad you're not us?"

If you don't want to know what they did with this blood-soaked chopping board, razor-sharp knife and bit of bent coat hanger, don't look below.

It's a cruel world ain't it?

Gordon Ramsay (in Dubai) - The C-word

2010-10-30T00:08:00.019+04:00

No, it's not that C-word, in case you were wondering. But neither is it 'cooking', 'cuisine' or 'caramelised sugar'. It's cars, of course. Because what else would Gordon Ramsay do on his first visit to his Dubai restaurant in two years but screech around the local race-track in a fast sports car?

The restaurateur, star of The F Word, Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, ex-Glasgow Rangers trialist and occasional cook was in the UAE for a mere 24-hours, in which time he managed to fend off the press, gee up his staff and launch his chef's table concept at Verre by Gordon Ramsay. As a special surprise for Gordon, his team had arranged for him to spend the afternoon driving fast Audis (Audi happens to be one of Ramsay's sponsorship partners, so that was a stroke of luck). "Driving a fast car around a track is a chef's dream," he told me.

After interviews at the restaurant, esteemed members of Dubai's press, and me, were whisked off to the Autodrome to watch Ramsay go through his paces on the track. I had the dubious honour of accompanying Ramsay in his car as he did his time trial, which obviously gave him a weight advantage. The above video shows what happened...

Who put the boot into Bhutanese food?

2010-06-24T16:23:00.002+04:00

The cuisine of Bhutan was once famously given a right kicking by the ex-New York Times restaurant critic and Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl. She called it the world's worst. So when I recently visited the Land of the Thunder Dragon - the mysterious 'last shangri la' Kingdom hidden in the eastern Himalayas - I was intrigued as to whether the food could actually be as bad as all that. I mean, had Reichl ever eaten Welsh lava bread, Filipino balut eggs (replete with feathery duck embryos) or American plastic cheese by Kraft?

Above is the first restaurant I set foot in - in the town of Paro, not far from Bhutan's only international airport. Colourful, isn't it? It's got everything a cheerful tourist restaurant might need - bright colours, sturdy wooden tables and chairs, nicely folded napkins, some pretty flowers...

... and a load of car steering wheels stuck on the ceiling. Obviously. They might not be big in the west yet, but steering wheel ceilings are all the rage in the Himalayas. Then I had to wonder whether this was some kind of symbol, a private Bhutanese joke, if you like, about the food served up to whiny foreigners (like Ruth Reichl), and the bend that the locals enjoy driving clueless tourists around with their insipid grub.

Then the food arrived. I must confess, it didn't look like the most inspiring spread I'd ever seen. There was loads of it, but my guide, Tshering, refused to join me in a mouthful. "You first," is what I wanted to say, because if I was going down I at least wanted to take him with me. He grimaced a bit and had a spoonful of plain boiled rice. There was a Chinese-style beef dish, which was as tough as a yak's wellingtons, some plain boiled cauliflower, a dahl soup, and some more Chinese style vegetables.

I asked him where the ema datshi was, the famous national dish of cheese and red chilli. He explained that it was too hot and spicy for tourists. Since independent travel is forbidden in Bhutan, my guide had worked out my entire itinerary, including the food I was going to eat. I told him to inform the waiters to get busy with the chillies, and in no time a bowl of the famous ema datshi materialised. "You like it," enquired Tshering, with a smirk? "Yhhessss..." I rasped, as my eyes welled up and I reached for the water. Tshering just grinned, and I sensed a steering wheel gently turning overhead.

Although he seemed pleased that I'd tried to immerse myself in Bhutan's fascinating food culture, I suspected Tshering wanted to punish me in some way for my impudence. I can think of no other reason why, while touring the next day, he asked our driver Jigme to pull over at this roadside stall. Those apples look good, I thought, but Tshering made a beeline for this...

It was dried yak's cheese, merrily hardening in the morning sun. When he handed me a block I thought it was some kind of resilient classroom chalk, or perhaps something used to remove dead skin in the bath.

As this image illustrates, it was indeed hard cheese. The thing had to be bludgeoned heavily with a rock in order to break it up into mouth-sized pieces. "Here, chew it," said Tshering as he lumped a piece into his mouth and began chomping away.

Gah, wouldn't you know it - I'd left my titanium-plated dentures at home. It was like catching a plastic bullet in the mouth. Personally, I didn't know whether to eat it or shoot Maoist insurgents with it. Try as I might, my old fashioned human calcium and enamel teeth could not penetrate the granite-like snack. And since I quite liked having my molars intact (call me soft, but I sometimes like to chew food before I swallow it) I decided to suck the yak's cheese instead, to see if it'd soften up. Half an hour later I spat it out the car window, fully intact, while Tshering wasn't looking. I think it ricocheted off a rock and killed a peasant.

Lunch that day was far more palatable. It began with a spot of tea - butter tea to be exact (po cha to call it by its local name). It was a curiously savoury drink of warm tea mixed with yak's butter and salt. Quite good, in fact, and just the thing on those cold winter nights several thousand metres above sea level in the Himalayas. Apparently the butter provides sufficient calories for working at such high altitudes, and helps prevent chapped lips in the biting wind. Not all cups of butter tea come with a ghostly apparition of a man's face floating above it - that's a reflection of Choki, founder of the Blue Poppy tour company - Tshering's boss.

Today's lunch selection - in a restaurant in the capital city of Thimphu - was much better. As well as a lip-swellingly hot bowl of ema datshi creamy cheese and red chilli, there was white rice with maize, red rice (which grows at high altitudes), fatty pork and boiled radish or phagsha pa, norsha fin or beef with rice noodles, potato with cheese or keaa datshi, and egg with cheese or eggy cheese. I got stuck in.

So did Choki. Some years ago, he married an English woman. He told me that on his first visit to England, he couldn't get out of the London underground station as he'd never even seen an escalator before, let alone used one. Bhutan only recently got its first mobile phones and satellite TVs. The capital city Thimphu has no traffic lights.

A few days later, back in Paro, Tshering (above) took me to a farmer's house for lunch. The owner, also called Tshering, said the place was 3-400 years old. It has been owned by his wife's family all that time, but these days it's open for tourist lunches. They even have a couple of rooms available.

Lunch was a simple but surprisingly tasty affair. There was weapons grade ema datshi, beef, potatoes, white rice and asparagus sauteed in butter.

As I ate with a wooden spoon, Tshering translated the farmer's tales of 'night hunting' when he was a teenage lad. This didn't involve shooting yaks after sundown, but climbing up the runged windows of farm houses to look for young girls. If there was one inside, he would hop in and get saucy - all while the parents 'slept' in the same room.

He even showed me the worn rung on the window, used for over three hundred years of the bizarre and very Bhutanese courting ritual of night hunting.

There he is, now a humble farmer and a capable cook, but once a night hunter. I could tell he was getting nostalgic and starry eyed while he was talking about his teenage exploits. But I never expected this...

He grabbed a handful of leftover boiled rice and began nimbly fashioning a strange object in his hands. He seemed very adept at making his model, squeezing and folding. Looked like he'd had plenty of practice...

And then this. Yep, it is what you think it is. A little on the modest side, I'll grant you that, but still not a bad representation of a Bhutanese John Henry Thomas. Needless to stay at this stage, it looked a little less likely that I'd take the room.

I thought perhaps the above bottle of Jack and the half empty bottle of Chivas Regal might have had something to do with Farmer Tshering's impromptu handicraft session, but no. Apparently the phallus is a good luck symbol offered to travellers. I said I needed a bit of luck, as my football team Aston Villa were playing Chelsea later that night.

We got shafted 7-1.

Like the food in Bhutan, my luck in this fascinating Himalayan Kingdom was hit and miss.

Pot Noodle World Cup - part 3

2010-06-09T13:41:00.000+04:00

Lucky Me - Bulalo
Philippines
(sachets - 3 + plastic fork)

As if to remind you that Filipino food is a bit, well, crackers, there’s a sachet of crackers included with this nest of noodles. You also get sachets of ‘beef’ soya bits and an indeterminate variety of flavouring powder, which, when everything comes together, re-creates the Filipino classic Bulalo - kind of. Everybody knows that crackers and soup go together like rump steak and chewing gum, and what any good bulalo really needs is a huge bone or two, stuffed with soft, juicy marrow. Taking the bone out of bulalo is like removing the karaoke machine from a Filipino funeral wake - leaving the whole thing flat, disappointing and as lifeless as the chick in a balut egg.

4/10 - Potty.

Koka - Laksa
Singapore
(sachets - 4 + plastic fork)

Having a pot noodle in your cupboard is like having a spree-killer your family - you’d prefer not to admit it at dinner parties. But when a minor lunchtime crisis strikes - or some kind of nuclear conflict happens - you could do much worse than this. There’s everything you need here to survive armageddon for at least a couple of hours - from the 4 sachets (seasoning, chilli oil, dried veg and coconut powder, in case you were wondering) you can use the plastic to fashion some kind of radiation-proof hat; and the pleasant, creamy and soupy noodles will keep you occupied for at least 12 minutes prior to that. In peacetime however, it’ll just make you long for real laksa, and leave you feeling slightly empty inside.

6.5/10 - Laksa little something. Ha-har - I’m here all week, folks!

Nissin
Japan
(sachets - 2)

You know what they say about the Japanese - the Pot Noodles they eat today are the Pot Noodles the rest of the world will be eating in 2078. Discovering this impressive melange of futuristic ingredients is like a trip in a DeLorean fixed with a flux capacitor. The plastic lid snaps off to reveal a sachet-fetishist’s wildest dream. Even the noodles come in a sachet, and guess what - they’re wet. Where most noodle-cakes resemble a tramp’s urinal-dampened shoelaces dried out on a radiator, these are moist, thick, bouncy udon noodles. There’s a sachet of miso-style powder with dried seaweed bits and then the coup de grace that buries all other pot noodles in a kettle-shaped coffin marked “fail” - a sachet containing a whole, flat, dried tempura cake, packed with fishy flavourings and prawn bits. By the time the rest of the world are eating these noodles, the Japanese will have done away with food altogether and replaced it with sound waves or dehydrated trousers.

12/10 - Pot of gold.

Pot Noodle World Cup winners 2010 - Japan

Pot Noodle World Cup - part 2

2010-06-07T13:37:00.002+04:00

Samyang - 60 Ingredients
South Korea
(sachets - 1)

The Koreans got special dispensation to have two entrants in the 2010 Pot Noodle World Cup, largely because it’s a fictional competition. As such, Samyang’s ’60 ingredient’ flavour variety surprises with its sheer amount of ingredients. The packaging shows broccoli, onion, sesame powder, a carrot, mushroom, garlic, leek, paprika, radish, pak choi, oats (WTF?), chilli powder and a pollack - but that’s just thirteen ingredients. In fact, I’m having trouble just thinking of another 47 ingredients off the top of my head. And because the only other English words on the packaging are ‘MSG’ and ‘well-being’, for or all I know there could be roasted armadillo, prune ice cream, parrots' feathers and bee spit in there. Whatever it is, tastes pretty good.

7/10 - Hot noodle.

Pot Noodle - Doner Kebab
England
(sachets - 1 ‘chilli soss, my friend’)

The English have had doner kebab grease (and weak lager) running through their veins for centuries, so this pretty little pot had me roaring ‘God Save The Queen’ - out of tune and with the wrong words - until my thyroid went wonky. I was revived, briefly, by the comely aroma, but I’m afraid the words ‘soya pieces‘ and ‘doner kebab’ should never occupy the same packaging. It’s either the eyelids, testicles, lips and chest-warts of a 39-year-old sheep with scrapie, and a bit of cat, or nothing at all, OK Stavros?

4/10 - Gruel Britannia.

Pot Noodle World Cup - part 1

2010-06-05T10:55:00.004+04:00

Pot Noodle World Cup

It comes around but once every four years and enthralls the entire planet. Of course, it’s the Pot Noodle World Cup - a celebration of human ingenuity and sheer slovenliness, where the worlds of technology and culinary artistry meet in a plastic pot full of dehydrated wheat flour products, flavour enhancers and food colourings. The nations of the earth are girding their loins, slightly dimwitted fans are blowing their 'vuvuzelas', and gangs of pot noodle ultras (noodligans) are having their passports confiscated in anticipation of the 'beautiful snack' - so stick the kettle on, get your fork ready and get stuck in...

Thai Choice - seafood flavour
Thailand
(sachets - 2 + plastic fork)

The plastic snap-on lid seals in all the heat so it’s done in good time, but does it seal in any flavour? Yes, it does, but it's the wrong kind of flavour - the fishy wrong kind. The noodles are grey and lifeless, like a Thai fishmonger’s string vest after a hard day of ripping out fish guts and wiping his hands on his belly. The soup is watery, clear, slightly frothy, oil-free and lacking in dead sea creatures - BP take note.

1/10 - Forking useless.

Indomie Instant Noodles - Beef Flavour
Indonesia
(sachets - 3)

Count ‘em. With the dry vegetable detritus, chilli powder and “Bumbu sauce” (snigger) we’ve got three sachets here. Makes it feel like you’re actually cooking, as you carefully add each one before you splash them with hot water. If you’re a couch potato with a guilt problem, it’s a real boon. But I’ve seen more beef at a Hindu barbecue.

4/10 - Fall of the ramen empire.

Cup Noodles - with shrimp
USA
(sachets - 0)

Americans, lazy? Hell no. But this pot of yankee-panky doesn’t help the stereotype. There are no fiddly sachets so you won’t lose any vital seconds on the settee watching the “soccer”. The dried noodles come pre-sprinkled, so all you need to add is hot water. What’s that - you need to put the kettle on? Damn, that means you’ll have to get up off your fat ass, which means all those cookie-crumbs on your stomach will spill down the cracks in the cushions. Your reward? Noodles in bilge-water. And the dried shrimps come with poo-veins intact. That’s lazy and insensitive.

0/10 - Plop noodle.

Nong Shim
South Korea
(sachets - 1)

Shards of dried veg, rocks of mushroom you could sink a battleship with, bits of kimchee (naturally), a packet of flavouring powder that makes a cloud like an Icelandic volcano... it’s all going on in this huge 'pot'. The soup is red and ultra spicy but the noodles are like a boiled goal net - a bit on the chewy side. Having said that, I couldn’t read the instructions as they were in Korean, so it probably needed 6 hours in a microwave on full.

6/10 - Pot, kettle, blah...

Al Rawabi milk's gotta lotta bottle

2010-05-19T11:34:00.004+04:00

It’s the biggest supermarket controversy since Sainsbury’s threatened to do away with the cardboard cereal box. Small children run away screaming when they see it in Spinneys. And grown adults - some of whom are surgeons, hardened criminals and war heroes - weep openly at the sight of it. Well, at the very least, it’s caused a few mumbled remarks and one or two raised eyebrows over the top of 7Days at breakfast. Of course, it’s Al Rawabi’s all-new design 2 litre plastic milk bottle.

To say that it’s unconventional is like suggesting Gary Glitter might make a poor Godparent. It stands out from anything on the milk shelves like some kind of cubist sculpture, the sort of thing Picasso might have had knocking around his fridge. Such is its post-modern strangeness, it wouldn't look at all out of place on a roundabout in Fujairah.

This is where it all goes abstract - the hole. Jimi Hendrix probably would have had no problem with this, but anyone with small or slightly weak hands and stubby fingers - the elderly, children, the hung over and Jeremy Beadle - would have problems gripping this for a glug of milk. It's about as ergonomic and user-friendly as an ashtray on a motorcycle. It almost guarantees you get more milk splashed on your kitchen tiles and work surface than you do in your mug of tea, which could lead to tears. As a design concept it's a little, well, semi-skimmed - but, somehow, it has charm.

It took me a while before I realised what it reminded me of. Yes, it's a performing seal. Look how it balances this tennis ball, just like a water-park pinniped. Clever Al Rawabi milk bottle, have a sardine.

Then it struck me, anything the Al Rawabi performing seal can do, the Al Rawabi acrobatic bottlenose dolphin can blow out of the water. What a cheeky little fellow. Intelligent too, you know. I believe this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that we'll discover more about the Al Rawabi 2 litre plastic milk bottle in due course, as it reveals its mysteries to the milk-slurping (and work-surface wiping) public of the UAE.

Chanelling Sanjeev Kapoor - an interview with a megachef

2010-05-09T09:29:00.005+04:00

Unless you’ve been enjoying some Josef Fritzl-style hospitality in a cellar for the last 15 years, you’ll probably have heard of Sanjeev Kapoor. As celebrity chefs go, he’s quite possibly the daddy of them all. You’d have to take Gordon Ramsay, Wolfgang Puck, Jamie Oliver, Mario Batali and Rachael Ray, bind them all together with really sticky molasses, zap them with gamma rays and turn them into a single power-crazed mega-chef entity hell-bent on controlling the universe to get anywhere near Kapoor’s astounding reach.

His website gets 25 million hits a month, for a start. His Khana Khazana TV show (which has been running for 17 years and is still going strong) is watched by an audience of hundreds of millions. He’s written more books than Stephen Hawking has read. His rapidly growing restaurant empire (which includes restaurants in India, Dubai and Doha, not to mention more to be opened soon in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and possibly Abu Dhabi) has got Colonel Sanders nervously looking over his shoulder.

There are undiscovered tribes of cannibals in Papua New Guinea who prepare their victims with Kapoor’s ready-to-cook spice mix range, for Heaven’s sake. And to top it all off - just to raise his profile a bit in the Andromeda galaxy - he’s starting up his own 24-hour food TV channel. I spoke to him on behalf of What’s On magazine (see May 2010 issue) about his presence in Dubai, his TV channel and the universal (in his case, probably literally) appeal of Indian food.

JB: What interested you about the Indian food scene in Dubai?

SK: When we opened in Dubai over eleven years ago, at that time the Indian food market was already crowded. Everybody warned me about it. I saw that there were quite a few places (Indian restaurants) but the quality was not there. So, in terms of giving people a quality option, we opened Khazana. Then we opened Options, which we wanted to make everything better, in terms of profile, positioning and product. In terms of what is available and what opportunities there are in Dubai, I still think it’s a very energetic market, in spite of all the downturns and everything. It’s still a very important market for us, and now we are launching our food products in that market - pickles, ready-to-cook pastes, spices - I think as a market our focus is more more than ever in Dubai.

Is it possible to buy your food products in Dubai now?

Yes, they have already reached there and I think they’re in the shops. I’m not exactly sure where, but they will be available.

Do you have any plans for expansion in Abu Dhabi or elsewhere in the Middle East?

Oh, yes, we are actually opening a few outlets in Bahrain, and we are looking at Abu Dhabi - we have some discussions going on there.

How would you describe your cooking?

Simple and no fuss.

That’s very straightforward!

Yes, it is (laughs).

I’ve eaten at both of your Dubai restaurants and, yes, perhaps it’s simple and no fuss, but it’s very vivid flavours, very evocative food...

Yes, it’s not me, it’s the uniqueness of Indian food. It has this specific flavour, it’s a robust cuisine. And that’s what we try to capture.

So, how do your two Dubai restaurants differ from other Indian restaurants in the city? What’s special about them?

Actually, I’ve not been to too many Indian restaurants in Dubai other than ours, so I really don’t know what’s different - I think it’s for people to decide. We know what we are and who we are, and i really don’t bother about what anybody else is doing. So to be very honest, I have no intelligence about other places, and I don’t try to be different from anybody else. We only do what we believe in. In food, I don’t believe it’s important to see what everybody else is doing. I think you should do what you are good at and what you believe in - I think that’s critically important.

Do you ever stop and pinch yourself when you think about your phenomenal success?

Every morning (laughs)!

Things have grown tremendously since your first TV show in the early 1990s...

That’s right. I think when you go into anything you never think that you will not be big. You always think that you will grow big. And whether this is big enough, who knows? It may be just the beginning.

Maybe it is just the beginning, because you’re about to launch a TV food network channel in India...

That’s right. Actually, I started thinking about it about five or six years ago. In India people looked at me as if I’d gone mad. People could not believe that we could do something like this, but I was making plans and talking to different people. I talked to the BBC, I tried speaking to Food Network in the US, and they could not believe that in India there could be something like this. It was something that I had to do, and now the launch will be in the next few months. We have our submissions, we have our content that we’ve started producing. For us it has already become a reality because we have already started everything, but for people to see it will be a few more months.

What kind of food television do people in India want to see?

I think they want to see all kinds of themed shows. The kind of shows that I do are more instruction-based. It’s a “how to” kind of show. But I think that people are ready for more experimental, more reality-based shows - “song and drama” shows. People are thinking what else can be done with food? They are waiting for that. There are a few things that have been tried internationally, like travel and food, we’ll do that. We’re looking at contests, reality-based shows, talent hunts... So I think as we launch the kind of shows we’ll have will be shaped by the reaction we get from viewers. We will learn, and we’ll come to know what will work and what will not. I think we’ll learn from our mistakes.

Perhaps a reality-show to find the best regional cuisine in India, from Goa, to Kerala, the north...

Yeah, I think it would be good to find out how much interest Indian people have in Indian food, but also how much they’re interested in foreign food. You don’t know. That’s what we learn from the restaurants also. Of the top end restaurants in India, not all of them are Indian.

How do you think the emerging middle class in India has affected people’s attitudes to food?

It’s interesting what is happening in India. For the first time the middle class is spending money. They are comfortable spending money. I think, if I look at my parents, they were looking at saving because they started with nothing. People of our generation, and subsequent generations, they have income which they are comfortable spending. They do not have the insecurities that our parents had - they are more comfortable and more confident. That has changed the whole perception and opened a gap in the economy.

Remnants of Kapoor's signature dish of shaam saveera, or spinach koftas in tomato gravy, have been photographed by NASA's exploration rover on the planet Mars.

Why is Indian food so popular in the rest of the world?

I think it’s the fullness it has, the unique blends it offers. I think one of the basic things with Indian food is the tastes are not subtle - our sweet things are more sweet, our savoury things are more salty, our hot things are more chilli-hot - so even a palate that’s not too refined can easily relate to Indian food. You cannot ignore it - you may even hate it because it’s too strong - but you cannot ignore it. When people get the chance to try it, they talk about it more and they become exposed to something that’s radically different to what they’ve had before. If you look at other cuisines - like Italian and French - when they work with spices and herbs they work in isolation. Whereas with Indian food, in a single dish we could use up to 20 different contrasting spices and herbs. I think that works like magic - it works like modern doctors who for a simple illness might give you eight or ten different medicines in the hope that it would work. I think it’s the same with Indian food.

It’s like chemistry - all the different ingredients work together...

Yes, that’s right.

Which ingredients couldn’t you live without?

There’s nothing that’s so essential that I couldn’t live without. I’m not that fussy. Of course I have my personal preferences to eat, but first I have to know who I am cooking for. I may like more cumin, more garlic, more mint, more lime, but when I’m cooking that’s not important.

What are the latest trends in Indian food?

I think recently that the kind of food available in Indian restaurants resembles the kind of food we eat at home. I think now more people are trying to bring the taste of home into restaurants, and that’s happening in India also. Also, we have food from different regions in India that hasn’t been exposed to people who live in other regions. There is more interest now in those foods.

Khazana Restaurant, Dubai, 04 336 0061; Options Restaurant, Dubai, 04 329 3293. Sanjeev Kapoor's 24-hour TV channel is set to launch in India, and in a solar system near you soon...

The S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants, 2010: As it happened...

2010-05-03T09:36:00.004+04:00

Eyjafjallajokull would have been the word on everybody's lips, if they could pronounce it, leading up to the S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurant Awards in London. Fortunately, the Icelandic volcano decided to stop spewing its ash into Europe's airspace in the days leading up to the prestigious event, and the world's best chefs and greediest media were able to convene upon the historic Guildhall for a night that was to signal a new order for the world's top restaurants. Here's how it unfolded.

Ferran Adria of El Bulli arrives alongside Juan Mari Arzak of Arzak, and, as if by magic, some journalists appear.

Heston Blumenthal grabs a cheeky kiss, hoping that journalists and nosy bloggers would be more interested in the man wearing Noddy Holder's trousers behind him. You were wrong, Heston.

Richard Haward's oysters proved a popular source of zinc at the Slow Food Market inside the Guildhall. Special mentions must also go to Oliver's Cider & Perry and Butford Organics for their fine, crisp English perry (both from Herefordshire), not to mention Great Glen Game of Inverness-shire for their dry-cured, oak-smoked wild venison. Needless to say, it was all duly sampled.

Either somebody's wearing a hilarious pair of shoes, or Eckart Witzigmann is merely delighted at receiving the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award. Rainer Becker, co-founder of Zuma restaurant, presents the gong to the legendary Austrian chef.

Ferran Adria gets emotional as he receives a special 'chef of the decade' award, sparking a flurry of whispers as to a possible change at the top of the 50 Best list.

And the whisperers were right. Rene Redzepi of Noma scoops the prize as his Copenhagen restaurant is named the best restaurant in the world, 2010.

For a moment it looks like Redzepi has had one of Heston Blumenthal's dodgy oysters, but the Dane is merely showing his gut-felt appreciation for his Gambian dishwasher, Ali. The man whose face adorns the Noma boys' t-shirts was denied a visa for travel to the UK, and was unable to join them for the awards.

Oh-oh! Ferran Adria holds his nose, Heston Blumenthal looks as if he's about to pass out, and (in the background) Fergus Henderson of St John restaurant offers a startled expression. Meanwhile, Juan Mari Arzak chortles cheekily.

"We still on for that Big Mac later?" Heston Blumenthal and Rene Redzepi share a private moment.

Their secret dinner-date agreed, Heston and Rene pose for the cameras...

... and some Catalan bloke crashes the party. The men behind the three best restaurants in the world (that is if you pay any attention to awards ceremonies): Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck (3rd), Ferran Adria of El Bulli (2nd) and Rene Redzepi of Noma (1st).

The full list is here (1-50) and here (51-100). Sadly, no Middle East restaurants made the top 100.

Justified ancients of momo

2010-04-20T18:38:00.003+04:00

Almost everyone in Dubai has access to the food that reminds them of home. One thing that always surprises me, however, is the shocking lack of Nepalese food. It’s like: Where are you from, sir? Oh, the Galapagos Islands? Wonderful! Darwin burgers this way. And you, sir? Nepal? Forget it mate, the airport’s over there.

So although my trip to Kathmandu wasn’t governed by my stomach (for once, as I had come to Nepal to do some voluntary work at some orphanages), I was looking forward to trying the local grub.

I hadn’t expected much of the food at the hostel I spent my first two nights in, though, and my suspicions were proved to be correct. The food was Nepali alright - something approaching the ubiquitous dahl baht tarkari or lentil soup with boiled rice with a simple vegetable curry - but it appeared to have been given the once-over by some kind of spice vacuum, rendering it utterly insipid.

The night I was sent to my host family - the completely brilliant Aryals - I went out to a touristy place called Bhojan Griha to meet up with the other volunteers in my group. The restaurant was in a stately building, once the home of the royal priest to the King of Nepal, and it was set up for tourist groups with set menus, music and traditional dancing.

And booze. Loads of lethal, 60 percent rice wine, in fact. I didn’t touch any of it myself, you understand, but the Everest lager did make me think more beers should be named after double-glazing firms (sorry, dodgy English gag).

First up was a plate of traditional Nepali murali makai, or popcorn to you and me. Yes, it was no different to the stuff enjoyed by lobotomised cinema-goers the world over, but it’s apparently a popular and nutritious snack in the rural areas of the Kathmandu valley. It was followed by something far more palatable - momos.

Momos are basically steamed dumplings made from thinly rolled flour-and-water dough stuffed with meat or vegetables, and quite often both. It doesn’t do momos justice to call them Nepali dim sum - that would be like saying pizza is just Italian cheese on toast. In any case, they almost certainly originally hail from Tibet, and are popular all over the eastern Himalayas. Anyone who’s had Russian pelmeni or overly-stuffed ravioli will know how good momos can be. I believe these ones were stuffed with minced pork and chopped onions, garlic and coriander. They were splashed with a fiery chilli sauce, which I couldn’t get enough of. It may be traditional comfort food for those long winter nights up in the mountains, but I could have carried on eating it through summer.

After badgering the waiters for extra momos, I took delivery of a thali dish, which was steadily filled with boiled rice, sauteed spinach with cumin, spicy mushrooms, cauliflower, and so-good-I-still-dream-about-them crispy pieces of mildly spiced fried trout. There were bowls of dahl and chicken curry to splash onto the rice, not to mention plates of zingy achar or vegetable pickle to give it that extra kick. Everything was combined and eaten by hand, but it could have been administered to me via a cement mixer and I’d still be happy.

Dessert was a simple affair - a bowl of sikarni, or sweetened yoghurt with chopped cherries - which rounded things off nicely.

The rest of my meals in Kathmandu were cooked by my host family, the Aryals. Like all the best home-cooked food, it was authentic, traditional, plentiful and made with special care and attention. The everyday staples of rice, dahl and curried vegetables were always present. Just before mealtimes, I would hear the familiar pounding of garlic, ginger and spices from the kitchen, and when the food was ready the flavours were every bit as resonant. Some days we'd have side dishes of cabbage with peanuts, or cauliflower and potatoes (like aloo gobi) cooked slowly with cumin, coriander and turmeric. On my final day, we had a plate of gundruk, a very traditional dish of fermented spinach-like leaves with a mildly acidic flavour.

I loved the food here, but what was just as good was the act of coming together around the table at the end of the day to eat, chat and listen to the Aryal’s special teenage son Sushant inquire as to whether I had lungs, or to wax lyrical about an imaginary American wrestler called “Big Foetus”. I didn’t want to spoil these precious moments by whipping my camera out and snapping the roti - I’ll leave the food paparazzi stuff for the restaurants, if you don’t mind. But just look at that kitchen and use your imagination.

Dubai doesn't know what it's missing.

Korean kismet, or the serendipitous incident at the stupa of Boudhanath

2010-04-13T14:09:00.008+04:00

As chance meetings go, it was up there with the very strangest. There I was, minding my own business on a hot day at Boudhanath in Kathmandu - one of Nepal’s largest Buddhist stupas - when this bloke came up to me and asked me to take his picture in front of the giant temple. Nothing too odd about that, I thought, so I duly obliged. Then he asked me where I was from. I told him England, living in Dubai. “Me too,” he gasped, amazed, in a heavy far-east Asian accent, “living in Dubai, I mean.” And he began to tell me his story.

The general manager of the soon-to-be-opened Asiana Hotel in Deira, he was in Kathmandu on a recruitment drive. He said that the new hotel - which will be the first Asian boutique concept in the city - would have a bunch of restaurants including a Japanese, a Chinese and a Korean. He told me he was originally from Korea, Jeju to be precise, and his name was MS Jahng. “MS, like Microsoft,” he quipped.

After explaining that I had more than a passing interest in restaurants, I gave him my contact details and asked him to keep in touch. A week after my return to Dubai, he called and invited me to dinner with him, his wife and two teenage daughters at Yehjun, a tiny Korean joint next to Sea World restaurant, above Safestway supermarket on Sheikh Zayed Road. The place is owned by the parent company of the Asiana Hotel, but is about as low-key as a dwarf’s front door.

I joined them in a private room with bamboo shutters. After exchanging pleasantries, the banchan or small side-dish plates arrived. There were ‘kongnamul’ boiled bean sprouts dressed in sesame oil and served cold, spongey fish cakes or ‘odeng’, ‘gaeran mari’ rolled omelette with vegetables, sauteed garlic stems or ‘manul julgi’, and ‘sigeumchi namul’ or wilted spinach with a splash of soy, garlic and sesame oil.

And of course, since a Korean meal without it would be like a Las Vegas Elvis impersonator without the mutton chops, sweat and 56-inch-waist gold lame suit, there was kimchi. Kimchi is the Korean superfood of pickled and fermented cabbage, which is low in calories, high in fibre, vitamins and minerals, and packed with lactic acid bacteria. Koreans usually eat it every day, often with every meal, but as MS and his girls confessed, sadly many younger Koreans are more interested in McDonalds and KFC these days.

Where I would have leapt upon the banchan like a starving castaway, my civilised Korean hosts politely waited until the mains arrived before tucking in. We had marinated short ribs, which were sweet and smokey, tender and moist. After being torn from the bone and dipped into some soy sauce, the meat was dispatched onto a lettuce leaf and introduced to a bit of kimchi, some garlic stems and whatever we fancied from the banchan selection, before being folded up like a parcel and posted straight down the hatch. It was a stupefying rhapsody of sweet, salty and umami flavours, and crunchy and fleshy textures.

There was also bulgogi, the famous Korean dish of beef marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic and sugar, and barbecued with spring onions to sweet and sumptuous perfection.

What the pan-fried glass noodles lacked in aesthetic quality (it appeared to have been dumped on the plate from the top of a skyscraper), it made up for in flavour and texture. The silkiness of the noodles and black fungus mushrooms, the crunch of the carrot, courgette and spring onion, and the tanginess of the slightly spicy sauce was where it was at.

The seafood pancake sprawled across the table like a giant pizza of egg, squid, prawns, red peppers and spring onion. Unlike a pizza, it was light and fluffy and good with soy sauce.

Like most Korean blowouts, this was a feast that simply couldn’t be finished, even by me. As I reclined in my seat, fully sated, I took my friend MS back to that chance encounter at the stupa of Boudhanath.

“Didn’t you think our meeting like that was a little bit, well, strange?” I asked still basking in the post-feast haze.

“Yes, very strange,” he agreed.

“In English, we might call it serendipity, or kismet...” I suggested, searching for the right word.

“Destiny,” countered the youngest daughter with a bashful smile.

“You know, after walking around the stupa three times, I think you were sent to me by God,” added MS.

Yes, that’s me, heaven sent. Something may have been lost in translation, but I allowed myself to think he was right. Of course, God’s messengers are almost always sweaty, red-faced, puffy-eyed and slightly overweight English tourists, predisposed to eating you out of house and home (and restaurant) and writing blog entries about you and your family on the internet.

I raised a glass of ‘su jung gwa’ cinnamon and ginger tea and proposed a toast to our next meeting, hoping it would be just as eventful as the first two.

Yehjun Korean Restaurant, next to Sea World restaurant, above Safestway supermarket on Sheikh Zayed Road, 04 321 1500. The Korean restaurant Sonamu at Asiana Hotel in Deira opens after Ramadan.

You say “tomato”, I say “what, in this weather - have you gone insane?”

2010-04-05T18:58:00.004+04:00

“Grow cherry tomatoes? In the desert? Why don’t I just go and build a snowman on Sheikh Zayed Road in July, while I’m at it, or put on a sheepskin coat and go hiking in the empty quarter with a giant magnifying glass for a hat?” This was my exasperated and rather childish response when it was suggested to me that I could grow stuff on my balcony in Dubai.

But last summer, while researching a story about an unlikely home gardening craze sparked by Michelle Obama and Queen Elizabeth II (I still can’t quite picture the Queen wading through the turnips in her size-11 Wellington boots, but there you go), I met Zafar Ali Khan, and everything changed.

Khan is the horticulture engineer at Dubai Garden Centre, and he’s a man who knows a thing or two about getting edible things to grow in the harsh desert conditions of the UAE. He assured me it’s quite easy to grow cherry tomatoes, coriander, basil and oregano on my balcony, as long as I give my undivided attention to the plants, keep ‘em watered and resist the temptation to chuck them over the railings and go and buy a load from Spinneys instead.

So I bought a few packets of Franchi seeds (vigorous determinate bush variety, no less) and a little soil and got cracking. The cherry tomato seeds were not organic, at least I don’t think they were, but since I had little hope of actually getting any tomatoes out of them anyway, I thought I’d give them a go.

One sweltering day last August, I took a handful of seeds and laid them out on some moistened sheets of kitchen tissue, which I placed into a cupboard overnight. I was amazed and excited to see that little white shoots had begun to appear on each seed. Less excited when I realised I’d sprinkled about 60 of them onto the tissue. That’s a lot of tomato plants.

When the shoots were about a centimetre long, I transferred them to my improvised seedling containers - a couple of plastic tupperware tubs. This, I realised shortly after the last shoot was placed in the soil, was a stupid idea. The containers had no holes for drainage, but I simply couldn’t be bothered to replant them - it just meant I had to watch how much water went in. Then I placed the containers on my work desk underneath a window with plenty of sunlight.

Within a week of careful watering, the green seedlings began to emerge, uncurling their baby cotyledon leaves unto the glory of the sun. I had created life where there was no life before. I felt a bit like Dr Frankenstein, although less maniacal and without the grave-robbing habit.

Soon the seedlings needed space of their own to flourish, so I had to buy enough small plant pots for 60 of the blighters. Some of the seedlings, ahem, sadly perished while being transferred to their pots, leaving me with a slightly more manageable 50 seedlings to devote my time to. I reckoned a few more would fall by the wayside before I was ready to harvest my cherry tomatoes.

I decided that I’d keep the use of fertiliser down to a bare minimum, so I used nothing but water and sunlight on the little fellows for the first few months and watched them grow (not literally, as that would have been extremely tedious and taken far too long). And grow they did, into hefty, healthy, leafy plants that had to be supported with canes, and eventually began to produce little yellow flowers from which my first green baby tomatoes would emerge. Some of them died, of course, so its a matter of luck, I suppose. I ended up with about ten to fifteen strong plants.

At this point, I had to repot of few of the plants in larger containers, and I added some Phostrogen slow release fertiliser tablets to the soil. Organic fertiliser, Khan had assured me, would stink like a Satwa trashcan, so I decided against that. It was as the first budding green tomatoes appeared that I transferred the plants to the balcony. The summer was over and although some of them began to wilt a bit, they soon adjusted to the cooler-yet-hotter-than-inside weather.

In the first week of February the first blush of redness appeared on a few tomatoes, and in a matter of weeks more and more of the fruit became flushed a deep red.

My first harvest was a bumper crop of about twenty cherry tomatoes, which were fine in salads and even better when roasted alongside some garlic in olive oil, with a sprinkle of salt and cracked black pepper.

For over two months now, I’ve been getting juicy, bright and spotless tomatoes - even from the plants that remained in their small plant pots because I was too lazy to upgrade them to a nice big pot. I didn’t have to use any insecticide either, and although the occasional bird has had it away with one or two of my beauties, some kind of large catapult might put a stop to that.

I’ve got tomatoes coming out of my ears (figuratively speaking). I could even have my own La Tomatina festival like they have in Spain, where I playfully pelt myself with tomatoes while only half losing my temper. Or perhaps I’ll just eat them?

I’m expecting the plants to succumb to the heat when the summer kicks in, but I’m ready to start all over again ready for next winter.

Because I can.

Ember - will it light your fire?

2010-03-31T17:15:00.003+04:00

Ember, The Address Dubai Mall

It’s perhaps emblematic of our times that there’s a hotel in Dubai’s biggest shopping mall.

The Address Dubai Mall would seem to cater for all kinds of travellers, not least those avid consumers who regard a town-sized shopping centre as a destination in itself. There would appear to be plenty of demand for such a place - the Address has another property at Downtown Dubai, no more than a Gucci handbag’s hurl away - but for those who live here it’s the hotel restaurants that really matter.

Hiking around one of Dubai’s malls can be soul-destroying at worst and exhausting at best, so it’s not uncommon to lessen the pain with food. If you’re particularly disgusted with yourself for going to a mall in the first place, that might involve a trip to Taco Bell. If you deserve better (and you do), The Address - which is licensed - offers something of an escape. Of sorts.

Ember is the recently-opened signature grill there. As a restaurant, it is one of the vital components of a five-star hotel, along with rooms, a reception, a spa and fitness centre, a swimming pool and a car park. Unfortunately for Ember, it’s smack bang next to the car park. What’s worse is that you can see the cars through a large window, and at rare interludes the screech of tyres or the impatient blast of a horn can be heard.

It’s a shame, since Ember is otherwise stylish, contemporary and very pleasing on the eye. Huge mirrors on roughly rendered walls make the elegant dining room seem larger than it is, yet the lambent glow of a candle on each table offers an intimate touch. The immaculate open kitchen sprawls along the edge of the room, while at the opposite end a bar blushes with warm red lighting and large invigorating photographs of vibrant bubbles and sloshing liquid.

The setting certainly got us in the mood (adjoining car park notwithstanding), as did the capable maitre d’. Rarely have I encountered one so charming and knowledgeable at a new Dubai restaurant. He was even careful to warn me that the Japanese-style ‘Robata’ items on the menu were modestly proportioned, and that two might suffice for a starter. He was lying, of course. One would have been perfectly sufficient, but since I was here as a guest of the restaurant, perhaps he thought it best if I tried as much of Ember’s food as possible.

I wasn’t disappointed. I chose the spicy jumbo prawns, which arrived on a bed of kimchi sat upon a papad-like green onion pancake. The seafood was moist and suitably prickly with heat, while the option of further tangy hotness lay in a sprinkle of spicy powder at one end of the plate and a dab of chilli sauce at the other. Following the maitre d’s advice, I added the miso cod cheeks, which on this occasion was substituted with hamachi, a similar white fish from Japan also known as yellowtail. Either way, four dewy hunks of the stuff had been perfection-seared in miso sauce and presented with pea shoots and a scattering of orange flying fish roe.

My lucky companion opted for the foie gras, a hearty lobe indeed, seared and set across three slices of smoked duck, accompanied by a duck consomme, figs and a handsome ball of cabbage - rolled pleasingly into a perfect sphere not unlike a bumper Brussels sprout - stuffed with more shredded duck for good measure.

For my main course, I had the braised short rib, which was every bit as tender, gooey and sticky with thick pinot noir sauce as I’d hoped. The American meat peeled away, deep red fibre after fibre, but I wanted to snaffle the accompanying potato and coarse grain mustard first, so it was just me and the meat left. If a stretch-Hummer, painted Day-Glo yellow, driven by a zombified Michael Jackson wearing a Macauley Culkin t-shirt had parked right next to my table, I wouldn’t have bothered looking up.

I did glance across the table, however, when a medium rare wagyu steak pulled up with a black truffle risotto and a zingy chimichurri sauce. The Australian grade 5 sirloin was as richly flavoursome and tender as I’d expected, although it was let down at the end by an unfortunate string of gristly fat.

I rounded things off with a celebration of the Granny Smith apple which came in the form of a light cheesecake encased in paper-thin white chocolate, an apple sorbet, scattered crumble and a thousand shards of crisp apple. It was like having a regular cheesecake in an orchard that had been hit by an asteroid. I guess the chef really likes Granny Smith apples. Meanwhile, my accomplice demolished a selection of Fourme d’Ambert blue cheese with pear and a wispy salad, which was delivered on a thin black slate.

We left asking each other a simple question: did we really eat that well - in a mall? Technically speaking, the answer was no. Ember isn’t in a mall. It’s in a hotel with direct access to a mall. For some that may be too close. But although the views onto the underground car park might bring home the reality of Ember’s location, the gentle ambience, fine service and great food - at its best - can take you someplace else.

Besides, the car park problem can always be solved by some kind of big, heavy curtain. I'd bet they sell them in Dubai Mall.

Meal courtesy of Ember restaurant, The Address Dubai Mall, open 6.30pm - 11.30 pm, 04 438 8888.

Bon Chon Chicken: do these Korean wings flap or flop?

2010-03-06T18:18:00.006+04:00

Bon Chon Chicken

Times have changed. It wasn't so long ago that King Kong tried to take New York and got his big hairy behind kicked. Now it appears a South Korean chicken joint has prevailed where a 60-foot gorilla fell flat on his face. Bon Chon Chicken has seemingly swept all before it in the Big Apple, winning gushing plaudits from the likes of Esquire magazine, GQ and the New York Times. But since New York is the town that recently went all giddy over cupcakes, should we be getting equally excited about the fried chicken chain's arrival in Dubai?

Bon Chon's first foray into the Middle East occupies an unassuming location among a stretch of fast-food joints on Trade Centre Road. Rubbing shoulders with the likes of Hardee's, Pizza Hut and KFC, Bon Chon appears to be having no delusions of grandeur about its place among the city's restaurant hierarchy. Yet unlike those giant, impersonal corporate fodder factories, Bon Chon has a certain charm and amateurish naivety about it that instantly sets about winning you over before you've so much as nibbled your first wing.

A wall plastered with Post-it notes drew me across the bright and cheerful restaurant while we waited for our food (which wasn't as fast as fast-food should be). The doodled missives to Bon Chon's particular brand of fried loveliness ranged from opportunistic classified ads - "Sanoo Architects & Engineers :)" - to this artful little sketch...

The Spy Who Fried Me: Yes, the James Bond character appears to have bludgeoned Colonel Sanders with a chicken drumstick.

... and this culturally sensitive tribute to the first Bon Chon Chicken to open in a Muslim country:

It was just as well the wall-art was so absorbing, as our chicken took a while to materialise, which wasn't completely ideal since the air conditioning wasn't working. It hadn't taken us long to choose, however, since the menu is somewhat limited. I plumped for the chicken fillets combo, consisting of three pieces of chicken, three Korean style mandu dumplings, some bread and a diet coke - all for the grand sum of Dhs20.

Across the table, my by-now ravenous companion opted for the wings combo, featuring half a dozen wings, French fries, bread and a coke. I added a tub of kimchi coleslaw for good measure and set to work demolishing the lot. What became immediately apparent was that Korean-style chicken isn't like KFC-style fried chicken in that it isn't slathered in a thick, breadcrumb-based batter. Instead, it's merely licked by a special marinade - either "soy" or "hot" flavour - that thinly coats the surface, leaving it light and crisp to the touch after being fried in oil that contains no trans-fats. The frying process takes place in two stages so that the meat cooks through, but the coating doesn't burn or go too dark and crunchy. What you're left with is a barely dressed morsel, sizzling hot and full of tangy spice - a kind of Asian KFC in nothing but its underwear.

The chicken wasn't quite as crisp as promised, and neither did it sing sweet songs to my palate in either of its garlicky "soy" or lip-burning "hot" incarnations. The fillets were little more than goujons, modest strips of breast meat, while the wings were so tiny they were barely enough to get into a flap about. What we had here was a preparation style that was different, tasty, and arguably healthier than the fat-saturated fried-chicken to which many of us have become accustomed. But there was very little more than that. In fact, I was just as taken with the kimchi coleslaw, which presented the famous Korean fermented pickled cabbage in a spicy mayonnaise sauce. Although quite what those big lumps of baguette were all about, I can't quite fathom. Still, the diet-friendly portions were soon stripped to the bone...

Since "banchan" is the Korean word for a small side-dish, perhaps Bon Chon is best regarded as nothing more than a welcome addition to the Dubai fast-food scene, a pleasant distraction rather than a main event in itself. But if this is the way to get New Yorkers' knees knocking, perhaps next time King Kong decides to shimmy up the Empire State Building he should think about wearing a giant chicken suit?

Bon Chon Chicken, Trade Centre Road, Dubai, 055 266 2466.

Black cod, bluefin and Greenpeace: Nobu speaks (part II)

2010-02-27T19:53:00.005+04:00

(part two)

The Nobu interview continues. We've chewed the fat about black cod and Nobu's many imitators, so now it's time to get down to the nitty gritty...

JB: Do you worry this type of ‘contemporary Japanese’ restaurant might go out of fashion?

NM: Well, people are still coming to Nobu-style restaurants. Why? First of all, customers accept this food. Business-wise, it makes money. So that’s why investors spend money to make the restaurants. And then they are head-hunting the chefs from my restaurants. So this is business competition. At the end of the goal, the restaurant has to keep its quality, it must always try to upgrade its great food and service, create new dishes. With this kind of competition, one day it’s a success and another day it’s not a success. This is natural, I don’t worry about it. It’s good for the Japanese because I get to present my Japanese food to the world.

And you don’t think people will get bored of it?

It’s about quality. Sometimes people will go to a restaurant and think Nobu is better. Or they will go to another restaurant and think that is better. This is competition. That’s why I like to try my best. Competition means we have to take care more, we have to concentrate more. This is good for the chef - no lazy!

Are you afraid of a backlash?

That’s why we have such different menus. we have a lot of choice. If one day, you say no Japanese food..?

No, I mean if people get tired of this type of restaurant. In Dubai in the last year we’ve had seven or eight of these places open...

We need it! (laughs)

It’s your fault! But it’s as if it’s very fashionable at the moment but then maybe next year it’ll be something else? Maybe they’ll go and eat German food? Though probably not...

Everything is possible. After we open, we have to see the next step.

Were you surprised by how the celebrities that normally come to your London restaurant threatened to boycott it over your refusal to remove bluefin tuna from your menu?

You know, it’s bluefin tuna. We do nothing illegal. Nothing illegal. But I care about bluefin tuna for the next generations. That’s why the Japanese technique is to do a bluefin tuna farm. We know. But boycott, it’s um..? Greenpeace attacked us, to lock the door with a chain at the entrance... This is terrorist. It’s not fair, you know. But if we do something wrong maybe I will stop using bluefin tuna. But the government decides how many kilos or pounds you can use. So we listen to the government. If the government says don’t use bluefin tuna I would never go against the government.

So, you don’t listen to the celebrities?

London is where Greenpeace attacked this restaurant. We sell bluefin tuna more than before. This is a true story. But still, I’m not against bluefin tuna. In the menu we mention it’s bluefin tuna. Customers order this. It’s not my choice. We don’t push through the sale. Automatically, the customers like it, but we don’t do anything illegal. Now bluefin tuna sells more than before. The media is talking about the bluefin tuna so a lot of people understand. But also, on the other side, it’s a misconception.

What’s interesting about the case in London is that your restaurant was heavily associated with the celebrities who went to dine there, and it seemed as though a lot of them were turning their backs on Nobu...

**Goes off record** (Here is where the interview gets a bit, shall we say, passionate, and Nobu asks to take things off the record. We return with a rather less controversial line of questioning...)

What’s new on the Dubai menu?

The main course usually has a garnish, like carrot and potato for example. We have cilantro - coriander - and shiso leaves and Japanese vegetables in the garnish. But this time we’re calling it a coriander salad with grilled shrimp, together. Shiso is very expensive in Japan, but it never makes money because it’s just a garnish. So, I’d like to make a supporting actor a main actor!

It’s been promoted.

Yeah, that’s good (laughs). Also, the Japanese eel always makes sushi, so this time I showed to the chef how to make unagi steamed rice, which we can do for lunch or do family style for three or four people to share one dish.

How long before that’s on Zuma’s menu?

Ah, you know, we start it here. Somebody comes here and eats it. And then somebody comes to spy or see. Then people like it. Then it comes to Zuma. This is great, also. Their little twist will be the difference. But they are more than welcome, free to do it.

I suppose chefs have to get their inspiration from somewhere - where do you get yours from?

Sometimes when I have nothing to do on a plane, I think what shall we have to eat? Eel? So, how about eel in a different way? Sometimes I’m thinking about my creations. Like miso. Why should miso only make the soup or a sauce? I’d like to try the miso made dry. So, one day we made the freeze-dried miso. Now the sashimi with dried miso is a very popular dish. But this one, nobody can copy it because - a lot of process (laughs).

They don’t have the technology...?

No, no. But I started selling a jar in Los Angeles, at the market. Many people go to the market and buy the dry miso and do their own menu. But the label is Nobu (laughs)!

Any plans for new restaurants in the Middle East?

Doha. Maybe next year, my designer says. Maybe the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011. I never know about the construction.

* * * * *

Black cod, bluefin & Greenpeace: Nobu speaks

2010-02-23T15:33:00.004+04:00

Love him or loathe him, it’s difficult to imagine what the world would be like without Nobu Matsuhisa.

There’d be a lot more black cod in the sea, that’s for sure. The ‘contemporary Japanese’ phenomenon probably wouldn’t have happened, so Dubai would only have about six restaurants. Former tennis star Boris Becker might not have got up to a certain act in a certain broom cupboard. And Robert De Niro may well have gone into business with Ainsley Harriott instead, which really doesn’t bear thinking about.

Well, Nobu is here, and at the end of last year he was here in Dubai. I caught up with him at his restaurant in The Atlantis just over a year after its launch, to ask him about his impressions of Dubai, his restaurant here and its signature dishes. But the interview took an interesting turn as we discussed his imitators and the controversy surrounding his refusal to remove the endangered bluefin tuna from his menu.

Parts of this interview were used in Esquire magazine in the Middle East, but in this two-part blog post (I know you love the suspense) here’s the rest in all its glory...

(part one)

JB: How’s Nobu Dubai coming along?

NM: We just passed one year, and it’s much, much more comfortable than in the beginning - maybe in the last six months. The quality is higher and the people know how to work now, the organisation is stronger.

Has it exceeded expectations?

I knew it would happen like this. When I come here and people are working, they are very comfortable and smiling. When you’re comfortable in the kitchen you want to try something more challenging. So this kind of energy makes everybody happy, there’s a happy feeling at this time.

How is Dubai different?

It’s the religion here. I was a little confused at the beginning. We cannot use soy sauce with alcohol because of the religion. But now we know how to do it. Alcohol is the difference. And costumes. In the west people wear suits but not here. And sometimes husbands and wives have to sit at different tables. I don’t know why, but... It’s this kind of thing that’s different from New York or any other country.

It’s the culture. I learn from the culture. There’s nothing strange about doing something different. There are a lot of beautiful people here. People come to dress up. Americans come in t-shirts and jeans, but mostly at nighttime here they dress up.

You create your own dishes for the menu, but tell me about your Dubai chef’s own creations...

Herve, our chef here, used to work at Nobu Paris, so already he knows the basic Nobu menus. He loves cooking - he’s French - and he shows me his creations, we discuss them and finally we made like three or four dishes. I don’t want to say to the chef, ‘you must make exactly this,’ because chefs have a lot of creativity. We are not KFC or McDonald’s restaurants. We have recipes, but the chef has a lot of opportunity to make his creations, but basically we have the sauce, flavours, style...

So it’s like a guideline?

Yeah. I don’t want to say, ‘don’t do this’. Try as much as possible. Food is like fashion. Fashion changes - the style, the quality, the colour - it changes every year. Also, it depends on the country too. New York and London are very fashionable, that’s why there’s always more competition. Dubai has a different style of fashion, but Nobu is still new here - one year. Still we have to teach the basic signature dishes to our kitchen staff. But a lot of people coming here know the other restaurants - New York, Canada... no not Canada (laughs). I confuse myself!

You say food is like fashion, what about the competition that comes with it? I’m thinking about places like Zuma and Mirai.

In Zuma, it’s the guy who used to work for Nobu Tokyo, he moved here. Of course, he knows my style. Then there’s Scott (Hallsworth) at Mirai. I don’t know when he moved here, but he was with me in London and Melbourne. So, automatically they know Nobu’s food. Then they open their restaurants here and they know the most popular dishes. I don’t want to say that they copy everything from me, but it’s like in fashion - somebody is copying, then little by little he makes something original. I am very proud because people understand and accept my food and it’s popular. I’m very proud that my dishes are popular in the world.

Have you been there - Zuma, Mirai?

I went to Zuma once - just for a drink. I have no time, too busy (laughs).

Why do you think this type of contemporary Japanese restaurant is so popular?

I don’t want to call it contemporary. Its background is Japanese, but it has a Nobu style. It means that we have a lot of choice on the menu - we have raw fish, shellfish, meat, lamb chop, quail, vegetable, noodle. Customers choose a lot of varieties. But some Japanese restaurants are very traditional. The service is very traditional. Here people choose the atmosphere, the energy, the good food and good service. The background is Japanese but the difference is in the service, style and hospitality. Customers have to enjoy their time in the restaurant because they are spending money. So this is Nobu’s philosophy, I guess. I enjoy to see customers eating, smiling, laughing.

Nobu restaurants have been going for more than 20 years, so this is my style. For an example, if I go to a French restaurant with Michelin stars, it’s very quiet but beautiful presentation and the service is very formal. Just me - I don’t enjoy much this kind of restaurant. I enjoy restaurants that are more casual, but service is perfect. Food can be eaten with chopsticks or a knife and fork. It has to be comfortable. This is Nobu’s concept. When a customer comes in, we say ‘Irashaimase’, which in Japanese means ‘welcome’. Many people don’t understand. They ask what it means, and we say, as a joke, ‘spend money!’ Jokes make people comfortable. At Nobu people are comfortable - in New York, London and other restaurants - because it’s the same feeling. Immediately they know it’s a Nobu. The good food, the service, the communication. Traditionally, at French Michelin restaurants they never talk or say ‘hi, how are you doing?’. It’s tight silence.

About Nobu’s small portions, are they popular in the Middle East because they are like mezze?

It makes sense. We have a lot of varieties and if five or ten people sit down, we do it sharing style. Not individual plates. You can order a lot of different things, do a lot of tasting. Maybe this is one of the reasons?

Tell me about black cod miso and the many versions of the dish outside of Nobu?

I have the black cod in this restaurant.

Obviously! Do you mind that they do it elsewhere - Zuma, Okku...? Have you tried it?

No. I’m very proud because I started black cod more than thirty years ago. In the beginning nobody used it, it was very cheap to fish. Now the price is up. All the restaurants in five continents use black cod. Best seller - number one.

What do you think about everybody using the recipe?

I’m very proud. It’s nothing to feel bad about because it’s a good image. People talk about black cod and they know it’s Nobu’s signature dish. Even Zuma makes black cod - oh, this is a Nobu dish (laughs).

It’s like free advertising...

One time in the London newspapers they said that Robert De Niro is the Godfather, but Nobu is the Codfather! (eruptions of laughter).

To be continued...

Hello, thali

2010-02-16T12:52:00.002+04:00

Rajdhani, Rolla Street, Bur Dubai

What's a thali? Imagine an Indian buffet that comes to you instead of you having to go to it. Think of a broad metal platter that could easily double as a hubcap for a Caterpillar truck, cluttered with curries, dahls, chutneys, pickles, breads, sauces and salads of every imaginable hue. If you can, try to conceive of a self-replenishing plate of vividly tasty morsels that dizzies and delights, beguiles and bedazzles with its many-splendoured charms.

In short, the thali is a meal fit, not just for a king, but for an entire kingdom. And at Rajdhani, it only costs Dhs25 (GBP4.30, USD6.80).

It's amazing to think that this Bur Dubai restaurant offers one of the more expensive thalis available in the city. Part of a successful Indian chain of restaurants, Rajdhani has won a devoted following in the UAE for its staggering quality, variety and value. Which is why I was astounded that, in all my time in Dubai, I hadn't been there. Until now.

I don't think I've ever been so well looked after in a restaurant. Within seconds of entering the place, I was seated in front of a thali platter laden with empty stainless steel ramekins called katori. The food was soon delivered by a succession of waiters, whose job it is to circulate and fill any empty space that might appear on a thali platter.

They do this with such zeal and gusto that if you even attempt to refuse, they look at you as if you've gone dangerously insane. It's difficult then to resist their second attempt at replenishing your thali. What this means is that, no matter how much you eat and as long as you don't put up a fight, your thali remains resplendent with fresh and fantastic Indian food. In theory, if this was a 24-hour restaurant, your meal would never end.

If you've been offered a last meal prior to your execution, this would be the place to have it.

As soon as I whipped the camera out, I had an audience. The waiters and the manager swarmed around my table with huge grins on their faces as I marvelled at the feast before me. The manager kindly explained the component parts of my Gujarati thali. To the right hand side were the papads and chapati or bhakari breads. This was for ease of access, since the thali is traditionally eaten with the right hand. Also to the right was the spicy Rajasthani dahl, which is also strategically positioned as the katori most likely to be dunked with bread. Beyond that was the sweet gur khadi, which was a yoghurt dish sweetened with jaggery, and next to it a portion of pert and lively whole toor lentils.

Moving anti-clockwise around the thali, I found a portion of spicy fried potato chips with sesame seeds, nuts and a hint of tamarind. Next to it was the brinjal (aubergine or eggplant) tomato, a knee-bendingly comforting arrangement of rich and smoky vegetables in a thick, sultry sauce. And then came the sev tomato sabji, coloured as brightly as it was flavoured with red tomatoes and slowly dissolving sev, the crisp, stringy gram flour snack.

Taking centre stage was the ragda pattice (sometimes called ragda patties), a classic chaat or street food. Here it took the form of a samosa stuffed with peas and potato, crushed and covered with curried yellow peas (ragda) and sprinkled with a salad of onion, tomato and coriander.

On the side there was a vibrant mung bean salad, mint raita, lime pickle, tamarind chutney, a scattering of fried chillies and - just in case a little extra spice was required - a fistful of fresh green chillies. Perhaps fittingly, these were on standby in a glass of cold water lest they decided to combust spontaneously. A cooling, thick and gloriously rich tumbler of salty lassi was provided to extinguish any internal fires.

My thali was filled and refilled until I thought I could take no more. But I was wrong. There was still dessert to contend with. I took a meagre mouthful out of a moist and sweet carrot halwa, bejewelled with shards of cracked pistachio and sultanas.

"But, sir," said the manager with a concerned look on his face, "it's carrot halwa." He stretched the words out as if the dessert was some kind of holy sacrament - as if leaving a single shred of dewy carrot would be grounds for getting me sectioned under local mental health legislation. The manager looked like a kind, mild-mannered family-man, but one that might crack and transform into a human-heart eating maniac if somebody didn't polish off his carrot halwa. I duly ate it up.

Rajdhani may be a simple restaurant that looks like a couple of bored decorators had a paint-fight inside it. Its concept may be uncomplicated, unceremonious and - to some - inelegant. But there are few places in the city, from its five-star hotels to its trendy cafes, that offer such a staggering variety of colurful, tasty and freshly cooked food at such a recession-friendly price.

Don't wait 'til it's your last meal.

Rajdhani (04 393 4433).

Blooming heck!

2010-02-09T23:27:00.000+04:00

Magnolia Bakery, Bloomingdale's, Dubai

Being a man, and the wrong side of 30, the cupcake revolution has passed me by. This shouldn’t be an embarrassing thing to admit, right? Please tell me its okay for men my age to have more interest in things like whelks, ostrich eggs or Stilton than paltry blobs of sponge cake slathered in pretty icing and cradled in frilly little paper buckets... Thanks, I needed the reassurance.

The truth is, I would never have felt the need to investigate the wares at Magnolia Bakery at the newly opened Bloomingdale’s in Dubai Mall, had I not been made aware of the virtues of cupcakes by other men. Big men. Men who - if you so much as looked at their ribeye in a steakhouse - would happily pull your face off with their thumb and forefinger and kick it across the other side of the restaurant before ordering two more steaks and downing them both in one.

Some of these men were practically crying sugar-syrup tears over the cakes they’d had at places like Sugar Daddy’s bakery in Dubai - a cupcake shop with a pink sign and even pinker cakes. So I decided to look deep within myself, to reach out to my inner 7-year old girl, and skip merrily along to Magnolia Bakery at Bloomingdale's to see what all the fuss was about.

Bloomingdale's, Dubai Mall: disgusted valet-staff turn their backs on this embarrassing Porsche in the hope that something more blingy turns up instead, like a Koenigsegg or a spaceship.

Thing is, since I’m around six-feet tall and well-upholstered, with a buzz-cut and a five o’clock shadow, I don’t look like a 7-year old girl (unless you live in some parts of northern England). So, when I got lost in the ladies fashion section with my camera slung around my neck, I started to get funny looks from security. I saw a rat-faced man in an ill-fitting Men-In-Black suit squawk something into a walkie-talkie while staring at me through pinched eyes, so I waved at him like a 7-year old girl would and skipped off. I was in the wrong bit of Bloomingdale's anyway - the “home section” was on the Lower Ground floor.

There I found Magnolia Bakery, and low-and-behold it appeared to be besieged by a well-drilled platoon of scary-looking schoolgirls. They were all happily loading up boxes full of cupcakes at Dhs60 a go, just so they had something to nibble on or throw at their mates on the way home from school. Times have changed. In my day we’d save our sweaty lunchtime sandwiches for that. Especially if it was Marmite.

Order here. Pay here. Lose self-respect here.

Anyway, when they had dispersed I had a peek over the counter. There is no seating area at Magnolia, just a counter full of cakes to choose from. Whether it’s proper, large-sized cakes for slicing into wedges, or the famed cupcakes that make grown, hard men tearful, it all gets boxed up and taken away.

The opening exchange between me and the assistant went something like this:

Me: “What have you got?”
Her: “Red velvet sir, which is like red and velvet and like chocolate but red chocolate with white vanilla sir... then we have choc-choc, vanilla-choc, van-van, choc-van and van-choc-van...”

Of course, it made me dizzy. It just sounded like two closely-related cupcakes had been interbreeding. So I had the lot. Actually, there were only five different varieties of cupcake available, so I ordered an auxiliary cake to complete the box-set of six...

Her: This is like, not a cupcake sir, but more like a dessert sir, with brown sugar on top.
Me: Looks like a blueberry crumble.
Her: Yes sir.

It was probably a good thing that the mall-going public of Dubai didn’t have to witness a grown man with a scowl on his face munch his way through six cupcakes and a blueberry crumble in public. So I carefully took my package home and put the kettle on.

Guess which one isn't a cupcake.

First, I went for the cupcake that looked least appealing, with the skewed logic that the rest would be easier to face after that one. So I reached for the "red velvet" which was an angry red pustule of ruddy sponge with a creamy white head of icing. From now on I'm going to call it "the zit-cake". What the zit-cake lacked in aesthetic quality and natural grace, it made up for in moistness once bitten into. And redness. Christ, it was red. The sponge looked like it had been dipped in stage-blood. And the white head made it look like it would have been more at home on the forehead of a greasy teenager. It tasted much better than it looked.

Choc-choc: will it look any different on the way out?

Next up was the one the assistant called "choc-choc". I think the fact that it was named after a Harlem pimp in a 1970s Blaxploitation movie was lost on her. What I will say is that it was very chocolaty. The sponge was exceedingly moist too, so much so that it simply disintegrated on contact with hot breath. Most pleasing of all was the residue left on the cupcake paper, which demanded to be scraped off with lathe-like accuracy and savoured.

And that's where I had to leave it - for now. Five cupcakes - and another cake - is a little too much for one sitting. After all, I'm only 7. And a girl.

Don't worry, when I get round to eating the rest I'll be sure to give you the verdict. I bet you can hardly wait...

Addendum: Should anybody buy more Magnolia cupcakes than they can eat in one go, take heed of the following tip. Don't put them in the fridge. Store them in an airtight container, otherwise they turn into lumps of brightly coloured granite sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. Not nice.

He's here, he's there, he's Pierre Gagnaire.

2010-02-01T17:03:00.000+04:00

Recently, I had the great pleasure of accompanying Pierre Gagnaire to one of the Emirati breakfasts at the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding in Bur Dubai. It was a chance for the legendary French chef to learn a little more about Emirati culture and food. And it was an opportunity for me to stuff myself silly with a load of luqaimat dumplings drenched in date syrup (not exactly a bowl of Fruit ‘n’ Fibre with low-fat yoghurt).

I was there on behalf of Esquire magazine in the Middle East, the idea being that the master chef would gain inspiration from his petite dejeuner à la UAE, before returning to the kitchen at Reflets Par Pierre Gagnaire to create something suitably impressive from a handful of dates and a bunch of chickpeas.

The breakfasts are held every week to offer tourists and anybody else who fancies it a chance to find out more about the culture and customs of the UAE, while sampling some genuine and reasonably good Emirati food. We sat, we ate and we listened intently...

Reflets' restaurant director Etienne Haro discusses the merits of 'kahwa' Arabic coffee, while monsieur Gagnaire demonstrates how to administer a crafty backhander to the head of a bald gentleman.

Back in the kitchen, chef Gagnaire cowers behind two intimidating-looking bottles of camel's milk...

The chef surrounds himself with an array of traditional Emirati ingredients: chickpeas, dates, cardamom, KFC bargain bucket, Dunkin' Donuts, Vimto.... sorry, got carried away there...

Gagnaire and Reflets' head chef Olivier Biles take to the stove.

Et voila! Eggs Maktoum!

With the pressure off, the lads clown around with a bottle of camel's milk, while PG captures the moment for a photo album entitled "I never thought I'd live to see the day...."

I have to say, I was impressed with the end result. I certainly hadn't imagined that such a hotch-potch of ingredients - chickpeas, dates, honey, camel's milk, coffee, cardamom and a solitary poached egg - could be so, well, interesting. In his own inimitable style, Gagnaire had created something approaching good Emirati food.

Of course, just typing the words “good Emirati food” has caused smoke to come billowing out the back of my laptop. Even the most patriotic local will tell you it’s as rare as braised brontosaurus breast in the restaurants and cafes of the UAE. Mysterious, misunderstood and missing from most menus, it’s a cuisine that the vast majority of non-Emiratis will know practically nothing about.

The best way to discover decent Emirati food it is to somehow blag an invitation into the home of a UAE national. Alternatively, the Sheikh Mohammed Centre’s weekly breakfasts and lunches will give you a full belly and one or two cultural insights to help you understand why you’re eating mini doughnut balls and sweet vermicelli noodles at 10 o’clock in the morning.

Failing that, just grab hold of a Michelin-star chef and see what he can rustle up with a bag of dried fruit, some legumes and the milk of an even-toed ungulate.

See Esquire Middle East, February edition, for the full Pierre Gagnaire story.

This place is full of Chinese people. That’s a good sign.

2010-01-30T14:18:00.000+04:00

Both of the above statements are true of China Sea. This legendary restaurant opposite the clock tower roundabout on Deira’s Maktoum Street attracts a steady stream of Chinese customers, who are no doubt grateful for its authenticity, not to mention its faithfully rendered Chinese food.

It also draws in a fair smattering of non-Chinese people, who perhaps also ache for a taste of real Chinese food at a price that won’t stop their hearts before the grease on the spring rolls does.

However, in an attempt to get more people through the door, the management have erected some large signs outside, which even the most cynical hater of Chinese food cannot fail to be enchanted by.

It reads exactly as follows:

"Good News

Big promotion - - 20 % discount for 68 days both in China Sea and China Wind restaurant. Along with that China Sea will reopen the buffet for chafing dish for all the people who love the hot pot so much. buffet 78dhs/person also make 20 % discount!

Buffet has more than hundred ingredients, the changes in style, meticulous preparation and the unique taste. Wish you have a good luck when you have that. The food you can have such as delicious small size lobster, all set of fish-ball we serve before, prawns, seafood, beef, lamb, chicken, staple food, seasonal vegetable, fruit, drink, traditional special grill etc.

Promises by all the employee from China Sea and China Wind restaurant:

Excellent service every day, Cannily make every meal!

Don’t miss the chance! Hurry up! Come on!"

I’m right there, just wait a moment while I stop sniggering. Ok, I’ll admit China Sea’s English just about has the edge on my Mandarin Chinese. But what a snappy sign to yank those busy passersby off the street and through the door. That chafing dish sounds painful, too. Wish you have a good luck when you have that.

For far better Chinese restaurant English howlers, go here

This is not the Food Network. This is not KFC. This is The Dubai Guzzler.

2010-01-29T18:08:00.000+04:00

Welcome to The Dubai Guzzler. May we take your order?

Since this is the very first post of a very new blog, I’d better explain what the hell it is I’m doing here. To be honest, I’m not really sure yet. Sure, this space will be used to talk about Dubai’s rapidly mushrooming dining scene - its restaurants, cafes, curry houses, shawarma dens, delicatessens, food shops, kitchen products, recipes, chefs, food trends, food oddities, obsessions, anomalies and downright absurdities - stuff like that.

Where there are reviews, I’ll let you know which ones I paid for, which ones I accepted an invitation to review, and which ones I actively, shamelessly and often cheekily blagged (all in the interest of keeping you - the reader - informed, ahem).

I’m hoping to post news of developments in the local restaurant scene - not just in Dubai, but also in Abu Dhabi, other parts of the Middle East, and throughout the rest of this gnarled old hunk of spinning rock we call planet earth.

There will be links to other blogs and websites, tips, interviews, observations and random musings, not to mention the occasional rant, I’m sure. Plus, I’ll be happy to answer any questions people may have (though keep the ones about quantum physics and string theory for when we’re in the pub, thanks).

But what I really hope it can be is a meeting place for a community of restaurant obsessives - of deli-addicts and prolific home cooks, take-away snobs, cookie-stashers, coffee-sponges, and curry shovellers par excellence (foie-gras-fanatics, fine-dining aficionados, fast-food freaks and people with an unhealthy relationship with tomato ketchup are also occasionally welcome).

I’d be delighted if that list of motley gourmets includes a few industry professionals - chefs, restaurateurs, sommeliers, waiters / waitresses, PRs, food writers, cookbook authors and the like - but I’d be even happier if it attracts some real people too.

You know, the ones who actually pay to attend restaurants, order the food, eat it, create an atmosphere and keep this whole industry ticking over. If you’re one of those people, thanks for keeping me in a job these past few years, but please, turn your phone off, keep the coughing down to a minimum and don’t use your napkin for THAT next time you’re dining out, eh.

I’d like to think of this little slice of cyberspace not as a blog or a website, but as a giant dinner table where chatter, gossip and opinions can be dissected, chewed over and occasionally spat out while nobody's looking. So pull up a chair, tuck in your napkin and let me know what you’re eating (or what’s eating you).

Let the guzzling begin.