Around the world, one dish at a time.
It isn’t hard to spot the dead hand of corporate PR on the menu of a certain type of restaurant. Ya know. The world’s most expensive cocktail, with a diamond in the bottom and some gold on top. Or the world’s most expensive pizza, with …
One great food find from Everest Base Camp? Sea buckthorn juice. I knew about this lovely stuff, of course. Sea buckthorn berries are famous for containing more Vitamin C than either cranberries or oranges — 400mg for every 100g of raw berries, although of course …
In Orhan Pamuk’s wonderful Istanbul: a Memoir, he records that stuffed mussel vendors, plying their wares along the streets, have been part of Istanbul since early Ottoman times. And Turkish stuffed mussels, known as midye dolma, are one of the world’s great street foods. Seriously, …
One of the great joys of any trip to Turkey is, of course, Turkish food. And, as the Ottoman Empire stretched across swathes of Europe, Asia and the Middle East at its peak, many of the flavours may well be familiar to you from elsewhere. …
My apologies for the abysmal lack of updates over the last few weeks. I’ve been trekking in the Himalayas, and, while there’s more internet than you’d think up there, there really isn’t a lot. And so, in lieu of more appetising material, I bring you …
Growing up British in an era before the Channel Tunnel had finally connected us with our not-so-dear neighbour and long-term rival France, and while plane travel remained substantially an expensive luxury rather than a mode of mass transport, ferries figured highly in my childhood. And, …
Unbowed by my experiences with yak butter tea, a flavour which, while not as bad as you’d think, definitely falls under the rubric of “acquired” (I’ll write it up for you at some point, I promise), I decided to brave another Tibetan winter warmer: hot …
Asian noodle soups are one of the great joys of travelling South-East Asia – and, for that matter, Asia as a whole. Cultures as far afield as Tibet and Japan have their own unique noodle soups, and in many parts of Asia, the noodle soup …
You don’t have to spend long in Nepal to realise that momo make the world go round: delicious, meaty dumplings in a super-light dough, they’re reminiscent of the northern Chinese jiaozi, and arguably ancestrally related to all the filled pastas of Europe from Turkish mantı …
What does a British pound buy you, foodwise? In most parts of the world, a lot. In fact, even in Western Europe you can feed yourself on junk food for under a quid. In this series, I’m going to be finding food you can buy …