Bhutan

Bhutan – after Tibet, probably the most remote and inaccessible place on earth, a place so keen to limit tourism that it costs $100 a day just to set foot in the country and famously measures its national success in terms of happiness rather than economic output. I once met the guy who designed their botanical gardens and who happened to be in the country the day the first mobile phone mast went up – he watched the people there go from the middle ages to the always-on chatter of the C21st in front of his eyes. Bhutan is distant, other, almost legend. Bhutan is, not to press the point, proper remote.

What it turns out they eat there is a sort of spicy yak’s cheese (“Datshi”) on red rice, both of which are so beyond re-creation in London that even the attempt is farcical. Yak’s cheese is not for sale even in the odder independent supermarkets on Turnpike Lane, so instead we scoured the web for the closest equivalent people had managed to find and discovered it was Dutch feta. Unable to secure that either, we resigned ourselves to bog-standard Greek feta. So far, none for one. Then we looked for the red rice that forms the other half of Bhutan’s national dish. Alas – none for two. Which meant in the end we found ourselves making probably our least authentic facsimile of a national cuisine so far – perfectly ordinary Greek feta over perfectly ordinary long-grain rice.

It wasn’t very nice, but for all I know the proper Bhutanese version is delicious. Ours was simply some feta cheese boiled up with jalapeños, garlic and onion served with a side of rice and some vegetables. It was, however, incredibly spicy which – according to the Bhutanese tourist board – is the main point of the local style of cooking, going so far as to admit that

“most Bhutanese people would not enjoy a meal that was not spicy”.

Should you ever be minded to boil heavily spiced feta cheese over rice I recommend you think again…but then again, why would such a notion occur to anyone? And if you do manage to eat the Datshi that is apparently the Bhutanese staple diet…do let us know what it’s really like.