Bangladesh

The mere thought of Bangladesh always rather worries me. With the exception of Tuvalu it seems, as a country, the most object lesson in the immediate downside of climate change staring us in the face. Most of the country is less than 12m above sea level (a height at which, doom-monger than I am, I would not buy a house); 10% of it would sink under a mere 1m sea-level rise. It’s a place facing serious ecological challenges that people generally prefer to ignore. I don’t really like to think about it.

Bangladeshi food is hilariously abundant in London – many of our local curry restaurants and take-aways claim to be Bangladeshi more than Indian (or sometimes, rather suspiciously, both). So when we came to Bangladesh on our list, it was simple enough to try a takeaway and a sit-down meal during the course of a week and see what we made of it.

Bahrain

Tonight we made Chicken Machboos. For the second time. Unfortunately, the photos of the first version were on Seamus’ camera which was nicked. Fortunately, Chicken Machboos was one of the tastier B dishes so eating it twice wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Making it twice was, however, another story.

The Bahamas

We had to cook our Bahamian meal twice – not because it was so delicious we couldn’t resist (although it was very tasty) but because the camera failed on the first attempt. On attempt one, we cooked tilapia fillets marinaded in lime and red pepper flakes with Bahamian peas and rice. Then I – brilliantly, I’m sure you’ll agree – attempted to photograph it using a camera with no SIM card in. So today I made it again for my parents, this time using swordfish steaks but with the other details unchanged.

The trick to marinading fish in lime and pepper flakes turns out to be overdoing everything. Our first tilapia fillets we gently smeared with a bit of lime and a few flakes, and after eight hours they still tasted basically like fish. On the second attempt, I smothered the swordfish steaks in lime and chilli and left them soaking all day. That did the trick – by half eight and an hour in the oven they tasted strongly of lime and chilli.

Result.

Azerbaijan

If Seamus was writing this post, I expect it would read somewhat differently. Azerbaijan food has certainly been the most decisive so far, especially in relation to the wine.

Eurovision song contests aside, I don’t know that much about Azerbaijan (now there’s a surprise!) so my expectations for the cuisine were vaguely based on a colleague’s comment following a previous visit (“a plate of meat”) and my incorrect understanding of where the country is located. The menu at Baku, an incredibly posh Azerbaijani restaurant in Knightsbridge, was consequently quite surprising. While there was meat a-plenty, there were also lots of interesting looking fish dishes and far more variety in the menu than I had expected. It was also presented on an iPad which is something I have been advocating for ages: nothing like a few pictures to make the food choice a little easier. And a little longer. It took the waitress three attempts to get the food order out of us.

Unfortunately , we weren’t quite so discerning in our choice of wine and going for authenticity rather than taste, we chose a bottle of something noxious and Georgian, a mistake I won’t be repeating. Tasting somewhat like the Echinacea I normally knock back holding my nose, the Georgian wine that the waitress recommended as something consumed in Azerbaijan, was a strange shade of orange for a white wine, and was only bearable following the ketchup-like sauce that accompanied Seamus’ starter. In my opinion. Happily for Seamus, an interesting flavour topped a good one, and he got double the amount of wine.

Austria

There are two Austrian beer houses in London: the awesomely named Tiroler Hut and Bodo’s Schloss, a new chalet /discotheque (!) in Kensington. While I was kind of looking forward to an Austrian style knees-up, complete with blonde waiter, wooden tables and chequered tablecloths,  a shortage of days, closed restaurants and general laziness led us to the much closer Kipferl in Angel, a Viennese and Austrian café.

Fortunately, the food more than made up for the lack of beer-houseness.

I haven’t been to Austria before. Seamus, on the other hand, had high expectations from a previous holiday and also a far better idea of what things like “meat broth with shredded pancakes” or “bread dumplings” would taste like.  He therefore made the far more educated order of meat broth followed by Käsekrainer; I played it safe with Vegetable Soup followed by linseneintopf mit servietteknödel, otherwise known as Lentil Stew.

Australia

Somehow we’re already at the third-to-last of the As, Australia.

There are Australian bars aplenty in London, and a couple of restaurants that allege to be Australian too. Somewhere in this city we could easily find ourselves real examples of what Australians eat every day, which appears to differ very little from what the English eat every day – meat pies, steaks, their alarming Marmite analogue Vegemite, and most famously absolutely any sort of meat that can be thrown on a barbecue. I’ve also harboured a long-standing fascination with Australia’s unique seafood delicacy the Moreton Bay Bug, ever since I heard an Australian friend raving about them and wondered out loud where on earth Moreton Bay was and why the curious people who lived there ate bugs (it turns out, of course, to be a sort of giant langoustine).

But for me the defining feature of Australian culture has always been its elegant, raw simplicity – the unabashed distrust of anything that has been, as the Australians themselves would famously have it, ponced up. So instead of going out of our way to find a an authentic Australian restaurant serving Moreton Bay Bugs and Vegemite we ordered a couple of kangaroo steaks from an exotic butcher and ate them more-or-less raw.

Our kangaroo steaks were delivered to the door in a refrigerated box and once they’d thawed out for a few hours we had two darkish, lean steaks sitting bloody as hell on a plate. We’d thought about grilling them but in the end the consensus seems to be to fry them in oil on a very high heat, and we did that instead.

Armenia

Erebuni is, apparently, the go-to Armenian restaurant in London. Typically, it has been closed for refurbishment for the past month. After three weeks of waiting for a sign of life, we gave up last week and, after a ridiculous amount of googling, came across Jakob’s in Gloucester Road, a café which, coincidentally, used to provide Seamus with his lunchtime sandwiches. Small world. As well as lunchtime sandwiches, Jakob’s website promised authentic Armenian, so we headed down the Piccadilly line to see if we could finally tick off our next A.

Jakob’s café is a sweet little building down the road from the museums in SW6. It is filled with quaint knick-knacks, a piano and a table covered in cakes, which makes it feel both warm and quirky. It wasn’t quite so full of traditional Armenian food (although the chef did point out that Armenians do eat non-Armenia-specific food too), but with two main dishes on offer, we decided that it just about qualified.

Argentina

The thing about my favourite Argentinian restaurant in London – the newish Gaucho on Charlotte Street – is that it’s in the basement of my old office. Once upon a time, back in 2004, there was a fad amongst newspapers to pretend their websites were independent start-ups, so everyone had a digital division in a satellite office, and ours was in the building that now houses the NoHo branch of Gaucho. Lovely place to work, mainly because the area was so very replete with great places to eat – and since Gaucho opened its doors at number 60 Charlotte Street a few years ago there’s now one more.

We visited Gaucho the night we had tried, and failed, to find an Angolan restaurant in London that hadn’t suddenly and mysteriously shut down – apparently a standard rite of passage for anyone trying to eat their way around the globe within the confines of the M25. We’d spent the afternoon buying pretty dresses and the early evening walking through surprisingly lovely and utterly deserted Streatham parks in the melting snow, so we had built up enough of an appetite to appreciate the big, robust slabs of steak that are Gaucho’s staple, and even had room for a starter.

Antigua and Barbuda

Last night we explored our second country for which no plausibly dedicated restaurant could be found in London, Antigua and Barbuda – a Caribbean island chain with a population as tiny as Andorra’s which nonetheless churns at least one world-class cricketer every generation.

Antiguan recipes generally seem to share something of a pattern – take some food and stick a load of coconut all over it. This would make Antiguan cooking fairly straightforward, were it not for the fact that Issa hates coconuts. Alas. So I scoured the lists for Antiguan staples that were not entirely coconut based, and came up with the following.

Angola

Last week, Seamus started researching Angolan restaurants in London. If you’ve looked at any of the other ‘eating the world’ blogs, you’ll notice that they are quite hard to track down. While the situation didn’t seem to have improved dramatically,  Seamus’ research did manage to uncover a few stray Angolan dishes on a menu for K&S Reign in Streatham, which is where we found ourselves heading on a bitterly cold and slightly sleety Saturday afternoon.

This is what we found when we got there.

It turns out that finding Angola continues to pose a problem to those trying to eat their way around the world.