h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The curry mile is no longer a good place to go for curries...I only go there now for the middle eastern places which are taking over...

I know there are a couple of good shisha bars down that way.

Moonlight on the Curry Mile is one of my favourite places on earth.

I've just got back from Viva Cuba, a tapas place in Kirkstall. It was amazing and I can barely walk. All food should be like this - friends sharing simple, very tasty food with good wine and great conversation.

Post MENUS, damn you!

http://www.vivacubaleeds.co.uk/menu/index.html

Here you go.

I love Tapas.

I think it was on Ramsey's last series where he met a fella who was doing Indian-Tapas fusion. The food wasn't particularly fusion, but he had a menu full of smaller dishes. A sort of make-your-own-Thali. Heaven.

B

The White Swan in Wythall, Birmingham for breakfast.

It's a carvery, so all the bits of a Full English are laid out in the carvery spot for you to pick and choose.

'Twas lovely.

Do you really need a menu for this one, Mu Beta?


Geggs

I went to the Raj Bari in Hotwells, Bristol on Saturday and it was damn fine.

FB

Went with and one of his friends (plus wife) to the Tüschenbroicher Mühle on Saturday. It's local and very gorgeous. We had booked a table to eat goose.

The deal is you get a table for 4. They come to the table and carve a goose, and give you as much red cabbage, roast chestnuts, baked apples, potato dumplings and gravy as you need. There is also a bottle of wine included in the meal price (about EUR 120)

'twas totally brilliant - although we always get good service there because worked there full-time for 5 years, and now helps out now and again (mainly baking their cakes)

http://www.tueschenbroicher-muehle.de/
(warning! it's all in German...)

I ate on a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Abuja. My PA had booked the flight and knew that I was vegetarian, she wasn’t sure what type of vegetarian and had played safe by picking the strictest. I therefore had meals prepared for those who eat only fruit. I was surprised by the inventiveness. I had fruit salad, a dried fruit kebab, a bowl of raisins and some fruit in a chilli sauce. As I was flying business I spent the whole time trying to refuse alcohol as I was nervous about arriving in Africa. Would I like champagne, an aperitif, wine, desert wine…

I ate at Lugis in Abuja. This wasn’t my choice I am here with colleagues. We sat outside by a fountain and enjoyed the warm evening air. I had pick your own pasta…I was given a list of ingredients and ticked the ones I liked, the chef tried to turn it into a meal. It was OK. My colleagues had risotto and got really cross that it was inauthentic. Why go to Africa and eat in an Italian restaurant and complain it’s inauthentic?

"trying" to refuse alcohol?

Does this mean you ultimately failed in this valiant effort?

I failed.

But not spectacularly.

i resisted the free bar at the airport, the first glass of champagne, the second glass of wine...

I breakfasted at the Sheraton hotel in Abuja. We sat in a courtyard next to a waterfall. Beautiful people in exotic costumes surrounded us (it wasn’t until the last day that my colleague pointed out that some of these were coming off the nightshift).

My colleague asks me …are you vegetarian? Yes I reply I am. Ah he says good luck.

Breakfast appears to be no problem as a buffet is served of anything you can imagine anyone anywhere in the world eating for breakfast. I find myself eating Nigerian food; rice porridge, moi moi (a sort of spicy bean chunk a bit like polenta), eggs with onion and chilli and a chilli and yam stir fry. Before I go a friend extracts a promise from me…I will eat pap. This is a gruel made from maize and is eaten either with spicy food or sweet food. I take a mouthful and my whole face screws up. I’ve never eaten anything that tastes so wrong yet so innocuous. I take another mouthful (this time with honey). There is no way I can eat it. I’d rather swallow the similar tasting mosquito spray. I look enviously at the beef stew and fish eaten by my colleagues. As a life long vegetarian I know I wouldn’t like it but it certainly looks interesting.
I’m nearly done with Nigerian eating stories…

Last one...i promise!

I ate at the financial training college outside Abuja.
When we drove around the city I saw food everywhere, bicycles with ice boxes, apples on string, bbq’s made out of metal drums and shacks made from plywood and corrugated metal with hastily scrawled signs saying ‘food ready’. It wasn’t possible to stop and risk these delights and I found myself wondering what ordinary people ate.
At the training college we ate with the students, we were taken to a building with a large empty room, the walls were crumbling and the whole place looked derelict. We were taken to a table (actually the table) and food seemed an unlikely prospect. a curtseying maid in a red beret brought me a tray. As a vegetarian I was given vegetable rice and coleslaw, which was lovely. My colleagues received the same but with a hunk of fish or chicken barbequed with a spicy coating. This they say is what meat should be like; it is what meat was like when they were young and lived on the Isle of Lewis…
Some of the students eat the same as us. Others eat something else….it looks like candyfloss, but white…clearly some kind of carbohydrate in a plastic bag. I think it has been steamed. They tear chunks off and use it to mop up some kind of stew. They suggest we try it but nearly fall over laughing so hard at the idea. My colleague considers it but the opportunity never occurs. I want to try it but am constrained by the vegetarian barrier.

#151 "Why go to Africa and eat in an Italian restaurant and complain it’s inauthentic?"

This is on the front page as "quote of the day", which was how I found it. All I will say is that a friend of mine went to San Francisco and had Peking Duck ... should he have complained it was inauthentic?

I think Storm's point was that if his colleagues wanted authenticity then perhaps they should have gone to a restaurant that served local dishes, and not those referencing another country a few thousand miles away.

Whether to complain is your friends choice, Storm was musing upon the incongruity of his colleagues' complaining, I think.


Geggs

can't remember the name of the place but I was in a kind of Cuban/Turkish fusion bar/restaurant the other day. Interesting.

The next day at a Fish Restaurant on the Bosphorous. Very good but I have no idea what any of it was.

#158 "I think Storm's point was that if his colleagues wanted authenticity then perhaps they should have gone to a restaurant that served local dishes, and not those referencing another country a few thousand miles away."

I'm not going to make a mountain out of a molehill, and my comment was only associated with seeing it presented as a particular "quote of the day" on the front page, but I'll elaborate the point I was trying to make.

The restaurant in question - The Sheraton Abuja Luigi's Restaurant, Nigeria on their advertising says: "Italian food at its best. Come and experience dinner at Luigi's."

Now if I went to an Italian restaurant in the UK and they served poor Risotto - I would complain. Just because that Italian restaurant is in "Africa" should one not be able to complain about the poor Risotto?

My point was the assumption that just because the Italian restaurant was in Africa we should think - well it's Africa - what would you expect anyway...