Every time I return to London I feel completely food-ed out. Although I am a good cook (I'm writing a cookery book and am obsessed with food), I eat or take out from restauants, bars & cafés in Manhattan maybe eight or ten times a week as my apartment is just too small for entertaining.
Many Manhattan-ites (especially the single 30-something variety) are in the same boat, which seems extraordinary to Londoners who eat out maybe once or twice a week: with a two course meal with a single glass of wine for one at, for example, Pizza Express (an average upmarket-ish chain) costing approx £30/$60, it's just too prohibitive to eat out in good restaurants frequently unless you have a generous expense account.
So in London we eat an enormous amount of more inexpensive cuisines: Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Malaysian, Indian and more. For me it's not just a financial thing, it's a taste in part fuelled by the travelling I have done all over the world, both for pleasure and as a travel writer for a Sunday broadsheet and a major glossy travel mag.
These small, often family-run UK restaurants turn out extraordinarily good food, equal to the dishes you are served in resturants, hawker stalls, markets and street corners in Bangkok, Mumbai, Cochin, Hanoi, KL, Singapore and the rest. The Vietnamese restaurants on the Kingsland Road in Hackney, Indian in Southall...Chinese in the West End...
And goodness, I miss this in Manhattan where the food from these cultures is sub-par every single time. Greasy, soggy Chinese; Thai green papaya salad with no balance of flavour and shockingly, no chili; a Madras curry with no heat and no perfume; flaccid pad thai; Pho with overcooked noodles; dumplings with wrsppers seemingly made of shoe leather. I just do not understand why it is so, so, so bad, so inaccurate. All the spice and chili is stripped out of iconic dishes, leaving them as pale imitations of themselves. The only exception to this litany of execrable food is Mexican, which explains why I eat Mexican food maybe six times a week.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Over rated & Over there
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8 Opinions:
I'm right with you--when I lived in London I ate Indian non-stop, but in the US it's Mexican all the way.
My roommate visited New York last spring, and she said the Indian food didn't taste like anything she'd ever eaten before (and we're Indian!). But she did like the pretzels...
Oh goodness the Indian food is bloody awful in Manhattan. Really, shockingly unlike anything I've ever eaten in London or in India or in Tamil Malaysia... All my English friends in NYC are obsessed with tracking down gd curries!
I ate so much great curry when I lived in London. It's virtually nonexistent here (San Diego), and it's cr@p when you can find it.
I get really good Thai here—super fresh and wonderful, but it was awful when I got it in Chicago.
I feel very fortunate to have some of the best Mexican around—especially fish tacos! Mexican is third-rate anywhere that's too far north (i.e. north of any of the border states).
Yes, fish tacos sounded disgusting to me too, when I first moved here, but they're not.
I made fish tacos for my friends in London, using halibut, and it was really great experience. Everyone loved them.
Even Mexican food is getting up to speed here...Wahaca in Covent Garden is excellent and budget-friendly!
I love Thomasina Meiers - & I'm dying to try out Wahaca. When Im back on my feet, it's on my must visit list. Thanks Susie for reminding me - brilliant! LLG Xx
Wahaca?
That is HILARIOUS!
Is that meant to be a phonetic "translation" of
Oaxaca?
Well, I agree it wld be better if they called it Oaxaca: but you find me a man/woman on the British street who wld have any idea how to pronounce that...let alone have heard of it before. The restaurant isn't pitched at a massively sophisticated crowd, and the thinking is that they wld be put off if they had no idea how to pronouce the restaurant name...so there you go...
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