Part 9 (1/2)

'Try this, darlings. Do you like it? OK, let's put some on the buffet.'

It was more like attending a large family dinner party than going to a restaurant. Ismail beamed at the noisy chatter and sounds of appreciation from every table.

'That's the way I want it, darling', he told us. 'This is food my grandmother used to cook. It's family food.'

After hours of watching the food being prepared, I was starving - all the more so as I had missed out before. We joined the queue and loaded our plates with fresh popiah, curries and salads - all to be eaten, of course, with our right hands.

'Ihadbreakfastalready b.u.t.thisissogood Icouldjustkeepeating. LOL', Lex mumbled through her umpteenth spring roll. I did not understand a d.a.m.n word she was saying, but I knew exactly what she meant.

'Thanksfor askingmealong', she smiled.

'No problem, love. What are uncles for?'

Crouching Down for Pho with Uncle Ho I am happy to share with you a very successful technique for staying alive in Hanoi, Vietnam, when confronted by the thousands of motor cycles that fdl the streets and shoot down the alleyways at an alarming speed twenty-four hours a day. You can thank me when you go there.

Never be ashamed to use a local as a human s.h.i.+eld.

The locals have in-built instincts about when to cross a busy road and at what speed. If you cross when they do, you have a chance. If they get it wrong, at least it is them who will be hit first. I am not proud, but I will admit that if it is between me and a doddery old woman in the road survival stakes, granny's going down.

My quirky guesthouse in the Old Quarter of Hanoi appeared to be the Vietnamese equivalent of Boys Town, with half the male teenage population of the city asleep on blankets laid on the floor of the reception. I left Big Red and went straight out for something to eat, immediately bringing into play the survival technique above, while scooters shot either side of me as I walked along the alleyways towards Hoan Kiem Lake in search of breakfast.

Vietnamese food has become increasingly popular in the West in the last twenty years. In part this is due to ma.s.sive emigration during and after the Vietnam War, which brought sizeable expat communities to America, France, the UK and particularly Australia, and with them came their cuisine. But more than this, the light, clear flavours of Vietnamese food, combined with its use of fresh ingredients, small amounts of protein and little fat fits well with the current Western obsession with healthy eating.

The most famous dish of all is pho, a noodle soup, which is good any time of the day but a must for breakfast. Pre-cooked noodles are placed in a bowl with slivers of meat or seafood, sprinkled with spring onions and fresh red chilli and then topped off with ladles of hot beef or chicken broth. As I walked down through the Old Quarter, the air was already filled with the smell of pho being prepared and, using the trusted adage that the best and safest street food is to be found at the busiest places, I selected a crowded spot, pulled up a small plastic stool and pointed to a bowl of beef soup, indicating that I wanted the same. Less than a minute later, I was presented with a steaming bowl filled to the brim and topped off with a freshly cracked egg softly poaching in the hot broth. Every spoonful had layer on layer of flavour and texture. I spiked the broth with chilli paste and added a dash of fish sauce for salt. It was as good a dish as I had tried in a long time, and I knew that for my few days here breakfast would be taken care of No one would ever call Hanoi an attractive city. It suffers the attendant problems I had seen in so many countries on the trip: pollution, dirt, poverty and decaying infrastructure, in this case made worse by the strict Communist regime, which has neither the finances nor the inclination to do anything about them. But it still has plenty to offer and is made enjoyable by the sheer energy of its locals, who appeared cold at first but over time were very welcoming.

I spent the day in search of Vietnam's most famous son. Ho Chi Minh, to this day revered in the country as the greatest hero and liberator, known to everyone as 'Uncle Ho'. His body was mummified, against his dying wishes, and in true Communist leader style housed in a mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square. I made my way around the square to the entrance, guarded by young soldiers who barely looked old enough to carry toy guns, let alone real ones. Surprisingly, there was hardly any queue at all.

and I joined the small line, handed my camera and bag over and filtered respectfiilly along in front of the body of Vietnam's great leader. He was in better shape than I imagined - owing to the fact that he apparently goes on a two-month holiday to China every year for a bit of a wash and brush-up. The quiet tears of the older people in the line made for an unexpectedly moving experience.

On my journey from the airport to the city I had shared a cab with a young man from England called Darran, and we had agreed to meet up later for a drink. By his own admission he was not that experienced when it came to food, but he was willing to try anything, and over the next couple of days before he had to join his own travel party, he became my wingman as we went in search of things to eat.

All over the Old Quarter signs were posted offering 'bia hoi' for sale. The three main Hanoi breweries, as well as making their bottled beers, also produce barrels of fresh beer made with no preservatives. The beer won't last more than a day, so it is sold for a few pennies a gla.s.s at shops all over the city, where you hunker down on small plastic stools to sip the refres.h.i.+ng brew. After a few gla.s.ses Darran and I felt as though we could conquer the world, and we agreed that the next day we would fmd our way to La Mat, also known as 'Snake Village', the place in Hanoi to eat our slithering friends. Viewed through the bleary goggles of 'bia hoi', the idea had sounded good to us. The next morning, when Darran arrived at my hotel bleary-eyed, he looked a lot less certain, as indeed did I.

We found a cab for the short journey out of the city only to find, when we turned down a small side-street, that we were suddenly surrounded by a posse of men on scooters, each employed by a different snake restaurant and screaming at the driver to bring us to their establishment. When the driver finally disgorged us, we were almost immediately surrounded by people trying to persuade us to eat in their restaurants. I was not ashamed to admit that I was having second thoughts.

T don't fancy this much, mate.' I looked across at Darran, who looked back with a grateful look in his eye. 'Me neither.'

We walked around the neighbourhood for a while, trying to convince ourselves that we had done the right thing as we saw the shops filled with snake medicine and wines until we found another cab to take us back to the city. That night we shared a last beer, but inside I felt lousy. I had turned down this unique eating opportunity because some nasty men on bikes shouted a bit. As I said my goodbyes to Darran, I went back to my guesthouse feeling like a fraud.

The next day I had booked myself onto a cookery course at the ultra-smart Metropole Hotel, another remnant of French colonial times, where Graham Greene had lived when writing The Quiet American. It was a fabulous day. The young woman chef who led the course was a delight and, after a visit to the famous Cho 19 market, we spent the rest of the morning watching and taking part as Thuong Thuong, our teacher, showed us how to make everything from fresh salads using the hearts of banana flowers to whole fried fish and, of course, the small, delicate spring rolls for which Vietnamese cuisine is famous. Afterwards we decamped to the hotel restaurant and helped ourselves to the buflet, a collection of nearly a hundred dishes, made in small portions to maintain freshness. 1 sat with my fellow students and enjoyed the meal, but I kept thinking back to my failures at La Mat and that somewhere there was a snake with my name on it.

I had arranged to go on a tour on my last day in the city, but when I awoke, I still had snake on my mind and decided that Halong Bay could wait. I had to go and right my wrong. I girded my considerable loins and caught another cab, this time making sure he dropped me ofl” about ten minutes walk from La Mat so that I could pick out a likely candidate without ha.s.sle, and found myself entering a restaurant called Quoc Tien. It was more sedate 'han I imagined, and far from the gloomy den of iniquity I had antic.i.p.ated, being light and airy with a smart terrace.

As for the meal, well, after selecting a snake from the tank as one would a lobster, I watched as it was killed and its heart was placed in a gla.s.s with some spirit laced with a little blood. I drank it down in one gulp of burning alcohol, but the heart reminded me of an oyster and I remained convinced throughout the meal that I could feel it beating. I drank the bile that had been milked from the small glands of the snake, which was bitter, and I ate the rest of the snake, which was, thankfully, served in rather more ordinary preparations - soups, stir-fried with vegetables and in dainty spring rolls.

What did it taste like? I hate to say it, but it tasted like ... well, you can finish the rest of that off yourself A Filler in Manila Few places on my trip surprised me as much as the Philippines. My expectations were low, and my impressions of the country had been gleaned from Western media horror stories of crime, corruption and crippling poverty. It was only the intervention of my Filipino aunt Evelyn in New York that changed my mind and my itinerary, as I decided to bypa.s.s Cambodia and Laos and head to Manila instead.

The Philippines are hardly on the tourist radar of South-East Asia. Its government has been seriously lacking when it comes to promoting just how beautiful and varied this archipelago of over 7,000 islands is. They have also failed to promote the range and quality of the cuisine, leaving people to a.s.sume it consists entirely of adobo, the famed dish of pork and vinegar, lumpia, the local versions of spring rolls, and lechon, barbecued suckling pig. Add to this the fact that it is not considered a cheap or a safe option for travellers, and it is easy to see why the security-wary and budget-conscious often give it a miss.

Evelyn rea.s.sured me that Manila was a worthwhile city to visit, that the food had great variety and, most important of all, that she would be in the country at the same time.

'You have lots of cousins there. I will make sure they look after you.' I was sure they would. Few people ever say no to 'Auntie Evelyn'.

I had also been contacted by a terrific food writer called Robyn Eckhart, who runs a website called Eating Asia. She got in touch to give me some helpful hints about Malaysia but, in pa.s.sing, had mentioned that she thought Fihpino food was one( the 'undiscovered treasures of Asia'. That was enough for me.

There is no doubting that Manila has many problems. The! traffic is chaotic, and going even the shortest distance takes mu planning; and, of course, with the traffic come the problems i noise and pollution, made worse by the stifling humidity. Poverty

and the uneven distribution of wealth are readily apparent too,' as the shanty towns cl.u.s.tered by the runways of the airports give I way to the luxury hotels and private houses, all in secure com-j pounds. With poverty come its unhappy bedfellows drugs andj prost.i.tution: the area around my business hotel in Makati wasj surrounded by girly bars and ma.s.sage parlours, all catering for thej grim recreational desires of fat middle-aged men. However, as l] knew from my travels, these were the problems of any developing! nation, not just the Philippines, and despite them there was muc to recommend the place to the potential visitor.

You have to begin with the country's greatest a.s.set, its peop who swamp you with their hospitality and goodwill. The che greetings of the staff at my hotel were genuine and followed with hand-drawn notes showing me where to find the best food.^ The drivers of Manila's plentiful and cheap taxis were, after gentle bout of haggling, trustworthy and another useful source! of information, and stallholders, restaurant staff and shopworke could not have been more helpful.

Then there is the beauty of the country - not Manila, whic is as ugly as a rejected set for Blade Runner, but head a few hot outside or to the far reaches of one of the islands, and the scene is breathtaking. Most of all, for me, however, it was the foodii had not been prepared for the bewildering variety on offer or I enthusiasm, bordering on psychotic obsession, with which fo was treated by just about everyone I met, including my relatives. ] was an obsession 1 had not encountered since I had been in Mexic which, given the fact that the two countries were both ruled 1 the Spanish and the fact that many governors of the Philippir came from Mexico, should not have come as a surprise.

There appears to be no such thing as a quick meal or a small meal, and when the Filipinos eat, they like to indulge in their other great obsession, talking. They talk about anything and everything and have an opinion on everything and any subject, even if they know nothing about it. It is more important to have an opinion and to express it than for that opinion to have any basis in knowledge. We had a lot in common.

They are most opinionated about food, as I found out during my first meal with my cousin Carlo Tadiar at a restaurant called Abe. Laconic and with a dry wit, Carlo, like many Filipinos, had a slight American tw.a.n.g to his English, which he explained was a legacy of the era of American 'protection' after the Spanish left the country. So indeed was the shopping mall in which the restaurant was situated. The Filipinos love malls, and at times you would think you were in Kansas rather than Manila.

Carlo was the editor of a popular men's lifestyle magazine in the Philippines, and, as he talked to me, he was also ordering food and shouting in Tagalog, the local language, into his mobile phone at the same time. Between conversations he managed to take me through the plates of food that kept appearing on the table. Delicious and deeply savoury, each dish was packed with astonis.h.i.+ng new combinations of flavours.

A slow-cooked kare kare stew of oxtail was cooked so that the bones released their gelatin and thickened the sauce. Then there were chunks of bangus fish 'cooked' in lemon juice and palm vinegar and topped with chilli; roast chickens stufled with Filipino rice and dried fruit; lechon, the legendary suckling pig, served with a sauce made from the pig's liver; camaru, a bowl of crunchy, deep-fried crickets served with sharp raw onions; and finally a bicol express, an a.r.s.e-threateningly hot dish of pork, coconut milk and fiery green chillies. It was wonderful, the sort of food that raises taste buds from a jaded torpor - sharp, clean flavours, savoury, delicious stews and the crunch factor that Filipinos demand from at least one dish every meal. I adored it.

As I dived headlong into bowl after bowl of food, Carlo-^ explained what was planned for me during my visit. I grunted in understanding as he listed where I would be going and who I would be meeting, but in truth I wasn't really listening. I was too busy focusing on the plates of food in front of me, to make sure that he and our two dining companions did not take my fair share of anything. He might just as easily have told me that I was about to have a hydrochloric acid enema on live TV the next day and I would have given him the same nod of enthusiastic agreement, as I pierced another piece of suckling pig with my fork. If this was how good it was going to be, I could hardly wait for the next few days.

On the Thursday Carlo collected me in a car and announced that we were heading out of Manila on a two-hour drive to the city of Angeles, in the Pampanga region. He had decided to include an article about my trip in his magazine and to combine it with a 'meeting of minds' between me and a famous local artist and gourmand, Claude Tayag.

Claude, Carlo told me, was one of the most noted gourmands in the country and had agreed to prepare a meal for us at hisj home, a bale dutung or 'house of wood', worth seeing in its own right, he told me, as it had been constructed entirely by Claude , himself from remnants of local churches and farmhouses.

A true polymath, Claude Tayag was a painter, sculptor, writer, musician and cook, who had not only laid every wooden plank in the house but also made every piece of furniture, all in a traditional Filipino style, with the living quarters elevated and thtf side panels removable so that air could flow through on humid' summer days. He led us out on to a large deck overlooking a. garden in which half a dozen of his sculptures, made from old. ploughshares, were standing, and seated us around a table (whic he had made, of course) to begin the meal.

It is hard to describe just how good this meal was. I sat in i attention as Claude and his wife brought out dish after explaining how each was prepared. A salad of crunchy paco 1 served with pickled quail's eggs came with a dressing made of duck egg yolks. It was followed by bulanglang, a seafood stew with guava and fresh prawns, with heads so large that Claude instructed us to rip them off and allow the fat to dribble into the soup as a thickener. Fried hito fish came next, served wrapped in mustard leaves with balo halo, a condiment of fermented rice, which of course Claude makes himself and sells under his own label. And there was yet another version of the kare kare stew I had tried before, but this time made with fish.

Most simple and most delicious of all, adding the necessary crunch, was a bowl of bagnet, deep-fried belly pork. There was rice too, of course: no meal in the Philippines happens without rice. I was staggered by it all, the generosity and the food. This was one of the best meals I had eaten, ever.

After the meal Claude shepherded us towards his car for the short drive into the city. He wanted me to taste perhaps the quintessential Filipino dish - sisig. Created in his home town of Angeles, this is the dish that every Filipino loves to have with a cold beer. It is made up of left-over bits of pig - cheek, nose and ear - chopped up finely with chilli and cooked on a hot plate to form a crunchy layer on the bottom. It is served communally so that people can fight over the crispy bits as they talk. It was deliciously savoury, and I am sure I could still taste it as we headed back into Manila.

Over the next few days of my stay I set out to explore what else was on offer, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of yet another cousin, Ethan. He was a huge teddy bear of a man, with a deep laugh that peppered his conversation. I liked him immediately.

'Man, I hear you have been doing some good eating? Heh, heh', he boomed at me in his baritone voice. 'Let's see if we can't do even better. Heh, heh.'

And we certainly tried. We ate lechon at Salcedo, the weekend market for middle-cla.s.s Manilans. 'It's from Cebu', he told me knowingly. 'They don't serve it with the liver sauce. They say if you need sauce, there is something wrong with your lechon.'

We tried sinigang, the FiUpino equivalent of Jewish chicken soup, soured with tamarind and flavoured with pork, beef or seafood - in this case with a huge hunk of corned beef simmering in the broth.

'It has to be sour, man or its not sinigang,' Ethan advised as he slurped up another mouthful.

We tried crispy pata - yet more pork, but this time braised, hung up to dry for up to twenty-four hours and then cut into chunks and, you've guessed it, deep-fried. And we tried pork skewers. 'My favourite', Ethan said, joining a long line for them at the market. He emerged from the queue brandis.h.i.+ng four meaty examples.

'One's never enough', he said, without any argument from me.

He really was a man after my own heart attack, and thanks to him. Carlo and my aunt Evelyn, I enjoyed my time in Manila more than I could have possibly imagined. 1 was delighted when she joined us for a last meal at the enormous family home. Prepared by Carlo, the main course was perhaps the best-known dish of all, adobo - pork and chicken marinated in chillies and vinegar. For many Filipinos it is the ultimate comfort food.

Ten of us sat around the table and ate, drank and, of course, talked for over five hours until the small hours of the morning. We talked mainly about food, about how things should be done 'properly' and about how so many young people now took short cuts. Everyone shook their heads mournfully. I felt totally at home, and I could not have been happier. I had 'discovered' a new cuisine, and one that could not have been more suited to my taste for hot, sour and crunchy. And best of all, I had discovered a new family, a family who shared my own obsession for food. My next stop was to discover my old family.

I was off to India.

India: Crazy, Beautiful Nothing you have ever experienced prepares you for India.