Haandi

While in London recently, a priority for me was to have a good Indian meal. Brussels has a handful of half-decent Indian restaurants, but nothing like the variety and quality available in the UK (ahh, the benefits of having once had an empire…). Our first choice was Amaya, one of the few to have received a Michelin star. I called – they had a table available. I mentioned that we had our three-month-old son with us in a pram, hoping that this wouldn’t be a problem. But it was. No children allowed. I gritted my teeth, hung up and switched to plan B (I’ll leave my rant about British restaurants’ intolerance of children, compared to most other countries where we’ve never had a problem taking non-adults out to eat, for another time).

Plan B turned out to be pretty damn good, so my disappointment and frustration quickly evaporated. Haandi is hidden in a side street just around the corner from Harrods. The first branch opened in Nairobi and offers what they call “North Indian frontier cuisine”, with a few Kenyan and Goan dishes thrown in for variety.

I started with the Dahi Bhalla; soft lentil cakes with a  colourful, tangy sauce. Interesting, even though it looked and tasted more like a dessert than a starter. In the foreground, my wife’s Chilli Paneer; spiced fingers of curd cheese with peppers, tomato and coriander. Hers was probably the better of the two.

Mains: Jeera chicken, a Kenyan speciality, Chicken Chennai Special with coconut and curry leaves, with Pudina (mint) naan. Both very moreish. Portion sizes were large, but I had no problems clearing my plate.

For dessert, on the left Pista kulfi and on the right Mango kulfi. Cool and fruity but not too sweet.

One of the better Indian meals I’ve ever had – definitely worth seeking out if you’re in the area. Or Nairobi.

P.S. We had been turned away from Amaya for having a baby, but some guy dining alone on a table near us in Haandi spent the entire meal noisily clearing his sinuses. We gave him several strong glares, to no avail. But I bet he’d have had no problem getting a table at a “grown-up” restaurant, because he’s an adult and therefore knows how to behave in public and not bother his fellow diners, right?

Unrelated but cool P.P.S.: The day before we spotted these in Fortnum & Masons’ food hall. Only the exorbitant prices stopped us buying them.

 

Art Attack

This is Shawn. Shawn has a scar on his forehead, but he’s no boy wizard.

Shawn recently visited Paris and Brussels with his Japanese wife and her parents. While strolling around a Parisian square his wife’s attention was caught by the work of a street artist. She pulled out her camera and took a photo of one of the paintings. The artist was seated a little way off and noticed what she was doing. Perhaps understandably miffed at this infringement of his intellectual property rights, he threw a rock which he apparently had about his person in case of such eventualities. Whether by accident or design the rock hit Shawn square in the temple, rather than his wife. A stream of multilingual abuse issued from the aggrieved artist’s mouth, to which Shawn replied with an apology.

I’m trying to imagine how this little drama might have played out in other, more litigious cultures.

 

Sandwich Party 4: Back to Basics

First, an apology. Time constraints (we have five houseguests this weekend; one from Genoa and four from Tokyo) + minimal food preparation talent + lack of inspiration = probably my feeblest Sandwich Party entry to date. But I couldn’t bear to be left out, so here it is.

Having contributed Belgian and Italian recipes in previous years, I wanted to return to my homeland. Wikipedia claims that cheese sandwiches are quintessentially British (I can hear the howls of protest and derision from non-British readers even now), so who am I to contest the collective wisdom of the internet? A cheese sandwich it will be. Or rather, two cheese sandwiches. Two simple but honest, blokey, British cheese sandwiches.

First, the bread. This year I made my own. Well, our bread-making machine did.

(This blogpost is brought to you in association with Moulinex).

Next, the ingredients. Cheddar and Branston’s Pickle from an expat-oriented British/Scandinavian food shop near my office. I’m not sure how widely Branston’s is available abroad, so for the benefit of those of you unfortunate enough not to have been born a subject of Her Majesty Elizabeth II, the ingredients apparently include “swede, carrots, onions, cauliflower and gherkins pickled in a sauce made from vinegar, tomato, apple and dates with spices such as mustard, coriander, garlic, cinnamon, pepper, cloves, nutmeg and cayenne pepper with sugar”. It’s brown and lumpy and very tangy. I think you either love it or hate it, like Marmite. I only got into it recently.

On the other side I wanted coleslaw, but for some reason coleslaw is quite hard to find in Belgium. The supermarket fridges are full of various types of creamy salad dressings, but most of them contain ham or chicken or shrimp or crab or whatever. In the end I had to go for this “salade printanière“, which contains chunks of ham but was the closest thing they had.

All ingredients should be quite thick and chunky, for maximum manly mouthfeel.

Don’t forget to check out the other contributions at the Sandwich Party flickr pool.

Update: I managed to procure some proper coleslaw (God bless Marks and Spencer) during a trip to London last week. Behold the creamy, cabbagey goodness:

 

Abandoned at ballet

As we entered the ballet school with our two daughters, we noticed a small (about 4 years old) girl in the regulation pink dress and tutu, lurking in the hall, crying. Obviously there for the same class as our daughters, we tried to coax her up the stairs to the class, but she refused to budge. Another parent said that they’d seen the mother drive up to the school, let her daughter out and shoo her towards the door, and then drive off. And apparently when other people had opened the door to go in this little girl had even tried to walk back out and onto the street.

We called down one of the school staff and he managed to persuade her to come up to the class. I hope he gave her mother a good talking to when she came to pick her up an hour later…

 

No-vember

The trees are all pretty much completely bare around here now (well, the deciduous ones, obviously), so I’m just in time for the obligatory “Isn’t autumn photogenic?” post.

A recent family walk in a nearby park yielded plenty of “Oooh – pretty colours!” moments…

as well as one “WTF?”

At one point we sat under a tree for a snack and noticed a couple of girls on the other side of the park taking some photos of their own. For some reason they seemed uninterested in the beauty of nature surrounding them.

They were there for quite some time, trying out a bewildering variety of poses.

 

Liège

Recently we decided to go on a daytrip to Liège, one of the largest cities in Wallonia and birthplace of Georges Simenon, Justine Henin and (allegedly) Charlemagne.

But we weren’t interested in history or culture, of course. We wanted to see the fancy new Médiacité shopping centre. There has been much media hoopla about this project which, along with the equally fancy recently renovated train station is intended to spruce up the image of a rather glum city more associated in most people’s minds with unemployment and depressing movies by the Dardenne brothers.

Much to our surprise (imagine that last phrase with a sarcastic tone of voice) it turned out to be…just another shopping centre, with the usual selection of shops (and a lot of empty space which has yet to be rented). The roof is pretty, though.

We made our way into the centre of town which, by stark contrast with the gleaming modernity of Médiocrité was quite picturesquely run-down and full of “character” (i.e. dirt). We found ourselves in a series of narrow, quiet streets full of Turkish restaurants – a kind of Little Istanbul, I guess you’d call it – and so we stopped for lunch at Le Raki Turc, which turned out to be really rather good.

We had a tasty mezze with some meltingly tender veal.

Then we headed back into the streets for some window shopping, ogling the macaroons…

roasted meat and potatoes…

toy alligator warriors…

and “reality wear”…

So a mixed bag, but not unpleasant overall, and I wouldn’t rule out a return trip someday if I’m in the mood.

Oh, and at least we got to see Mickey Mouse:

 

Monumental

From Tim Parks’ “Europa“

“I reflected, leaning against a post forbidding parking, that every major monument in Europe is now cleaned and floodlit. Everything ancient and medieval has been appropriately sandblasted, cleaned and illuminated. It is impossible even to imagine these stony martyrs being in the gloom now, impossible to imagine these angels and gargoyles in a dark wind or under moonlight. Impossible to see them as part of our lives, our nightmares, potent in the gloom, sacred in darkness or starlight. These monuments have been neutralized by the light, I thought, by the light and by carefully researched detergents. They have been made part of the modern city. They have been subtracted from us and made possible for us. Squares where people hanged and lynched and guillotined each other and, in general, committed all sorts of irremediable crimes, are now attractive areas of floodlit public art, I thought, emptied of their potency precisely by the zeal with which we have focused on them, cared for them, illuminated them, absorbed them into the on-off neon of our intermittent modern night.”

 

Please keep your receipt

Having met friends for lunch at our local Ikea and consumed far too many Swedish meatballs, we tottered back to the car. Baby needed feeding, so as my wife attended to his needs, I let my gaze wander around the carpark. I noticed a man fiddling with the row of trolleys, trying to get something out of one of them in the middle of the chain. He glared at me and basically told me to mind my own business, but I kept a surreptitious eye on him anyway. After much faffing he eventually succeeded in recovering a receipt left in the bottom of the trolley. He then made his way along the rest of the column, seemingly checking all the trolleys for stray receipts. Then he moved on to the next trolley park and started the search again. He found a second one. He pocketed it and headed into the shop.

Our theory is that once inside he he picks up off the shelf whatever’s listed on the receipts and then goes to customer service and claims that he’d just bought it but has changed his mind and would like an exchange or a refund.

 

Multiculti

We recently attended the fourth annual Thai festival in our neighbourhood. It’s been going from strength to strength recently, and the best Thai restaurants from all over Belgium come along and set up stalls to sell their food. There are fruit carving experts, Thai masseuses, dancing and martial arts displays, etc. It’s all very enjoyable and tasty and gives you a warm glow of tolerance and multiculturalism, but this time I started questioning the whole idea a bit.

Brussels is a strange town in this regard. Plenty of other world capitals are home to immigrant populations, and I don’t think Brussels is any more multicultural than, say, London or New York, but it feels different. For one thing Brussels is relatively small, with a larger proportion of expats and immigrants than other towns its size. For another, a large proportion of those expats come here to work for multinational organisations, and there’s a large infrastructure and support network which allows you to live in a comfortable expat bubble and not really integrate or even speak to the natives if you don’t want to. Now obviously plenty of people do learn the language, make local friends, etc,  but I get the feeling that the different communities here are a little more self-contained, and I think this shows in the cultural festivals.

The Brussels festival calendar is pretty full – at any one time there’s bound to be a Thai or Peruvian or Lichtensteinian cultural initiative of some kind, and it’s great to have this kind of stuff on offer and that people take an interest, but it feels more like a slickly-rehearsed display for tourists than an opportunity for intercultural dialogue and exchange.

Sure, people will drink a Singha, devour a plate of pad thai, politely feign interest in the traditional dances, and maybe pick up a leaflet about package deals to Phuket, but I’m sceptical that there’s any real contact or learning going on. On the other hand it’s often more successful as a chance for Belgium-based Thais to get together and re-connect with their own culture, perhaps reminiscing about life back in the old country, and complain about the weather in northern Europe.

Festivals are fine and have their place, but I increasingly find them slightly unsatisfactory. Basically what this makes me think about is what’s really important to me when I travel in terms of having a memorable, meaningful experience of another culture. Now I’m not one of those travel snobs who’s constantly in search of the most “authentic” or “genuine” thing, as this implies that Thais all live, eat, worship and act in one particular way and if you don’t get a piece of that during your two week stay, ur doin it rong. But what I get from visiting a country (and what I don’t get from cultural festivals in another country) are those little differences of detail and sense impressions: the feeling of dust and exhaust fumes in the back of my throat in Agra, the bustle and noise of a square in Marrakesh, the press of sweaty bodies in the streets of Seville during Semana Santa, frost in my nostrils and eyelashes in Lapland…

[photos below from a tour of Thailand taken in 2002]

 

Bacardi nostalgia

You know how it can be: you get an idea, you research it, draft it, feel very pleased with yourself…and then find that someone has beaten you to the punch, and probably done a better job than you would have.

So go and read this; it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted to write.