Going With My Gut

Top 10 Eats in Europe, Middle East and Africa -- My Guest Post for Guardian UK's Been There

I was delighted when Guardian UK's Been There approached me about writing a guest post about my top 10 eats so far, after 5+ months on the road.

The list in my post "Eating Her Way Around the World" covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and hopefully suits a range of budgets. (Well, except the uber-posh / silly expense account bracket, given my own financial limitations.)

Above all, I focused on a list of eateries that for me captured a sense of place and local flavour.

I hope it's helpful and enjoyable list for all you hungry travellers out there!

Moscow: (Food) Gawky Park

Above: A replica of St Basil's Cathedral made from grains, at the entrance of the uberposh Gastronom No. 1 Food Hall at the GUM luxury mall on Red Square (right across from Lenin's tomb, poetically)

Top tip on traveling and eating in Moscow? Go when you have money. Preferably backed by commodity du jour, with a side order of a English Premier League football team. Or else do a massive amount of research beforehand on value-for-money local and street food haunts before showing up. Otherwise, it's simply a metropolis of slick and expensive restaurants of every ilk of global cuisine. Very exciting for local and expat residents do doubt, but exhausting for a frugal foodie backpacker hoping to chance upon something cheap, cheerful, and core to the indigenous food scene.

Crunched on time and budget, and let down by 2 distinctly budget-busting-but-ultimately-"meh" Georgian restaurants, we did the next best thing to console ourselves; a little food gawking.

Especially amusing were these signboards below at a fried chicken shop at Gorky Park, the city's historic sprawling recreation centre and amusement park for locals.

For a while I entertained the idea that the one place on this round-the-world sabbatical that might be appropriate to eat at Micky D's would be at Moscow's Red Square. The place was absolutely mobbed (I mean crowded, not necessarily occupied by local goombas). It was a case of Russian Breadlines: The Capitalist Remix. I decided that life was too short and there had to be a better use for my already too-few rubles.

I noted with curiosity that there was a slew of sushi joints all over St Petersburg and Moscow. And peering at diners' platters from the sidewalk, the sushi actually looked credible. You can kinda tell when a city is just starting to get into sushi but sushi chefs and local palettes haven't been trained up yet. The rice looks dry and loose grains fall all over the platter. The maguro is an anaemic pink rather than a healthy deep maroon. And people are eating mostly plastic looking california rolls with crabsticks and neon pickles. But this was not the case in Moscow.

According to Peter, our guide in St Petersburg, sushi's become quite the staple for urban Russia's aspirational middle class over the last decade or so. Sushi has a great combination of a having designer look and exotic vibe, and apparently is especially popular among young Russian women looking to reduce their stodge intake.

So before camping out at Sheremetyevo Airport for the night to catch a early morning flight to Istanbul, we followed the lead of the locals and had sushi for dinner. We popped into Yakitoriya (a long list of branches throughout Moscow, and a delivery service to boot) where the sushi and ramen were credible for the price.

Next time I come back here, if ever, I'll follow my own advice. In the meantime, bring on Istanbul!

A Few Peeks of St Petersburg

A few quick glimpses from wandering around St Petersburg, Russia, in late August this year.

Statue of Peter the Great, immortalised in world literature by Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, an epic poem about man against the elements. Peter the First envisioned a new coastal capital for the Russian empire... built on a swamp...that would be frozen for a good chunk of the year. Apparently when his engineers told him that this swamp would be completely untenable for building for many months at a time, he said something to the effect of "Well you'd better work faster then".

Old men playing chess on Nevsky Prospect.

Young men dancing in front of the Hermitage Museum. Other youths around them were practising stunt bike and skateboard tricks.

A boy peers at the eternal flame memorial at Field of Mars for those who died in the Bolshevik Revolution. Right after I took this photo he spat into the flame and scampered away!

On a bus along Nevsky Prospect.

Life never quite returned to normal for the aristocrats after the revolution, it seems. Nowadays they can be found at various tourist sites around town, posing for photos with visitors for a fee.

Walking Tour of Peter's Burg, Russia

"So what was it like to be a university student here right when the Communist Government was falling from power?" I asked Peter, founder of Peter's Walking Tours in St Petersburg, Russia. As luck would have it, Peter was our guide on our accidentally private tour this late August morning.

Given Peter and I both studied film in university (him in St Petersburg smack at the start of the historic early 1990s) and then later both did stints as newspaper journalists, we had plenty to banter about besides the sights.

My favourite part of chat was over salmon and green onion & egg pie at Stolle, which serves fabulous sweet and savoury pies unique to St Petersburg, stemming from the city's pre WWI history of hosting many an academic German expat in its university district, one of the main areas of our walking tour. The pie crusts below look like brick, but actually taste and feel like brioche.

Peter responded that among he and his friends here in St Petersburg at least, politics wasn't actually their first concern at the time. Rather, it was how to access food.

Under communist rule, all food transport, distribution and sales networks throughout the Soviet Union had been controlled by the central government. So while there was food still being grown and stored out in say, the 'Stans, there was no functioning system to move the food to cities, let alone price it. A market system eventually filled the gap, clearly, said Peter, but it didn't just pop up overnight. And during that awful vacuum, people were quite hungry and afraid indeed.

A living lesson in the fragility of food security.

But those dark days had a lighter side, it seems. International aid organizations soon parachuted into town, and distributed food on the university campus. But by this time, everyone in the city also had food ration coupons... including vodka coupons! So each week, after coupons were issued, Peter and friends -- with their campus food aid socked away -- would run around town looking for teetotalling old biddies to trade in their food coupons for the old women's vodka coupons.

"That was a fantastic time!" said Peter with a smile, amused at his own nostalgia.

Another highlight of the walking tour for me a stroll through Andreevsky Market Place (located close to Andreevsky Cathedral on Vasileostrovkaya Island), where nary a tourist (except us) was in sight.

We stop at an Uzbek bakery for meat donuts. Yes indeedy. Meat donuts. While Babs and Peter deal through the retail window, I pop my head in through the back door to get this shot of their tandoori-esque oven.

We bite into the donut, and decide we have to get ourselves out into the 'Stans at some point. One of the bakers smiles and waves at me through the door, and then hollers "I love you!"

I'm going to assume that's simply all the English he knows.

A melon stall run by a guy I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. I can't decide if telling him "nice melons" will make his smile or piss him off. On the right, some kind of sour cherry, apparently, but I couldn't get the exact name of it. Please enlighten me if you know what these are called!

Caviar for the proletariat. Red caviar is usually from salmon and trout. I developed quite a taste for these paired with blinis (Russian crepes) during our time in Russia. Couldn't afford the black (sturgeon) variety.

How many pelmeni can you count in the picture below?

Well, enough to send us on a pelmeni pilgramage after we were done with the walking tour. We found some at this no-frills eatery called Pel'mennaya (guess what they serve) on the same street as our hostel, Hostel Zimmer Smart on 2nd Sovietskaya, close to Moscovsky train station. At just 95 rubles (just under £2) a bowl, I wish we had sniffed this place out sooner.

Pelmeni turned out to be one of those instances on this journey when I went hunting for something exotic, something fiercely local, but instead found something familiar and close to home. At Pel'mennaya you can drizzle white vinegar on your pelmeni; further east we would dunk Chinese guotie and Japanese gyoza in dark vinegar and ginger slivers. In Poland these globs of comfort would be called pierogi; in Turkey and Uzbekistan manti; in Kazakhstan manty; in Korea mandu.

Where else in between and beyond do these dumplings pop up? Are they local inventions -- i.e. does every people ultimately manage to concoct some local version of dumpling, like they do booze -- or are they improvisations based on basic recipes from roaming Mongols or traders on the Silk Road? And where does the ravioli sit on this spectrum? Your answer might depend on whether you believe Marco Polo brought noodles from the Italians to China, or from the Chinese to Italy.

What do you think? I'd love to hear from you. This could be quite the lively, educational and hilarious discussion, especially over vodka... like the best of those we had in university. Now where were those coupons...

Stolle
(Various locations)
St Petersburg Russia

Pel'mennaya (rough translation from Cyrillic)
2nd Sovietskaya
St Petersburg, Russia

Souperb Finds in Eastern Europe

Sometimes I imagine what hell might be like. Firstly, I imagine it's customised, so that eternal suffering is maximised for each person. In one of my many imagined versions, it's always mid January in Eastern Europe (yes in this version I suppose hell freezes over). And the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld (or a real Nazi, given the location and history dialed to the right year) bellows at me "NO SOUP FOR YOU!" unto all eternity.

*Shudder*

It's enough to make me behave. And slurp as much soup as I can as summer winds down in Eastern Europe. I wanted to share with you my most souperb finds. The Berlin film scene has its Golden Bears; I thought I might hand out a few Golden Bowls. If you have nominees to add, I'd love to hear from you!

For Best Ensemble Performance of a Soup Menu, the Golden Bowl goes to Restaurant Zemaiciai in Vilnius, Lithuania. The richness of their soup stock blew me away, be it the very dramatic borscht with pork rib, sorrel soup with smoked meat and quail's egg, or the humble but powerfully executed potato soup. This kind of deep sweetness in a stock you can only get from a lot of lovely bones, and time. Cheating by using MSG tends to leave a hollow after-tinge. Good stock is not hard to make, but many restaurants don't have that kind of patience.

You'll know from my earlier writeup of Zemaiciai that I'm a fan; these soups are just 3 more reasons for my case.

 

 

For Best Art Direction, the Golden Bowl goes to organic restaurant AED in Tallinn, Estonia. Kudos for keeping this cute island of summer sprouts so pristine amid a red sea of beetroot.

 

 

For Best Performance Featuring a seasonal ingredient, the Golden Bowl goes to the mushroom soup at U Babci Maliny in Krakow, Poland.

Very ballsy with the boletus, and brought out in a giant bread basket to boot!

 

And now for a few special mentions.

For successfully making me miss every Jewish mother who ever had me at their dinner table while I was a student at Brandeis, the 2 winners are both from Krakow (natch).

CK Dezerter's beef buillion with liver balls; and U Babci Maliny's borscht with dumplings. Special congratulations to the latter for living up to its name -- Babci Maliny means Grandma Raspberry (and she has the colour on all her walls to prove it) Maseltov!

 

 

 

And last but not least, for a very special booby "Surprise Supplies" prize (say that 3 times fast), the Golden Bowl goes to the hot and sour soup by Chinese restaurant CBET BOCTOKA in St Petersburg, Russia.

My heart sank when they brought this bowl below to our table. It sure didn't look hot or sour. And it was a lot larger than the 2 small portions we ordered. Were we going to get charged for an order completely lost in translation?

 

 

Turns out, it WAS hot and sour soup, just not the usual gloopy orange Szechuan kind. And very delish at that! Surprise!

And yes, they didn't charge us for 2 portions. They charged us LESS. Babs and I counted the portions we had from the bowl below. We counted 6. Supplies!

The perfect tonic for being caught in the rain earlier in the day. And it made me feel souper smug for ordering our food in Chinese.

But enough with the gawdawful jokes, before it becomes your personal vision of hell. I shall repent by spending this week working on uploading my (soup) stock tips, and recipes for chicken soup, mushroom soup and tom-yum soup for you. Look out for them!

 

Zemaiciai
Vokieciu gatve 24
Senamiestis, Vilnius, 01013, Lithuania
+370 5 2616573

Restaurant AED (Embassy of Pure Food)
Rataskaevu 8
10123 Tallinn, Estonia
+372 626 9088

U Babci Maliny
Ul. Szpitlana 38
Krakow, Poland
+48 12 421 4818
(Note: Most guidebooks -- even the restaurants own website -- still show a Slawkowska 17 address, but this location has closed. Thanks to the kindly building security guard who sent me on to the Szpitlana location)

CK Dezerter
Braka 6
Krakow 31005, Poland
+48 12 422 7931

CBET BOCTOKA
2nd Sovetskaya 12
St Petersburg, Russia
+7 812 717 2511