27 Mar
Most people don’t like dining in an empty restaurant. I love it. I love the desolate atmosphere of an empty dining room and I love the undivided attention I get from both waiters and chefs, at least in places like Qal’at al-Rumiyeh, my favourite restaurant in the Lebanese mountains, near where my mother lives. Fortunately, the restaurant is not always empty. Only when I tend to go for midweek lunch when there isn’t a single soul there apart from the family that owns the restaurant, seated at their regular table by the door and my mother and I (I always insist we go there as soon as I arrive in Lebanon), not counting the waiters milling about with nothing to do. I don’t particularly like the place which is huge and pretty charmless, but I love the dramatic views over a deep valley and the Mediterranean in the distance and of course the excellent food.
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5 Mar
So, here are my tasting notes from my penis eating adventure. As I have already said, it was not a gastronomic experience but a fun and a very interesting one all the same. We ate in a private room and had our own dedicated waitress who, as you can see from the slightly hazy picture above, was very pretty. I wondered how she coped with male customers during and at the end of meals as they got more drunk and convinced of their increased strength — to become strong is the main reason for eating penis; strong is also the name or logo of the restaurant — but it wasn’t a question I felt I could ask despite being with two lovely Chinese friends who helped me find the restaurant and once there, decide what to order, translate, etc.
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23 May
Another great trip to Syria with a wonderful group. We had great fun despite being driven by possibly the most stubborn and moronic driver ever. He and his uncomfortable bus (supposedly VIP) were the low point of an otherwise lovely trip.
As usual, the food was delicious with one of the great hits being breakfast at my favourite fawwal (ful medammes specialist) where lovely Hajj Abdo makes the best ever ful medammes. Like Hanna, Hajj Abdo is a wonderful old man who’s been making ful medammes for over fifty years; and he is still personally in charge of the making and serving of his speciality. Here he is in action. What you see him doing in this clip is what he does, almost non-stop, from 7 am to 3 pm every day.
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18 Mar
I love Pakistani food, but it is not often that I can have it well prepared. The Lahore Kebab House in London has expanded and is no longer as good as it used to be and Salloo’s is too expensive and too far from where I live. And I can’t go to Karachi (where I had fabulous food last year) every day, or even every year.
Luckily, I happen to be in Dubai where my brother, a fine gourmet, lives and he seems to have the best addresses. Today, he took me for lunch to Barbecue Delights, a rather charmless restaurant in an equally charmless part of town but where the cooking is just perfect. As usual, we ordered far too much: raita and salad before anything, then chicken tikka, mutton ribs, lamb chops to start, followed by lamb biryani, potatoes, spinach, daal, and kulfi to finish.
Every dish apart from the lamb chops (tough and not so tasty) was scrumptious but my favourite was the mutton ribs. They reminded me of my mother’s dale’ mehshi (ribs stuffed with rice and minced meat). After lunch my brother showed me where he lived, on the 41st floor of a tower opposite the DIFC overlooking a good chunk of Dubai and the sea. Sadly, the light was not so good but the photograph below gives you an idea of how amazing the place is. I guess there are some consolations to being here.
Near Lamcy Square, Oud Metha, Dubai, Tel: +971 4 335 9868 or 9870
