DJEMAA AL-FNA - MARRAKESH

FIVE STOPS THREE COUNTRYS AND A COLONY

Two years, two long bloody years with no foreign travel. Somewhere somehow two years salary disappears bills,mortgage and other mundane aspects of the daily grind which unfortunately we have to pay for.
The two year hiatus is over, a trip is planned - Morocco, Gibraltar, Spain and Portugal.
For fiance it's relaxation time, how she purposed to relax is beyond the scope of this entry or any other entry for that matter. It was her idea you see to go overland
from Marrakesh to Faro - Portugal making the travel plan as we go, using trains, buses, taxis and the odd ship!
For myself however relaxation was never on the agenda, knowing full well and with a dearth of travel behind me, a five stop three country and a colony for good measure was going to be anything but relaxation. What do you do in times like this - think of the food of course!
Morocco had to be the biggest let down of the trip by far! Of course plenty of time was spent immersed amongst the labyrinth like souks which fan in all directions from the Djemaa Al-Fna, but still full from a filling but mundane hotel breakfast we somehow managed to miss the fun of local eating on the first full day. Tajine's were consumed on the trip but not anything like i was hoping for! The problem must lie with the massive influx of tourists? Every Tom,Dick and Abdul was offering Tajine or other local speciality's. Whilst I'm fully aware that some Tajine's go to the community Hammans to be cooked slowly in the residual heat, also being made by expert hands, we on the other hand must have consumed the tourist quota!
The one missing link on our behalf was not trying the market stands that appear on the Djemaa Al-Fla as dusk approaches, we were there but Photography was also very high on the agenda. On reflection this probably would have fulfilled the foodie obligation of seeking authentic good food, so sadly, a missed opportunity but in this day and age only a short hop on a cheap flight we will be sure to sample the Djemaa again.
Of course Morocco isn't all about Tagine's, Brochettes and Shawarma were devoured with gutso and fiance's sweet tooth took a bit of abuse with the vast array of sweet delights and pastries, perhaps a legacy of the French but certainly ingrained in society.

Next stop on the Marrakesh express,- Rabat the capital, a charming leafy city with wide boulevards, tree lined streets, a less bustling Medina and the odd pick pocket.
While only a fleeting visit, miles were walked amongst these charming streets. Food wise most Moroccan staples could be found on offer but whether or not it was the moment or the toast was really that good, what we ate in the cafe on Rue Ghazza was truly memorable. Fresh French bread with butter and local orange marmalade, with good strong coffee!
I have as yet managed to place what part was so special, but i imagine it was the combination of the four. (Cafe is opposite Hotel Splendid Rue Ghazza)

For our second journey on Morocco's limited but excellent rail network we travelled straight through to Tangier just in time for the 1400hrs sailing to Tarifa Andalusia, our end destination to be Gibraltar.
Gibraltar was to be our home away from home for four nights, however i wouldn't recommend turning up looking for a hotel as there is only seven. We were lucky to find a room in the Cheapest hotel on the rock - The Cannon.
A good little hotel with friendly staff. Rooms start at £42 a double with shared bathroom rising to 50+ with own bathroom.
Just round the corner on Main street you will find The Horseshoe pub with the ever entertaining Abdul managing the bar - just don't tell him your age, it could end up a rich topic of conversation!
Restaurants are one a penny throughout the rock, as are pubs serving food but most follow the standard pattern of British pub grub with Spanish staples on the menu! Amusingly most pubs appear to have a serious sachet fetish! You name it they have it in a sachet!

With a start in La Linea across the border we headed up to Seville by bus. Four hours later with a good look at the Andalusian countryside and a stop in every village, Seville greeted us with a downpour and a mist you could set a Stephen king horror to!
Weather aside what a delightful city steeped in culture and the most amazing food.
Seville is one of the homes to Spanish Tapas and what a great time was had bar hopping and grazing. Most tapas are simple and with a very basic grasp of Spanish most bar menus are relatively simple to decipher.
Tapas are not the only delight of Seville with several Bodegas dotted around the city where great sherry from Jerez and neighbouring producers that can be drank alongside small plates of hearty food.
But as always ulterior motives play at least some part in most travel plans and all was revealed on the second day - Jamon Iberico bellota!
As some of the best Ham in the world is produced in Andalusia this had to be the place to sample and buy, but i will leave that for another post along with the authentic Tortilla Espanola i have been trying to perfect!

Last stage was a through bus to Faro - Portugal, which was not without incident!
E U borders are not normally that interesting unless Obama and the rest of NATO are in town.
Before we could even say Portugal we were hauled into a makeshift Immigration post complete with concrete barriers strewn across the four lane motorway. Police,Immigration and several mean looking albeit not long out of diapers GNR officers were all over the bus!
With in minutes we were turned back to Spain due too an American backpacking kid not having his passport. The miserable shit of a driver was going to leave him on the side of the Motorway in the middle of nowhere, but sensed an on board mutiny, so agreed to drop him to a local town!
Back over the border and through the same tedious, mundane fiasco yet again. The GNR kindergarten cops going through every millimeter of every bag en route to Lisbon.
Now interestingly there was only four or five passengers disembarking in Faro, and our bags were left alone. Now if you wanted to disrupt a gathering with heightened security would you take a direct route? I certainly would not. While i realise Portuguese Police might not be the best in the land, the whole fiasco was kind of complete Bullshit. Why check all bags but four? To top off the fiasco some clown from Bomb squad boarded the bus, not sure what he was trying to find but i doubt he could even find the Bunsen burner in second year Chemistry!
Eventually arriving after a two hour delay to our last stop Faro. A bed for three nights at the Residential Dandy, strange name, even stranger place but all the same very quaint with a very helpful and cheerful owner.
A nice place to while away a day or two with plenty of restaurants offering the same fish and seafood dishes at not so cheap prices!
We did most of our eating in a French run place two streets back from The Dandy which was homely with a good little crowd of staff!

An interesting little trip that Spain has managed to put a culinary spark back in this mans life!!

PHOTOS FROM MAKPHET TRAINING RESTAURANT -LAOS

Makphet training restaurant,Vientiane Laos.

Front sign with a description of the restaurant.

"Yum mak nee" Banana flower salad with grilled pork

fillet,tamarind and chili.

Coconut lime cake with "mar not" sorbet and Red hibiscus

flower syrup.

"Mar not" Sorbet

MAKPHET TRAINING RESTAURANT -LAOS

Modern Lao food for the uninformed can take many guises, but none more so than at Makphet restaurant in Vientiane Laos. I chanced upon Makphet after leaving the restaurant next door, although not dissapointed with what i had just eaten, deep down i was a little annoyed at not having found Makphet an hour previously. I made a note to have lunch there the following day, as a sign outside informed the public that they were to shut the day after for a ten day break!

Makphet translated as Chili in Lao language is very unique in that it serves as a training restaurant for former street children. The restaurant is overseen by the teachers with the former street kids cooking and tending front of house. Students and teachers alike are adorned in identical green t-shirts with the Makphet motif and respective grade adorned on the front.


Makphet is overseen by a charity Ngo called Friends international, a charity committed to helping former street children and there mothers through training in the hospitality industry and the making of handicrafts. http://www.friends-international.org/laopdr.html

Friends international have a similar set up in Cambodia with training restaurants in the capital Phnom penh. Makphet has a second floor that sells handicrafts made by parents with 70% of the profit being retained by the crafts person, while the other 30% is injected back into the enterprise.

The very modern menu with it's culinary roots ingrained in Lao cooking and culture is a revelation. The menu you are handed by your Laotian waitress is given with a gracefulness that could hail from the former royal courts, only this is a former street child with the determination to make good fortune of one self. If other restaurants could put the thought into the design, that has taken place with the menu you are handed at Makphet i'm sure there clientele would be back for seconds! The menu itself could hail from a Sydney cafe at the height of fashion, only this comes from a training restaurant. You are handed a lime green coloured professionally designed booklet with amazing food photography and delightful writing that describes the dishes on offer. With dishes starting in the range of 40,000 kip and ranging to 55,000 kip for mains, and desserts starting from 30,000kip(exchange rate at time of meal 8,500kip to the $) this is a little bit on the pricey side for Vientiane but offers extraordinary value for money once you have sampled the goods on offer, if you could sample food of this quality in a major western city you would be sure to pay a small fortune!

The food on offer is inventive sounding with good use of local ingredients. I opted for a banana flower salad, grilled pork fillet and chili and tamarind called yum mak nee. The dish it's self was lovingly presented, without the need to be pretentious. A nice background of sweet sour flavour with a gentle kick of chili, this salad is tantalising to the palate with the pork fillet beautifully cooked and moist with a succulent bead of crisped fat still attached. For dessert i found it rather more difficult to choose as they all jumped out to grab your attention and shout EAT ME!!!

Dessert is a big let down in south east asia with many desserts in the asian repertoire, a lot of places offer some abomination not native to the region, when all most people want to eat is authentic cuisine! For my dessert i was faced with a task of mammoth proportions-what to order! The selection starts at 30,000 raising to 35,000 kip, with Red Hibiscus,Passion fruit sorbet with Meringue and Pineapple in Palm Sugar Caramel with Coconut Gelato and chili amongst some of the selection on offer, i opted for Coconut Lime Cake,Hibiscus flower syrup and a sorbet made from a local fruit called Mar not. While not over the top with the presentation, enough effort had been taken to plate the dessert but the taste was Divine, overshadowing the presentation by a long way. The sorbet with a taste i can only describe as being somewhere between Mango and Passion fruit, was technically perfect and would not be out of place in a Michelin starred kitchen, and i would say probably the best i have ever eaten yet, the lime coconut cake was a good texture, moist and full of flavour. A sauce of Hibiscus flower syrup remained in the background ,but was a welcome taste although the dish could stand alone, if needed.

My view might read as biased, but this a genuine review and i am in no way associated with Friends International or Makphet restaurant. The food is really of exceptional quality being served from a rare little gem of a place, with happy smiling faces serving and not a hint snobbery to be found!

One main course, one dessert, a side of Laos sticky rice and two coffees 109,000kip, approx £12.50/$20 us

If you are fortunate to be visiting Vientiane be sure to drop into Makphet, and don't forget to leave a jolly good tip!!!

Makphet is located down a side street off Th Francois Nginn, next door to Ban vilaylac restaurant, directly behind Wat Ong Teu Mahawihan. Open monday to sat for lunch and dinner.

KOBE BEEF @ kABUKI: SIAM PARAGON

The search had started months before the scheduled flight to Krung thep a.k.a the city of angels but better known to you and i as Bangkok for that mythical piece of beef known as kobe. This may seem a long way to go for a sample of the worlds most expensive beef, but their was a method behind the madness. For one i would not be able to afford to sample Kobe beef in London, without a second mortgage. Bangkok seemed to be a good choice to start, seeing as japan would not be on the culinary radar for at least a couple more years, and a large Japanese presence in Bangkok, means good Japanese food. Bangkok must at least, be one of the major culinary destinations in our modern world, with some very good restaurants to boot,fabulous local cuisine, extraordinary street food that turns even the most ardent of food snobs into drooling animals whilst dripping namh prik down the front of there overpriced and over sized designer labelled clothing.


I started my search on that trusted friend google, with results showing a smattering of establishments that serve imported Kobe beef. The first was a joint that specialized in steak of all kinds and at reasonable prices with the Kobe steak coming in at 13 Thai baht a gram, on the other side there was the big hotels with even bigger names that import Kobe but again the problem being the big price! I eventually settled on Kabuki restaurant in the Siam paragon mallhttp://kabukithailand.com/. Kabuki was offering Kobe for 20 Thai baht a gram while not the cheapest, in my mind it would offer the better experience being a Japanese restaurant, and association was to be a key element of this dining experience.


To be classed as Kobe beef the cattle must be born in hyogo prefecture, fed by a farm in hyogo prefecture and be slaughtered in hyogo prefecture. The cattle being Tajima ushi breed of wagyu cattle. WA- meaning Japanese and Gyu meaning cattle, so wagyu translates as Japanese cattle. Tajima cattle originated from ancient stock, called kuroge wagyu translated as black haired Japanese cattle. Wagyu cattle are now bred in Australia,America and Britain but cannot be classed as Kobe due to the strict breeding measures! Kobe cattle and associated products still retains an air of mystery with the strange breeding practices you read about being true. The cattle are fed beer, but not as a luxury. The beer serves a purpose, and is used to help stretch expensive feeds, increase the appetite in the summer months and fatten the cattle. Another practice that is employed is massage with the use of sake! Massaging the cattle may sound extreme, but one purpose of this technique is to make the meat more tender as tajima cattle are prone to inactivity, therefor the massage stimulates the effect of muscles being worked.

Kabuki restaurant is located on the ground floor of Siam paragon an ultra modern top end mall, with the ground floor being dedicated to food.

On entering Kabuki you are greeted immediately then shown to either a private booth or a central seating area. In my case i was shown to a private booth with seating for four, probably on account of my enquires seconds earlier about the availability of the infamous and elusive Kobe beef, which incidentally is hard to find. Kobe was offered in two different cuts sirloin or fillet.

Fillet being 25 Thai baht a gram, i decided on sirloin at 20 baht a gram which was bought out on a platter with the best part of £500 worth of steak on show, the marbling of each piece being an extraordinary off white colour, with a good ratio, almost equal of red meat to white fat. My choosen steak being priced at 3900 baht for a 190 gram steak roughly- £69/$115 us.

I started my meal with an 8 piece sushi roll set that was moist and succulent with the rice clinging to the roll providing a lovely texture. A small piece of toro sushi nigiri that cost 250 baht was next and a new experience for me. The tuna belly melting into the mouth and dissolving on the tongue like a pillow of air, giving me an insight into the Japanese Psyche about quality fresh tuna of superior grade!

The Kobe arrived on a small black plate with three pathetic chips and a garnish of julienned vegetables. When you are paying this much for a steak the garnishes make little difference, a little soy would have been a better gesture, rather than an attempt at haute cuisine arrangement with crap chips that a fast food restaurant would be happy to serve!

My steak was very good but unfortunately did not compare to a wagyu meal i had in Singapore several months previous. Now don't get me wrong this was far superior to what your average person has ever eaten or will probably eat with out taking the plunge and parting with serious money, but something was lacking the steak was a little over done, and a little seasoning would have benefited the meat rather than trio of crap chips! While melt in your mouth tender, i struggled a little bit with the amount of fat content!

If i was to compare wagyu and kobe to 4 and 5 star hotels obviously Kobe is the 5 star, but i prefer to stay 4 star, much more comfortable!

I have eaten in some very top restaurants around the world, but have never managed to spend £92 on a complete meal and be in and out of a restaurant in under 40 minutes. Incidentally on leaving the restaurant prangs of guilt set in with the amount i had payed and the less fortunate i passed on the streets of Bangkok, becoming a top concern. With no access to welfare, i dug deep into my pockets and spent half that amount again in handouts to the needy and not the greedy, as i was feeling the wrath of greed!

Kabuki(Thailand)co.ltd

• Siam Paragon
• G27 ground floor. 991/1
• Rama 1 rd. Pathumwan
• 10330 Bangkok Thailand
• Tel: (66) 0-2129-4423
• Fax (66)0-2129-4424

Open daily from 11.30-2115(last orders)

Sky train stop Siam BTS.

info@kabukithailand.com

http://www.kabukithailand.com/