Steve and I are always very cautious when it comes to restaurants. We do our homework, we read more than one guide (usually Lonely Planet and DK), if the place is mentioned in Trip advisor we read the feed backs, we check out where that place is on the map and if it's far in relation to the hotel where we're staying, we try to stick to local cuisine as much as possible and never NEVER go to a fast food!
What usually happens is that we find a very nice place where the meals are safe and good and the atmosphere is decent and the price is ok and then we go there a few more times depending on how many nights we spend in that place.
This is a necessity, especially when traveling in Asia, where you can end up so much in love with the toilet that you don't want to leave it for hours and hours.....
And then there's always the favourite dish: a dish of the local cuisine that is so good that you wish you had known all along and ordered THAT one instead of all the other stuff you've tried before finding it.
It usually happens at the beginning of the holiday, when you still haven't been to many places and it's a combination of a nice restaurant, a fast wi-fi and prices that you can't compare to the same kind of restaurant in your hometown (the rule is: if it's not less than half the price then it's too expensive, f.e. the price of a decent Pho Bo in a restaurant in Sydney is average $14, if you are in a restaurant in Saigon and the price of Pho Bo is more than $7 get out! It's a tourist trap! You're probably in a "gaijin only" place and they're going to charge you a lot of money not because the food you're eating is expensive but because they know that you are a tourist and of course all tourists are extremely wealthy!).
Sometimes that dish becomes a legend, something your children and the children of your children and their children after that (assuming you'll still be alive) will hear about so many times that in the end they will refer to you as "phobo granma" or they will simply look at you with commiseration and roll their eyes when you will ask them "Did I tell you about that Pho Bo I had in Saigon? It was SO good!".
I'm not going to lie to you, when you finally find THAT dish you're doomed!
You will start craving it in the early hours of the morning when you have to wake up before sunrise to go visit YET another temple, or in the hot and humid mid afternoon post-lunch just after you've already chosen to eat "just a snack not to ruin my appetite for tonight", you'll have visions of your favourite dish when standing in line to go to the same restaurant you went to when you found it for the first time, you'll feel like you're already chewing on it even before you've had a chance to order it and then of course when you do ask for it and the waiter will tell you:"Very popular today, no more, finished" you will feel like you're living your worst nightmare! A sudden thought will come to you "what if I can't find it... anymore!". That night you will settle for any other dish cause of course you have to eat, but the day after that you will start thinking that maybe that perfect dish didn't exist, maybe it was just a product of your mind intoxicated by the many bottles of beer, maybe it was just something a famous chef coming from a remote province of the country made that night and that night only because he was in town visiting his cousin and now the only way to taste it again would be to embark on a quest to find that chef and the remote village where he lives and works. But you know you can't do that, you have an itinerary to follow! It would be silly, wouldn't it? And then hope kicks in, maybe if I come tomorrow I will find it again, maybe if I change restaurant, maybe in another place they call it in a different way, maybe if I bribe them, maybe if I put more chilli.....
....Maybe if I enrol in a cooking class they will teach me how to do it and I will make hundreds and hundreds of them until I will master the art and I will never have to worry about finding it ever again!...
Yep, I even thought to do that, it was in Orchha, India and I was looking for the perfect butter chicken....
Suffice it to say that I rarely eat butter chicken nowadays... so sad....
In Thailand it was Tom Yum, in China it was duck bread, in Japan it was any kind of sushi (!!), in Vietnam it was beloved Pho Bo, in Cambodia it was fish amok, in Laos it was Beer Lao (I know, it's not food but it was the perfect beer!), in Korea it was the bbq, in Bali it was gado gado, in India butter chicken, in Nepal dhal makani, in Melacca it was Baba nonya pineapple cookies (BEST cookies in the world, NEVER found them again, I'm seriously thinking about going back to that village to buy tons of them), in Singapore.... nothing, I didn't have a great time in Singapore, I was kind of sickish, in Burma it was TAMARIND FLAKES!!!
I know it sounds a bit odd, but oh my goodness they are so delicious, seriously I'm salivating right now just by thinking about them!
We found them the first time in a restaurant in Bagan and since then we adopted a strategy: when deciding on where to eat we would quickly and furtively inspect the other tables where other customers had already finished their meals to check if they had been offered tamarind flakes.
If we could find no tamarind flakes on their tables we changed restaurant!
Sometimes we had to resign ourselves and hope to find them again the day after, but when we did find them we gorged on them!
They are sweet but that kind of sweet that fills your mouth with saliva because its also a bit citrusy.
Needless to say we're now trying to find them in Sydney. Good luck! We did find some tamarind lollies though... a pale memory of the real thing.....so sad....
What usually happens is that we find a very nice place where the meals are safe and good and the atmosphere is decent and the price is ok and then we go there a few more times depending on how many nights we spend in that place.
This is a necessity, especially when traveling in Asia, where you can end up so much in love with the toilet that you don't want to leave it for hours and hours.....
And then there's always the favourite dish: a dish of the local cuisine that is so good that you wish you had known all along and ordered THAT one instead of all the other stuff you've tried before finding it.
It usually happens at the beginning of the holiday, when you still haven't been to many places and it's a combination of a nice restaurant, a fast wi-fi and prices that you can't compare to the same kind of restaurant in your hometown (the rule is: if it's not less than half the price then it's too expensive, f.e. the price of a decent Pho Bo in a restaurant in Sydney is average $14, if you are in a restaurant in Saigon and the price of Pho Bo is more than $7 get out! It's a tourist trap! You're probably in a "gaijin only" place and they're going to charge you a lot of money not because the food you're eating is expensive but because they know that you are a tourist and of course all tourists are extremely wealthy!).
Sometimes that dish becomes a legend, something your children and the children of your children and their children after that (assuming you'll still be alive) will hear about so many times that in the end they will refer to you as "phobo granma" or they will simply look at you with commiseration and roll their eyes when you will ask them "Did I tell you about that Pho Bo I had in Saigon? It was SO good!".
I'm not going to lie to you, when you finally find THAT dish you're doomed!
You will start craving it in the early hours of the morning when you have to wake up before sunrise to go visit YET another temple, or in the hot and humid mid afternoon post-lunch just after you've already chosen to eat "just a snack not to ruin my appetite for tonight", you'll have visions of your favourite dish when standing in line to go to the same restaurant you went to when you found it for the first time, you'll feel like you're already chewing on it even before you've had a chance to order it and then of course when you do ask for it and the waiter will tell you:"Very popular today, no more, finished" you will feel like you're living your worst nightmare! A sudden thought will come to you "what if I can't find it... anymore!". That night you will settle for any other dish cause of course you have to eat, but the day after that you will start thinking that maybe that perfect dish didn't exist, maybe it was just a product of your mind intoxicated by the many bottles of beer, maybe it was just something a famous chef coming from a remote province of the country made that night and that night only because he was in town visiting his cousin and now the only way to taste it again would be to embark on a quest to find that chef and the remote village where he lives and works. But you know you can't do that, you have an itinerary to follow! It would be silly, wouldn't it? And then hope kicks in, maybe if I come tomorrow I will find it again, maybe if I change restaurant, maybe in another place they call it in a different way, maybe if I bribe them, maybe if I put more chilli.....
....Maybe if I enrol in a cooking class they will teach me how to do it and I will make hundreds and hundreds of them until I will master the art and I will never have to worry about finding it ever again!...
Yep, I even thought to do that, it was in Orchha, India and I was looking for the perfect butter chicken....
Suffice it to say that I rarely eat butter chicken nowadays... so sad....
In Thailand it was Tom Yum, in China it was duck bread, in Japan it was any kind of sushi (!!), in Vietnam it was beloved Pho Bo, in Cambodia it was fish amok, in Laos it was Beer Lao (I know, it's not food but it was the perfect beer!), in Korea it was the bbq, in Bali it was gado gado, in India butter chicken, in Nepal dhal makani, in Melacca it was Baba nonya pineapple cookies (BEST cookies in the world, NEVER found them again, I'm seriously thinking about going back to that village to buy tons of them), in Singapore.... nothing, I didn't have a great time in Singapore, I was kind of sickish, in Burma it was TAMARIND FLAKES!!!
I know it sounds a bit odd, but oh my goodness they are so delicious, seriously I'm salivating right now just by thinking about them!
We found them the first time in a restaurant in Bagan and since then we adopted a strategy: when deciding on where to eat we would quickly and furtively inspect the other tables where other customers had already finished their meals to check if they had been offered tamarind flakes.
If we could find no tamarind flakes on their tables we changed restaurant!
Sometimes we had to resign ourselves and hope to find them again the day after, but when we did find them we gorged on them!
They are sweet but that kind of sweet that fills your mouth with saliva because its also a bit citrusy.
Needless to say we're now trying to find them in Sydney. Good luck! We did find some tamarind lollies though... a pale memory of the real thing.....so sad....
I'm online looking for tamarind flakes... I'm down to my last three little packs after a trip six months ago, I'm not going to eat any more of them as I now realise they'e impossible to get - so sad...
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