Eat Rio

I love a food tour. What better way to start a trip than to be shown around a city by someone who loves food as much as you do? It’s a great way to find out how best to enjoy food for the rest of a trip.

So, after the usual trawl of reviews, I booked a tour with Eat Rio. Everything about their website said they were my kind of company, and they certainly didn’t disappoint. Starting at a market, it was brilliant to be able to ask questions about the weird and wonderful fruit and veg I’d never seen before. It still amazes me that this can be the case!

I came to the conclusion that maxixe, a small spiky cucumber with a slightly lemony flavour, would be best served in a G&T. My mind was blown that each single cashew nut comes from the stem of a cashew apple (caju) and that the fruit itself is so delicious! Having also learnt that the nut (really a seed) starts life in a poisonous form and has to go through rigorous process to make it safe, I now understand why they cost so much!

A favourite discovery was to ask for pimenta da casa when eating the wealth of snack foods available. I’d been surprised to see so many chillis in the market when the food I’d eaten so far had so little spice. And this is the answer. Everyone adds the fiery chilli sauce or oil ‘of the house’ to their snacks. It brings them to life and varies from good to incredible.

On the subject of snacks, well, wow! These are something that Rio does well, and they can really constitute a meal in themselves.

The tour offered opportunity to sample bolinhos de bacalhau (salt cod and potato croquettes), coxinha (traditional chicken croquettes), pastel (deep-fried pastry parcels), and even beiju de tapioca (a thin pancake-like form filled with the local salty cheese). I loved them all!

Visiting an Amazonian restaurant offered the most divisive dishes. Personally I enjoyed the Tacacá, a strange soup which leaves your tongue tingling and contains some super salty prawns. But I don’t think the Açaí bowls, fruit pulp of açaí berry, slightly sweetened with guaraná syrup, are really for me even if this berry is a supposed superfood. It was a great excuse to add lots of delicious nut filled granola though!

Away from the snacks and enjoying more of a meal, we demolished carne seca com abobora e feijão de corda (air-dried, salted beef with pumpkin and beans), moqueca Baiana (in this case prawn, stew made with coconut milk, peppers and red palm oil), escondidinho de carne seca (creamy mashed cassava with cured beef, topped with grilled cheese), and couve (shredded bitter collard greens cooked with garlic. The moqueca was a winner for me, and I could have gone on eating that with rice and greens all day!

Of course, no food tour is complete without added drinks! We tried sugar cane juice, which is beautifully balanced if you add a squeeze of lime, and has to be drunk freshly squeezed or it begins fermenting. And of course there was beer, fruit juice and the legendary caipirinha! Having experienced the classic lime caipirinha on the beach (and wobbled home afterwards!) I decided to try one made with passion fruit, which here are larger and a little more sour. It was DELICIOUS! The husband went even more rogue, and tried it made with jabuticaba, a sour black berry we’d tasted in the market. We also tasted a Cachaça, the spirit base of a caipirinha, made with jambú, the green leaf that caused the tongue tingling in the aforementioned soup. I can’t even describe how strange this was, hitting each of your taste receptors in turn over a couple of minutes to create some very odd flavours and sensations. Fun, but perhaps not a regular for the drinks cabinet!

A brilliant day of food, drink, and exploring the city with lovely people. So many things to eat and drink again.

Dumplings to Die For!

When five friends headed to Kiev for the weekend, we didn’t have high hopes for the cuisine. Our destination had basically been decided upon by the availability of a bargain basement flight, and without the usual food related assessment! But I have to say, we were all blown away, and our food memories will primarily be focussed around dumplings. They may not look pretty, but boy they sure taste good.

Night one saw us at a Ukrainian restaurant in the middle of a park, which had been recommended by our hotel receptionist. As one of the few things we’d read about during on-plane research, and since they’d also been recommended by a returning school girl seated next to us on the plane, the ordering of Varenyky was a must. These small stuffed parcels, perhaps better known (in the UK at least) by their polish name, Pierogi, were the perfect accompaniment to an ice cold beer. We opted for a selection of three flavours: meat, potato and mushroom, and cottage cheese. Each dish came topped with fried onions and served with vast quantities of soured cream. And that was it, we were hooked, ordering dumplings at every opportunity.

On a walking tour of Kiev, our guide told us about the strong Georgian influence in the city. Our hotel was beside the Georgian embassy and so we decided to try the highly rated Georgian restaurant nearby. Well, we thought Ukrainian dumplings were good but the dumplings here, Khinkali, were on another level! Looking rather like garlic bulbs, the top of the dumpling shouldn’t be eaten (thank goodness our waiter explained that!) and is purely used to enable you to hold the dumpling and take a bite, drinking the incredible broth inside before you go on to devour the rest. A beautifully spiced and dense mixture of beef and pork was the favourite filling for us, and we’ll definitely be trying to track these beauties down in London town!

Imagining them to be the size of dumplings, we also ordered Chebureki, a kind of pastry turnover, which we selected to come stuffed with cheese. Having ordered one each, it’s safe to say they limited what other food would be consumed as they were HUGE. Fortunately they were also delicious, flaky and packed with oozing salty cheese

We did eat other things in Kiev, many of them snacky in nature to accompany the fabulously prevalent craft beer, but dumplings were the winner. All five of us will return to the city, having been amazed by just how beautiful, friendly, and full of fabulous food and drink it really is. A very happy discovery indeed.

A Little Canadian Road Trip

During visits to Canada I have discovered that every road trip, no matter how short, is best started with a trip to Tim Hortons. Now, I know I have Canadian friends who don’t like ‘Timmys’ but I also have friends all over the world who adore it. Personally I enjoy the fact it’s a successful home-grown Canadian brand, that it costs a fraction of the price of other coffee chains, and that it’s something of an institution here! Not only did today’s road trip start with a Tim Hortons coffee, but it also began with Timbits, essentially little donut holes that come in multiple flavours. We were a happy carful indeed!

As if starting the trip with these little sweet joys wasn’t enough, we also visited a brewery, one of my favourite things to do abroad. Creemore Springs Brewery, on the main street of the lovely Creemore village, allows each person to sample three taster pots without charge, rather a lovely treat I must say!

I chose to sample Lagered Ale, Lot 9 Pilsner, and the current ‘Batch’ beer – Cream Ale. The Lagered Ale, a crisp light bodied beer, was my favourite, although I thoroughly enjoyed the Batch too. Lot 9 had a slightly hoppy finish for my taste.

By the time we reached Collingwood, our final destination, night was drawing in and it was DEFINITELY cold! It’s supposed to be 10 degrees warmer tomorrow, which is difficult to believe, so I’ll enjoy looking at the snow for this evening.

Riverside Dining

In case I’ve not mentioned it (much!) before, my favourite place to be in Bangkok is by the river. In fact, this applies to my home city of London too, and pretty much to every city I’ve ever been to. If it’s not a river, any body of water will do. There’s just something I love about watching the inevitable activity that comes with water, and Bangkok has this in spades.

We’re back in Thailand for a couple of days before we head home and if we’ve not been by the pool (the water theme continues) then we’ve been by the Chao Phraya. Two locations in particular have enticed us, an old favourite and a new find.

The old favourite is Be My Guest, a riverside restaurant that we return to every trip, regardless of whether we’re staying at the Millennium Hilton (next to which it sits) or not. Neither this nor the new find is flashy. We’re talking friendly, characterful places here, selling the equivalent of street food at reasonably elevated prices to match their riverside locations. I’ve eaten much more expensively while I’ve been away but this was my favourite meal, watching the darkening sky reflected in the CAT building that my husband loves.

The menu at Be My Guest contains plenty of simple Thai favourites, plus a few dishes to test the more adventurous. We started with an appetiser of shrimp cakes while we enjoyed our first beer. I’ve never eaten anything quite like these donut shaped nibbles anywhere else, but they’re a good start for an evening on the Chang!

When we were ready to move on to food proper, it had to include the Wing Bean Salad. I’ve never seen one of these beans whole, and I have no idea if you can buy them back home, but I adore the variety of textures and the delicately balanced flavour of this gently spiced (by Thai standards) salad.

I was meant to order the red curry to avoid the strong Thai Basil that my husband dislikes but I got distracted and ordered the green curry instead. As predicted, it was indeed full of Thai Basil, and in my opinion was all the more delicious for that. Soft, plump prawns and chunks of small green aubergine in a heavily spiced, creamy coconut soup. Mmmmm. I have yet to find a green curry outside Thailand that comes close to this.

I went off-menu for the last dish because I had a craving! Chicken with garlic and pepper is one of my favourite Thai stir fries and the staff were very happy to make it for me. It totally lived up to my expectations and the husband loved it too, vegetables and all!

We crossed the Chao Phraya back towards our hotel before finding our newest riverside haunt, and also returned to it the next day for lunch. Jack’s Bar is a haphazard bar-come-restaurant that sits, in part, directly over the water. It’s busy with a mix of Thais and foreigners of all ages, and the staff are smiley and fun.

Lunch was an extended affair over a few beers, giving me time to just watch the river. The number and variety of boats that pass by is a constant source of amazement for me, and the occasional wetland bird floating by atop a piece of water hyacinth adds to the interest.

Thai fishcakes, flavoured with red curry paste and kaffir lime leaves, followed by fried rice and a puffy omelette is the simple lunch I remember from my working days living in the city. I love this food as much as anything more fancy and will miss it when we head home.

Craft Beer from a High Perch

Hanoi seems to have joined much of the rest of the world in getting a taste for craft beer. It’s not the cheapest thing to drink in the city, but its availability has already provided us with two excuses to sample some ale from a high perch while watching the world below. And some of the local brews are very good too.

I should highlight from the off that my taste in beer is not everyone’s cup of tea! I adore anything super-sour or salty. So walking into Pasteur St Brewing to find a draft dragon fruit gose beer, aptly named The Salty Dragon, made me very happy indeed! In truth, I should have stuck with it because it was my favourite beer of the several we tried there.

Watermelon wheat beer sounded right up my street but it lacked any kind of complexity and I’d rather have just had a watermelon juice! Passion fruit wheat ale was rather more successful but it still didn’t live up to the gose. Now, before you think I was probably too sloshed to judge given all the beer, I should point out that after the first drink we moved on to a sampling flight, the husband’s side of which was made up much more of traditional IPAs and the like. His main problem was the strength that these came in at, with anything under 7% proof seeming mild compared to the rest! We spent several enjoyable hours watching the activity below, which ranged from the passing of traditionally dressed traders to the police seeming suddenly interested in parking rules, from the beautiful roof terrace.

Our second craft beer outing was the result of a fortuitous glance up as we passed through the street that was to become the Night Market. We were rather early for trading to have begun and were pondering how to entertain ourselves when I spotted the very cheerful looking Peachy bar overhead. It seemed only right that we give it a go since it also provided the perfect vista to watch the market come to life.

Another day, another beer flight, this time served by a very cheerful Glaswegian. Sadly there were neither sour nor salty beers on offer, but the IPA was lovely and mellow, and the Hanoi Saison was delicious! The lemongrass beer was tasty but I can’t say that the taste particularly struck me as lemongrass at all!

There are several more crafty offerings in the city so I’ll just have to see if the opportunity arises to sample a few more! Of course, after a few Vietnamese beers it was strictly necessary to soak up some of the alcohol with a crispy Banh Mi on the way home!

Honking Hanoi

I’ve always thought Bangkok was chaotic but it’s not a patch on Hanoi. From the second you walk out of the airport you are surrounded by free flowing traffic, with most drivers honking their horns continually, and often for no apparent reason! Once you hit the old town the craziness increases further with scooters, often laden with the most insane quantity and variety of goods, whizzing in every direction.

But somehow as you get used to it, unlikely as it may seem, the apparent chaos reveals some kind of order and the crazy appears more systematic. You have to re-learn how to cross the road though, something everyone is keen to make sure you understand. The best explanation I’ve heard is to imagine that the vehicles are ants and that you are free-flowing water. If you keep moving at a steady and continual pace, the traffic will just avoid you. And it works! Well, as long as you preserve enough wits about you to be aware of the random directions things are coming at you from and don’t step out straight under a tyre!

Keeping your wits about you is easier said than done though because there are just so many things to look at! Every inch of street (and most of the pavement just to add to the road navigation fun) is packed with fascinating things: traditional hatted hawkers; stalls laden with stunning fruit and veg, brimming with dried mushrooms, or even piled high with plastic chickens!; shops overflowing with scarves, paper products or lacquerware; tiny off-lead dogs or fluffy cats on leads; snaking cables; sign covered surfaces – you get the idea!

After an hour of navigating the streets, we decided the best thing to do was settle down with a beer and just watch the world go by. Happily, we happened upon Beer Corner, whose name alone demonstrates its suitability as a location for the task at hand. Saving Bai Hoi (street beer) for another time, we sat back to sample a couple of the Vietnamese bottled brews, relaxing in the relative calm and quiet (until they turned the techno on!) to take it all in through a well placed door.

With so much to see even when static, I’m happy we’ll be in Hanoi for a while to try and see all the incredible city has to offer. I’ve not even started talking about the food yet, but I think it’s safe to say I’m going to like it here!