Po-tay-to, To-mah-to

In the US, when I told people I was headed over to England, one of the first things I would get asked about is the “awful” food. My pocket answer was “Well, I hear the Indian food there is actually quite good,” which was usually accompanied by a smirk.

And I can’t really issue a verdict at the moment, as I still have had a very limited experience with the food here, but so far I’ve had some interesting food-related experiences to share. Nothing as exciting as pigs brain like I had in China, but interesting never the less.

The other evening, I took my friend Kelly out for a lovely dinner in Clapham (south London) at a Mexican restaurant. The food was actually quite nice, and they even had guacamole. Mind you, it wasn’t as good of guac as I was having in California all summer, but it was quite decent considering our locale.

The thing that stuck me about the restaurant, though, was its servers. In the US, a Mexican/Tex-Mex/Cal-Mex place typically has Latino staff. Here, I couldn’t tell where our main server was from, but the others seemed all to be Polish immigrants. Usually, if there seems to be some difficulty communicating at a Mexican restaurant in the US, I break out the little Spanish that I know—and with the food all having Spanish names, it’s not normally a problem of them understanding you. Here, they had given many of the dishes English names (ostensibly so people not too familiar with the food could figure out what they were getting), but when we were having trouble communicating with the staff, it was so frustrating because I couldn’t turn to them and just say what I wanted in Spanish and have them understand. We worked it out, but if anybody know how to say taco salad in Polish, please let me know. I think it would make life a lot easier here!

Other experiences on the food front include a lovely meal prepared mostly by Kelly’s roommate Lil, which included jacket potatoes (I think normal people call them baked potatoes. And what was really weird is that people here say to-mah-to but say po-tay-to, what’s with that? Shouldn’t they be consistent?) that were topped with baked beans flavoured with curry. I thought it was a creative meal until I saw baked beans on a potato at a chain jacket potato restaurant (who knew potatoes would be popular enough for a chain?).

And beyond that, I had my first taste of chips in a bag from a take away fish and chips place yesterday. Added lots of salt and drowned them in vinegar; it was criminally delicious.

As for weird Britishy things, my friend Shan insisted that I try marmite this morning on toast. The only way I can describe it is as a salty/sour yeast spread. The flavour is really quite strong, and its not my favorite, but I could see where they were coming from. In a way, the flavour had overtones of sourdough bread in the US, which I absolutely adore. I say that it usually takes three times of trying something new before really starting to like it, and since I don’t find it completely repulsive, I’m sure that I’ll be spreading on my toast sooner rather than later.

The last food-related story comes from Chinatown. We went there for some cheap chao mian (chow mein/stir-fried noodles) at a place that apparently specializes in rude service. I asked for the spiciest chao mian they had. “Not just spicy, spicy spicy.”

The waiter’s response was simply “What’s spicy spicy? You want spicy, you order the Singapore noodles.”

“Ok, well is that Sichuan spicy because that’s what I mean by spicy spicy.”

“Yeah, it’s spicy.”

“Alright, well I guess I’ll try that.”

They came and plopped down a heaping pile of stir-fried noodles that were quite yellow in color. I took a bite and realized that they were actually flavoured with curry, which I suppose is spicy in its own way, and is certainly very savory, but it’s certainly not what I was looking for.

I guess I’ll just have to learn Cantonese on top of the Polish so I can get what I want here! At least I know the names of proper Indian dishes.