A Week in Gluttony

I've been eating out a fair ammount this week which is odd, especially considering as I'm unemployed and as such don't have any money. But if there are two things I love to talk about its food and how fucking poor I am, plus a couple of the meals I had this week were stuff I had never eaten before. This is particularly weird as I have eaten A LOT, so finding new food is always a delight and totally something you, dear reader, want to hear about.

Ethiopian food at Habesha

On Tuesday night I went out for Ethiopian food with my lovely chums Nija, Joe and Gemma. It's always great to see them and to be honest I was pretty excited for Ethiopian food because not only had I never eaten it before but I'd never even heard of it so had absolutely no idea of what to expect. Habesha is a little restaurant just off of Canal Street and you already know its excellent when you walk in. This is because to get to Habesha you first have to go into a kebab shop downstairs and then climb some stairs in the middle of the room to get up to the restaurant. Sleaziness of this level is always a sign of either excellent food to come or horrifying gastric problems, a gamble I was more than prepared to take.

Even before you start eating the place is pretty amazing, there are East African decorations on the walls, a traditional Ethiopian dining set up which is kind of hard to explain but looks awesome (there are also normal tables, and we were at one of those). The music is kick ass being what I can only describe as African psyche, and if you don't think that's amazing I don't know what to say. In the corner is a TV which when we came in was showing Eritrean TV, with what looked to be some sort of memorial show or something being stage invaded by a man with an air freshener. To drink we shared a bottle of Ethiopian wine which to be honest wasn't that great but was saved by the label which proudly announced that it had won a 1980 East German wine competition as well as another award that looked like it was Russian.

With the scene set I will now describe the food and it's aftermath. Me and Joe shared a vegetarian and a lamb dish. The vegetarian portion, which contains a variety of things lentil based (so a bit like dhal) are served on a massive sour dough pancake, the lamb was a sort of curry which tasted strongly of tamarind. As well as this each of us got a basket filled with more of the sour dough pancakes as well as a bowl of incredibly strong spice (and possibly MSG). I've got to say that it was delicious and to be honest I appreciate any meal which you eat entirely with your hands, especially when shared with a group of friends.

There was one issue though. It was incredibly filling. TO the extend that I honestly don't know if I have ever been so full in my life. To give you and idea of how full I was, I woke up the morning after and I was still full and didn't need to eat until about 9pm the next evening. It was a food hangover and I feel everyone should get at least one of those. So eat Ethiopian food but also probably don't eat for a while before and after so you have enough room for a stomach packed with sour dough. I will definitely go again though even at the risk exploding.

Chinese Hot Pot at Tai Pan

Just this evening I went out for a farewell party for my good friend Dory who is moving to Singapore next week, and to say goodbye we went to Tai Pan on Upper Brook street. Tai Pan is a pretty decent Chinese restaurant and is (in my experience) especially good for Dim Sum because it's both delicious and, if you time it right, very decently priced. Word of warning though if you go to Tai Pan you need someone who speaks Chinese, every time I've been there I've needed a Chinese person to read the menu and order the food and I honestly don't know how you'd actually cope otherwise.

So anyway onto the hot pot. Now when I hear hot pot I immediately put the word "lancashire" in front of it. I was assured that a Chinese hot pot is different but to be perfectly honest it's much the same beast. Get a bunch of people and a pot full of boiling water and chuck a bunch of meat and stuff in the pot until it's cooked. Simple as. Obviously the sauce we were dropping stuff into was Chinese tasting and there was a lot of seafood but the principle is the same. There were 12 of us there and to save money we only ordered enough for 10, knowing that Tai Pan gives fairly generous portions anyway. They gave us enough for about 20. I am not kiddding when I say that we were dealing with an actual mountain, or perhaps even a mountain range, of food. I mean I was already feeling pretty gluttonous having dealt with the Ethiopian earlier in the week but I think after this I am basically not going to be allowed to eat for a week.

All told hot pot was a lot of fun, communally cooking stuff and trying to work out what the hell half of the raw food we were given is definitely fun. It's pretty messy though and I honestly felt really bad about the ammount of food we had left (I would say that we probably only ate about half of what we were given). A couple of us were saying that really to do it right you would probably need to commit most of a day to it, and nice as Tai Pan is I don't think I want to spend that much time in there. It was well priced considering what we got and knowing how much they gave us this time I would say that you could get a very good meal out of it for only about £7.

So there you go, the highlights of what has been a week of overeating. Join me next week as I try to live on nothing but toast!