Sydney food

Our best meal of the entire trip, hands down: a place called Est. Maybe the best meal we’ve had in the past year, even.

Sydney is considered a culinary rival to SF, and we arrived armed with a list of restaurants, cafés, patisseries, delis, bakeries and takeouts that had all received glowing reviews from the press or recommendations from fellow visitors. The list didn’t prove very helpful though. Turns out that Sydney pretty much shuts down in January, and almost every single place on our list was closed for the month. After a few fruitless cab rides and metro trips, we learned to call ahead.

Sydney is home to some of the nicest McDonalds I’ve ever seen. They almost look... upmarket(!?) Modern & spacious with a pseudo Jonathan Adler design aesthetic; faux leather and woodgrain. One downtown branch had pillars, chandeliers and a cathedral ceiling. Oh, and they’re all pristine. After India, it was a strange thrill to actually see employees wiping down tables and mopping floors. Ahh, beautiful.

No credit

At dinner one night I was offered yak-butter tea, the Tibetan staple. To my dismay, it tasted as foul as it sounded. I felt it was important to be polite, so I took a big sip. My cup was topped off almost immediately. I took two more big gulps, and each time it was topped off. I was feeling queasy, and I was convinced I would throw up right there at the table if I took a fourth sip. I had choked down almost an entire cup just to please my host, and yet my cup looked untouched.

"Don’t you want to try the tea?" I was asked.

Tibetan food

The food we ate was generally a bland assortment of Chinese-, Indian- and Nepali-influenced dishes. Chicken gristle, bok choy, tofu, naan and curried vegetables... We didn’t have too much that was explicitly Tibetan. There’s a staple Tibetan soup that’s pretty good; it was very similar to matzo ball soup. Beyond that, it was pretty much yak meat, yak meat, and more yak meat. Sometimes curried, always tough and gamey. Mmmmm.

Food notes

Pleasant surprise:
1) Ostrich jerky (aka ostrich "biltong") is very good.

2) The sushi here is excellent. In fact, Cape Town has an incredible concentration of sushi restaurants-- it's pretty much the local cuisine. There's so much good food here I'm anticipating putting back the weight I lost in Egypt and Italy.

Disappointment:
Our first morning in Cape Town, sleep-deprived and jetlagged, I ordered a bloody mary and got a glass of steak sauce on the rocks. A few days later--at another establishment but still a little gun shy--I ordered one again. It was...better, I guess...but that's not saying much. I'm through with bloody marys for a while.

Anisette hijinks

Strolling down the idyllic streets of Orvieto, we came upon the most beautiful of little shops selling Anise candies. Anxious for just one or two, we went inside and met the nicest girl whose family owned the shop. As we expressed our interest in some candy, she promptly brought out delicious homemade anise cookies for us to sample, plus samples of her father’s home-made Anisette which they sell to area restaurants. So impressed were we by the Anisette (not to mention the almond liqueur samples, the anise candy samples, the chocolate samples and the many shots of the various grappas her father makes in the bathtub or something), we were perfectly inclined to make a reckless decision: "Let's get a bottle of Anisette and ship it home!" We bought it along with a cube of marzipan, some amaretto cookies, and a pound of sugared anise cookies. We promptly brought it back to our hotel for shipment at the local Mailboxes Etc. in the morning... what could go wrong?

As we woke early to ship before catching our train to Assisi, we traipsed down to MBE to enquire about shipping. “Is it alcohol?” the clerk asked. “Yes it is Anisette.” we said excitedly. “I can only ship in quantities of 6, 12, 24, 48, etc.” “You can’t ship a single bottle?” “No. Your government won’t allow it. FDA.”

Unsure as to the logic of this particular practice, but more confused as to why someone would lie about such a silly rule ("is he joking?"), we were faced with a traumatic decision. We didn't have time to get a "second opinion" from the local post office. Because we’re traveling for so long, we have absolutely no space in our tiny tiny bags. We made a promise not to buy any souvenirs unless we were willing to ship them home. There were only two choices: carry the bottle onward (a major pain with three train transfers ahead of us that day), or leave it in Orvieto. A third option presented itself: pour most of our precious liquid in an empty water bottle (safer for transport) and leave the remainder as a gift to our hotel. We asked our hotel if we could use their kitchen sink and... viola!

It took less than two days for us to go through (almost) a bottle of anisette on the train. (Our CODE WORDS: “Can I have some more water please?”)

It may be twenty years before I can eat black licorice again.

Italian food puzzles

Garlic: We've been in Italy for two weeks now; we've eaten a variety of meals in a variety of cities & towns north and south, and it recently occurred to us that we have yet to even smell garlic anywhere, let alone taste it. Is this unusual? Has there been some kind of moratorium placed on its use? Is garlic just an "immigrant" thing?

Gelato: I've had some gelato here too, of course, and I'm still not sure what supposedly makes it different than ice cream. Sure, the flavors are more clever (Pineapple, Nutella, Tiramisu etc), but it all seems to taste pretty much like...well...ice cream.

Egyptian snacks

Pleasant surprise: Chicken-flavored potato chips are really good.

Disappointment: Cumin-flavored pretzels taste just like regular pretzels.

Also I should note that every Egyptian wine-- red, rose, or white-- tastes like cooking sherry (and the beer is a little underwhelming here too. Not a big nation of drinkers).