Justified ancients of momo

Almost everyone in Dubai has access to the food that reminds them of home. One thing that always surprises me, however, is the shocking lack of Nepalese food. It’s like: Where are you from, sir? Oh, the Galapagos Islands? Wonderful! Darwin burgers this way. And you, sir? Nepal? Forget it mate, the airport’s over there.

So although my trip to Kathmandu wasn’t governed by my stomach (for once, as I had come to Nepal to do some voluntary work at some orphanages), I was looking forward to trying the local grub.

I hadn’t expected much of the food at the hostel I spent my first two nights in, though, and my suspicions were proved to be correct. The food was Nepali alright - something approaching the ubiquitous dahl baht tarkari or lentil soup with boiled rice with a simple vegetable curry - but it appeared to have been given the once-over by some kind of spice vacuum, rendering it utterly insipid.

The night I was sent to my host family - the completely brilliant Aryals - I went out to a touristy place called Bhojan Griha to meet up with the other volunteers in my group. The restaurant was in a stately building, once the home of the royal priest to the King of Nepal, and it was set up for tourist groups with set menus, music and traditional dancing. 

And booze. Loads of lethal, 60 percent rice wine, in fact. I didn’t touch any of it myself, you understand, but the Everest lager did make me think more beers should be named after double-glazing firms (sorry, dodgy English gag).

First up was a plate of traditional Nepali murali makai, or popcorn to you and me. Yes, it was no different to the stuff enjoyed by lobotomised cinema-goers the world over, but it’s apparently a popular and nutritious snack in the rural areas of the Kathmandu valley. It was followed by something far more palatable - momos.

Momos are basically steamed dumplings made from thinly rolled flour-and-water dough stuffed with meat or vegetables, and quite often both. It doesn’t do momos justice to call them Nepali dim sum - that would be like saying pizza is just Italian cheese on toast. In any case, they almost certainly originally hail from Tibet, and are popular all over the eastern Himalayas. Anyone who’s had Russian pelmeni or overly-stuffed ravioli will know how good momos can be. I believe these ones were stuffed with minced pork and chopped onions, garlic and coriander. They were splashed with a fiery chilli sauce, which I couldn’t get enough of. It may be traditional comfort food for those long winter nights up in the mountains, but I could have carried on eating it through summer.

After badgering the waiters for extra momos, I took delivery of a thali dish, which was steadily filled with boiled rice, sauteed spinach with cumin, spicy mushrooms, cauliflower, and so-good-I-still-dream-about-them crispy pieces of mildly spiced fried trout. There were bowls of dahl and chicken curry to splash onto the rice, not to mention plates of zingy achar or vegetable pickle to give it that extra kick. Everything was combined and eaten by hand, but it could have been administered to me via a cement mixer and I’d still be happy.

Dessert was a simple affair - a bowl of sikarni, or sweetened yoghurt with chopped cherries - which rounded things off nicely.

The rest of my meals in Kathmandu were cooked by my host family, the Aryals. Like all the best home-cooked food, it was authentic, traditional, plentiful and made with special care and attention. The everyday staples of rice, dahl and curried vegetables were always present. Just before mealtimes, I would hear the familiar pounding of garlic, ginger and spices from the kitchen, and when the food was ready the flavours were every bit as resonant. Some days we'd have side dishes of cabbage with peanuts, or cauliflower and potatoes (like aloo gobi) cooked slowly with cumin, coriander and turmeric. On my final day, we had a plate of gundruk, a very traditional dish of fermented spinach-like leaves with a mildly acidic flavour.

I loved the food here, but what was just as good was the act of coming together around the table at the end of the day to eat, chat and listen to the Aryal’s special teenage son Sushant inquire as to whether I had lungs, or to wax lyrical about an imaginary American wrestler called “Big Foetus”.  I didn’t want to spoil these precious moments by whipping my camera out and snapping the roti - I’ll leave the food paparazzi stuff for the restaurants, if you don’t mind. But just look at that kitchen and use your imagination.

Dubai doesn't know what it's missing.

Korean kismet, or the serendipitous incident at the stupa of Boudhanath

As chance meetings go, it was up there with the very strangest. There I was, minding my own business on a hot day at Boudhanath in Kathmandu - one of Nepal’s largest Buddhist stupas - when this bloke came up to me and asked me to take his picture in front of the giant temple. Nothing too odd about that, I thought, so I duly obliged. Then he asked me where I was from. I told him England, living in Dubai. “Me too,” he gasped, amazed, in a heavy far-east Asian accent, “living in Dubai, I mean.” And he began to tell me his story.

The general manager of the soon-to-be-opened Asiana Hotel in Deira, he was in Kathmandu on a recruitment drive. He said that the new hotel - which will be the first Asian boutique concept in the city - would have a bunch of restaurants including a Japanese, a Chinese and a Korean. He told me he was originally from Korea, Jeju to be precise, and his name was MS Jahng. “MS, like Microsoft,” he quipped.

After explaining that I had more than a passing interest in restaurants, I gave him my contact details and asked him to keep in touch. A week after my return to Dubai, he called and invited me to dinner with him, his wife and two teenage daughters at Yehjun, a tiny Korean joint next to Sea World restaurant, above Safestway supermarket on Sheikh Zayed Road. The place is owned by the parent company of the Asiana Hotel, but is about as low-key as a dwarf’s front door.

I joined them in a private room with bamboo shutters. After exchanging pleasantries, the banchan or small side-dish plates arrived. There were ‘kongnamul’ boiled bean sprouts dressed in sesame oil and served cold, spongey fish cakes or ‘odeng’, ‘gaeran mari’ rolled omelette with vegetables, sauteed garlic stems or ‘manul julgi’, and ‘sigeumchi namul’ or wilted spinach with a splash of soy, garlic and sesame oil.

And of course, since a Korean meal without it would be like a Las Vegas Elvis impersonator without the mutton chops, sweat and 56-inch-waist gold lame suit, there was kimchi. Kimchi is the Korean superfood of pickled and fermented cabbage, which is low in calories, high in fibre, vitamins and minerals, and packed with lactic acid bacteria. Koreans usually eat it every day, often with every meal, but as MS and his girls confessed, sadly many younger Koreans are more interested in McDonalds and KFC these days.

Where I would have leapt upon the banchan like a starving castaway, my civilised Korean hosts politely waited until the mains arrived before tucking in. We had marinated short ribs, which were sweet and smokey, tender and moist. After being torn from the bone and dipped into some soy sauce, the meat was dispatched onto a lettuce leaf and introduced to a bit of kimchi, some garlic stems and whatever we fancied from the banchan selection, before being folded up like a parcel and posted straight down the hatch. It was a stupefying rhapsody of sweet, salty and umami flavours, and crunchy and fleshy textures.

There was also bulgogi, the famous Korean dish of beef marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic and sugar, and barbecued with spring onions to sweet and sumptuous perfection.

What the pan-fried glass noodles lacked in aesthetic quality (it appeared to have been dumped on the plate from the top of a skyscraper), it made up for in flavour and texture. The silkiness of the noodles and black fungus mushrooms, the crunch of the carrot, courgette and spring onion, and the tanginess of the slightly spicy sauce was where it was at.

The seafood pancake sprawled across the table like a giant pizza of egg, squid, prawns, red peppers and spring onion. Unlike a pizza, it was light and fluffy and good with soy sauce.

Like most Korean blowouts, this was a feast that simply couldn’t be finished, even by me. As I reclined in my seat, fully sated, I took my friend MS back to that chance encounter at the stupa of Boudhanath. 

“Didn’t you think our meeting like that was a little bit, well, strange?” I asked still basking in the post-feast haze.

“Yes, very strange,” he agreed.

“In English, we might call it serendipity, or kismet...” I suggested, searching for the right word.

“Destiny,” countered the youngest daughter with a bashful smile.

“You know, after walking around the stupa three times, I think you were sent to me by God,” added MS.

Yes, that’s me, heaven sent. Something may have been lost in translation, but I allowed myself to think he was right. Of course, God’s messengers are almost always sweaty, red-faced, puffy-eyed and slightly overweight English tourists, predisposed to eating you out of house and home (and restaurant) and writing blog entries about you and your family on the internet.

I raised a glass of ‘su jung gwa’ cinnamon and ginger tea and proposed a toast to our next meeting, hoping it would be just as eventful as the first two.

Yehjun Korean Restaurant, next to Sea World restaurant, above Safestway supermarket on Sheikh Zayed Road, 04 321 1500. The Korean restaurant Sonamu at Asiana Hotel in Deira opens after Ramadan.  

You say “tomato”, I say “what, in this weather - have you gone insane?”

“Grow cherry tomatoes? In the desert? Why don’t I just go and build a snowman on Sheikh Zayed Road in July, while I’m at it, or put on a sheepskin coat and go hiking in the empty quarter with a giant magnifying glass for a hat?” This was my exasperated and rather childish response when it was suggested to me that I could grow stuff on my balcony in Dubai.

But last summer, while researching a story about an unlikely home gardening craze sparked by Michelle Obama and Queen Elizabeth II (I still can’t quite picture the Queen wading through the turnips in her size-11 Wellington boots, but there you go), I met Zafar Ali Khan, and everything changed.

Khan is the horticulture engineer at Dubai Garden Centre, and he’s a man who knows a thing or two about getting edible things to grow in the harsh desert conditions of the UAE. He assured me it’s quite easy to grow cherry tomatoes, coriander, basil and oregano on my balcony, as long as I give my undivided attention to the plants, keep ‘em watered and resist the temptation to chuck them over the railings and go and buy a load from Spinneys instead.

So I bought a few packets of Franchi seeds (vigorous determinate bush variety, no less) and a little soil and got cracking. The cherry tomato seeds were not organic, at least I don’t think they were, but since I had little hope of actually getting any tomatoes out of them anyway, I thought I’d give them a go.

One sweltering day last August, I took a handful of seeds and laid them out on some moistened sheets of kitchen tissue, which I placed into a cupboard overnight. I was amazed and excited to see that little white shoots had begun to appear on each seed. Less excited when I realised I’d sprinkled about 60 of them onto the tissue. That’s a lot of tomato plants.

When the shoots were about a centimetre long, I transferred them to my improvised seedling containers - a couple of plastic tupperware tubs. This, I realised shortly after the last shoot was placed in the soil, was a stupid idea. The containers had no holes for drainage, but I simply couldn’t be bothered to replant them - it just meant I had to watch how much water went in. Then I placed the containers on my work desk underneath a window with plenty of sunlight.

Within a week of careful watering, the green seedlings began to emerge, uncurling their baby cotyledon leaves unto the glory of the sun. I had created life where there was no life before. I felt a bit like Dr Frankenstein, although less maniacal and without the grave-robbing habit.

Soon the seedlings needed space of their own to flourish, so I had to buy enough small plant pots for 60 of the blighters. Some of the seedlings, ahem, sadly perished while being transferred to their pots, leaving me with a slightly more manageable 50 seedlings to devote my time to. I reckoned a few more would fall by the wayside before I was ready to harvest my cherry tomatoes.

I decided that I’d keep the use of fertiliser down to a bare minimum, so I used nothing but water and sunlight on the little fellows for the first few months and watched them grow (not literally, as that would have been extremely tedious and taken far too long). And grow they did, into hefty, healthy, leafy plants that had to be supported with canes, and eventually began to produce little yellow flowers from which my first green baby tomatoes would emerge. Some of them died, of course, so its a matter of luck, I suppose. I ended up with about ten to fifteen strong plants.

At this point, I had to repot of few of the plants in larger containers, and I added some Phostrogen slow release fertiliser tablets to the soil. Organic fertiliser, Khan had assured me, would stink like a Satwa trashcan, so I decided against that. It was as the first budding green tomatoes appeared that I transferred the plants to the balcony. The summer was over and although some of them began to wilt a bit, they soon adjusted to the cooler-yet-hotter-than-inside weather.

In the first week of February the first blush of redness appeared on a few tomatoes, and in a matter of weeks more and more of the fruit became flushed a deep red. 

My first harvest was a bumper crop of about twenty cherry tomatoes, which were fine in salads and even better when roasted alongside some garlic in olive oil, with a sprinkle of salt and cracked black pepper.

For over two months now, I’ve been getting juicy, bright and spotless tomatoes - even from the plants that remained in their small plant pots because I was too lazy to upgrade them to a nice big pot. I didn’t have to use any insecticide either, and although the occasional bird has had it away with one or two of my beauties, some kind of large catapult might put a stop to that.

I’ve got tomatoes coming out of my ears (figuratively speaking). I could even have my own La Tomatina festival like they have in Spain, where I playfully pelt myself with tomatoes while only half losing my temper. Or perhaps I’ll just eat them?

I’m expecting the plants to succumb to the heat when the summer kicks in, but I’m ready to start all over again ready for next winter. 

Because I can. 

Ember - will it light your fire?

Ember, The Address Dubai Mall

It’s perhaps emblematic of our times that there’s a hotel in Dubai’s biggest shopping mall. 

The Address Dubai Mall would seem to cater for all kinds of travellers, not least those avid consumers who regard a town-sized shopping centre as a destination in itself. There would appear to be plenty of demand for such a place - the Address has another property at Downtown Dubai, no more than a Gucci handbag’s hurl away - but for those who live here it’s the hotel restaurants that really matter.

Hiking around one of Dubai’s malls can be soul-destroying at worst and exhausting at best, so it’s not uncommon to lessen the pain with food. If you’re particularly disgusted with yourself for going to a mall in the first place, that might involve a trip to Taco Bell. If you deserve better (and you do), The Address - which is licensed - offers something of an escape. Of sorts.

Ember is the recently-opened signature grill there. As a restaurant, it is one of the vital components of a five-star hotel, along with rooms, a reception, a spa and fitness centre, a swimming pool and a car park. Unfortunately for Ember, it’s smack bang next to the car park. What’s worse is that you can see the cars through a large window, and at rare interludes the screech of tyres or the impatient blast of a horn can be heard.

It’s a shame, since Ember is otherwise stylish, contemporary and very pleasing on the eye. Huge mirrors on roughly rendered walls make the elegant dining room seem larger than it is, yet the lambent glow of a candle on each table offers an intimate touch. The immaculate open kitchen sprawls along the edge of the room, while at the opposite end a bar blushes with warm red lighting and large invigorating photographs of vibrant bubbles and sloshing liquid.  

The setting certainly got us in the mood (adjoining car park notwithstanding), as did the capable maitre d’. Rarely have I encountered one so charming and knowledgeable at a new Dubai restaurant. He was even careful to warn me that the Japanese-style ‘Robata’ items on the menu were modestly proportioned, and that two might suffice for a starter. He was lying, of course. One would have been perfectly sufficient, but since I was here as a guest of the restaurant, perhaps he thought it best if I tried as much of Ember’s food as possible.

I wasn’t disappointed. I chose the spicy jumbo prawns, which arrived on a bed of kimchi sat upon a papad-like green onion pancake. The seafood was moist and suitably prickly with heat, while the option of further tangy hotness lay in a sprinkle of spicy powder at one end of the plate and a dab of chilli sauce at the other. Following the maitre d’s advice, I added the miso cod cheeks, which on this occasion was substituted with hamachi, a similar white fish from Japan also known as yellowtail. Either way, four dewy hunks of the stuff had been perfection-seared in miso sauce and presented with pea shoots and a scattering of orange flying fish roe.

My lucky companion opted for the foie gras, a hearty lobe indeed, seared and set across three slices of smoked duck, accompanied by a duck consomme, figs and a handsome ball of cabbage - rolled pleasingly into a perfect sphere not unlike a bumper Brussels sprout - stuffed with more shredded duck for good measure. 

For my main course, I had the braised short rib, which was every bit as tender, gooey and sticky with thick pinot noir sauce as I’d hoped. The American meat peeled away, deep red fibre after fibre, but I wanted to snaffle the accompanying potato and coarse grain mustard first, so it was just me and the meat left. If a stretch-Hummer, painted Day-Glo yellow, driven by a zombified Michael Jackson wearing a Macauley Culkin t-shirt had parked right next to my table, I wouldn’t have bothered looking up.

I did glance across the table, however, when a medium rare wagyu steak pulled up with a black truffle risotto and a zingy chimichurri sauce. The Australian grade 5 sirloin was as richly flavoursome and tender as I’d expected, although it was let down at the end by an unfortunate string of gristly fat.  

   
I rounded things off with a celebration of the Granny Smith apple which came in the form of a light cheesecake encased in paper-thin white chocolate, an apple sorbet, scattered crumble and a thousand shards of crisp apple. It was like having a regular cheesecake in an orchard that had been hit by an asteroid. I guess the chef really likes Granny Smith apples. Meanwhile, my accomplice demolished a selection of Fourme d’Ambert blue cheese with pear and a wispy salad, which was delivered on a thin black slate.

We left asking each other a simple question: did we really eat that well - in a mall? Technically speaking, the answer was no. Ember isn’t in a mall. It’s in a hotel with direct access to a mall. For some that may be too close. But although the views onto the underground car park might bring home the reality of Ember’s location, the gentle ambience, fine service and great food - at its best - can take you someplace else. 

Besides, the car park problem can always be solved by some kind of big, heavy curtain. I'd bet they sell them in Dubai Mall.

Meal courtesy of Ember restaurant, The Address Dubai Mall, open 6.30pm - 11.30 pm, 04 438 8888.

Bon Chon Chicken: do these Korean wings flap or flop?

 

Bon Chon Chicken

Times have changed. It wasn't so long ago that King Kong tried to take New York and got his big hairy behind kicked. Now it appears a South Korean chicken joint has prevailed where a 60-foot gorilla fell flat on his face. Bon Chon Chicken has seemingly swept all before it in the Big Apple, winning gushing plaudits from the likes of Esquire magazine, GQ and the New York Times. But since New York is the town that recently went all giddy over cupcakes, should we be getting equally excited about the fried chicken chain's arrival in Dubai? 

Bon Chon's first foray into the Middle East occupies an unassuming location among a stretch of fast-food joints on Trade Centre Road. Rubbing shoulders with the likes of Hardee's, Pizza Hut and KFC, Bon Chon appears to be having no delusions of grandeur about its place among the city's restaurant hierarchy. Yet unlike those giant, impersonal corporate fodder factories, Bon Chon has a certain charm and amateurish naivety about it that instantly sets about winning you over before you've so much as nibbled your first wing. 

A wall plastered with Post-it notes drew me across the bright and cheerful restaurant while we waited for our food (which wasn't as fast as fast-food should be). The doodled missives to Bon Chon's particular brand of fried loveliness ranged from opportunistic classified ads - "Sanoo Architects & Engineers :)" - to this artful little sketch...

  

The Spy Who Fried Me: Yes, the James Bond character appears to have bludgeoned Colonel Sanders with a chicken drumstick.

... and this culturally sensitive tribute to the first Bon Chon Chicken to open in a Muslim country:

 

It was just as well the wall-art was so absorbing, as our chicken took a while to materialise, which wasn't completely ideal since the air conditioning wasn't working. It hadn't taken us long to choose, however, since the menu is somewhat limited. I plumped for the chicken fillets combo, consisting of three pieces of chicken, three Korean style mandu dumplings, some bread and a diet coke - all for the grand sum of Dhs20. 

Across the table, my by-now ravenous companion opted for the wings combo, featuring half a dozen wings, French fries, bread and a coke. I added a tub of kimchi coleslaw for good measure and set to work demolishing the lot. What became immediately apparent was that Korean-style chicken isn't like KFC-style fried chicken in that it isn't slathered in a thick, breadcrumb-based batter. Instead, it's merely licked by a special marinade - either "soy" or "hot" flavour - that thinly coats the surface, leaving it light and crisp to the touch after being fried in oil that contains no trans-fats. The frying process takes place in two stages so that the meat cooks through, but the coating doesn't burn or go too dark and crunchy. What you're left with is a barely dressed morsel, sizzling hot and full of tangy spice - a kind of Asian KFC in nothing but its underwear. 

The chicken wasn't quite as crisp as promised, and neither did it sing sweet songs to my palate in either of its garlicky "soy" or  lip-burning "hot" incarnations. The fillets were little more than goujons, modest strips of breast meat, while the wings were so tiny they were barely enough to get into a flap about. What we had here was a preparation style that was different, tasty, and arguably healthier than the fat-saturated fried-chicken to which many of us have become accustomed. But there was very little more than that. In fact, I was just as taken with the kimchi coleslaw, which presented the famous Korean fermented pickled cabbage in a spicy mayonnaise sauce. Although quite what those big lumps of baguette were all about, I can't quite fathom. Still, the diet-friendly portions were soon stripped to the bone...

Since "banchan" is the Korean word for a small side-dish, perhaps Bon Chon is best regarded as nothing more than a welcome addition to the Dubai fast-food scene, a pleasant distraction rather than a main event in itself. But if this is the way to get New Yorkers' knees knocking, perhaps next time King Kong decides to shimmy up the Empire State Building he should think about wearing a giant chicken suit?    

Bon Chon Chicken, Trade Centre Road, Dubai, 055 266 2466.