Durian, the fragrant/foul fruit

Durian.

Number-one quality premium durian costs a small fortune.

The price of this durian is the equivalent of U.S. $54.

Chendol, a classic Malaysian iced dessert, is heavenly topped with a scoop of fresh durian.

You love it. You hate it. Or you’ve never had it. This powerfully-fragrant fruit from Southeast Asia is considered so foul-smelling by some people, they say they hate it even though they can’t bring themselves to taste it.

All I can say is: poor them. I’m obviously in the love-it camp. I can smell it from blocks away and am magnetically drawn to the stand like a bee to honey or a fly to… well, I’ll leave the similes to you.

Durian flesh is intensely sweet but at the same time, delicately flavored. Its creamy-custardy consistency can be firm to soft, and has a silky texture. Surely one of nature’s strangest inventions, its surprising, delicious interior is protected by multiple barriers. If its odor doesn’t put you off, its dangerous thorns might. And how do you crack the thing, anyway. All messages are: stay away!

Unless the fragrance entices…

The football-shaped durian has a thick spiked shell. If it weren’t so heavy, it would be a formidable weapon. Durian professionals wear an armored glove on one hand, and wield an evil-looking knife or cleaver in the other. The soft interior segments are gently prized out and arranged in a styrofoam box, where they look not unlike an undercooked omelet, or piece of raw chicken fat. Ready-to-eat durian will not win a beauty contest no matter who are the other contestants in the fruit-world. It beckons with its fragrance. By necessity, it must. A feast for the eyes, it isn’t.

I don’t know the qualifications the durian man uses to grade his fruit, especially without tasting it. Maybe they’re meant to remain a mystery. But wherever durian is sold, a range of qualities is on display. The priciest are often noted with a number of exclamation points: “best quality!!!” I’ve seen styrofoam boxes of durian ranging from about $3 to over $60. Locals scrutinize the offerings with serious concentration and buy the best they can afford.

Other durian stands sell the whole, uncut fruit. How does the buyer choose? Locals I have dined on durian with answer ambiguously.

Ladies-who-lunch and professional women visit the durian man in small groups. After selecting, they take their box to a plastic table, pull disposable gloves over their nails and jewelry, and dig in with their hands. I like the dichotomy: these elegant women visit their local supplier to quell a craving, get a quick and messy fix, then peel off the gloves, pop a breath mint, and slip back into society. The aroma will stick to them like illicit cigarette smoke.

Before I knew better, I bought durian and tried to take it home on a bus. This was in Singapore. It only took a few minutes before the bus stopped and I was ejected with my plastic bag. A taxi grudgingly drove me, but only with all its windows open despite the high temperature and humidity.

I ate too much durian in Bangkok one time and got what I later learned is called “hot tummy.” I felt light-headed, too, and had to take a tuk-tuk back to the hotel. Bangkok traffic is legendary—not even a little tuk-tuk can move quickly through it. The carbon monoxide fumes made me feel even sicker, but by the time I got back to the hotel, my hot tummy had cooled.

It seems you can now get durian in New York City, though I wonder how fresh they are. What is the shelf-life of an unfrozen durian? They’ve got to be frozen. If the NYC supply has been frozen, I’d stay away. They’d certainly not be suitable for a first introduction.

In Southeast Asia, when fresh ones are not available, I’m very happy with a durian shake. Durian cakes and custards are okay. Nothing beats the iced malaysian dessert durian chendol. I dream about it.

Mamak Malaysian restaurant, Sydney

Just part of the line of people waiting to get into Mamak.

Mamak is worth standing in line for. Bob and I waited 50 minutes for what is actually rather ordinary Malaysian food. But you can’t get these dishes just anywhere, and here, they’re done to perfection. I’d call this restaurant perfect in every way my single visit allowed me to experience. Let’s start with the entertainment on offer…

Mamak window showcases the making of roti.

After standing in line for 30 or 40 minutes, you finally creep up to the glass wall of the kitchen. Two roti-makers work like machines at their stainless steel counter, stretching small balls of dough by flinging them over their heads until they look like giant, translucent handkerchiefs. You just know one is going to become a kite and sail onto the head of a grill cook. Or one will rip and fly into shreds. They never do. After the final toss, the dough lands on the counter stretched into the size of a sheet of newspaper.

That’s when the roti is given it’s specific form. It might be quickly folded into an air-filled pillow and simply thrown on the grill, where cooks hover over the rotis, pressing them, flipping them, and rushing them off to drooling diners. Or the dough might first get a sprinkling of red onions. Bob and I ate rotis often when we lived in Singapore. In their most basic form, they’re simple flat breads served hot off the grill with a bowl of curry sauce for dipping.

A filled (and filling) version is called murtabak. An egg is broken onto the stretched dough, which is then topped with a smear of curry sauce, a toss of onion shreds, and possibly shredded chicken, mutton, or sardines. The gossamer dough is folded into a many-layered square, cooked on the grill, and served steaming hot with a bowl of spicy curry sauce. Perfection! Mamak serves murtabak. I wish I could have tried it, but we ordered other items.

I’d gotten a menu to look at while in line, so we’d be ready to order right away. That’s the one tiny improvement that could speed Mamak’s turnover just a tad: menus outside so diner’s can use the waiting time to peruse the offerings.

When you finally enter the restaurant, all primed for a roti (but which one???), the fragrance of baking bread slays you. The urgency of the cooks and waiters increases your heart rate and your stomach announces its presence and desires. Luckily, Mamak is fast! Your order is in and out in moments.

Mamak cooks a small selection of Malaysian dishes (most of which are traditional street foods) which keeps the menu from overwhelming people unfamiliar with the cuisine. They do a variety of rotis, two kinds of satay, several curries and stir-fries, and spicy-fried chicken. There’s the classic nasi lemak, which is fragrant coconut rice with condiments (which we ordered), and a couple of fried noodle dishes.

We also ordered rojak. I’ve had it many times in Singapore, but never like Mamak’s. Typically a salad of crisp and crunchy fruits and vegetables, julienned yambean and cucumber, fried tofu, and prawns, it’s coated with a spicy peanut sauce and garnished with hardboiled eggs. Mamak’s version was heavy on the sauce, sweet, tall, and… delicious.

Crisp and fluffy roti cania looked to be the most popular item on the menu. So simple, yet so satisfying. You lick your finger to pick up every last flake of the toasty bread.

The rich and exotic roti planta requires a time-consuming process. Twenty or so little dabs of butter are spaced out along one edge of the stretched dough sheet. The sheet is then rolled into a lumpy, air-filled snake, the buttery dots along its length like undigested mice. The fragile tube is then carefully coiled like a sleek-skinned cobra, and set on the grill to crisp, melt, sizzle, and brown.

Egg roti and one with red onions inside puff and sizzle on the grill at Mamak restaurant. — An egg roti and one with red onions inside puff and sizzle on the grill

Mamak also offers a variety of Malaysian tea and coffee drinks, and two typical desserts: ice kachang and chendol. I ADORE chendol, a complicated ice dessert composed of many ingredients. Instead of trying it here though, Bob and I chose to go next door to the Taiwanese dessert shop called Meet Fresh. Yeah, funny name! I got “handmade taro-balls #4” with peanuts (soft), pearls, and red beans. I could have ordered it hot, but chose to have it over ice. Bob got mango sago coconut soup.

Taro-balls #4 was nice, but it’s no chendol. Come to think of it, chendol needs a post of its own. I dream of chendol, but only a certain kind. It must be topped with one particular fruit. I will tell you… soon!

In addition to the selection and quality of its food, Mamak gets a gold star for speed. Our meal arrived eight minutes after ordering it. When we left, the line was as long as when we got into it an hour and a half earlier. And guess what? After we finished dessert next door? Yep, the Mamak’s line was even longer.

On Goulburn at Dixon in Haymarket, on the edge of Sydney’s Chinatown, Mamak is a winner.

Australia food restaurant street food Sydney

Beijing street food

Arachnid kebob, anyone? If you haven’t lost your appetite from all the lusty hawking and spitting and splatting, your stomach will certainly rumble as you browse Beijing’s edible temptations. Between great steaming caldrons and vats of bubbling oil, squirming specimens are lined up, already impaled, ready to be plunged to their crispy deaths. They’re simply waiting to be chosen…by you?

If you’re bored by the ordinary, fed up with fishballs and fried octopus, sick of spicy noodles and delicate dim sum, why not try the next level of Beijing street food? Have something on a stick.

The adorable seahorses must be all crunch when fried, but who’d want to eat such a fantastical creature? I’m heartbroken to see the splintery skewer piercing the armor of its chubby belly while it’s big round eyes stare sadly… Excuse me while I anthropomorphize. Don’t call me ethnocentric!

On the other hand, I get the shivers looking at the seahorses’ stick-mates. The headless scorpions curl and straighten their tails and claw the air. They’re certainly fresh, but not terribly appetizing, even though my heart holds no soft spot for them.

When I see them fried, they’re no more offensive than a barbecued shrimp: a thin-shelled body with a lotta legs. Crisp and plump, with the promise of succulent sweetness inside. It’s mainly a difference in attitude and behavior, isn’t it, between the shrimp and the scorpion. One swims, one hikes. One fishes, one hunts. One has charm and magnetism, the other is furtive and hostile. The scorpion’s reputation makes him repugnant. It’s prejudice! And look: unlike the shrimp, the scorpion’s fully edible—no legs or tough shells to spit out. Still…no thanks. I can’t bring myself to nibble one.

The young woman in the video is a Russian tour leader. And yes, she ate them all—I watched. She judged the fried scorpions “actually quite pleasant.” She was hesitant to eat their tails, but I know about these things and told her the shop would have removed the stingers if they were harmful. She bought it and chowed ’em down.

Silkworms, locusts, and grasshoppers are other potential snack options, sold separately or in colorful combinations. Big fat larvae, mahogany brown and shiny with oil, are five on a stick. They look like beads of exotic hardwood, but I know their liquidy centers would gush out at the gentlest squeeze. Wait, on closer inspection they appear to be candied. My mouth waters in anticipation of a brittle coating of burnt sugar shattering against my teeth. Maybe they’re buttered, not oiled… I’m close to grokking the allure of the delicacy. If it weren’t for the damn ick factor.
Read the rest with more photos… Continue reading

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Pattaya’s sex tourism

Pattaya, Thailand’s got to be the seediest, one-track party-town in the world. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Huge signs advertising the Fcuk Inn Bar and Kiss Food and Drink make the theme obvious. Couples like this one are ubiquitous.

Hot, sweaty days are for advertising the possibilities of hot, sweaty nights. Bored “massage” girls pose on plastic chairs in front of their shops, long bare legs ending in spike-heeled evening shoes dangling in the trash-filled gutters.

Just across the narrow lanes, clusters of old, fat, ugly, white men slouch and slump over beers, gathering confidence from one another. They all look the same. They all wear floppy shorts and t-shirts and sandals. Some wear socks with their sandals. These are the tunnel-vision men those pretty Thai girls are dreaming of.

The local specialty, called ladyboys, also ogle these men. Look at the 23-year-old ladyboy pictured at left, who just had her bag snatched while riding on the back of her Italian boyfriend’s motorcycle. (A reversal of the classic Italian scippatori theft, in which the thief—not the victim—is the backseat rider.) The Italian “boyfriend” may or may not have known what was under the coy ladyboy’s skirt.

After dark the lanes explode with open-air billiards bars, tiny beer bars, bars named for your country, pole-dancing bars, and enormous “pussy bars” offering “pussy menus” and buckets of ping pong balls. Establishments large and small feature alluring girls.

The city’s other passion is food. I love the street food culture in Pattaya. Entire restaurants zip through the streets on the backs of tricycles and on motorcycle sidecars, their sauce buckets sloshing and condiments precarious. In grubby plastic baskets they carry the myriad fresh and fermented ingredients that their specialties comprise. Seductive food is cooked to order on smoky charcoal grills or stirred over car-battery-operated stoves.

Hot, ready-to-eat curries are peddled from wooden trays on the backs of bikes, single servings tied up in clear plastic baggies. Mysterious delicacies are baked in bamboo canes—the ultimate environmentally-friendly fast-food container. Longons, lychees, mangosteens, jackfruit, dragonfruit, durian—the tropical fruit displays are mouthwatering.

Whatever your pleasure, Pattaya is to drool for. Western men tend to visit for three week stays. Many or most have met their exotic girls online and come specifically to see them. They pay the girls about US$100 a night to stay with them in their hotels. They might visit their girls two or three times a year. Sometimes the couples marry and the men take the girls away to live in their Western countries.

For a beach resort town, Pattaya’s remarkably unattractive. Where trees should be, tangled electrical wires form a shadeless canopy over streets, the thick cords nearly obscuring the mosaic of signs for Cialis, Viagra, pharmacy, clinic, laundry, and rooms-for-rent. There’s nothing for the eye here—just hard-driven business: that is, the business of the sexual drive. It’s a lewd town, but an honest one, advertising what it’s about in every way it can.

bag snatch prostitution sex industry street food Thailand thieves

Eating in Mumbai

Delicious do-it-yourself panipuri at the upscale restaurant Soam, in Mumbai.

Eating Mumbai

Bhel puri just might be my favorite Indian food. A snack commonly prepared and served on the street, you can find it in restaurants, too. It’s hard but not impossible to find it in the U.S., where Indian restaurant almost always means a predictable menu of Northern Indian dishes, often dismal and boring.

The dish is a perfect mix of sweet, sour, hot, and spicy, plus soft and crisp. It always includes sev—delicate crispy yellow noodles—and puffed rice. There’s usually chopped potatoes and onions, and sometimes tomatoes. It’s all tossed with a spicy sweet-hot sauce and topped with green coriander leaves. It must be eaten as soon as the ingredients are combined.

Eating Mumbai: Bhel puri walla, Bombay, 1989. — Bhel puri walla, Bombay, 1989.

I discovered bhel puri in 1989, my first trip to Bombay. I was intrigued by the long line of people buying from this humble bhel puri walla. Using only his hand, he mixed fistfuls of the ingredients in a bowl, then transferred the concoction to another bowl for the customer to eat from, right there. Yep, I got in line. Nope, I didn’t get sick.

Eating Mumbai: Bhel puri cart, Bombay, 1989. — Bhel puri cart, Bombay, 1989.

Eating Mumbai: Bhel puri and other street food for sale, Bombay, 1989 — Bhel puri and other street food for sale, Bombay, 1989

Once I recognized the ingredients, I began to see dramatic displays like these all over the city, each more artistic and appetizing than the next. I ate at many of them.

Eating Mumbai: Savoring the last few bites of bhel puri on Chowpatti Beach — Savoring the last few bites of bhel puri on Chowpatti Beach

In March of 2010, I saw very few street food vendors, no bhel puri wallas. Perhaps I just didn’t walk in the right streets, though I criss-crossed the city and spent much time in Colaba, as I did in 1989. The food stalls on Chowpatty Beach, long famous for bhel puri, have been swept into a permanent organization of stainless steel stands, similar to Singapore’s street food culture.

Eating Mumbai: Chopping onions at Chowpatty Beach. — Chopping onions at Chowpatty Beach.

I had excellent bhel puri (and many other dishes) at the vegetarian Kailash Parbat on Colaba Causeway. Across from the restaurant, they run a sort of glorified street food stand, at which one can order all the standard snacks and sweets. I had incredible panipuri there, one after another until I had to hold up my hand and reject the last of the six that come in an order, handed over one by one. Panipuri are crisp hollow spheres, punctured and filled with spicy potatoes or chickpeas, then topped off with spicy, cumin-flavored water. The entire fragile globe must be placed in the mouth, sometimes a tricky maneuver for a small mouth. The payoff is a satisfying burst, a crackling, a flood of liquid, an explosion of flavor and texture like no other.

Eating Mumbai: Delicious do-it-yourself panipuri at the upscale restaurant Soam, in Mumbai. — Delicious do-it-yourself panipuri at the upscale restaurant Soam, in Mumbai.

Eating Mumbai: Mysore paanki, steamed between banana leaves, is peel-and-eat spiciness. — Mysore paanki, steamed between banana leaves, is peel-and-eat spiciness.

The vegetarian restaurant Soam is a few block’s walk from the north end of Chowpatty Beach, and definitely worth the trip. The small, trendy place serves upscale versions of street food and Gujarati home cooking. Bob and I loved it.

Jackfruit for sale in 1989 Bombay. I didn’t see any this time, though it was the same month.

Eating Mumbai: Beer is served in tall, iced dispensers at Leopold's the famous cafe that was bombed in 2008. — Beer is served in tall, iced dispensers at Leopold's the famous cafe that was bombed in 2008.

I drank fresh coconut every day from this vendor around the corner from our hotel.

Reviewing my 1989 photos, I found the same heap of coconuts in front of the same temple on Colaba Causeway.

bombay food India mumbai street food

Observations of Japan

Just back from Japan with a few shallow thoughts:

I like the Japanese philosophies of beauty and simplicity, love the food, but can’t get used to the unquestioning, obedient nature of the people. Or that all answers are “yes,” even when it means “no.”

High-tech toilets: I like having a warm seat and a control panel. The electronic sound effects are annoying—fake waterfall or babbling brook sounds. The bidet/washing features are—um, too personal for comment.

I appreciate super-fast Asian internet, but my hotel wifi ate a bunch of my outgoing email without telling me. I prefer slow and reliable.

Cherry blossoms make up for the gray, cold, windy, rainy, dreary weather on the March/April cusp.

Yokohama has no trash cans. None. After I needed one, I kept looking the rest of the day as I crisscrossed the city. I never found one. Yep, there was a little trash on the ground, but only a little.

Natto beans with mustard, ready to top rice.

Breakfast: a bowl of rice with 30 different garnishes, 30 different ones every day. Wonderful. The one constant: natto beans, the love ’em or hate ’em fermented beans with a strong ammonia fragrance, which you whip up into a froth of snotty, stringy, viscous liquid, not unlike the stuff okra oozes. When you eat natto beans, the stuff loops from the chopsticks in long, fine, spiderwebby strings that stick to your chin and do feel like actual spider webs a minute or so later when dry.

Astonishing and confounding, how little English is spoken in Japan, including by the young people. What English exists is often amusing. The woman who was assigned to translate our presentation spoke to me beforehand and, pointing to a bald man, innocently called him a skinhead. I saw shops called “Junk Jewels” and another, “Junk & Antiques.” There’s a chain of mini-markets called “Sometimes Fresh.” Passed the “Pay Up Hotel.”

Pocari Sweat, available on every street corner.

If you’re thirsty on the street, you can stop at a vending machine and buy a bottle of “Pocari Sweat.” Vending machines also sell “Full Supporty” stockings, and tickets for full, hot meals, chosen by plastic display and then picked up from a cook nearby with never a word spoken.

Some very tall pine trees looked like cellphone towers.

A digital sign in front of a tollbooth showed an animated cartoon man waving a flag back and forth.

I’ve been to Japan quite a few times. These thoughts are not cumulative, but specifically from this visit.

food japan street food travel

Singapore ice cream

What sounds more scrumptious that “bread ice cream?” Scallion pancakes, Dutch waffles, and durian come to my mind, along with a hundred other street foods.

The lines are long though, at the bread ice cream carts on the streets of Singapore. For a few cents, you get a scoop or a slab of neapolitan ice cream between two slices of soft white bread. Only—the balloon bread is green and pink.

I’d choose bread ice cream over fried grasshoppers, for sure. But it’s nothing like the wonderful Turkish ice cream. And Turkish ice cream comes with entertainment.

Singapore street food

Mumbai

I feel like celebrating Mumbai, a city I love to visit.

I’ve stayed in the Taj Mahal Hotel a couple of memorable times and looked out my window at the iconic Gateway to India monument. Looking down from my window at dawn, I watched men squat with tiny coal fires in tin cups, ready to cook a little breakfast for passersby. Or for those waking from a night’s sleep on the plaza. Entire lives are lived out on the Mumbai streets.

At a tea stall in the Colaba district, the chai-walla pours boiled milk onto tea leaves and spices.

After my first and second visits in the comforting embrace of the grand Taj, Bob and I chose more intimate Indian hotels in the Colaba area. Less quality control, more flavor! The neighborhood is a congested, confusing warren of small streets that run into the slums Mumbai is famous for, the kind you can walk in and start a parade of the curious and friendly, not beggars, just those smiley-shy children and adults who want to see what you’re going to do and why.

Tea leaves and spices are strained out with a cloth.

We got into the habit of buying milky masala chai from a stall near our hotel. The tea-walla always opened a new container of milk and boiled it while we waited. To his generous handful of tea leaves, he added his own mysterious mixture of “warm” spices: cinnamon, clove, cardamom, allspice, black pepper. When the tea was brewed and strained, he poured it into a take-away plastic bag, and off we walked with it, to drink in the mugs in our room.

We’ve had a few meals at Cafe Leopold, too, my favorite of which included curried eggs. Anybody who’s read Shantaram knows that Cafe Leopold is an institution central to social life for expats, locals, and tourists. It’s where the sunny and the shady commingle, knowingly or not.

Tiny cups of masala chai are readied for delivery.

For a deep look at Mumbai and all things mafia, which is to say all things Mumbai, read Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, by Suketu Mehta. Or better yet, visit the city and see for yourself.

bombay mumbai street food

PICKPOCKETS, CON ARTISTS, GANGSTERS, THIEVES, AND TRAVEL

Durian, the fragrant/foul fruit

Durian.

Mamak Malaysian restaurant, Sydney

Beijing street food

Beijing street food

Pattaya’s sex tourism

Eating in Mumbai

Eating Mumbai

Observations of Japan

Singapore ice cream

Singapore ice cream

Mumbai

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