The land of Durrell (and Moussaka)

On his final visits to Corfu, towards the end of his life, Gerald Durrell lamented the extent to which the island where he grew up had changed.

In many ways I'm in a similar situation. I didn't grow up there, obviously, but I did spend several weeks of my youth holidaying on various Greek islands - the last time more than 20 years ago.

Until last week, when we spent a few days in Corfu as a base for a trip to Sarande, Albania (my 49th country, folks!) and to see if Greece was still as I remembered it.

How to destroy 12 countries in 83 paragraphs

Some time ago, I forget exactly when - probably around last Christmas, I set myself the slightly bonkers target of visiting 12 new countries during 2015.

Given that I'm reasonably well-traveled and had already been to something like 36 different countries, depending on what criteria one uses, this was a bit of a challenge. Especially as I also really like staying in England quite a lot. (We live in a fucking great country with a history and culture that shames the rest of the world and a thriving craft beer scene. Coventry are winning every week, and Steeleye Span are on tour. Who in their right mind wants to go off somewhere else in a fucking aeroplane?!?)

But with over 50 days still left in the year, I completed the mission relatively easily. Go me. (It's an even more impressive score for Mrs. B-V who hadn't been to Estonia or Belgium before and thus got 14 new countries!)

Some places were interesting from a food and drink perspective, some were not. Some I blogged about at the time*, others I wrote about elsewhere, and still others I didn't bother with as I considered them a waste of ink. Or keystrokes.

Expensive 'Spoons, expensive countries and a very expensive poo

One of the most insane weekends of my life involved a stag night in Tallinn, eight years ago.

We set off at stupid'o'clock on a Friday morning, on a minibus from Ipswich, started drinking in the Stansted Wetherspoons, and got to the Estonian capital shortly after midday local time, if I recall correctly.

There then followed a marathon afternoon and evening of spiced beer and shots of pepper vodka, followed by weird, tasty, offally food. I suspect I drank more than anybody else. At least eight pints plus half a dozen shots, I'd imagine.

A Whale of a time

I wasn't expecting much.

Supercheap Ryanair flights, a swift one-night break somewhere in Norway, and another boring country ticked off the list. Job done.

But life can surprise you. What I actually experienced this week was a peaceful, pleasant stay in delightful little town and one of the very best seafood restaurants I have ever visited. I've been banging on about it for the last few days since we came back.

If you like your fish you have to go there. You just have to.

Birra alla pompa a Roma

So, Italy turned out to be no better than England at the World Cup. Worse, in fact, if your criteria for judging which team is better is 'results against Costa Rica'.

As I said the other day, nobody hates Italy, though I'm starting to refine that theory slightly on the basis of new information. Specifically:

1. Rome is fucking brilliant for beer. 
2. Rome is fucking shit in a lot of other ways.
3. There is probably nowhere in Italy where the food is bad. 
4. Not even Rome.

Regular readers will have picked up on the fact that I've never much liked lazy beach holidays - not for me the indignity of sprawling, sunburned, for a fortnight on a beach like some sort of floppity-haired manatee - and as such I've always thought of myself as more of a short city break-type person.

But, having just returned from the Italian capital, I've realised that I don't much like them either.

Allow me to explain.

It's grim up North

OK, when I say, 'GO', I want you to think of the top three great cuisines of the world and name them aloud.

In fact, give me the top five. You ready...?

GO!

........

So, what have we here then? French? Sure. Italian? Indian? Japanese? Did somebody clever say Turkish Cypriot? Maybe even American or Mexican?

But I'm guessing nobody gave much thought to the food of Iceland. And that's reasonable, given that it doesn't have much of a reputation on the global platter, and any crumbs of reputation it does have tend to focus on stereotypes of Scandinavian stodge and manky pickled fish.

It wasn't a topic I'd spent a lot of time thinking about either, but I've just got back from Reykjavik where I was able to enjoy - or perhaps 'endure' might be a better word - some traditional Icelandic food, and add some empirical weight to my affirmation of the stereotype.

Utterly Paphotic

Having an e-Passport is great.

It means you can breeze through immigration at Gatwick in no time, whilst pointing and laughing at the suckers in the lengthy queue with their manual passports.

'So long, losers!' you get to say, as you merrily scan your way across the border and into the Arrivals Wetherspoons.

Of course, as the new e-passports are phased in, the balance will shift. Soon we'll start seeing queues, and then they'll be the same length as the non-e queues. One day the last remaining people with old fashioned documents will be having the last laugh when 99% of us are waiting in line to scan.

But for now, it's the golden age of the electonric passport, and I fully intend to savour the schadenfreude.

'Dam you, 'Dam you all to Hell!

This isn't the place for me to bang on about the (mis)fortunes of my football team. There's enough reporting elsewhere of the shambolic clusterfuck that is Coventry City and the clueless Hedge Fund managers destroying our poor club.

Suffice it to say that when new owners come in to save you from Administration, you don't expect to be in a situation five years later where your squad has been asset-stripped to the barest of bones, you've been relegated to the lowest division you've played in for 50 years, you're in self-imposed exile from your own fucking stadium for not paying the rent for a year, you've alienated the vast majority of your supporters and you've still fucking well ended up in Administration anyway!

Amsterdam, home of window shopping...

What's more, the day-to-day running of the club is now so shockingly bad that no new depths of incompetence can surprise me any more.

We were supposed to be playing Dutch side Go Ahead Eagles on Tuesday, but ironically the game didn't go ahead, and was replaced at the last minute with a fixture in the middle of nowhere, the other side of the German border - completely inaccessible for us fans who had already booked flights and accomodation in Holland.

And so, that's how Mrs B-V and I happened to have a couple of completely unplanned days hanging around Amsterdam this week instead of watching a 6-0 win against non-league German minnows Wachtendonk.

Still, I'd never actually been to the Dam (or indeed anywhere in Holland) before, and was vaguely hopeful of some good beer and interesting food...

Sicklehammer would be a great name for a band, wouldn't it?

We were flying back from Moscow at exactly the same time as Edward Snowden was flying in the opposite direction.

A week later, he's still stuck at the airport - I can vouch for the long queues, complicated, expensive visas and overly fussy customs and immigration processes, but a whole week is ridiculous!

But then Julian Assange has been happily living in some 3rd Division country's embasssy for a year now. Maybe these are the prices one pays for a life of consciencious whistleblowing (or perhaps self-important attention-seeking).

I thought this 'we're all being spied on 24/7' went out of the window years ago with the demise of the old USSR, but apparently not. Maybe in some ways we're all still living there waving our hammers and sickles around, and I didn't actually need to visit Moscow after all?

Walking past the mummified corpse of Lenin I made some throwaway comment about how amusing it would be if he suddenly opened his eyes and sat bolt upright... and a security guard angrily sidled up behind me before I'd even finished the sentence.

Of course, I didn't notice at the time because it was quite dark in there and I was already writing a screenplay in my mind where Vladimir the Revolutionary Zombie gets into all sorts of hilarious scrapes.

In my contended obliviousness I didn't realise what was happening until Mrs B-V told me later on, long after Mr. KGB had decreed that I wasn't a legitimate threat to his great, deceased leader. And maybe we don't notice when our governments back home are spying on us either?

Broken Eastern Promise

A few weeks ago I went along to Craft Beer Rising, not expecting there to be anything much for me, and came away rather pleasantly surprised.

It didn't take long, however, to find the place where there was nothing for me, and that place is Dubai.

So, what's my beef with this fantastic international city; this emerging gulf hub; this centre of Arabian Nightlife... and what is the food and drink like?

Well, it's too hot, too sandy, too crowded, too 'international', too expensive, no pubs. It really is quite a shitty place and now that I've been there I can confidently tell the next recruitment consultant who informs me about 'spectacular job opportunity in Dubai' that 'thanks, but no thanks, I'd rather work on the moon.'

10 things you may not have known about Switzerland and York

I know, I know. I’ve not done a whole lot of blogging lately. Been out and about you see. Riding panthers, slaying  dragonflies, tormenting chickens, that sort of thing.

Actually that’s all a shower of vicious lies, apart from that last one, but last week we were in fact in York, watching the mighty Sky Blues winning 4-0, and the week before we took a little trip to Switzerland (no, not to the Dignitas clinic – things aren’t that bad!)

I’d never been to either Switzerland or York before and there was plenty to do and see and eat and drink. But given that I’m lacking the time and inclination to carefully sculpt vast blogs about either of these places, I’ll just shower you with a dixtet of factoids:

Could this have been my big break?

It's been a surreal few days, what with losing my Grandma, and then starting a new job today - the day after leaving the previous one! And going back for a meeting at the place I just left on my first day!

Our family seem to have suffered rather a lot of bereavements over the past year, and coupled with the stresses of job insecurity for much of that time, it's been a bit of a rough ride. But, hey, I can cope with pretty much anything, me.

Anyway, in preparation for leaving my old job I had to allocate several hours to 'digital tidy-up', sorting out anything I wanted to copy off my work laptop before I had to give it back.

For some, this task is inconvenient and tiresome, but I actually find it quite cathartic, not just because of the whole 'putting stuff in order' therapy, but also because I'm constantly finding little bits and bobs that I forgot about. Humourous jpgs, revealing and salacious emails, 'To Do' lists of stuff that never got done, that sort of thing.

All flights grounded...

The exercise also turned up a little gem about which I'd completely forgotten - a copy of a foodie article I'd written for Maxjet's in-flight magazine in 2007, just weeks, or possibly even days before they went bust.

The funny thing is, I actually got paid for the piece, but was never sent a proof (or indeed a final copy) and to this date I've no idea if this issue of the magazine ever made it onto a flight. I suspect it didn't.

I'd rather have not had the money but got the article into the skies though - and if Maxjet had survived, there would have been a series of these fuckers, which might possibly have propelled me to minor stardom, but alas this was not to be.

And so, I've reprinted the article below in all it's glory - hopefully not violating copyright legislation in the process - for all to see.

I've not edited it, and there are some concessions to contractual obligation in the copy, but overall I think it's a decent piece and one that Maxjet passengers would have enjoyed, if only they'd ever got to read it...

Baltic Birthday

Nobody likes getting old much, do they?

I spoke to a 101-year-old recently whose refreshing and darkly candid take on her longevity was 'I hate being old. All my friends are dead!'

I've a comparatively long way to go, not that I'm likely to make it that far, but I did 'celebrate' my 35th last week, and to add insult to injury, I was accosted by not one but two market research people the very next day, and had to select, for the first time, the '35-44' box in which I shall be stuck for the next decade!

I'm now officially part of the target audience for Radio 2, The Spectator and Guy Clapperton's LifeOver35 blog, although in preperation I've been reading the latter for a few months, the Speccie for several years, and I actually like to think I've outgrown the Light Programme!

In recent months I've been acquiring new ailments left, right and centre, and a spell of extended stress at work (it would be less depressing working at a children's hospice) is taking its toll on my blood pressure. 

All I need now to trigger the textbook midlife crisis is a bad marriage - though, fortunately, I'm very happy being married to Mrs B-V who surprised me with a unique birthday present in the form of a trip to Latvia!

Beer

Chronophobia aside, the big day itself was quite enjoyable, with several beers at the Craft Beer Company to numb the pain, some of which were very good indeed. Highlights included Summer Wine Diablo, 6% and bursting with Citra hops, and a Black IPA from Arbor, though the 7.5% Breakfast Stout from the same brewery was a long and sickly struggle from the first sip to the bottom of the glass.

Birthday beer

Fortunately our flight to Riga the following day wasn't until late afternoon, so I didn't pay too heavy a price for overindulgence in strong ale. My system probably needed to stock up too, as Latvia isn't known for it's beer. Or, indeed, anything much.

Firstly, a few recommendations for anybody thinking of visiting Riga:


1. You can realistically 'do' Riga in a single day, so it's probably a bad idea to book a stay of more than two nights. We had two nights and were getting bored.

Being 35+ I'm never happier than when sitting down, but Riga is one of these 'old towns' that you have to walk around, with manky cobbled streets. Never been my kind of destination, and probably never will. Some things don't change as you get older. 



2. Try to avoid ever flying Ryanair. To anywhere. They are cheap, but their planes are cramped and unpleasant and we got stung with 'security charges' at the airport which they had deliberately not included in the upfront price to keep it cheap. Wankers.

There wasn't even a bus to take people from the gate to the plane, despite the plane being further from the gate than I've ever seen before - probably around 400 yards, which is a long way to dash in torrential rain with other aircraft moving disconcertingly around as you run across the tarmac.


3. Avoid using the strangely-named Terravision coach service to Stansted. It's bad enough having to fly from fucking Stansted in the first place, without this total shower of incompetence. 

Rather than running to timetables, they seem to depart only when there are enough bodies to completely fill the thing up, which for us meant standing in the aforementioned rain at Stratford worrying that we'd miss our flight on the way out, and standing around at Stansted late at night, knowing that we'd miss the last DLR on the way home.

It's the Ryanair of coaches.


4. In fact, don't fucking fly at all. There's too much hanging around, too much hassle getting to and from airports, too much turbulence and fearing for your life, and too few people in passport control at British airports. 

It's the Terravision of travel. Except that that's already Terravision.



5 (and back on the actual subject of Latvia rather than general whinging about shit). Don't take too much money. Riga is cheap and it's hard to spend. You can get a half-litre of beer in a bar in the centre for about £1.30 and a plate of food for the same price. I bought the best spoon ever for about a fiver. No, really. It's a great spoon.
 

The important stuff

So, what about the food and drink?


Well, with so little to do we spent quite a lot of time eating and drinking, and I noticed some similarities to Lithuania and Estonia, both of which I've previously visited. 

Grey peas; Steak with liquor

The national dish is grey peas, which thankfully aren't like peas as we know them, but a sort of cross between split peas and black-eyed beans, cooked with onion and bacon. It's not unpleasant and widely available (for a couple of quid).

What was unpleasant, however, was lunch on our first day. Somehow we seemed to find ourselves in a workers cafe in the basement of some government offices and not knowing about the food, just pointed to something behind the glass which we ascertained was a sort of potato pancake with meat inside.

The 'meat' was some kind of reconstituted pulp, almost entirely unseasoned apart from the sour cream which they seem to serve with everything in this part of the world. Maybe it was pink slime? I couldn't eat much of it without gagging, whatever it was.

Oh for some beer to cleanse my mouth...

Riga has a brewpub, Lido, located in some suburban shopping mall away from the old town that we didn't get to visit, but their beers are available fairly widely, and their old town outpost, Alus Seta offered an opportunity to try the closest thing to proper beer in the area (and some grey peas!)

This lot cost about £2.80

As expected, it's nothing to write home about. I tried their regular light lager, a honey beer which was a bit more interesting, and an amber which was darker and maltier. All of it was very fizzy and none of it was particularly hoppy.

Alus Seta is also well known for it's traditional Latvian food, though slightly disconcertingly, you have to queue up, canteen-style, with a tray and point to everything you want.

Suck it and see

Again we didn't know exactly what we were getting, but most of the stuff here was indeed very good. Skewers of moist chicken, garlic roast potatoes, thick garlic-infused steak with a parsley sauce a bit like the 'liquor' dispensed by our very own pie'n'mash shops. 

Clearly if you choose the right thing, there is some tasty food to be had here.

Garlic Bread? Garlic? Bread? Queens?

While some of the food can be bland, garlic features heavily and, as is common in this region, the garlic bread is something rather special - black rye bread deep fried in thin slices, probably in garlic-infused oil, and liberally coated with smushed garlic. 

Served with blue cheese sauce in the Queens pub, they were particularly good, though perhaps not the healthiest snack ever.


There was unfiltered wheat beer on here (passable), as well as Latvian 'Kiss' cider, which is a lot like the Scandinavian ciders that have taken off over here in recent years - horribly, horribly sweet and synthetic-tasting.

But as we were staying for a few (and some vodka, balsam and cream liquers) we were able to eat our way through the food menu, which was at odds with the 'English pub' theme.

After the garlic bread, smoky hunters sausages and slow-roasted pork belly in chilli were good accompaniments for an afternoon's drinking before we had to catch the plane home, and if I'd known how long and manky the journey home would be (we didn't get back until 2:30 AM) I'd have had more to drink!

'City of contrasts' is a cliche that's been done to death, but it's probably a fair reflection on Riga. Some of the food was very tasty, but there's not a lot to see or do (a 35 minute ride on a little cart seems to cover everything) and there are other, more interesting parts of the former USSR. Like Ukraine. And Estonia.

Am I glad I've been? Yes.

Was it a good birthday present? Yes. Thank you, Mrs B-V.

Would I want to go back, or go through the experience again? Fuck, no!

B-V on (whistle-stop) Tour

Question: How many of you have eaten or drank in four different countries in the same day? Possibly not many.

I have, obviously, or I wouldn't be asking. I don’t think I’d managed more than two in a day until last week, and certainly didn’t intend to achieve this unlikely feat. It just sorta happened.

And here’s how:

With a few days to kill and an impulsive desire to visit a part of the world I hadn’t hitherto seen, I booked us a last-minute trip to the Cote d’Azur. Just one night, but two long days – plenty of time to explore the region and enjoy some top-notch food.

Chicken in Kiev

One of the reasons I've not blogged recently - in addition to my unadulterated laziness, obviously - is that we've been off to Eastern Europe once again - this time to Ukraine.

If you're into ghost towns and urban exploration the reason for visiting this part of the former USSR is fairly obvious - to see the remains of Chernobyl and Pripyat inside the Exclusion Zone.

While the Ukranian government officially don't allow tourism, meaning that any excursions there are spuriously designated as scientific or ecological visits, it's a hotbet of urbex tourism, and not hard to see why - as ghost towns go, Pripyat is unprecedentedly spectacular.

 Not pleasant

The same can't be said of the food there - the only place for visitors to dine within the 19 mile exclusion zone is the cleanup site workers canteen, which has the look and feel of a prison or hospital eatery. And the charm.

The four course lunch provided - there was no choice in the matter - was substantial but fucking horrible, consisting of an indifferent, watery borscht, a squishy smoked ham salad, a disgusting fried chicken fillet with gloopy mash, and a dried fruit fritter made with potato flour and served with sour cream. Ugh.

I didn't worry all that much about the possibility of the food being radioactive because I hardly ate any of it.

The tourist office had said that we might want to take a packed lunch - despite lunch being provided. I now understand why!

The Real Deal

Fortunately, the food in Kiev, where we were staying, is rather more edible. 

 

The city even boasts three brewpubs, though the beer is decidedly lacking in variety, and consists universally of a range of lagers ranging from pale-and-tasteless to brown-and-over-malty, with the occasional wheat beer thrown in.

I was expecting more garlic

It was in one such brewpub, the Arena Beer House - modelled on American style bars with exposed brewing equipment and multiple  screens broadcasting sports - that Mrs B-V got to sample a genuine Chicken Kiev. Or Kyiv. Or Київ.

The fact that words can be written in any one of three ways - Westernised, Ukranian spelling / International alphabet, and Ukrainian spelling / Cyrillic alphabet - makes it incredibly hard to navigate ones way around the city, by the way, as maps and street signs all use different renditions.

Anyway, the Chicken Howeveryouspellit seems to be a dish primarily aimed at tourists who think themselves experimental but aren't, as, it has to be said, the filling was rather bland and probably less garlicy than you'd find in a Tesco's Finest Chicken Kiev.

I'd gone for the Pork neck shashlick, which bore only a passing visual resemblance to the shashlicks found in Indian restaurants, but was no less tasty. The barbecued meat was smoky, tender and full of flavour, having clearly been marinated for a very long time. 

It came up with fresh hummous, a chilli sauce, flatbread, salad and garlic and rosemary fries, and was damn good. A lot like the pork souvlaki one finds in Greece, and thoroughly recommended, should you ever go to the Arena beer house.

Shisha pipes are also surprisingly popular in the City and seem to be available in several bars, so we rounded off our meal with a tasty pipe of watermelon tobacco.

Where and What Else?

One place where we did manage to eat something deeply garlicy was the Shato brewery where you can pick from a special beer snacks menu while you drink your pale-and-tasteless or brown-and-overly-malty lager.

Ear ear

Like many former Soviet countries, deep fried black bread with smushed garlic is a speciality and this time they haven't dumbed it down for the tourists.

Crispy pigs ears were also on the menu, but were a disappointment compared to those I'd tried in Tallinn a few years ago. However, the 'peasant sausages' proved to be an agreeable blend of offal and herbs, and the fried cheese would go well with almost any beer.

You'll probably want to drink some vodka - known locally as Horilka - when you visit this part of the world - if possible go for a small obscure local producer, or homemade if you can find it. As well as being cheaper than the big name brands, these have a fresh, creamy flavour and grainy aroma and make for far better neat-drinking than the mainstream vareties that taste only of alcohol.

On the street you will find people dispensing 'Krak' an almost non-alcoholic beery drink made from bread. With it's low carbonation and frothy head, it has the look of a pint of real English bitter, with a sour edge, offset by artifical sweetening. Strange, but not unpleasant.

Oh, and right by the Mussorgsky-inspiring 'Golden gate' - which is neither golden nor a gate - there's an Italian restaurant that does an absolutely killer Osso Bucco with Parmesan mash.

Don't expect the good food in central Kiev to be cheap. While Ukraine is fairly poor, and prices in shops and from the street kiosks are low (40-50p for a half-litre bottle of water or beer) it's clear that bars and restaurants are only affordable to the wealthy elite, and prices are almost comparable with London at current exchange rates.

Tables in restaurants stand empty, while outside it's one of the most crowded cities (and certainly the most congested metro system) I've visited.

Is it worth a visit? Well, I like ticking off countries and am fascinated by ghost towns, so it was a no-brainer. The food and drink is hit and miss, but it's interesting and varied and you get to tell your friends you've been to Chernobyl!

Just remember to listen to the guy at the tourist office when he suggests taking a packed lunch!

No place like home - my Romania and Hungary-moon

Well, she didn't abandon me at the altar, nor did our plane explode on take-off whilst whisking us away on our honeymoon (both of which are things I actually worried about, being the neurotic slice of toast that I frequently am) so I've returned alive to these shores, and this blog, a married gentleman.

The second cake we cut that day!

Yes, yes, I accept your well-wishes. Gifts in the post please. Thank you.

If you like beer, champagne and curry, you'll have loved our wedding. And wedding cake too. We managed to wangle not one but two of them.

Every guest I've spoken to has remarked that the quality of the food from Premier Rouge was simply fantastic, and it was a fitting menu for a brilliant day.

Brilliant and exhausting, mind, and I don't know whose bright idea it was to book a 9 AM flight the very next morning to take us away on our honeymoon to the Far East. Of Europe.

Ro-Mania

Romania is part of Eastern Europe that really hasn’t opened up much to Anglican tourism yet, particularly in early February when it's several degrees below freezing and everywhere is covered in snow and ice. Few natives speak English, even in central Bucharest, and the ski resorts to the North, and the whole place still feels surprisingly Soviet, which all adds up to an interesting destination for honeymoonal adventures...

Traditional Romanian food isn’t exactly reknowned as one of the world’s great cuisines, and some of the stuff we ate while exploring the streets of Bucharest and castles of Transylvania was indeed pretty ropey, especially the plain fried fish dishes, and the tendency to serve gloopy polenta with almost everything.

But there were some highlights; Caru cu bere is a decent restaurant in central Bucharest, ornate and cavernous, and specialising in their native food,  and we enjoyed a couple of meals there both before and after our mini tour around the region.

March of the kitchen staff

A quite bizarre event happened there on our first night when, at 9 PM, all the waiters, chefs and everybody else working at the place suddenly downed tools and paraded around the restaurant to marching band music, while the regular diners applauded and visitors like us looked on, utterly bemused!

One of the staples of Romanian menus is the bacon and bean soup, often served in a bread bowl, though it has to be said that the bread itself was often pretty manky and perhaps not as freshly baked as it might be.

It's a pity, because soups and stews feature strongly on the menus of Romania, and some nice soft bread to mop them up would have gone down a treat. Part of the joy was the surprise when ordering a traditional Romanian stew and never knowing exactly what it would contain, though it's usually some combination of beef, pork, bacon and sometimes bits of sausage, in a tomatoey or mushroomy sauce. Which makes for perfectly acceptable food.

Also prominent are cheese and and cold meat platters, ideal for snacking on and a good accompaniment to an evening of drinking and smoking Sobranies, smoking in bars and restaurants still very much a part of life over there, of course.

The most interesting cheeses are the Blue Rocfort (the good news is that it's pretty much the same as Roquefort, and every bit as tasty) and the bark-smoked Brânza de burduf. Meat products include pigs intestine sausages, various pates, and cured lard, which lacks the heavy spicing of Northern European versions and therefore seems like a not particularly pleasant way to ingest high proportions of fat!

A little observation: Chicken is almost non-existent on Romanian menus, with the notable exception of their livers which are widely available - sauteéd, deep-fried, and served as a thin paté with cheeses and salads - which rather makes you wonder what they do with the remainder of the creatures!

We froze our cocks off

Pretty, but chilly

The Ice Hotel at Balea Lake seemed like a nice Romantic idea for a honeymoon at the time, but the reality is that it’s extremely cold and once you’ve got over the novelty of everything being made from ice, and half-way up an inescapable mountainside, there really isn’t a whole lot to do, other than go inside the non-Ice hotel owned by the same people to eat, drink and warm up.  



We were the only people staying, and thank God we were only spending one night of the tour there!

Outside of the vaguely happening Bucharest, their food is, for the most part, rather bland and indifferent, though the hot smoked sausage did the job when it was cold outside, which was all the time, and I experienced for the first time, the surprising joys of Rum Tea, which is, as one might expect, just hot black tea with a tot of rum in it.

Smoky and Sausagey

But leaving the Ice Hotel behind was a relief, and Romania itself isn't a place we'd hurry back to, though it was a brilliant experience.

It's not really a country for serious drinking. The nation's domestic beer is largely limited to a few brands (Silva, Ursus and Ciuc are the most widespread) and these are brewed by multinationals anyway. Go for the porterish 'dark' or 'black' versions if you can, or Ciuc unfiltered as these have more flavour than the fizzy pale lagers.

Around Bran Castle, home to Vlad Dracule, you can buy 'Transylvanian' wine, only it's actually imported from neighbouring Bulgaria, which is probably a good thing, but it's not a Romanian thing.


Fly Malev

Incidentally, my fear of flying notwithstanding, if you’re planning on going somewhere in Europe and using Budapest as a hub, you can do a lot worse than flying Malev Hungarian Airlines.

No, really.

Zero queuing time for check-in and baggage-drop at every stage of the journey meant more time spent eating and drinking before the flight, and that’s got to be a good thing.

(If you do fly Malev, be sure to choose the ‘peanuts’ snack option on the plane rather than the ‘chocolate’, which turned out to be a gruesome Hungarian wafer thing, like an old stale Taxi or Blue Riband bar, thinly coated in dark cooking chocolate!)

Hungry in Hungary?

So, anyway, having survived the Arctic conditions in Romania, and been wise enough to eschew 'chocolate' in favour of peanuts on the flight this time, we stopped off in Budapest for a couple of nights on the way back and found it an altogether more Westernised and civilised place – with the possible exemption of Memento Park which is just, well, weird!

At a mere one degree below freezing and with no snow on the ground, Hungary is a tropical paradise compared to Romania. We found a couple of restaurants near our hotel which were outstanding, and though I have no Hungarian benchmark to compare them against, never having been to the country before, I’d highly recommend both

It’s worth noting that prices in Budapest are close to those in London, whereas Romania is still quite reminiscent of the golden days when everything in Eastern Europe cost peanuts to us – you can have a beer in a bar for little more than one of the King’s pounds, and substantial main dishes in restaurants are about £4. But the food in Budapest was also vastly superior and worth the price differential, it has to be said, and Hungarian portions are notably larger to boot.

Arany Bárány (the Golden Sheep) is a cosy and intimate place, classy and unassuming, apart from the resident fiddler who assumes that you’ll buy his CD if he serenades you for long enough.

(Which we did, largely because I tried to catch him out by asking him to play Bartók then Lizst then Kodály, which he did, and I couldn’t think of any more Hungarian composers after that!)

The food seems to be pretty authentic and traditional Hungarian and damn good at that. As in Romania, they’re big on soups, and I had to try a genuine goulash, which was thinner, soupier and more startery than I expected, but with a good hit of paprika. Mrs. Ben Viveur’s pheasant and quails egg soup was meaty and flavoursome too.

Arany Bárány’s main courses, at least the ones that we sampled, are superb too. The stag stew with potato doughnuts was less gamey than one might expect; rich and flavoursome with the meat oh so tender.

Rustic lamb dishes are the speciality of the house, and my meatballs stuffed with Ewes’ cheese were gooey and well spiced, almost kofte-like, with a hearty tomato and onion sauce, rice and a few slices of fresh orange.

Given these generous platefuls we really needn’t have ordered the side of rosemary potatoes, but they were so perfectly cooked and seasoned, we’re glad that we did.

As if things couldn’t get any better, the chocolate crepe dessert was incredible – with an intense, dark cocoa sauce on top, and a moussy hazelnut butter filling inside the pancake.

All in all, one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten, and that’s high praise indeed from me.

Boom & Brass

Of course, the temptation was go right back to Arany Bárány again the following night – our last in Budapest – but there are so many other places to try in this delicious world of ours and only so many evenings in which to try them.

A big fuck-off pan of Hungarian meat

Just a few minutes walk away, right by Vorosmarty Ter. Station on Budapest’s historic first metro line, is Boom & Brass, a thoroughly modern brasserie offering a contemporary take on traditional Hungarian cuisine.

This was perhaps the silver or bronze to the previous evening’s Golden Sheep, but the food was good nonetheless.

The fish goulash offered an interesting twist on Hungary’s national dish, and their garlic spinach was a scrummy side, but the real talking point was the conspicuously huge set plate for two, which included duck leg, pork medallions, various skewers of meat, and velvety, melt-in-the-mouth duck foie grois, along with whole roast potatoes and a medley of vegetables, all presented in a giant pan.

Deeply satisfying, all of it, and proof surely that there are many worse places in the world to eat out than Budapest.

If you really must, you can even round off your meal with a small glass of Unicum (and, trust me, you’ll only want a small glass) which purports to be Hungary’s national drink. An astringent, herbal concoction, it’s almost revolting enough to make your palette forget how delicious the dinner was. Almost.

We brought some back as a souvenir, just so people would think we had a less enjoyable honeymoon than we actually did!

And so, it’s back to real world, and my new life as a married Ben Viveur. Now, if you’ll excuse me, this has been a long, long post, and I suspect it’s time to go and prepare some pancetta and sweet pepper linguine for my wife. Coming, dear...