A To Z And Little Chefs

After the flurry of comments about the relative worth of Danish cuisine yesterday, I thought I would share with you a few more culinary insights based on my travels around the world:

a) Italian food is deeply over-rated, and based - if you are in Italy anyway - purely on how much you fancy the restaurant owner's daughter/restaurant owner's son.
b) Chinese food is absolutely appalling in China. I went to the most famous crispy duck restaurant in Beijing, and was served a blown up Daffy Duck. My dinner companion and I spent the whole evening trying to turn him around so that he was not staring at us.
c) Unlike Indian food in India, which is amazing.
d) Scottish food is terrible. Who put the ban on seasoning up north of the border? (This with a big caveat for my Auntie Jan's oatcakes which are about as close to heaven as you can get without going to Church.)
e) Vietnam? You never really know if it is eel or snake do you?
f) Thai food? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But try it for a month. There is a limit to how much lemon grass a man can be infused/enthused by. And the sausages in Northern Thailand are stupid spicy. They made a friend of mine come out in a rash, and faint.
g) Russia? I have sat in Russian restaurants and literally not been able to eat anything that is put in front of me. Russian breakfasts are staggeringly uneatable (and I mean uneatable rather than inedible). When mrs househusbandnot was living in Russia, a friend of hers was forced to drink perfume to make sure her taste buds had not died.
h) I was once offered horse tartare with a vodka sauce in Lithuania.
i) In Ethiopia I ate the best Italian meal I have ever had, followed the next day by the nastiest meal I have ever had which was served up by my mate's housecleaner's mum who I think wanted me to marry her daughter. We had to hide our mouthfuls of goat - or hyena or something - curry in our camera bags so that Mum would not be offended. Their bread product (injira sp?) looks like dirty manhole covers and tastes like soapy duvet.
j) I've not been to Australia, but Mrs Styx says they just fuck everything up by having no class. I asked for an example. "Lobster and honey sauce", she said.
k) Actually I had a lobster pizza in the West Indies once. It was the best munchies meal I have ever had.
l) Paris? Annoyingly, the food there is pretty much 100% delicious, if served by some of the least helpful people on earth.
m) In Portugal, Styx and I tried on several occasions to order a meal that was not entirely white. Which proved difficult. They don't really do the colour thing in their food there do they?
n) Indonesia? Not been there, and only ever had Indonesian food in Amsterdam. See k.
o) Spanish food is great, although mrs hhn just sent me an astronomy website which said people with my star sign are inclined to order foie gras and then complain that it is not fresh enough, which - I am ashamed to say - I did do once in a restaurant in Madrid. Great Spanish words for things like butter and soup make the Spanish eating thing fun too.
p) I was sorry to read that they are phasing out the Little Chef motorway cafes. Despite having had to suffer the ignominy of (when I was briefly at the same school as all three of my three sisters) going there with our mother to have our end of term reports read over, whereby my sisters were variously praised for their 105 out of everything reports, and I was left in the corner booth with my banana milkshake being asked to explain why my behaviour for the term had been assessed at less than a percent, I did love them. Great breakfasts, and the staff were always young kids who had just been out back smoking skunk. (Probably goes some way to explaining why they are being closed down.)
q) Denmark? We've kind of done that yesterday, but my brother in law's meatballs after a hard afternoon of chopping his wood can't be chaffed at.
r) I didn't have a McDonalds until I was 25.
s) I lived in Belgium for a year. I put on a stone and a half, and didn't even ever get around to the pancakes or frites. French food in German proportions.
t) Greek food is great. For a while I had a 'tradition' of having my birthdays at a Greek restaurant in South Kensington, where you could eat 43 different dishes, get entirely wasted on retsina, and get pulled by the restaurant owner's daughter/son for a tenner.
u) Japan? I went there when I was quite young, and (embarrassment again) spent most of the time in the Hard Rock Cafe or whatever the equivalent was in the 80s. Vinderama knows a bar in Tokyo where you can get noodles and a blow job (while you are eating those noodles) for half of a tenner.
v) I had Brazilian food in Spain recently, but it was an evening when mrs hhn and I had a terrible row, and I thought she was going to leave me, which I could not deal with on any level, ever. So will not be actively seeking out Brazilian food again, ever.
w) Best burger? The Sanderson Hotel in London. Don't be distracted by the 20 squid cocktails. A burger and beer, and you are out of there for under 15 squid.
x) When in Suffolk, I tend to eat at Restaurant Bad. Terrible service, great drinks list, excellent company, and always fresh oysters.
y) And all the half countries like Wales and Canada and Switzerland? It's just chicken and chips and some local cheese isn't it? (A half country is one where they speak more than one language, and they have more than three law enforcement agencies on the streets.)
z) Just read a headline on the front of one of mrs hhn's cooking magazines: "Freeze-ahead Beef Ragu". Why would anyone do that?