Eating in Kathmandu

                My favorite city in the world for eating is Kathmandu Nepal. This is probably not the city most people would expect me to name when one considers cities like New York, Paris, Rome, or even my hometown of Columbus. Unfortunately, I did not take any pictures of food when I was in the city, and as much as I’d like to, I can’t fly there to make up for it, so I will settle for describing it.  

                Nepali and Indian food are in themselves quite good, and should be sampled first by anyone who visits Nepal. Most Nepali meals consist of rice with dal (lentils) and a few vegetables like potatoes, green beans, and others. Madison, Wisconsin is the only city where I’ve found a Nepali restaurant in America, but there are probably others. Several years after I traveled to Nepal, I spent a summer in Madison studying Hindi and Urdu. I ate in that Nepali restaurant quite a few times and it brought back good memories.  A picture of the restaurant is included.

Chinese food like spring rolls are also common to Nepal, which isn’t surprising. What is surprising is the large variety of western foods to be found there. Kathmandu is a city that has for long attracted world travelers, adventurers, and hippies, and some stayed there. Unlike, India, the Nepalis learned to make aged cheese, which was different from the unaged panir that is used in India. I believe they learned the art of cheese making from the Danish. This accomplishment, more than any other, has made Kathmandu a culinary paradise for the world traveler. I had been in southeast and south Asia for several months before going to Kathmandu, so I was very much in the mood for some western dishes. I had a wonderful water buffalo steak there that I’ve always compared to other great steaks of my life (see my post on kangaroo). I also had one of the best lasagnas of my life there, as well as a great mousaka, a burrito, and several great pizzas. I believe things have changed since then, but in the 80’s the only kind of pizza one could get in India were chapattis with panir and sauce on them, which does not actually earn the name pizza. There were only 3 things that I missed about America during my 2 stays there. Classical music, hot baths, and pizza. In Kathmandu the third item was readily available (I did buy Mozart and Bach cassettes there, but I had to borrow a walkman for just one afternoon to listen to them).  One of the happiest faces that I ever saw was on a local beggar whom a friend and I gave half a pizza that we had left over.

Kathmandu is also famous for its pie shops. During my 2 months in the Kathmandu area I ate banana cream, chocolate, and apple pies to name a few. Again, I’d recommend getting to know the local cuisine first, but the rest shouldn’t be missed either. They are still Nepali businesses even if the food is not Nepali.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to that beautiful area of the world. I’m sure that there have been many changes, but hopefully McDonalds and Burger King have not invaded Kathmandu. 

Creole Food at Creole Kitchen in Columbus

                Columbus, Ohio is one of the best cities in America for restaurants. I’ve lived in the New York area, Washington, Boston, Miami, and have been in virtually every major city in the country, so I am making that statement based on experience and knowledge, not hometown pride. The variety of ethnic restaurants is astounding, and these include Italian, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Greek, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Ethiopian, Somali, West African, Iranian, Afghani, Indonesian, and Cajun, but the list goes on. The latter is what I want to discuss here.

                Cajun and Creole food is probably my favorite in all the world. I do like French food and cook it rather well, but no offense to the French, I think that the Cajuns of Louisiana did them one better. After working 5 New Orleans Mardi Gras and other festivals in the state selling concessions and novelties, selling flowers from a stand in Harahan, and working on an offshore oil boat out of New Iberia (the original Cajun settlement), I got to eat a great deal of this delicious food.

                A short while ago I found a coupon for a restaurant in Columbus called The Creole Kitchen and headed straight for it hoping to find some real Creole food. I was not disappointed. The menu included many wonderful entrees that one would expect from a Creole restaurant, such crawfish etouffee, jambalaya, red beans and rice, gator, fish and oyster poor boys, and a wide range of other delicacies. I had a special craving for a muffuletta before going there. When I lived in Harahan, a suburb of New Orleans, I lived across the street from a muffuletta shop and ate there often. It had been almost 30 years since I had eaten one and I was excited to find them on the menu. A muffuletta is a round toasted sandwich with meat and a special salad containing lots of olives. The muffuletta that I ordered, called a Toni Po Boy, was extraordinary. It included chicken, crawfish, and shrimp in addition to the muffuletta, and it took 2 days to eat. My companions had sea food fettucini, oyster and fish poor boys, and we all  sampled the gumbo. All of it was fantastic and was as good as any restaurant in Louisiana in which I have eaten, and better than most.  I make a very good gumbo myself, which I’ll write about in the future.  I won’t make any comparisons here with my own gumbo, but I will say that the cooks definitely know their stuff.

                The seating is limited at The Creole Kitchen, being more of a carryout, but the service is courteous and quite friendly. In fact, we were treated like family and will be returning as often as we can.  I will be writing about other Cajun and Creole dishes in the future that I make myself.

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Kangaroo with Chocolate Sauce

I’ll begin with a kangaroo dish. Here in America and just about anywhere else in the world, kangaroo is considered to be a very exotic meat. In Australia, of course, there is nothing at all exotic about this all too common native of that continent. There is nothing exotic about its taste. Kangaroo has a delicious rich red meat with virtually no fat. My first encounter with kangaroo was a couple of grilled steaks. My wife still describes it as the best steak that she ever had. I had a water buffalo steak in Kathmandu that I might have enjoyed more, but that may have been influenced by having had nothing but Indian and Southeast Asian food for several months prior. Venison backstraps compare, but probably the closest steaks that I have had to kangaroo steaks were ostrich steaks. I’m not sure which were better. I will be talking more about ostrich in later posts.

My first dish with kangaroo was Kangaroo in Chocolate Sauce. I used a rabbit recipe from 1001 Foods to Die For, which I modified a bit as I usually do. All good cooks, like Jazz, Baroque and Classical era musicians, should be able to improvise, but the recipe itself is below. There is no reason to equate kangaroo with rabbit. Both are pests to farmers that hop, but the comparison stops there. The meat of neither domestic nor wild rabbits, which are rodents, is closer to chicken while the meat of the marsupial is closer to ostrich or venison. Nevertheless, I wanted to try the rabbit recipe, and not having a rabbit, I used a kangaroo. It worked out wonderfully. Other kangaroo dishes will be presented in later posts.

Unless, you live in Australia, the biggest problem with preparing kangaroo is finding kangaroo. We found ours at Jungle Jim’s in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s not cheap meat, but it is not outrageously expensive either.  We have bought both steaks and ground kangaroo there and look forward to our next trip there. It is quite a remarkable store that I will be bringing up quite often in the future.