Mem Saab Revisited

Ahem... The last time I visited Mem Saab, I complained that our meal was disturbed by a group of "raucously drunken international cricketers" at an adjacent table. It has been brought to my attention that this was in fact the England Cricket Team, fresh from a stunning victory over Australia at Trent Bridge. I am further informed that said cricket team have won something called "The Ashes" and are therfore peerless sporting heroes of the realm and definitely not "pissed-up, lager-quaffing yobs" as I may have mistakenly described them.

Inexplicably, Mem Saab managed to bounce back from this scathing review and they were packed to the doors (and even out onto the street at one point) when we arrived on Saturday night. The greeter, perhaps the manager himself for he was a distinguished-looking Asian man with a grey goatee, informed us that things were "running a little slow tonight" and that people had been "staying at their tables longer than they are supposed to." Of course another way of putting this might be to say, "sorry, we got greedy and overbooked the place" but who can blame them and the backlog cleared pretty quickly.

The food excelled once again, one of our party (who lives in London) declaring it the best curry he had ever eaten. The highlights were the dark and succulent Lamb Haryali, Goan Fish Curry in a spicy coconut sauce and an Okra Bhaji side-dish that was really superb. The place had a buzzing, civilised atmosphere with even a few Asian families amongst the diners - something which I've always assumed must be a definite seal of approval for the cooking.

After comments to this blog from "Chris" regarding "The Vegetarian Pot" on Alfreton Road, I had intended to go there instead but there was no answer when I called to reserve. Chris is right in saying that "real" Indian restaurants are always vegetarian - most of what we think of as Indian Restaurants are actually Bangladeshi and of course nobody on the sub-continent has heard of "Chicken Tikka Masala" anyway. I don't know the heritage of the Mem Saab people but they have an excellent product.

Provincial vs Provencal

I've just got back from a week in a villa in rural Provence and was reflecting on the curious inversion of the relationship between countryside and city that we experience here in the UK. City dwellers in England are apt to look down on those who live in the "sticks" and who are therefore denied the delights of culture and gastronomy afforded by the British metropolis. This goes at least double for London of course where the sticks begin anywhere outside zone 3 of the Underground.

In Provence the situation is perfectly reversed. All the rich and clever people live in the villages and regard the cities, Nice, Cannes, St. Tropez as crass and dull, crowded with tourists and tawdry celebs. Meanwhile, every village has a noticeboard advertising piano recitals by world reknown musicians, cutting-edge theatre productions and art exhibitions. And every village has its restaurants - stylish, abundantly decorated with Michelin stars and serving the best locally produced food and wine.

We stayed in a villa close to a tiny hilltop village and shopped at one local supermarket for our provisions. I counted nine different varieties of creme fraiche and thirteen different kinds of butter. The fish counter was 30 feet long and at the end of it they had a tank full of live lobsters. The cheese counter was positively stupefying - one third famous cheeses, one third that I had never heard of and a final third that nobody has ever heard of. The wines were mainly locally produced - you could see one of the vineyards from the supermarket carpark and this was a "Super U", a big national chain like Sainsbury's.

Compare this to the dire situation to be found in our rural villages or even many of our cities come to that. The Spar shop with its tinned frankfurters and flabby white buns, the Post Office with four-day-old pork pies and two kinds of cheddar cheese in plastic wraps. Then of course there is the village pub (if you are lucky) and its microwave dinners with oven chips. Ugh, where did it all go wrong?

New Orleans

It's amazing how thin the veneer of civilization is. Until this week I would have expected that little short of a nuclear holocaust could have produced the sort of collapse we have seen in the American South. And this was done by the wind?

From the BBC:

"There is rapes going on here," Africa Brumfield, 32, who was staying at the convention centre, told Reuters news agency. "Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats," she said. A National Guard soldier described a similar incident. "We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom [at the arena]," he said. "Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death."

"On Saturday more than 10,000 people were removed from flood-ravaged New Orleans. After spending days without food, water or medicines among rubbish and human waste, survivors appeared numb as they stumbled towards buses and helicopters."

You have to hope for the sake of the American people that when the big chemical/biological terrorist attack comes (and it will) that they no longer have that imbecile in the Whitehouse. Not content with reducing Iraq to a smoking ruin and a state of anarchy, now he's doing the same to his own country. The pictures make it look as though the whole American dream was just that, a dream. And now we have woken up back in Africa. Everyone is black and poor - debris and corpses everywhere, wildmen with guns roam the streets. It looks like Somalia.