Somalia

Blue Ocean Restaurant

358 Uxbridge Road

Shepherd's Bush

020 8765 6354

I am no longer a vegan. I lasted precisely one month.

At first my body, unaccustomed to so many beans and pulses, rebelled in painful and occasionally antisocial ways. By the end of the second week I felt good, and after 25 days I had a minor epiphany - there was nothing dead inside me. I was completely alive. Alive, but so damn tired of falafel and bean salads.

One reason the veganism had to end was this blog. I flirted with the idea of running vegan reviews, but after dining at Pogo, a strictly vegan Hackney cafe and a "positive alternative to the unyielding dominance of mainstream capitalist culture", I decided this was a terrible idea. I could only joke about anaemic, brittle-spined, woolly jumper-wearers so many times before I became one of them. In truth, I quite liked Pogo and its revolutionary battle cries and its impressively cheesy tofu burgers, although they didn't appreciate my lame jokes - "you do accept Visa, yeah?".

I suppose I'm just a big ol' carnivore. I broke my fast with a piece of black pudding at the brilliant Euskal Etxea, a pintxos bar in Barcelona. And to prove I was no longer tempted by a herbivorous lifestyle, I went to El Vaso De Oro a couple of days later and ate this. Now the bloodthirstiness is back, I wanted to choose one of the many countries where veganism is considered a mental illness. Somalia, with its reputation for being the world's biggest basket-case, should fit the bill nicely.

Gratuitous joke: the restaurant is named Blue Ocean after the preferred workplace of most Somali males.

Blue Ocean, which has a high-quality commercial on the YouTubes, is a functional, nondescript little place serving seafood, Somalian and pasta dishes - Somalia was an Italian colony for 15 years before WWII. While I have been viewed suspiciously when attempting to visit Somali cafes in the past (one in Cricklewood wouldn't even let me in), the welcome here was very friendly.

We asked for traditional food and received a Somali salad (essentially a Greek salad with boiled egg and a sugary Thai-style chilli sauce drizzled over the feta) and two lamb dishes with unpronounceable names. The first was a roasted chop served with red peppers, mashed potato and a spicy sauce. The other was closer to a stew, with small chunks of tender meat in hot sauce. They came with rice and a pot of a fantastically fiery and deceptively white chilli paste. My freshly squeezed mango juice was a treat.

It's estimated that there are as many as 100,000 Somalis in London. It's a culture few Londoners know much about, but the food is pretty tasty and Blue Ocean's a good place to try it. Especially if you like meat.

India (Gujarat)

Indian Veg Bhelpoori House
92-93 Chapel Market
020 7833 1167

At the bottom of a wall-chart of British prime minsters it is written:
Q: What do all these prime ministers have in common?
A: They have all eaten VEGETABLES!

You can tell it was printed a while ago. As everybody knows, David Cameron only eats human skin.

The legendary – and I use that word infrequently and diligently - Indian Veg opened in 1983. I first visited in the mid-90s with my militant vegetarian father, who spent the meal loudly reciting the “quotable quotations” and excitable anti-meat propaganda writ large on every inch of wall space. These range from the obvious to the pathetically spurious:

“Vegetables keep the brain young”
“Good diets would save 70,000 lives”
“Onion bhajis can slash risk of colon cancer”
“Research shows that Indian food can be really orgasmic!!!”

If Harry had met Sally here, that scene would have been so much more believable.

After dozens of visits over the years, I'm still sexually troubled by Indian Veg's obsession with orgasms and beautiful women. This time I sit by a poster of “Indian Veg's Bengali Woman of the Year 1995” and opposite a gallery of Miss Asia's visit to the restaurant in the same year. I can't help thinking the grinning woman in the sashay and crown had expected her performance in the swimsuit round and earnest wishes for world peace would have earned her a meal that cost more than three quid. It's a juxtaposition of alarming incongruousness. There's clearly no place for pouting, preening princesses here. The interior has all the sexiness of a Ryanair plane. A shouty, vegan Ryanair plane.

“What is good enough for Miss Philippines is good enough for you!”

But is what's good enough for me good enough for Miss Philippines? I am no longer sure.

No other London restaurant is so charming and charmless at the same time. It's a place of great comedy, high principles and surreal beauty, yet it's totally devoid of atmosphere. They never play music. It's the safe haven of the silent solo diner - usually, in this part of the world, a grade-A nutbox - so all you can ever hear is the buzz of the refrigerated drinks cabinet. It's a bloody enormous drinks cabinet.

The buffet selection hasn't altered one bean in 15 years. In fact, nothing here has changed apart from the price. It's gone up by a pound, but they no longer hassle you to buy soft drinks with murderous glares. There are three types of vegetable curry, three types of rice, papadoms, bhajis, dal, raita, and a few simple salads. It's basic stuff and you get what you pay for, but I feel helplessly drawn to their evangelical devotion. The Hare Krishnas, with their funky Soho joint, seem slick, cynical and commercial by comparison.

It was while reading a particularly powerful quotation by the actress Olivia Newton-John that I decided to become a vegan. It won't be easy. I have always been a hardened omnivore. I often dream of pork knuckles. In the past, if a mob of animal rights activists had locked me in a cow's stomach to, say, punish me for recommending the foie gras at Gordon Ramsay's restaurant in Dubai in 1994, I would have chewed my way out of trouble, and enjoyed it. Now I'm a vegan I'd just curl up and wait to be returned to the earth. You'd be proud of me, Olivia.

Moldova

Amurg

579 High Road

Leytonstone

020 8556 9602

"How do you know about Moldova?" asked the waiter, a young man from Chisinau.

We barely know a thing about Moldova, we confessed.

"But how did you hear about Moldova?" He seemed surprised we'd even heard of the country, even if we couldn't remember the name of his hometown, the capital. We raised our glasses of Ursus (Romanian, I'm afraid) to one of Europe's lesser-known lands and washed down yet another forkful of polenta.

Amurg used to market itself as a Moldovan restaurant but nobody went. These days it calls itself a Romanian restaurant and, on our visit, two other people went - a glum-looking couple silently drinking Red Bull from cans with straws. It's hardly a date restaurant. It reminded me of the bar at the airport Premier Inn.

As it wasn't Friday, when a Moldovan pop band performs live ("We just sacked the Romanian band," we were cheerily informed), entertainment came from a music channel with an unfortunate focus on R&B. On more than a couple of occasions I zoned out of our conversation about Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and ogled close-ups of thoroughly shaken female booty.

There are two Moldovan main courses on the menu and we greedily ate them both. But first we ploughed through two exemplary specimens of Romanian stodge. The Transylvanian bulz (pictured) is a lump of polenta topped with a runny fried egg and a pond of sheep's cheese, with three further squirts of fromage and some jauntily-angled bacon flaps on the side. It looked like an idiot's attempt to draw the sun. We also had the misleadingly-named "aubergine caviar", an unluxurious but moderately tasty dip served with unsightly slices of cheapo toast.

The tochitură moldovenească (Moldovan stew to any non-Romanian speakers out there), a garlicky mix of pork and spicy sausage, was served with another slab of cheesy polenta. The other dish, cabbage stuffed with minced pork, was more subtle, a rustic take on the Turkish dolma. Unsurprisingly, it came with a huge slab of cheesy polenta. We didn't have enough room to take on the Romanian doughnuts, which almost certainly come with cheesy polenta.

Before leaving, we spoke to our friendly waiter about his homeland.

"It's very poor and there isn't much to see," he said. "You shouldn't go there."

Shame. I like polenta.

Sri Lanka (Tamil)

Jaffna House

90 Tooting High Street

020 8672 7786

"It's the sort of meal you'd get at a bus station in Jaffna," said my friend. She was right. It was filling without being fun, cheap without being cheerful. Bus station fare.

I visited Sri Lanka in December 2005, a year after a tsunami killed 35,000 people and displaced half a million. I was tagging along with my ex, a guest of the tourist board. Every time she met a marketing manager for dinner at a posh hotel, I ate at a cheap cafe with our driver. The food was simple but delicious - no cutlery, all flavour. I recall one meal, eaten somewhere on the road from Colombo to Galle, a winding circuit of flattened houses, overturned cars and temporary tent cities. And terrifyingly bad driving. At this small roadside eatery, I pushed sambal round the plate with my fingers to mix up the flavours and textures, and almost wept when my first bite revealed psychotic levels of spiciness.

While some parts of Tooting look like they've been hit by a natural disaster*, the food here's not good enough to bring back the devilled memories. We started with two weighty deep-fried balls of dough; one made with bananas (vaaipan) and one made with onions and chilli (vadai) - they tasted similar. Pittu, a brown and white-striped blend of rice flour and coconut, resembles a Birds Eye arctic roll that's spent a week inside a vacuum cleaner. It's another dry, doughy, heavy dish, which didn't go swimmingly with vegetable kotthu (made from bread) and fried string hoppers (rice noodles) with chicken. A couple of small bowls of dal couldn't counter the fact that everything was dry and heavy, and the flavouring lacked subtlety and variety.

I've had plenty of great Sri Lankan food in the past so I have faith that the Sinhalese meal will be an improvement.

*A gratuitous joke because things were getting a little heavy. I actually love Tooting.

United States of America (New York)

Big Apple Hot Dogs

Outside 239 Old Street on weekdays (and sites including the Chatsworth Road Market at weekends)

Last night I ate something special. It was a portion of badrijiani - fried aubergine with walnut paste - served with foie gras. While at Vong, one of the best restaurants in Tbilisi, I also devoured jonjoli (a native plant) with tuna tartare and rainbow trout, khinkali gyoza and magnificent shrimp dolma. The dishes had been created by Tekuna Gachechiladze, a hugely talented local chef, and these dishes form part of her pioneering attempt to create a contemporary Georgian cuisine.

What does this have to do with hot dogs in London, you ask. The answer, apart from a tenuous New York link in the next paragraph, is almost nothing. I wanted to use this little forum to thank Tekuna and urge everybody who likes food to visit Georgia.

But this new wave feast did make me think about how you can't beat eating food in its place of origin. Tekuna wants to open a restaurant in New York, but in Manhattan you wouldn't have had the whole city instantaneously go nuts when the national football team score a last-minute winner in a Euro 2012 qualifier against Croatia. Oh, it was a great night.

No matter how good the hot dogs are at Big Apple Hot Dogs - and they're very, very good - Chatsworth Road in Clapton isn't New York. To me, New York and hot dogs just seem inseparable. In September, I ate the Recession Special here, at Sixth Avenue on Eighth. If anything, the hot dog wasn't as plump and juicy as the fine specimens on offer at Big Apple, but the setting is amplified NYC - an open-24-hours weirdo-magnet round the corner from Times Square, where $3.95 gets you two dogs and a drink, and signs behind the counter spuriously spell out the nutritional benefits of hot dogs - "good enzyme supplier helps digestion". Yeah, right.

Back in Clapton, the big dog (£3.50) is excellent - fat, firm, explosively juicy and sandwiched in a good quality bun, although it was missing grilled onions (I'm told these are usually available). French's mustard, tomato ketchup and BBQ sauce are available, and Big Apple's self-styled "sausage-meister" is a nice bloke who deserves success. The only thing missing from Big Apple, unfortunately, is New York.

India (Delhi)

Delhi Grill

21 Chapel Market

020 7278 8100

I'm going to attempt to coin a new phrase. I'm going to start talking about the New India Cuisine as if it's a real thing and see if it catches on.

In the not-so-distant past, Indian restaurateurs in London had to make a choice between pandering to the bhaji-and-beer, masala-and-farts British palate or make Indian food for Indians; all laminated menus, strip lighting and steel katoris on Formica tables. There have also, of course, been ill-advised experiments in faddish fusion (wasn't Indian tapas meant to be the food of the 21st century?), and there still exist some colonial throwbacks that unashamedly hawk Last Days of the Raj experiences to Last Night of the Proms audiences. The overrated Bombay Brasserie comes to mind.

But the New India Cuisine is different. It's not just about the food. It's about confidence, humour, pride, nostalgia and a sense of what it means to be Indian in the 21st century. When it comes to food, the NIC trio - Mooli's, Dishoom and Delhi Grill - aren't exactly ripping up the rulebook. Mooli's doesn't strive for authenticity - a mooli is essentially a burrito made with paratha or roti - but the Soho eatery is guided by the principles of good, old-fashioned Indian cooking. Dishoom takes its culinary cues from the old Irani cafes of Bombay, and the cooks at Delhi Grill are sworn to traditional recipes. They want to run a dhaba, an honest, straightforward local restaurant. And as any in-the-know Islingtonite will tell you, they're succeeding.

The India of the NIC trio isn't deferential, diluted or embarrassed. The British palate is becoming more adventurous - we can no longer order a chicken tikka masala without it feeling like an attempt at irony - and as India becomes a major global player in the 21st century, there's greater confidence in the quality of Indian goods and services. Opening an Indian restaurant in the UK is no longer something only first generation immigrants did because their options were limited. These are second- and third-gen British-Asians choosing to open Indian restaurants because they're passionate and proud of their heritage and their food.

The chaps behind these restaurants are in their twenties and their thirties. They communicate with their customers through blogs and through Twitter. While the Brick Lane bunch slowly comes to terms with the downfall of Geocities, the NIC have the sort of gorgeous websites Shoreditch design firms would be proud of. And their restaurant interiors are equally stylish; they're not shy about reclaiming Indian kitsch from the stuff of tourist board cliché, with Bollywood posters, street signs, Times of India front pages and Hindu paraphernalia creating a sense of playfulness and fun.

The food is excellent at all three NIC restaurants, but Delhi Grill might just be the strongest of the bunch. The titular dish, featuring chicken tikka, sheekh kebabs and lamb chops, was glorious. The kebabs fizzed and dazzled with a marinade of garlic, coriander and garlic; the slow-cooked chops were tender to the touch, and the chicken tikka was tastier than chicken ever has the right to be. The chicken makhani was thick, buttery and subtly spiced, while the rice and bread were spot-on. We paid £17 for two - great value for money.

All hail the New India Cuisine. You heard it here first.

* The photo was taken by Libby, whose Ravenous Libby blog is marvellous.

Argentina

Buen Ayre

Broadway Market

020 7275 9900

Revenge is sweet. Which is why my enjoyment of writing a review is more or less inversely proportional to my enjoyment of the meal I'm writing about. The most fun I've ever had writing about food was in Dubai after a meal at Baku, a pretend restaurant on Jumeirah Beach Road. My review began: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," partly because everything this Azeri served us was practically inedible (oil and tomato soup was a lowlight), but mostly because the place was probably a front for the Mafia and I was slightly scared of being killed a few days after publication. I still am.

It's a compliment to say that writing about Buen Ayre is a chore. It's a cute place, if somewhat un-Argentinian-looking, and it's staffed by friendly people. Most importantly, John Patrick Rattagan, its Irish-Argentinian chef, knows how to work the hell out of a charcoal grill. The beef and chicken empanadas are both delicious, slightly spicy starters, and £12.80 is a very fair price for a wonderful 8oz sirloin steak. Our side order, chips with garlic and parsley, were fantastic too. Only one complaint, and I can't joyously vent spleen over this - the wine and the food arrived too quickly. Slow down, amigos.

I'm bored. Let's go somewhere shit next time, eh?

England (16th-19th centuries)

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park

020 7235 2000

Being the King of England five hundred years ago must have been bloody brilliant. When the glugging of ale by the gallon demanded new lining for a bloating stomach, you could instruct your cook to make you one of those "rich men's tangerines" lifestyle magazines kept going on about, knowing you could pluck off those fake leaves, flick them into the air like confetti, and let every gluttonous bite take you to a bunga-bunga party where barely legal Tudor hotties lap-danced to a tasty tune in your multi-chinned royal cakehole. With hedonism like this on offer, it's no wonder Henry VIII was a fat fuck with five dead wives.

Thanks to famed molecule molester Heston Blumenthal, the good old days are back again, and the oligarchs, sheikhs and assorted grade-A anuses who splashed up to £140 million on One Hyde Park penthouses can now have meat fruit (£12.50), salamugundy (chicken oysters and bone marrow, £15) and other olden-daysey indulgences hand-delivered to their garish wank-parlours by hotel staff whose hourly wages wouldn't even buy them a bowl of fluffy tipsy cake (£10).

Oh, who am I kidding? As much as I'd love to be the first blogger to shit all over Heston Blumenthal's new history-themed restaurant, it wouldn't be very journalistic of me. This place is very good. Granted, it's about about as charismatic as its Knightsbridge location; the theatricality of The Fat Duck is nowhere to be seen. The open kitchen is impressive but while watching master craftsmen drizzle red wine jus onto plates with millimetrical precision is educational, Hot Wok on your local high street has the better pyrotechnics. And the smooth, efficient service and gimmick-free food - meat fruit excluded - ain't exactly Bray-style sweetbreads with headphones.

From the a la carte menu we ate meat fruit (hedonistic) and tipsy cake (fluffy) with spit-roast pineapple (fruit meat, almost), but we're not aristocracy so the rest of our meal came from the set lunch menu (£28 for three courses). I started with shredded pigs' ears, ably assisted by anchovy, onion and parsley in a stirring sauce. I then had the tenderest roast quail one could possibly ask for (and, Christ, the number of times I've asked...) with smoked parsnips and thyme, and I rounded Dinner off with the highlight of the feast, chocolate wine, which tasted exactly like wine made out of chocolate. As Heston stalked the kitchen, quietly inspecting the food being made in his name, we slowly, joyfully savoured wow-inducing Earl Grey ganaches.

It was very, very good. But it wasn't Fat Duck gosh-heck-fuck-wow-jeez-FUCK-oooooohhhhhh!!!! life-changing. But yes, it's very, very good.

India (Mumbai)

Dishoom

12 Upper St Martin's Lane

020 7420 9320

In November 1998, I forced down half a plate of hairy cow innards at the main bus station in Johur Bahru (I'd ordered beef) and promptly threw up. It wasn't a pleasant experience but I now see the silver lining. I became one of the few people to actually learn something on their gap year. I learnt the 200-yard rule.

1) Never eat within 200 yards of a major train or bus terminal.

2) Never eat within 200 yards of a major tourist attraction.

3) Never eat within 200 yards of Leicester Square.

The third clause was added in 2002 after an unsavoury incident featuring a cafe, two slices of bread, half a can of tuna, a squirt or two of mayonnaise, a slice of tomato and a piece of somebody else's nail. I'm not sure of the distance between Dishoom and Leicester Square but it's enough to arose suspicion that "London's first Bombay cafe", ranked 9th in Time Out's new Best Restaurants in London list, is not to be trusted. It quickly became clear that there was no need for concern.

According to our hosts, there are fewer than 30 Bombay cafes left in the Indian metropolis now known as Mumbai, down from almost 400 in the 1960s. There's an informative piece here about how the chaps behind Dishoom got inspired, did their research, and made sure they had the details right. It's not meant to be a faithful recreation of an Irani cafe. It's an homage, aimed subtly and sophisticatedly at both tourists and Londoners, and it's seriously good.

Dishoom gets nearly everything right. Apart from the waiter suggesting we order three or four plates each when half that amount was more than we could manage, we had no complaints. The chicken berry biryani, slow-cooked in the dum pukht style (a clay pot sealed with a dough lid) was soft and gooey and bursting with flavour, and the calamari deep-fried with chilli and lime was perfectly textured and zestily spiced. Our lamb tikka roomali roll was tasty enough, but a notch or two below those at the brilliant Mooli's. The chai, raita and nan were all solid, and the Thums Up, India's undistinguished answer to Coca-Cola (and owned by Coca-Cola) tasted awful, like something created by a SodaStream user being stingy with the syrup.

At £30 for two it's good value. I really want to try their bacon nan roll for breakfast, which I doubt appears on many menus in Bombay, while the pau bhaji (mashed spiced vegetables on buttered bread) and chilli cheese toast will have me heading back to Dishoom for seconds, measuring the distance from Leicester Square to see if my trusty old rule still applies.

Thailand (Issan)

Esarn Kheaw

314 Uxbridge Road

020 8743 8930

The pleas of the photographer have fallen on deaf ears; my deaf, alarmingly red ears, which were captured for piss-poor posterity halfway through this meal, glowing like a red-hot poker, subtle as a fire alarm. No, picture taker, I'm not uploading your side-on portrait.

This is not a website where people come to laugh at me. It's where people come to laugh with me. But apart from a vintage PR mishap on the menu (Thames Water: 50p for a glass, £1 for a jug - oh you're so friendly, little local restaurant...), an amusing conversation with a Yemeni shopkeeper on the street (Me: "Good luck getting rid of your president!" Him: "You too!"), and a spotting of Adrian "I'm An Average Bloke You'd Find Down The Pub Drinking A Pint Of Beer" Chiles down the pub drinking a pint of beer, it wasn't an evening for laughs. It was an evening for serious - and thanks to Groupon*, seriously cheap - Thai food.

My ears turned red for the following reasons, listed in order of detectability: chilli, coriander, garlic, lime, onion and fish sauce. But mostly chilli. Daintily sprinkled over the northeast-style papaya salad, the red stuff menaced my mouth receptors like a whip to a masochist's backside. I purred.

Strictly adhering to a northeast-only diet, we ordered and adored the chicken marinaded in lemon and lime juice, onion, chilli, coriander and fish sauce. Purrrrr. And despite our calculations hinting at a mark-up of over 1,600%, we loved the son-in-law eggs, and not only for the silly name (something to do with your wife's mother threatening to use your genitals instead of eggs next time she cooks if you misbehave, so careful now, chaps). The deep-fried eggs came drizzled in a garlicky, lobe-glowingly sweet and sour sauce. Crispy sundried strips of beef and a pot of sticky rice rounded off the meal. Purrrfect.

Esarn Kheaw is a great little restaurant on a road full of Dovi possibilities. Nearby there's Mr Falafel (Palestine) and his eponymous stuffed snack, Red Sea (Yemen/Somalia/other failing states), Nepalese Tandoori (clue in name) and a bunch of Middle Eastern places including Dovi veteran Abu Zaad. I'm going back to Esarn Kheaw tomorrow - another Groupon** voucher to use up. I'll be the one with the red ears.

* Can I have £6 free credit for this plug?

** And the same again for this one please.

Italy (Venice)

Polpo

41 Beak Street
020 7734 4479

Polpo is popular. We arrived at 6.20pm and waited at the bar for seats. Peeking into the restaurant, I wondered if they were hosting a speed dating event. There's a long row of tables for two, with the teeniest of gaps between each one. Every woman faced the restaurant and every man faced the wall. We were a boy and a girl not on a date, and I felt the itch to upset the collective chivalry. I sat facing the wall. I'm a sheep.

Polpo is popular because it knows what it's doing. Service is friendly and informal, the décor is dimly-lit and moody, the food is bite-sized and perfect for sharing. Date service, date décor and date food. They played pre-Teen Dream Beach House. I can't help but be impressed.

We started with cicheti, bites of crostini, croquettes and polenta mixed with chicken liver, anchovies, cheeses, figs, cured meats and various pestos. There are ten chiceti on the menu. Ten boys, ten girls, ten plates of cicheti. Sorry, I keep thinking this is a speed dating event.

Polpo is popular but its portions are small. That's how we managed to eat a plate of taleggio cheese, a fennel and endive salad, a platter of cold meats and, the star of the show, a cuttlefish risotto - and still leave a little peckish having spent £25-30 per head. But it's hard to find fault with any of the cooking.

They handed me the bill. My friend took it and paid with her card. I must have looked like a terrible, terrible man.

England (Lancashire)

Masters Super Fish

020 7928 6924

191 Waterloo Road

The biggest names in showbiz eat at Masters Super Fish. Look at the photo. See? We sat next to an autographed photograph of Danny Blue!!!!!!

I'm not shitting you. We quite possibly sat at the same table Danny Blue once sat at. Danny "Blue Comedy" Blue, the former member of the Monster Raving Loony Party. The rebel who screams "bollocks to political correctness". The patriot who knows what the REAL national dish is ("bollocks to chicken tikka masala," he possibly says). The radical comic who's not afraid to make mother-in-law jokes. The adult entertainer who's "rude but not crude". The legendary comedian who's literally shared a stage with Jim Davidson. The proud defender of the British sense of humour. The archetypal lad's lad who hosts stag shows with busty British strippers. The man who, in his immortal words, is "innocent until proven filthy". It's Danny cocking Blue!!!!

Blue, along with numerous other Cockney micro-celebrities, eats fish and chips at Masters Super Fish. And from this day onwards, so do I. For less than a tenner, we received an eminently shareable portion of fish and chips, mushy peas, bread and butter, pickled onions, gherkins and fried prawns. The cod was perfect: crunchy, crisp and ungreasy batter, and flaky, fresh fish. The chips and tartare sauce were spot on. If I hadn't been sitting opposite a lady, I would have consumed the sensational pickled onions in a undignified cutlery-free frenzy.

I love the food here, but not as much as I love everything else about Masters: the clientèle of pensioners on their ten-thousandth visit, ravenous cabbies refuelling, net-savvy tourists taking photos of mushy peas, and middle-class theatregoers incongruously sipping red wine; the yellowing newspaper clippings and dog-eared wallcharts of fish species; the David Brent poses and Alan Partridge desperation of Danny Blue and his photo-opping, arse-end of pier, Davro-worshipping Z-list pals.

I love the tragic, funny, timeless, wonderful Britishness of it all.

Oh, by the way, the first ever chips to be fried in the United Kingdom, hit oil in Oldham, Lancashire, in the 1860s.

England (Yorkshire)

Hawksmoor
11 Langley Street
020 7856 2154

It says this on the menu: "Our steaks come from Longhorn cattle that have been lovingly reared in North Yorkshire."

I'm legit with this one. I needed an excuse to briefly gush about yesterday's sensational dinner at Hawksmoor and the fact that the cows we ate were Yorkshirewomen works nicely. More to the point, I was never going to find a specialist Yorkshire pudding restaurant.

So, first came the rock oysters - sniff, slurp, smile - and then came the chips. One portion was triple-cooked for extra crispiness and the other was cooked in beef dripping for extra meatiness. Carrots and spinach dissolved on tongues like cream. The pork belly ribs were stupendously delicious. The bone marrow even more so. I split 800g of porterhouse, medium-rare, and quarter of a lobster with the bloke opposite me. Sharing is rarely such a competitive sport. We measured each other's intake while failing to regulate our own. After scoffing my 400g, I polished off a strip of chateaubriand a tablemate had incomprehensibly failed to eat. Soon afterwards, I made light work of a cornflake ice cream sundae. On nights such as this I'm a greedy bugger.

The plain-clothed staff, indie music (who knew Belle & Sebastian and meat go together so well?), open kitchens, and meaty shades of brick, oak and cast iron is perfect for the cool carnivore vibe. The food, most importantly, had me purring.

Egypt

Ali Baba

32 Ivor Place

020 7723 7474

I'm flabbergasted by today's food discovery. It's got nothing to do with the boring Egyptian restaurant described below. It's got everything to do with a Zimbabwean stall I found in Elephant & Castle. OK, they weren't selling dovi, the ceremonial peanut and chicken stew that will be eaten with a golden ladle in front of the world's media while fireworks explode in the sky at the conclusion of this project, but they could possibly make it on request - and that changes everything.

Knowing Zimbabwean food, the one cuisine I'm not permitted to eat, is available in London has given me a target. All I have to do now is eat every single one of the world's cuisines, including regional cuisines within countries, before the two blokes at Elephant & Castle market realise there's no market for Zimbabwean food in London and close the stall down. At this rate I'll be eating there in 2024.

Like Zimbabwe, Egypt's an African country that's been driven to the ground by an old dictator who just won't fucking die. Ali Baba's a likeable, family-owned place, but the food's as tired as its orientalist cliche of a name would suggest. I went there with a couple of Muslim friends for the iftar meal, the breaking of the fast. I'd eaten a big lunch. The hugely popular Arab TV show Ramadan - Live From Mecca was on the telly. It's such a ratings smash they show it on all the channels at the same time. The Libyan chap sitting next to us was lonely and pretended to have heard us talking about his home country.

"What's happened in Libya?" he asked with a jolt.

"Nothing much," I replied, pausing a few seconds for comic effect. "Although, you know, Colonel Gaddafi has just died."

He looked like a man who's just found out he's out of a well-paid job. He didn't appreciate our sense of humour. But there's so much fun to be had joking about the death of old dictators who just won't fucking die.

A voice from the TV started praying. We ate dates and supermarket flatbread dipped in tahina. We ate the infamous Egyptian carb-fest koshari (rice, lentils, pasta, fried onions, spicy tomato sauce), molokhia (jew's mallow) with chicken, bamia (lamb and okra stew) and ta'amiya (Egyptian falafel). With the exception of the falafel, which was crispily moreish, everything was underflavoured. Everything needed more oil, more garlic, more stock, more spice.

I wanted to like it. It's a no-frills, to-the-point, friendly-owned restaurant - and I've loved some of the local food I've had in Egypt - but Ali Baba just seems so staid. It's unatmospheric to the point of being oppressive and the food is bland. Bring on the dovi.

Kyrgyzstan

Kazakh Kyrgyz House

Pasha Hotel

158 Camberwell Road

020 7277 2228

"This is like being in Dubai," observed my dinner companion, who used to sit next to me in an office in that shithole. She was right. It was like a hotel in the poor part of town: neon lights and big windows, narrow corridors and red carpets, dubious-looking cosmetics on sale from reception, and a restaurant with Russian pop music and a fake plastic lake running through it. I felt right at home.

There's Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Turkish food on the menu, but we stuck to our guns and only ordered dishes you'd find in a neighbourhood restaurant in Bishkek. This included borsok, a fried doughnut made of eggs and honey and accompanied by sour cream and hummos, and a baklajanovaya ikra, a stewed aubergine dip with tomato, onion and garlic. It was the high point of the meal.

I hoped the beshbamak would contain horse, but due to the unavailablity of such exotic meats in Camberwell Green, we had to settle for beef, which arrived boiled to the point of tastelessness and floating with pasta in a nondescript broth. The lagman, a nicely spiced stab at spaghetti bolognaise, was much more interesting.

It's fair to assume that until six months ago the majority of Londoners knew nothing about Kyrgyzstan. Almost 100 deaths in demonstrations and riots opposing Kurmanbek Bakiyev's government have put the country on the map for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps, we wondered before our visit, we would unearth a brilliant cuisine that had the potential to make Kyrgyzstan famous for something other than violence. It's highly unlikely.

Guyana

Umana Yana

294 Croxted Road

Herne Hill

020 8671 8227

"Hello sweetheart!"

At least I think that's what the lady at Umana Yana said to me as I walked through the door with my earphones plugged in. It's a simple place, a takeaway with a single table by the window, but welcomes don't get much warmer.

The charming lady behind the counter, who, if the health and safety certificates on the wall are to be believed, is called Deborah, listened patiently as I expressed my delight at finding food in London from a country with a smaller population than Bristol. She then gave me a taste of everything in front of her. There was poulourie, a deep-fried split pea fritter; doubles just like those I found at Roti Joupa, and a channa dal, an Indian chick pea dish.

A week earlier at the Lambeth Country Show I'd relished a chicken and pumpkin roti wrap at the Umama Yana stall. On that occasion it had been prepared by Deborah's daughters; this time it was her son cooking soft, spongy rotis at the back of the restaurant. Again it was delicious, a blend of tender chicken breast and stewed pumpkin in what Debs unhelpfully described as "many different spices". There's certainly a blast of curry powder in there and perhaps some jerk seasoning, too.

A look at Guyana's history explains the eccentric nature of its cuisine. The Spanish, French, Dutch and British each had a go ruling the country, and between them imported African slaves, plantation workers from China, indentured labour from India, and Portuguese settlers (used by the Brits to bolster the white population). This ethnic mix has blended with a dominant Caribbean culture, and the flavours and recipes of Trinidad and Jamaica are very evident.

Umama Yana, named after an iconic thatched hut in the capital Georgetown, may not be the world's prettiest restaurant - there are no plates to be seen - but it's the only place I know of serving this great little cuisine.

United States of America

The Meatwagon

The Florence

131-133 Dulwich Road

(and other places too)

themeatwagon.co.uk

Until my first bite, I had my reservations about the Meatwagon. In spite of (or perhaps because of) its infrequent appearances in the wild, this plain white van has been cooking up a cacophony of fawning tweets and retweets and blog posts that have had me trying to wipe away the saliva from the inside of my screen. Its devoted followers willingly travel to obscure parts of the city (i.e. South London) and endure long waits before receiving their dinner. I couldn't see myself jumping on the Meatwagon bandwagon. I suspected an internet fad, a fast-food fantasy as disposable as a flash mob. I was so wrong. This is great street food, done the American way.

The thing I love most about the Meatwagon's cheeseburger with bacon is that it's not a gourmet burger. It's sold by a bloke in a van and served on a paper plate. You don't need a knife and fork to disassemble it before consumption. It doesn't come with a side salad. It is never - never! - made out of beans or tofu or lentils. You can't pay a pound extra for beetroot or blue cheese or, for shit's sake, baba ghanoush. I love being able to hold it in two hands, give it a firm squeeze, and taste the whole of the burger.

It's stacked, layered, precisely as tall as the space I can make between my upper and lower lips. The flavours reveal themselves one at a time, like those jawbreaker sweets I taunted my teeth with as a kid, but in rapid succession. The first bite releases the pheromones, a swell of blood and oil softening the bun, some dripping off the edge, giving my plate a rosy translucency. The cheese and mustard, at the top and the bottom respectively, are as American as corn dogs and root beer. Apparently it's not a Kraft Single, this sliced cheese, but to me it looks and tastes just as cheap and yellow and nasty and perfect. The mustard coalesces with the gherkins, the onions and the salty, streaky un-British bacon. As for the main attraction, the protagonist, the star of the show, well, you should read about here because Ibrahim does a much better job of describing it than I ever could. And I fear I'll win a Bad Sex In Non-Fiction award if I even tried.

Let's stop here. I can't see for the saliva on the outside of my screen.

Ecuador

El Rincon Quiteno

235 Holloway Road

020 7700 3670

It was the hottest day of the year and every pore in my body begged me not to go to a cramped eatery on Holloway Road and gorge on meat, beans, plantain and rice. But a voice inside my head decided it was necessary to paraphrase Homer Simpson.

"You don't win friends with salad, you don't win friends with salad, especially when vast quantities of meat, beans, plantain and rice are on offer from a cramped Ecuadorian caff on Holloway Road," said the voice.

My lunchtime companion, who can put away an impressive amount of meat for her small stature, ordered the fritada con mote y maduro frito, which loosely translates as pork cooked in pork fat with fried plantain. "Ask them to make one with extra pork," the voice inside my head said. I ignored him, but did make it absolutely clear to my hungry tablemate that we were doing a 50/50 split on this meal. Assured of hog-happiness, I ordered the seco de chivo con arroz (lamb in white wine sauce). We sipped head-spinningly oversweet soft drinks from Ecuador and Bolivia while waiting for the food to arrive.

El Rincon Quiteno, meaning "A Corner of Quito", fails to live up to its name - it looks like any other London caff. The dishes listed on the main blackboard are bog-standard fare such as jacket potatoes and sandwiches. Only a person with severe mental health problems would come to a place like this and order a jacket potato or a sandwich.

The fritada was as wonderful as you'd expect from a dish built from pork, pork fat and a flame. Each piece offered a perfect fusion of crispiness, juiciness, tenderness and smokiness. The token non-artery-destroying dish was also delicious, although it possibly wasn't what we ordered. It was lamb and it came with rice, and the sauce may well have contained wine, but it was suspiciously red and tomatoey for a white wine sauce. We saw no cause to complain.

After the meal, I walked out into the Highbury sun carrying a doggy bag. Saturday night at home with microwaved fried pork? Fuck yeah.

Zambia

BB's (aka Fredor)
Forest Gate, call 07947 106 429 for address

The lights were on and the sign in the window said open, but the door was firmly shut. Auntie Dorothy, who'd we read so much about on the Zambia UK message boards, was nowhere to be seen so we retreated to a Pakistani kebab shop to kill time.

An hour later, Fredor was showing signs of life. Just. Two elderly gentlemen were seated, one of them cheerfully gnawing on a lump of meat. We walked in, sat down, and glanced at the unfamiliar words on the menu. The man not holding meat handed me a phone. It was Auntie Dorothy! She was in a nearby house, she explained. And if we headed over right away she'd cook us Zambian food.

We entered the building gingerly, ambling down the hallway towards a Tardis-like surprise, a venue with a bar, dancefloor, DJ and kitchen. After chatting to Dottie, who was every bit as delightful as billed, we ordered Kenyan beer and what she said was 'Zambian Fanta' (in a retro glass bottle). She went off to cook. We never saw a menu.

At the weekends, we're told, some serious house partying goes down here. But on our visit, when we were the only customers, the atmosphere wasn't exactly electric. The Nine O'Clock News played silently on a wall-affixed screen and the DJ eschewed Zambian pop to play some of the worst music we've ever heard. Unbreak My Heart, the Muzak version, was a lowlight.

The staple of Zambian cuisine is nshima, a solid porridge-like substance made with maize flour. In Zambia they eat it three times a day. Since it's almost entirely tasteless, I'll eat it once. We also had what Auntie Dorothy called "tiny fish from a lake that's half in Zambia and half in Tanzania", which I've since worked out is whitebait from Lake Tanganyika in a spicy tomato sauce.

There was grilled beef brisket, refried beans and - how's this for a revelation? - a bowl of tasty sweet potato leaves. The most delicious dish, we agreed, was the boerewors, a spicy South African sausage that's made its way north. The only dish we didn't like was the dried fish, a bowl of bones, skin and guts, as if the fish had been filleted and the wrong pile had been thrown in the bin.

It turns out that Fredor, where we originally went, is a Zambian restaurant by day and a Barbadian restaurant by night, which means Dorothy swaps kitchens in the evening, working non-stop to give Zambians in the UK a taste of home. And at ten quid a head for a huge amount of food, she can't exactly be raking it in. Before we left, she invited me to her birthday party in early June. I'd love to go.

United States of America (Southern)

The Spot Soul Food
58 Willesden Lane
020 7372 1972

Rumours of this blog's demise are greatly exaggerated. I went to Georgia and Armenia, ate cartoonish quantities of khachapuri, and became utterly stuck in Yerevan (thanks, Eyjafjallajökull). I turned 30, went to Berlin, got the flu and spent a week feeling like crap. I took on two full-time jobs and a load of freelancing. But in between the coughing, ageing, toiling and cursing Iceland I managed to take my hungry little Norwegian brother to The Spot.

The Spot claims to be London's first soul food joint. I have little doubt that it's London's first Islamic soul food place - the menu is Halal. By opening on Willesden Lane earlier this year, it bolsters my claim that Kilburn is the centre of the universe. This place is great.

It's as no frills as can be; five tables, a few stools and a TV tuned to MTV Base. The walls are covered in colourful cartoons of a matronly mama carrying pots of gumbo and plates piled high with steaming cornbread. When the door to the kitchen opened, we saw a woman who didn't look unlike her. According to the man at the counter, she's a bona fide American from the southern states. The lady knows her mash from her mac 'n' cheese.

After a wait of nearly 20 minutes - The Spot could do with some extra help in the kitchen - our food arrived. The chicken in my gumbo had a browned, caramelised glaze and the sweet, honeyed sauce was densely packed with okra, chorizo and cornbread that crumbled at the touch of a plastic fork. I didn't have room to finish the Cajun fritters, made with saltfish in a spicy batter. The Norwegian plumped for the beef gumbo, which wasn't quite as delicious. Both portions were huge.

I can't wait to return to try their fried chicken and sweet waffles, a dish I've only had once before. My meal here, back in the heady days of summer 2001, was one I'll never forget.