Trinidad & Tobago

Roti Joupa
12 Clapham High Street
020 7627 8637

I'd long assumed the only reason I'd ever feel a compulsion to visit Clapham Common would be if I went all Ron Davies and had a moment of madness. But that was before I visited Roti Joupa.

Worldly as I may be, I'd never been to Clapham. I'd never met anybody from Clapham and I'd barely heard anybody talk about Clapham. My dining companion found this most unusual, although she seemed to find most of my utterances strange and wrote several of them down in a notepad to print as slogans on T-shirts in the future. (We never got round to discussing royalties.) "Loads of my friends live in Clapham," she insisted unconvincingly.

If I lived in Clapham, which won't happen as long as I'm in control of my own brain, I'd eat the pumpkin roti at Joupa every day. £3.50 isn't expensive, but I'd spend enough money here to put the Joupa kids through college. The roti is a flatbread that originates in India, although it's fluffier and lighter here than I've seen it at Indian restaurants. The pumpkin option was spicier and altogether livelier than the king fish roti. Both were stuffed to squirming point with curried potato.

We started our meal with doubles, Trini's most popular street food, a sandwich of chick pea curry in flatbreads. We adored the deep-fried green pea and flour balls known as poulourie (pictured) and our drinks were like nothing else we've tasted before. Mauby tastes like a cross between root beer and liqourice and sorrel is closer to hibiscus.

Clapham? Can't wait to go back.

India (Tamil Nadu)

Chennai Dosa
3 Ealing Road

020 8782 8822

I'll be straight with you. We were in Wembley for drugs. The drug we were looking for is perfectly legal. It's called qat, a leaf containing an amphetamine-like substance called cathinone. People chew it in failed states such as Somalia and Yemen.

We asked every Somali we could find where we could buy it, and were lucky not to get beaten up for racial profiling. A shopkeeper told us the address of a butcher that sold cat meat (meow!), the second sent us up a stairwell into a scary man's living room, and the third sent us to the far end of a back alley where we got sensibly nervous and ran away.

But I was more interested in the dosas than the drugs. I'd combed Wembley on Street View to find a dealer, and when I spotted Chennai Dosa on the corner of the street I went to its website, downloaded the PDF of its menu, printed it when everybody had left the office, and clogged the printer up with drool. As befits a place with a £4.99 dinner buffet, the decor is pretty much non-existent, although we did find seats under a poster celebrating the restaurant's family dosa - all six insane feet of it.

We started with vadai (£0.30 each!), the wonderfully spicy lentil and potato doughnuts eaten on Indian railways. Four puffy parcels of idly (rice and lentil cakes) came with sambar (lentil dal) and coconut chutney, while my friend's masala dosa, with its spicy symphony of potatoes and onion, was a stunner. My green chilli coriander dosa was so disappointing - no stuffing, just a sprinkling of coriander and a few chillies. I started craving drugs again.

We found our qat, by the way. A fiver a bunch. From a little shop in the Edgware Road underpass you'd never find unless you knew to look for it. The stuff tastes hideous. But give it three hours and it'll work. It'll work wonders.

Sweden

Garbo's
42 Crawford Street
020 7262 6582

I've been to Sweden once, in 1998. I was at my most penniless, but having only eaten Tesco's least finest canned fish and Value crackers for the first three days of the trip, I had £30 in my pocket for an authentic Stockholm smörgåsbord (gotta love those accents). The problem was that I couldn't find one anywhere. I was 18, supposedly at my physical peak, and I couldn't even track down a smörgåsbord in Sweden. I spent the money on a ticket for the ABBA Museum, a falafel from an Iraqi bean-hawker and a proposterously expensive pint of beer. It's a winning combo.

As I walked through the door at Garbo's, the average age of the clientele fell by 30 years, and I'm not very young any more. My grandparents, who had started their meal without me, pointed towards the smörgåsbord. At last, an authentic Swedish smörgåsbord. My first ever. I loaded pickled herring, gravadlax (cured salmon) with mustard sauce, and potato salad on to my plate with such zeal I barely noticed the 30 or so photos of Greta Garbo and, rather incongrously, a giant stuffed moose's head on the wall. A giant stuffed moose's head, a dead Swedish actress and lots of elderly Scandinavians, all as quiet as each other; the only noise to be heard the waitress screaming to her chef: "You forgot the hollandaise sauce!"

The tardy sauce perked up a lifeless piece of grilled salmon, while my grandparents didn't seemed particularly thrilled by their mains. Their kåldolmar is like a northern European answer to the Meditterranean dolma, cabbage rolls stuffed with lamb. It wasn't brilliant, but £14.95 for a smörgy, a main and a dessert (went for a boring fruit salad) is good value. The less said about the signed Fabba (the 4th best Abba tribute band, if we're being generous) poster, the better.

Taiwan

Keelung

6 Lisle Street

020 7734 8128

Keelung, a coastal city in northern Taiwan, boasts one of Asia's biggest food markets. It's a lively, bustling place, with stalls overflowing with fresh vegetables, meat and fresh seafood.

Its London namesake seems more interested in post-war popular entertainment - Cliff Richard shares wallspace with the likes of the Rat Pack, the Beatles and Dame Anna Neagle - an unanticipated theme that threatened to divert our attention from the food. But the Chilean sea bass, steamed, filleted and bristling with chilli, put us back on track.

From the "night tapas" menu we ordered deep-fried oysters, which were winningly crispy and brackish, and melt-in-the-mouth steamed crab dumplings. We were less impressed by the pork congee (a watery rice porridge) and the pork belly with bitter melon.

Prices here are reasonable, around £4 for starters and £6-8 for main courses. I hope to go back soon and try some of the other dishes on the menu.

Disclaimers

I wrote a different version of this review for Hotline, the excellent magazine of Virgin Trains

The photo is taken from the Zagat.com website. I'll remove it if you ask me to.

Addendum

2.01.10

On New Year's Eve, I went to Leong's Legends, another Taiwanese restaurant in Chinatown owned by the same company. I think it's a slightly better bet than Keelung, with a more diverse menu and lower prices. The highlight was this, the Taiwanese mini-kebab with pork belly. The xiao long bao were wonderful, too.

Turkey

Mangal

27 Stoke Newington Road

Hackney

020 7254 6999

There are dozens of Turkish places in Dalston and Stoke Newington, and many of them are called Mangal. We naturally gravitated to the mangiest, mankiest Mangal of all - a low-rent, low-fidelity, low-priced joint with a dilapidated façade and n shortage of empty tables at peak feeding time.

But I liked the fact that this was no Mehmet of all trades; Mangal's menu only offers one thing - save for a couple of ill-advised stews - and that's pide.

Pide is not Turkish pizza - that's lahmacun. It's a more substantial offering, a canoe-shaped flatbread with curved edges, cooked in a wood-fired oven. Only a third of Mangal's offerings involve cheese. Instead, lamb, chicken, spinach and sausage dominate proceedings, while green peppers and mushrooms pop up on many a pide. Everything costs £5, or £4 to take away. My ispanakli yumartali (pictured) was the pick of our pair, with spinach, onions and eggs creating a tangly topping, while the kusbasili mantarli combined lamb, mushrooms and green peppers to juicy effect.

In terms of atmosphere, there's an oven, two pictures on the wall, four tables and two blokes making the stuff from scratch. It's bare bones, and that's just fine by me.

Brazil

Amber Grill Rodizio
47 Station Road
Willesden Junction
020 8963 1588

We felt guilty. Using my Taste London card, the all-you-can-eat deal at Amber Grill costs less than a tenner. It seems unlikely they made any money from us. We did, after all, eat a lot of meat.

Amber Grill is a churrascaria, a restaurant at which customers are served meat from the churrasco barbecue until they surrender; flip the coloured chip on your table and the man walking round with the knife and the skewer will stop pestering you. This style of service is called rodizio. It's a system that favours the hungry.

We helped ourselves to a buffet laden with fried plantain, black beans, potatoes, olives, pasta and salad. But we were careful not to overindulge; we needed room for the meat, which fell to our plates with such regularity we couldn't eat quickly enough. The steak was mostly excellent. Some of the thinner, rare-cooked slices were meltingly good; other slices couldn't be chewed enough. The pork was wonderfully juicy with a thick edge of crackling.

It's not the best location and the restaurant feels a little bare, but Amber Grill offers good food and great value for money.

Afghanistan

Khorasan

20 Cricklewood Lane
020 8450 0400

So, the plan is to eat every cuisine in the world without leaving London. Due to a seemingly impassable obstacle called Andorra, I've decided against doing this alphabetically, but I'm starting with Afghan food and, perhaps around 2044, I'll end with dovi, the national dish of Zimbabwe. At the start of a great global adventure, I thought it apt to eat my first meal at the end of my road, at a fast-food joint opposite Cricklewood rail station.

Most people visit Khorasan for the pizza. We went for the pasta. Pizza is not an Afghan dish. But pasta, quite unexpectedly, is. OK, so the aashak (ravioli dumplings stuffed with chopped leeks) may not have been perfectly al dente, but it was still delicious; fresh and zesty, covered in yoghurt, garlic and lentil sauce. It's believed Marco Polo introduced pasta to the Afghans as he returned along the Silk Road from China to Italy. Good on him.

My friend and I tried to think of other countries in the region that eat pasta. The Iranians and Pakistanis eat quite different versions of falooda, although that's made with rice vermicelli, while in several of the Stans they love a bit of dumpling with their dinner. The other Afghan pasta dish on the menu, mantoo, sounds a lot like mandoo, a Chinese stuffed steamed bun and the Korean word for pasta dumplings. I'd love to get more etymological, but all I could find of Wikipedia was a dubious claim that mantoo is originally an Uzbek dish.

The other Afghan cuisine at Khorasan is the sort that makes the Taliban such a resilient enemy, a mishmash of Pakistani, Indian, Arabic and Persian food; hearty, calorific sustenance for mountain people and guerrilla fighters. Our qabeli pilau, saffron rice with carrots, raisins and a leg of lamb, was delicious.

Two-thirds of Khorasan's menu is taken up by pizzas, burgers and kebabs, so the Afghan staff perhaps get few opportunities to prepare their own food. They looked flustered when we tried to order borani banjan (baby aubergine and yoghurt dip); it seems they didn't have the ingredients.

Decor is limited to a few Qu'ranic inscriptions on the walls, and the TV is often set to the Islam Channel, which delighted my devout Muslim friend but irritated the woman sitting next to us waiting for EastEnders to start. The atmosphere is not exactly electric, but Khorasan's a good bet for authentic, straightforward Afghan food.