Colombia

La Bodeguita

Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre

020 7701 9166

Apologies for the wait. I've been in Saudi Arabia among other places. There's no Saudi food in London I'm aware of, so in Riyadh I excitedly guzzled handfuls of camel kabsa (chewy chunks of prime Arabian dromedary in spicy basmati rice). The portions were so large we barely made a dent in them. And judging by the size of the lads (there wasn't a woman in sight), my Saudi companions rarely stick to salad. If I lived in Riyadh, I'd eat myself to an early grave too.

It's possibly because I'm a glutton, or because I enjoy the communal experience of eating, but I get far more pleasure from vast plates of shareable food than the dainty slithers and barely-there foams they charge the big bucks for in London. I've craved the bandeja paisa, Colombia's national dish (a speciality of Antiquia in the north of the country), since reading on Wikipedia (where else?) that you're not allowed to serve it on a normal plate. It must be served on an oversized oval dish, perhaps because bandeja means platter. My unconditional love for this evilly calorific fry-fest increased thirtyfold when I saw the link to a website called This Is Why You're Fat at the bottom of its Wiki entry. It was going to be a challenge.

It was a challenge we failed. I'd eaten a particularly well-stuffed tuna sandwich already that day and my companion is hoping to run a marathon later this year, so at La Bodeguita we meekly ordered a single bandeja paisa, a feast of beans, rice, avocado, minced beef, fried egg, plantain, pork rind and a single arepa. It wasn't sophisticated, but it was very satisfying. We also had an empanada each, a (disappointingly cold) pastry stuffed with spicy beef. Like prime losers, we couldn't even finish a meal for one.

The other guests appeared to be Colombian; there's a big South American community in Elephant & Castle. It's not the most atmospheric restaurant, but I imagine live salsa and cumbia would turn the place into a theme park. The Royal Court is staging four plays around the corner from La Bodeguita, so I'll be back four times to try the fantastic-sounding dulce de guayabo con queso (sweet guava with homemade cheese) I couldn't fathom eating on this occasion.

To celebrate La Bodeguita's success, here's the greatest moment in Colombian history.

Germany

Bavarian Beerhouse

190 City Road

0844 330 2005

Maybe it's my notorious omnivorism. Perhaps it's my lapsed Judaism. Or is my inner Neanderthal swinging a wooden club, trying to get out?

It could be something to do with the daunting fact that on Sunday morning I'm flying to Riyadh, where they'd chop off my foodhole if I attempted to smuggle in a doggy bag from my meal at the Bavarian Beerhouse. Whatever the reason, there's no denying that one of my favourite hobbies is grappling with huge lumps of pork.

When it comes to dining table dissection, I'm far happier tearing to chunks a fuck-off hulk of pig than wrestling with smaller, sillier species. The fiddling to feeding ratio on overhyped delicacies such as partridge, pigeon or crab doesn't favour the hungry - too much work is required for very little reward. Luckily, pork shanks are big and (after you've detached the roof of crackling) they don't put up much of a fight.

I've been to Germany twice in the past 18 months, and the second trip was solely to eat pork. On Berlin and Munich I hoovered up Schweinshaxe, roasted pork shank with sauerkraut and potato dumplings. And on both occasions - and I'm ashamed to admit this - the pork defeated me. As I previously mentioned, German food is big. So big, in fact, that we waited two weeks between our starter and our main courses at Bavarian Beerhouse.

On our first visit, we shared a starter platter and agreed afterwards it was all we could intestinally handle. We had obatzda, Camembert mixed with cream cheese, butter, beer and onions, as well as a sausage salad, a potato salad, a selection of Bavarian sliced meats and two pretzels. Welcome to Stodge City, Hoxton.

Our return visit, two weeks later, was more rewarding. My friend declared himself pleased with his roast pork with red cabbage, beer sauce and potato dumplings, while my Schweinshaxe, while not as perfectly cooked as the schwein I devoured in Germany, was better than I had hoped for. It was absolutely massive. I ate, ate, ate and ate, and didn't get close to finishing the thing.

To be honest, I had expected the Bavarian Beerhouse to be terrible. The cartoon on the website of a bosomy, pigtailed fräulein carrying impossible amounts of Maßkrüge had me fearing a lethal combination of leder-slapping Deutschiness and British binge drinking, all to a soundtrack of the kind of abject Schlager you see advertised at 3am on ZDF. To our surprise, it was very quiet and the service was friendly. Perhaps going at lunch was a good idea.

Tschüß!!

Syria

Abu Zaad

29 Uxbridge Road

020 8749 5107

"I'll tell you about Syrian food..."

My taxi driver paused, slowed down as he approached the red light, and turned to face me in the back seat, revelations ready to leap from his lips.

"Syrian food is much better than Lebanese food."

In 2006, there was nothing unusual about a Syrian taxi driver in Dubai having a dig at Lebanon. But this was a display of some pluckiness, to refute the perceived wisdom that Lebanese food is the champion of Arabic cuisines. I had to fly to Syria and see for myself.

With the exception of Singapore, where tears formed in my eyes every time I walked into a hawker centre, Syria was the most satisfying holiday I've ever had when it came to eating. It wasn't just the muhammara (a dip made from red peppers, walnuts, cumin and pomegranate molasses), the beetroot moutabal, the spicy breakfast foul and the awesome cherry kebabs in Aleppo. It was also the only time I've had complete strangers buy me my meals, and this happened on two separate occasions. The warmth and friendliness I experienced in Syria was inspiring. The taxi driver had been correct.

Abu Zaad lacks the warmth and friendliness of Syria, but then so does everywhere else. Less acceptably, it also lacks all four dishes mentioned above. But it's a great place for indulging my aubergine obsession, and, who knows, if I visit often enough perhaps a complete stranger will buy my meal. We ordered a mezze platter (a bargain £5) of baba ghanoush (mashed aubergine), makdous (picked baby aubergines stuffed with red peppers, walnuts and garlic) and fattoush salad. We also ordered fried kibbeh and maklouba (pictured), a dish I'd always associated with Palestine; a baked aubergine stuffed with rice, lamb, pine nuts and yoghurt. Two of us feasted for £15.

One day I'd love to see a restaurant in London serving Aleppine cuisine, so I can once again eat a cherry kebab. Until then, I'll make do with this recipe from London's only Syrian food blog.

Georgia

Little Georgia

87 Goldsmiths Row

020 7739 8154

I went on a date with a girl. She had a thing for khachapuri so we arranged to meet at Little Georgia. I'd come straight from the 2012 Olympics site. She'd come straight from a wedding. I was dressed normally. She was dressed like a Guatemalan peasant. I was sober and needed a drink. She was drunk.

We talked and talked and I asked the waitress to give us a few minutes please and then I weighed up our options while khachapuri girl told me about her travels in Georgia and then I ordered the item at the bottom of the menu called 'Everything' because we were ravenous and it seemed like a sensible idea at the time. We also ordered portions of khachapuri and lobiani (bread stuffed with beans) in case everything turned out not to be enough.

Everything included pkhali (spinach and walnut dip), a garlic and carrot salad, a potato salad, something unpronounceable made with chick peas, and other things that fall under everything's broad remit. Both everything and the two bread dishes were delicious. So tasty, in fact, that when the drunk lady force-fed me at a point in the evening when I couldn't digest another crumb, I smiled and said yum, or made noises to that effect. Or it may have been because we were getting on rather well.

I'm going to Georgia in March. When I return, I'll add some freshly-gleaned food-related information to this simplistic entry.

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.