Venezuela

Arepa & Co
Boiler House Food Hall
Truman Brewery, Brick Lane
Sundays 10am-5pm

In the summer of 2003, I told my then-girlfriend I'd very much like to meet a Venezuelan. It seemed like a random utterance at the time, but being a determined sort it was only three months before I had a nice young man from Caracas living on my bedroom floor. If I hadn't been living with my parents at the time it wouldn't have been a problem.

He had been in the UK on a work trip and had decided to skip the flight home, fearing a civil war. In enthusiastic Spanglish, he told me all about the history of puppetry and physical theatre, the political situation in Venezuela, a bizarre new sport he'd invented called Fireball (like Dodgeball with an actual ball of fire) and how he was going to get it in the Olympics, and how he missed arepas, the national dish of his homeland.

Arepa & Co are the only people selling Venezuelan food in London. This, they said, is because it's bloody time-consuming to make the cornbread properly. I can't vouch for these arepas' authenticity, but I thought they were fantastic, like a carnitas burrito substituting a tortilla for a sweet, flaky cornbread pitta. Black beans, grated cheese and lots of spicy, juicy pork - delicious. The Hungarian CouchSurfer I was hosting, photographed here dutifully holding my tasty arepa, realised she'd made a big mistake ordering the Chinese dumplings.

I wondered what had become of the man who used to sleep on my floor. The last time I saw him was in September 2003 at Victoria train station. His girlfriend had flown from Caracas to Amsterdam and then taken the ferry to Harwich so she could hop on the train to London. My friend was going to propose to her at the station and they were going to live happily ever after in the UK. He was carrying the ring in his pocket. But she never made it past UK border control.

He took the first train to Holland the following morning to be with her. I was so sad for them. And I was pretty sad for myself. I'd been told she made one hell of an arepa.

Hungary

Toldi Catering

Brunswick Food Market

Saturdays, 11am-5pm

I didn't think I was going to find authentic Hungarian food in London. Several people had warned me that the Gay Hussar, once considered one of the greatest Hungarian restaurants in the world, was utterly cack. London's other Hungarian eatery, Louis Hungarian Patisserie, is a) Polish, and b) closed until further notice, which is enough to rule it out.

The food market at Brunswick Place was a pleasant surprise. Toldi is the stall with a bogrács (cauldron) hanging from a tripod, full of brown splattered stuff. It's goulash, and it's awfully good. It was served it on tarhonya, a chunky egg pasta, and with a helping of salad. It was really tasty.

I asked the owner what the key to a good goulash is. "It's a closely-held secret," he told me, before conceding that "it's all down to the paprika". So now we know.

Malaysia (Peranakan)

NP Star
Pacific Plaza
Wembley Park Retail Park

I'm thankful the Pacific Plaza's food court was almost empty. Anybody who saw me eat would have witnessed quite a spectacle. Earlier in the day, I'd injured my back attempting a ridiculous squash shot. For the first few hours, the damage seemed insignificant, but somehow the act of going to Zone 4, sitting down and eating curry laksa triggered waves of intense pain.

At this point the laksa did what laksa's paid to do and the double trouble of steam and chilli had me sweating like an Englishman. I removed my coat and my jumper, and reached for my bag to take photos of the food, the whole time clutching the left side of my lower-back, grimacing and sweating torrentially. I hobbled down Wembley Way afterwards.

If this had been a duff meal, I would have left traumatised. But the curry laksa from the unassuming NP Star stall was delicious. Before I gave it a good stir, the broth resembled a lava lamp in miniature. Yellow bubbles and red bubbles, forming and fusing. Coconut milk and chilli. Fire and ice. Yin and yang. Slices of slippery fish cake, straggly coriander, soft and supple king prawns, and brown strips of puffy tofu that absorbed the broth and - bang! - exploded upon contact with the teeth.

Fireworks in the sky. A sweaty forehead. Muscle spasms. Ouch. Yum. Ouch. Where's the ibuprofen?

Two tables away, a middle-aged Chinese woman shielded her child's eyes from the sweaty paraplegic strip-show.

Slovakia

Czech and Slovak House
West Hampstead
74 West End Lane

020 7372 1193

Wonderful and miserable in equal measures, Czech and Slovak House is communist to the core. We were led into an empty restaurant, reminiscent of crap embassy waiting rooms and dilapidated seaside B&Bs. "I feel like we're about to eat a hotel breakfast," my friend said.

On the wall are pictures of Vaclav Havel, the Queen, some Pope and that's your lot. In the next room hangs a large map of Slovakia and nothing else. The first page of the menu inexplicably features a cartoon-chef-child molester with half a tie, a monster's hand, a scarred forehead and flapping rabbit's ears made of burnt skin. We would proceed with caution.

Our waiter assured us that Czech and Slovak food are exactly the same, but my research suggested otherwise. Halusky is the Slovak national dish - not much of a hit in the Czech Republic, but a number one chart-topper since forever in Slovakia and in big letters at the top of the menu here.

It's a remarkably unsophisticated piece of work: a yellowy-white stodge, copious in carbs, positively Molvanian, guaranteeing obesity in 30 minutes or your money back. It combined Spam-like smoked sausage with a vast quantity of bryndna (sheep's cheese) and tiny potato dumplings like miniature gnocchi. I liked it, and felt guilty immediately.

We shared an outrageously indulgent starter of fried bread with melted cheese and garlic, a gut-tormenting classic. Oh, the deliciousness. And we enjoyed our main courses, too. We had half a portion of wild boar with cheese sauce and dumplings, and half a portion of roast pork with sauerkraut and dumplings. Czech/Slovak dumplings, we discovered, are what we know as bread. It was comfort food at its most comforting, and the pilsner is cheap, froth-topped and excellent.

This place is unashamedly retro, a Soviet bloc time-warp. I love it. And I've still got here to Czech out. Sorry.

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.