What food do you miss when you're away from home?

For some Australians, 30 miles really isn't far. I have some friends who have to drive 30 miles to get to the nearest shop. Their closest town - 15 miles from home - has 39 people and a pub. And another friend has been working on a project where his nearest shop is 200 miles away.

I find Brisbane a bit of a food desert, I must say. But we have two really good fish and chip shops within 5 miles. There are other places where the fish is OK but the chips are a bit too french-fry like for me.

Yeah, I had some good curries in Bradford when I was at uni in Leeds. But Leeds itself was extremely good for curry too. The only place I've been that comes close to West Yorkshire for curry is one building, Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong: the building was apparently condemned 30 years ago, but it's still there, and it has dozens of restaurants serving the best Indian, Nepalese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi food outside of Yorkshire.

I had some very nice curries in Sri Lanka too.

 

Yes. "You are in the process of eating something dry and tasteless", or "Try this paper - it's nicer than the cookie" would both be good messages.

 

Blade Runner would be right. Here are some photos.











The place is a dump. But the food is excellent.

Some of my local friends who liked Indian food (most of them people who had studied or worked in Britain and developed a taste for it there) would come with me for dinner, but only on condition that I didn't tell their parents: it was such a notorious building that parents would go ballistic if they found out their adult kids had been in there.

There's a good article at BBC News - Chungking Mansions: Inside Hong Kong's favourite 'ghetto'.

 

Nine years, eight months and four days. Is that a record for a gap from one post to the next in a thread?

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Gosh, I'm getting nostalgic for the old names in here. hyo silver and GrumpyCabbie were very active for a long time, and were a pleasure to read.

 

I think there are pigs who would argue that the best use of a pork shoulder is stopping a pig's front leg from falling off. But this definitely sounds like a strong contender for the second-best use.

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Where are you travelling? Any good food options there?

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My kids have got very into British food. Some is easy enough to get here, but they both yearn for steak pudding, something you can really only get within about 15 miles of my parents' house. The rest of Britain does steak and kidney pudding, but (a) it contains kidney and (b) the suet pastry just isn't the same as a proper Lancashire steak pudding.

 

Gosh, that is impressive. We're almost back to Gen I Priuses there.

 

If I remember correctly, you've spent your time in the South of England. They can't cook. Now the North of England, and Scotland, have all sorts of excellent delicacies.

Forgive me if I'm repeating myself here....

My Dad worked in Kent for a while, South East of London. He'd stay there Monday to Friday, and come home at weekends. He's a good cook, but he couldn't be bothered to cook just for himself, so he would go out for food. He could not find good food in Kent. Even foreign food - Italian, Mexican, French and Indian - was bland, because the locals were strongly opposed to such things as herbs and spices.

Fortunately, there was Le Shuttle. It's a drive-on-drive-off train connecting Kent with Northern France through the Channel Tunnel. You drive you car onto the train in England, sit in your car for 20 minutes, and then drive off in France. They had a special deal for a while where if you could show you lived locally (in Kent), if you went after 6pm it only cost £1 (about US$1.20) for a return ticket.

The food in the South of England was so bad that my Dad would just go to France every night for dinner.

 

Well done for educating them. When I'm travelling abroad for work, there are few things better than a local (or in your case at least someone from the right country) taking me out for a really good local meal. Not fancy; just good. I'm sure they loved it.

And the blackberry milkshake sounds spectacular. Blackberry anything is good, really. Except the phones. When I was a kid, our house backed on to a forest full of wild blackberry bushes. We'd pick huge amounts every September, and they were fantastic.