'Meal' Category
The Japanese Meal: Asakusa
As a sushi lover, I was surprised to discover a few years ago that sushi was not, until recently, a food for everyday consumption in Japan. Traditionally it would be saved for special occasions; while more popular today, it is still rarely prepared at home. This little nugget of information raised an immediate question [...]
The Ghanaian meal: The Gold Coast
Luckily, the Ghanaian menu at the Gold Coast Bar and Restaurant was completely worth an epic, rain-drenched Saturday night journey to zone six. Otherwise, I would have been in trouble. The restaurant was my suggestion. I’d found it almost at random—it was the first Google hit for “London Ghanaian restaurant”—and immediately decided we had to [...]
The Ethiopian meal: Lalibela
At university, I was fortunate enough to have a lecturer who spent nine months a year doing fieldwork in Ethiopia. In one memorable lecture, she described sharing a meal with a whole Ethiopian village—speaking not only of a rich and aromatic cuisine, but also of the fun she had dining with the whole community. [...]
Bonus meal: The British gastropub
To me, “gastropub” is almost a form of British cuisine in its own right. In my hometown of Toronto, a city of many restaurants and food snobs, I’ve been to plenty of bars that care about what they serve. But the food at London’s gastropubs, where the movement began, is unique, and uniquely British—traditional, pricier [...]
The Burmese meal: Mandalay
This will sound horrible, but it was the Burma cyclone that inspired our Burmese meal in May. I knew nothing about Burma, I realised, aside from the anger-inducing stories that had been coming out of the country for months; they were now peaking, with grim post-cyclone photographs in every paper. So when a visit [...]
The (South) Korean meal: Kaya
One of my first encounters with Korean food was the sight of a wondrous, clattering walnut-cake machine steaming up the windows of a small bakery in Toronto’s Koreatown. As a child, I had a brief fascination with food machines, drawing up blueprints for all manner of Heath Robinson contraptions—so this walnut creature made a [...]
The Swedish meal: Fika
I used to think that my only shot at eating Swedish food outside Sweden would be through a plate of lingonberry-topped Swedish meatballs consumed in the cafeteria of some suburban IKEA. So I was thrilled when Matthew announced that a Swedish café and restaurant called Fika had opened down the street from [...]
