18 NOVEMBER 1972, Page 28

International

Eating around

George Gale

I am an undiscriminating, if not exactly promiscuous, eater. By this I mean that I tend to eat whatever happens to be around and available. My root advice, after twenty or so years' experience in many parts of the world, is to eat and (if necessary) smoke local, but to drink international, except where the international drink happens to be local, in which case eat and drink local if you can. The difficulty about this last piece of advice is Scotland, where it is easy enough to drink local, but practically impossible to eat at all. There are one of two fishing hotels up in the farthest north of that lovely country which I recall with affection at Inchnadamph and, particularly, the Cape Wrath Hotel but as a general rule, Scotland exports rather than eats its best fish and game and beef. The only thing that can be depended upon in Scotland in the way of food and drink is the scotch.

Generally, if you have to eat in Scotland, eat breakfast: the Scots, like British railways and the Russians, are best at breakfasts. It is difficult to beat a breakfast of herrings in oatmeal, or kippered, but the Russians do manage to outpoint the Scots here. Caviar, followed by sturgeon in aspic, and washed down with a carafe of vodka, sets a man up wonderfully to face a Moscow winter's day. It is some years since I was last in Moscow, but when I used to go there fairly regularly I discovered that not only did the hotel have the same menu breakfast, lunch and dinner, but that several of the principal hotels all used the self-same menu. To relieve the boredom, we used to try some of the ' national ' haunts of which my favourite was a strange bar in a fruit and vegetable shop on Gorky Street, where we drank Russian champagne (and if you are going to drink champagne, which in my expert opinion is the worst of all civilised drinks, you might as well drink any old Russian rubbish) with Muscovite shoppers around us, and peasants selling vegetables out of string bags, and people eating steaming ice-cream. It was bizarre, not unlike drinking draught champagne in Yates' Wine Bar in Blackpool during a party conference.

There will be those who, noting my phrase 'in my expert opinion' will at once conclude that I am a charlatan. Let me put them right. I am not an expert on any particular hind of drink or food. What I am is an expert all-rounder, a professional amateur, and I assert my qualifications, which are entirely those of experience. Thus, it is my experience that Chinese food is better inside than outside China. I have had some of the best meals of my life in Peking. Chinese banquet food is incomparably the world's prettiest, all dressed up with paper flowers and the like. On one occasion in the summer of 1954, in honour of Clem Attlee and a Labour Party

delegation, they stage-managed a banquet so perfectly that a particular kind of lotus, which blooms only rarely, and then swiftly, bloomed as we ate; and its blooming was the pretext for another round of drinks. They are delicate eaters but coarse drinkers in China.

In this respect they are right at the other end of the scale from the Israelis who, if one is not careful, think nothing of starting an evening off with a small sherry, and leaving everybody stranded there all night. This, I hasten to add, is nothing to do with meanness but with forgetfulness. By and large, Jews do not drink much.

Thus, Jerusalem is not a place to eat and drink well in. But I have fond memories of both the goulash and the beer at Fink's, and also of bacon and eggs at the Dan hotel in Tel Aviv. This last was eventually stopped on the insistence of visiting Americans, who required that in Israel the strictest dietary regime should be observed, much to the disgust of most residents. The Middle East, generally, is rotten on food; and there are terrible dry areas. This leads me to make another generalisation, which is that food steadily declines as one travels eastwards from Italy until one gets to somewhere round about Ankara. Afterwards, although almost imperceptibly at first, it begins to improve. If one is travelling eastwards, Karachi comes as .something of a relief. Delhi a promise and Singapore a delight. The world's best rijstafel is (or was) to be had at the Cockpit Hotel on Sunday mornings. On to Hong Kong, where virtually every kind of food and drink can be bought; but continuing eastwards, the food starts to decline again.

I have seldom, if ever, eaten well in the African continent, although I have eaten memorably. When under a kind of house arrest in Bakwanga, in the Congo, during that country's least happy days, we had a stew of strange, dark meat not unlike whale, and rumour had it among the Belgian colons that it might well be Baluba. Certainly, in the market which developed in a refugee camp outside Elizabethville, as it then was, there were Chaps going around with the choicer bits of people for sale, in soggy carrier bags.

A happier meal I recall is a feast at All Souls where, for some ceremonious purpose, Or out of academic care to look after the pennies while they were blueing the Pounds, we were expected to carry our sOiled napkins across a quadrangle into the library for dessert. The candles guttered in the splendid room. We were not permitted to smoke because of the risk of fire. Later, back in the Warden's Lodging I noticed With dismay that we were expected to drink champagne, that filthy rotgut. I next Observed that Warden Sparrow, however, Was drinking what I took to be scotch and water. I remonstrated with him and he calmed me down with great grace, offering me, indeed, scotch and water. It transpired that he, in fact, was drinking dry ginger. His behaviour was thus, indeed noble. I forget about the food; but I am sure that at All Souls, as at every other Oxford or Cambridge college where I have been a guest on a feast day, there was too much and It went on too long. The greed of dons on the guzzle never fails to astound me.