Wu Wei

Trip to Batumi

Here are some highlights from our business trip to Batumi.  It rained most of the time so nothing spectacular about the beaches (big pebbles) or sitting in cafes enjoying the view.

The drive takes six hours along a reasonable road, (no motorway, and single carriageway (one lane each way) most of the way.  We had lunch in a cafe by the roadside (excellent food, nice outside seating by the river, awful toilets).  I don't know its name, but it's located where the road runs through a valley in the mountains which divide West Georgia from East Georgia.

On the way we commented on the lack of agriculture, which was a bit surprising and the lack of wild flowers, like in Greece where they would be wonderful at this time of year (or more probably dead from the heat).  But the scenery was very green (and wet) without that brooding gloominess that Bosnia (and Herzegovina) has.

Eventually we drove along the Black Sea coast from Poti, admiring the rain, and realising it was the usual British Public Holiday (wet) weather.  We checked into our hotel, Hotel David, pretty much like Hotel Hecco in Sarajevo (see post here).  12 rooms, more or less empty except for the five of us.  Good free internet, not much English and scarcely adequate breakfast.  All for an overpriced 80 dollars.  45 Euros (like Hecco) would have been reasonable.  Still, very comfortable.

For dinner we went to the Old Ship restaurant for some traditional Georgian food (we were 3 Georgians, 1 Brit and 1 Greek), and since it was Independence Day, some dancing and singing. The restaurant is in an old wooden ship, on two levels and the food was excellent.  Here was how the main course and desert were served:

    

The grilled meat, fish and mushroom pyramid of sword sized skewers was hard to dismantle.  The fruit arrangement with its swan cut from an apple was an original.

Technorati tags: Batumi, Hotel David, Hotel Hecco, Old Ship.

Preservatives free

Well that's a misleading headline if ever there was one.

As a reward for completion of another piece of work, I have allowed myself a tea break and opening a packet of stuff I grabbed in the dutyfree in Larnaca airport.  I meant them as cakes or biscuits (not sure which they really are) for the office, but they haven't got there in time.

Billed as Greek Traditional Cookies they are called Melomakarono  with honey and walnuts and they are delicious.  While I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I noticed that on the back there was no sell by date (not so unusual in Greece). Then I noticed "preservatives free" so I was expecting a disappointing taste as who knows how old they really were.

Reading the list of ingredients, I wonder which is the one which gives the special taste:

Flour, sugar, oil, semolina, honey, baking powder, soda, cognac, ammonia, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, glucose.

I assumed the cognac, until I read "ammonia".  And that's not a preservative? 

Actually the Greek says "choris syntiritika" which sounds more like "without synthetics". 

Whilst in Cyprus I was struck by how easily I manage to slip back into reading (and remembering) Greek signs even though I never learnt any Greek formally.  Perhaps there is hope for me with the Georgian alphabet.  Must do more practice.

Bolshaya Aviatika

Progress on learning the alphabet not so good but pleased to find I could read "big" ბიგ as in Big Mac, at the airport.

Christmas lights very pretty and the big freeze continues. Taxis are refusing to come when called to the hotel on the top of the hill, but the ones hired on Rustaveli manage to slither and slide their way up to deliver us home.

We went with some friends to a new restaurant called Bolshaya Aviatika, near the City Hall. We got there by directions rather than with an address so if you want to try it, go down Rustaveli past Freedom Square and straight on down the side of the City Hall. It's on the lefthand side and signposted well if you read Russian.

It is kitted out like an aeroplane inside, even with overhead lockers for your handbag, though it is somewhat wider and more comfortable to sit in. The mile high club would not find the toilet much of a challenge, as it was quite roomy.

The room is decorated with clouds, fake windows and Austrian airlines posters. Despite the Russian name the menu is in Georgian and not too bad English. The only other place I have been offered a Cold Collation is in Jane Austen. The food is Georgian (ie interesting and good), though the service is not quite clear what it is for. We were the only people in the restaurant but it was still quite hard to get attention. We went straight after work, to save going up the hill and down again, so perhaps people come later in the evening.

We heard some stories of election monitoring from our friends, but the most interesting point seemed to be the story that the opposition leader had apparently won most votes in the big towns (where disillusionment was perhaps more likely, whereas Saakashvili had won in the rural areas where he had been dishing out largesse. So how did he get such a big majority? Don't most people in Georgia live in towns? I think we should be told. No wonder Levan Gachechiladze wants to protest.

Don't have your birthday party at Fishers' restaurant in Oxford

I haven't had time to finish Part I, it needs photos, but what the hell, here is Part II.

Birthday (part II)

Last week for my birthday, Sloph and Bee took me out to Fishers, a smart fish restaurant, which we keep for special occasions, visiting grandparents etc.  This restaurant is supposedly one of the best fish restaurants in the country.  The kids tried my oysters (not really sure they were so wonderful) and then we had our individual choices for main courses.  We were having a really nice evening.  Then instead of dessert, Sloph produced a birthday cake and all hell broke loose. 

She asked politely if we could have plates and forks.  The waitress snarled and said she would have to charge us extra, what she called "cakeage".  We thought this was a bit rude, and also a bit funny as we never heard of restaurants complaining that people brought in birthday cakes, or inventing special terms for the "service".  It's not as if Fishers has any interesting desserts that we were displacing.  I've heard of "corkage" where you pay for wine glasses in cheap restaurants where you have to bring in your own wine, but "cakeage" for a birthday cake just seems silly.

We asked to see the manager.  The waitress was the manager, it seemed. She said that she would rather pay the charge herself and give us the plates and forks.  Perhaps it could have stopped there, if she had just said, "OK, as it's a birthday, we won't charge you".  But what was this "I'll pay it myself"?  Out of her wages?  Like a favour?  We didn't want a favour, we just wanted to have our cake and get on eat it.

Then we got a long lecture on company policy and how we were not allowed to bring food into the restaurant.  "Imagine what would happen if we allowed people to bring their own fish into the restaurant" we were asked.  We couldn't imagine, but she clearly had it all planned just in case, and was going to practice on us.  I asked what had ever happened to the idea that the customer was always right, and about restaurants not spoiling their customers' birthdays.

So we decided to take our cake home with us and tried to pay the bill.  But it was not going to be so easy.  Sloph had to pay by card.  Back came the manager, and instead of trying to get us out of the restaurant without further fuss, she told us how she had never had to deal with such rude people, and we had even made her cry.  Never in her 15 years as a manager had she been treated like that*.  I began to crack and said that never in my 60 years had I been treated like this in a restaurant**.

But it didn't stop there.  We didn't have time to look carefully at the bill, before she began again. "I've only charged you for the wine, which I have to do by law" she said.  But we weren't complaining about the meal, which we had enjoyed, and were quite happy to pay the full price.  And didn't charging us less admit that she had done something wrong?  Restaurants are surely entitled to give customers free meals if they want to.  Their accountant might not be very happy, but where did the law come into it?  So it wasn't really a peace offering at all, just the minimum she thought she could get away with.  We didn't spend a lot of time worrying about how to calculate the tip.

So off we went and had my Maison Blanc chocolate birthday cake at home.  As you can imagine it was not quite the birthday celebration we had planned.

Next day, I found that along with the bill, she had given us a card for the restaurant.  Some hope of us going back, I thought.  When I looked more carefully, it requested comments and suggestions. After that, it  said (I kid you not):

Do you want a free meal on your birthday? Then  enter your details below. 
Thank you for joining Fishers Birthday Club.  We will be in touch.

I don't think I could face another birthday there. And filling in our details might give her a chance to ring up and continue her harangue.  The website doesn't have an email contact otherwise I would send them a link to this post. 

It's really hard to understand a character like that, trained so successfully in the Basil Fawlty manner, or a restaurant that lets her loose on customers. 

Technorati tags: birthday, restaurant review, Oxford, fish, Basil Fawlty

*Actually she looked in her late 30s so to have spent 15 years as a manager in such an established restaurant seemed rather unlikely.  More like she started as a waitress there aged 25 and had worked her way up.  I bet this was her first night as manager.  Sloph was more charitable, saying maybe  it had been a horrendous evening and we were just the straw that broke the camel's back.

**even in Kiev, where they have often had a good try. 

Fish restaurant by the side of the Danube

Finally had a proper night out in Belgrade, despite the workload.  Someone I had worked with briefly in my first year in Vilnius was a colleague of our French lawyer.   She had never met him, just frequently talked to him over the phone.  It seemed he was now working in Belgrade again and he knew it well.  So we went off to dinner at Sharan in Zemun.  It seemed he remembered me and my kids more than I remembered him.  Embarrassing at first but we had lots of fun catching up with what had happened to all the people we worked with at that time.

Sharan is in Zemun which is a suburb just outside Belgrade on the other side of the Danube.  This is what it says on the restaurant's website

To come to Zemun and not to stop by the ŠARAN is like not having been to Zemun at all, the old folks from Zemun use to say.

Tavern Šaran is a pride of zemun. Located at the very bank of river Danube, Šaran still keeps the spirit of the old city. More than century ago fisherman Vićentije Vukotić, had opened this tavern that rapidly became widely known by its fish soup, which traditional recipe is still kept in the restaurant alone. However, it is not only the famous fish soup that is Šaran cuisine known about. In there, one could find various national dishes and exotic meals from around the world too. A friendly atmosphere and a selection of quality vines are the trade mark of tavern Šaran, for more than 120 years.

From the riverside inn, former hangout of fisherman and travellers, to the modern restaurant, where true connoisseurs of exquisite cuisine and good wine gather together, artists and diplomats alike.

Tavern Šaran was still is Zemun's Soul

It's right on the edge of the Danube and in summer must be wonderful.  Yesterday it was dark when we arrived and there was some building work going on on the river bank so it was not so picturesque as it might have been, even if it wasn't too cold to sit out.

We had a big fish dinner and lots of Vranac as always, and talked non-stop.  Then we walked around looking for a taxi without any success.  Finally we found a car park attendant who not only spoke good English but called the taxi off his own mobile for us.

Later I realised that Zemun is presumably the home of the Zemun clan, the most famous mafia organisation in Serbia, deemed responsible for the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic.  You can read about their escapades here in Wikipedia.  The town itself is full of small old buildings in the Austro-Hungarian style.  If a bit of money was spent on them it would be really pretty.  I suppose we can hardly expect gangsters to do that sort of thing.

My last week here.  Not had enough time to see friends and work memories not all that fond.  But that was the internationals not the locals. 

Time to go home and move into our next house. 

Technorati tags: Zemun, Saran, Belgrade, restaurants, fish

Life in the North

From today's lunch time menu:

Full menu with music 30YTL
Full menu without music 25 YTL

I just had chicken salad 11 YTL.

The restaurants are great. We have been having the set meals as they are such good value for money. Last night we had 6 cold mezes, 6 hot mezes and a whole fish between us. We were absolutely bloated. Today the mezes filled half the table, so I had to have a photo taken:

And that was only the first course.

This is a real hardship posting. Too bad I never get any time for sightseeing.

Fusion culture

 Finally I managed to meet one of my real Serb friends and go to somewhere non-touristy.  We went to a bar/cafe (well how do you tell the difference?) less than 100m from Skadarska but one you would never find unless you knew it was there: through a large ornamental cast iron gate, round a corner down some stairs and there you are. 

Well I was very confused, because it was like being back in Dveri* in Sarajevo, basically a corridor between two buildings with a makeshift roof over it, hung with random decorations.  

  

It is quite cold out, so my friend recommended hot wine, which got me very confused.  OK you can have mulled wine in Britain but usually only in your home or at a party.  You don't normally get it in bars.  So I always think of it as karstas vynas (recipe here) because that's what you have in cafes in Lithuania in December and January when it's really cold outside.  So there we were, knocking back the karstas vynas out of the irish coffee glasses,  having a very nice time in Belgrade.  Actually it wasn't really cold enough to need the gas-fired patio heaters, though I did have two sweaters and a jacket on.  Is it really only September?

*which I wrote about here, but I realise has its own website here.

Technorati tags: Dveri, Belgrade bars, hot wine, culture

Russky Tsar in Belgrade

We were all set to make a recommendation yesterday about this restaurant.

It's in a row full of cafes so it was hard to spot whether it had food or just drinks and ice-creams but we eventually spotted a menu, so we had lunch. I had a salad with chicken, rucola, walnuts, avocado and morello cherries.  There was lots of rucola, plenty of  everything else and not very much mayonnaise (clearly not very authentic for a Russian restaurant). I'm not sure whether the morello cherries were a good idea but were better than beetroot for the same effect of turning the avocado purple.  My colleague had a salad with chicken, pine nuts, thinly sliced pears and gorgonzola.  Again adequate quantities but not much mayonnaise.  The bread seemed home made and still warm. 

The waiters were dressed in mock Russian costume with the high collar blouse with coloured braiding off-centre down the front.  The waitresses, who were only allowed to sell ice-cream, were got up in those funny tiara style hats, with rustic smock dresses that looked like maternity gear, mostly in red.  Why anyone would want a waitress job in the place is not clear.

On the whole we were favourably impressed as it wasn't expensive, and had nice outdoor tables near a not too noisy square.  We made fools of ourselves complaining there were no spoons with our coffee, only to be shamed by the waiter who pointed out that the plastic stirrers were wrapped in an identical way to the sugar.  If it bends, it's sugar,  OK?  We made fools of ourselves a second time by having to count out  our last dinar for the bill and still hadn't enough.  So I dashed to the hole in the wall round the corner.

After all that we were definitely remembered today, when we decided to come back for more salads.  After ordering the same as yesterday but the other way round, we sat back in the sun looking forward to our lunch.  After 10 minutes (he had to search the complete kitchen, maybe) the waiter came back to apologise that if we wanted those salads we would have to wait 20 minutes, but we could have Greek salad immediately.  Did we have a choice?  An earlier lunch when our other colleague had ordered plum dumplings (also in only 20 minutes) which came after 40 minutes had already taught us how long we might have to wait.  So we settled for Greek salad which was really big and really good, with more fresh bread.  Nevertheless, what sort of restaurant doesn't have supplies of salad for lunch?  It's true that from our observations, most Serbs can't afford to eat out and content themselves with a drink or two, or maybe ice-cream.  But this is in a prime tourist area.

So we can recommend Russky Tsar on a Wednesday but not on a Thursday.   We may not be able to report on other days.

Technorati tags: Belgrade restaurants

Eats shoots and leaves, plus earth and moon

Armed with two new guide books we wandered in a new direction this evening in search of dinner.  We settled on a Chinese restaurant which figured in both.  Alas we should have known better.  Although the menu was large and the prices were low, the food was not good.  When the waiter asked whether I liked my seaweed salad, I answered honestly that it tasted like a strange sort of pickled red cabbage.  Both my colleagues agreed that seaweed should be green and crisp but we were told firmly that by the waiter (aged all of about 20), that we were wrong and it was genuine Chinese seaweed.  China was a very big country, bigger than Europe and by implication there was more than one way to cook seaweed.  My colleagues did better with their hot and sour soup.

After that, my chicken and bamboo shoots also got the thumbs down.  That was it, lumps of chicken (boiled) with about three slices of bamboo shoot, lying in a monosodium glutamate sauce.  if you fished around  you found some tiny slivers of green, eventually identified as leek.  The tofu was more colourful but not much better in taste. Our waiter was a masochist and asked for another opinion.  When we asked where was the colour and the other vegetables, he implied that chicken and bamboo shoots was just that.  But he said this was the best Chinese restaurant in town. 

We asked where the Chinese quarter was and were told in New Belgrade, obviously some way away.  My idea was to go and see where the Chinese themselves ate, thinking of the Paddyfields in Oxford, advertised as "the place Chinese people themselves eat"  It's my current favourite, especially as it does dim sum.  The waiter dismissed this as the Chinese were a dirty people and one shouldn't go there.  At that point, the ugly head of racism reared up and we stopped the conversation.  It was sickening, particularly as we suspected that he had probably never even been near the area and was probably just going on prejudiced rumour.

For a change of mood we went off to see the "Earth from the Air" exhibition which was showing in the park near Kalemegdan.  It's a fantastic exhibition of large photos in the open air, so you can see them from a distance (as from the air) and then go closer to see the detail and read the captions.  Although I saw the exhibition first in Copenhagen and London (when we bought the book and the t-shirts) there was still a lot to look at and some new photos as well (from the tsunami damage).  There was even one showing a graveyard of Iraqi tanks which had been destroyed by depleted uranium bombs in the First Gulf War and now were a repository of toxic and radioactive waste.  But didn't they try to tell us depleted uranium was quite safe in Bosnia?

Finally on the way home we noticed there was a fantastic full moon, with the first full scale halo I can remember ever seeing.  At least I thought it was a halo, but now I've looked it up it seems it was a corona.  You can see the difference here.  This is what I saw:

Technorati tags: The Earth from the Air, Chinese food, moon corona

To be or not to be? That is the restaurant

Another restaurant squashed into a tiny place down a side street. This one is one table wide downstairs and you can just squeeze past to climb the amazingly steep stairs without a handrail. Upstairs the space is two tables wide, and two tables long, so it's quite cosy. You can sit outside, but the sun goes down behind the mosque so it's in the shade in the evening, and it's not quite hot enough at the moment. In any case, the road has been dug up so no tables outside tonight.

The food is international: eg grilled vegetables, caesar salad, steak, black risotto. The service is adequate. The entertainment is provided by the incredibly hen-pecked waiter, whose life is made a misery by the cook. Last time we went there, we sat downstairs and had to listen to him being sent out for bread, then onions, then something else. (it was quite late by the time we got there). The Greek vowed never to go again, as he felt so bad for the waiter. So he went home for an early night and I had Irish company instead.