Go everywhere, eat everything

Simon Majumdar travelled the globe doing what he does best, eating a lot, and wrote this funny book about his experiences

The book has 41 chapters, each set in a different place that Simon went to, sniffed out the best possible meals on offer, ate them till he was stuffed, and described them for us.

How did he fund the trip? For five years he had been "putting by a decent sum away every month". Yes, some of the writing is hurried and the editing is unforgivably careless with proofing howlers every four or five pages.
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But Simon is funny and I was cackling away like an ill-bred hyena more frequently than that.

Half Welsh and half Bengali, you might consider Simon ethnically rather exotic, but the book reveals a homogenously British temperament and self-deprecating sense of humour. More endearing even than his unabashed greed is his devotion to his parents and siblings which manifest on nearly every page.

Some of the meals he tells of, were fabulously orgasmic and others hilariously vomit-inducing, and Simon travelled through Finland and Iceland; Mexico and Argentina; Istanbul, Manila and Senegal where, considering the size and duration of his meals, he surely released any number of loud and stinky dakars amidst the local populace.

In Melbourne he was bemused by the "almost pathological appeal to Australians of dim sum".

In Kyoto, he ordered an unfamiliar dish and spat it out. Everyone laughed. He had nearly eaten cod sperm.

China was the most fun: at a railway station, the toilet was half-a-dozen holes in the ground straddled by
Chinese men grimacing and groaning as they worked hard to extrude their daily bread in open view. Some of them had taken the opportunity to have supper at the same time and were eating bowls full of noodles. It was difficult to tell which end the slurping was coming from. Simon did not join them.

In Philadelphia, the Philly cheese steak was a soft Italian bread roll filled with sweet onions, wafer-thin strips of good beef and topped with cheese and so good that you have to queue for it at Geno's even at 1 am.

One of the few benefits of being British is the accent, and Simon overwhelmed American customers he was serving at a "deli" in Ann Arbor with the entire range from the "cor-luv-a-duck faux Cockney of Jamie Oliver to the plummy tones of David Niven".

The bits about India were towards the end and it was only my saintly self-restraint that had me plod patiently through every word till I got there, and read with approval that "Mumbai is truly one of the world's great cities, and it doesn't really care whether you approve or not. You get the feeling that, if you were to mess with Mumbai, Mumbai would just turn around and kick your a**." He described the food quite adequately, too.

I tried reading this book in one go, and got terrible indigestion. Read a bit at a time. If possible, carry it with you when you travel as a "gastro-tourist" to the places it tells of.

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