Extreme eating

Phil Lee's quest for Cambodia's tastiest soup led to a white-knuckle motorbike ride.Photo: Supplied

Theage.com.au
THE AGE

November 11, 2008

The food warrior considers no dish too abstract, no taste too challenging and no geography too impassable, writes Sarina Lewis.

FOUR days spent steering a motorbike north from Chiang Mai along the Burmese border along dangerously snaking roads must have made food blogger Phil Lees challenge his actions. Surely, he questioned the madness of making a white-knuckle, eight-day return trip through bamboo-covered mountains to slurp one bowl of khao soi soup? In a word, no.

"I think, at some point, in the trip it just tipped over the edge," explains Lees, creator of Cambodia's first street food blog, http://phenomenon.com.

After three years in Asia, he recently returned to Melbourne and now writes a food blog, Mouthful, for SBS online. "Suddenly, we weren't going to see anything any more. We were just going to eat."

So when a Cambodian friend tipped him off that some of the tastiest khao soi came from a nondescript joint near the entrance to Mae Hong Son's market "a few lazy days on a motorcycle away", well, what choice did a culinary crusader have?

To this day, Lees says, that bowl of coconut creamy curry served over flat egg noodles and melting-off-the-bone-tender beef, with a tart complement of pickled cabbage, stands uncontested as the best bowl of noodle soup he's eaten.

Welcome to the world of the food warrior. No dish too abstract, no taste too challenging and no geography too impassable, these obsessives hunt out the best of the regional, the seasonal and the unusual in their journey to uncover the heart of foreign cuisines. Leave the guide books to the masses, they say, donning their metaphoric khakis - there's a whole world of food experience out there and we're going to hunt down every delicious bite.

Among them is Sundhya Pahuja, a Melbourne University associate professor who accepted a marriage proposal at innovative British restaurant the Fat Duck, travelled to Bruge to experience Michelin three-star brilliance, and drove the winding roads of Umbria for a few heady inhalations of hyper-fresh black truffles whose pungent scent she describes as "a combination of earth and sex". But it's street food that really kicks her inner GPS into action.

"On average, I'd say it would be nothing to travel 100 kilometres to eat something," Pahuja says of her international food forays, estimating she's clocked at least 40,000 kilometres on foreign roads and back streets hunting down regional specialties.

Like the live crab cooked in a basket of coals and served with a fresh-ground red chilli, lime and salt dipping paste hunted out on a south central Vietnamese beach. Or the unsigned Madrid cafe specialising in little-known varieties of wild mushrooms, found after trailing a group of overall-clad workers through the city's winding side streets.

But it was India's holy city of Varanasi, and her continual search for chaat, that resulted in some of her most memorable adventures. The best of the deep-fried flour and lentil puffs, topped with flaming hot spices and dolloped with sweet chutney, are to be found in the ancient city's higgledy-piggledy back streets, she says. And Pahuja has devoted hours to the hunt.

"The lanes are too tiny for anything other than foot traffic," she explains of the three-phase journey; a car through suicidal traffic to the temple district, a rickshaw to the interior and "finally you get out and walk - you dodge the cows and the sheep and the vendors and the temple-goers to Vishwanath gully."

In this "tiny, dirty lane behind the temples" Pahuja will gorge, knowing full well the bowel-shaking consequences. "We're really sick afterwards," she admits. "But it's totally intoxicating. It's an addiction."

Renowned Melbourne chef and author Greg Malouf has a compulsion all his own; uncovering the edible secrets of the Middle East spice route. Not that unearthing them hasn't resulted in a couple of Indiana-style adventures. The veteran traveller - "I've been chasing food for 30 years" - has been in the vicinity of exploding car bombs in Lebanon, endured lengthy - and unfriendly - border checks in Algeria and Syria, and narrowly escaped all-out war in Beirut when he turned down an invitation from food warrior poster-boy, Anthony Bourdain, to join him on a filming expedition. "He was filming a doco and asked if I'd go with him to be part of his journey. I couldn't," Malouf recounts, "and I think on day two of his trip war broke out."

For this culinary Columbus, however, any threat of danger is easily offset by the thrill of discovery. "When you're given six weeks or so we have to be pretty organised, but you can only plan so much of a trip and a lot is found off the beaten track," Malouf says. Like the early-morning kebab joint discovered on his recent trip to the Turkish-Syrian border town of Gaziantep, courtesy of a local food journo.

"She introduced us to his special, tiny little hole-in-the-wall kebab shop, open only 5am until 9am, specialising in liver," Malouf says of their guide. "It was pretty hard to find - driving through the little alleyways heaving with taxi drivers coming off their shifts." There in a little bustling square, he says, the kebab guy roasted skewers of fresh liver, kidney and heart spiced with chilli, sumac and cumin over a charcoal grill, its cradle freshly made Arabic bread from the adjoining bakery, and its blanket a topping of lettuce, sweet tomatoes, onion and a squeeze of lemon.

Eaten at dawn standing side-by-side with the local cabbies it was, says Malouf, "a truly memorable breakfast".

Of course, not every tale of culinary adventure has a happy ending.

How clearly I remember being trapped in a car with a maniacal Portuguese driver speeding for an hour along dark, unsigned roads in search of a regional dish described by locals as "world's best chicken". To find myself seated at a formica table chowing down on deep-fried, KFC-style bites - chased by unlimited plates of batatas fritas - was, to put it mildly, more than slightly disappointing.

Melbourne freelance business consultant Samantha Bell has also had her fair share of mishaps. Sand-filled sangas in Egypt aside, the dairy-intolerant backpacker who survived two weeks of choking down yoghurt curd in Mongolian yurts, with unsurprisingly unpleasant side effects, was nearly brought undone by her determination to take a real bite of Turkey.

Invited to the family lunch by a Turkish High Court judge she met following a harrowing local bus ride, Bell was about to endure an even greater ordeal.

"We ate lunch at his parents' house where they dished up this 'feast'," she explains, having eagerly accepted the proffered invitation and followed a guide through labyrinth-like side streets to the family home.

"Out of courtesy you eat what's put in front of you - local yoghurt drink, some meat, some bits and pieces . . ." Difficult-to-digest bits and pieces that she was to later find out included goat hooves. "I really didn't need to know that," she laughs now. "Sometimes ignorance is bliss."

Consumption of the peculiar is an occupational hazard. However, the true food warrior isn't necessarily seeking the weird and wacky. More important than the purely odd, says Lees, is the authentic.

"I think every food journalist goes to Cambodia and talks about eating spiders but they're a really marginal food," he says. "They're there for tourists."

Though, for the record, he has tried them: "They taste like fried twigs with garlic. It's nothing to write home about."

Freelance food photographer Tim James couldn't agree more. The 32-year-old former accountant experienced his epicurean epiphany as a 14-year-old on his first trip to Malaysia and has since eaten widely of the strange and sublime. These days, however, his journeys are geared to discovery of the molecular. "I don't like the idea of the gimmicky thing particularly," James says. For his next adventure, armed only with a camera and an appetite, he will try to negotiate entry to Spain's NASA-like food labs.

For every experience digested, another appears in its place. For all the money spent, time squandered in airport lounges, and kilograms lost during episodes of tummy troubles, it appears that - for these trailblazing gastronomes - too much is never enough. There's always a new experience waiting.

For his part, Malouf is hoping to head back to the Middle East and Iran in search of fesenjan, a sumptuous, confit-like dish of duck with pomegranates and walnut. Lees hears the call of Portugal and acorn-fed piglets cooked to crisp-skinned richness in a eucalypt-fuelled brick oven. And Pahuja, well, she'll be found near street snack stalls.

Ultimately, it's about chasing the food back to the source.

"When you eat something where it comes from, it's generally perfect," she says. "It's not about the diner choosing, it's about you eating what's there. And, in the end, I think that's the real experience."