Down And Out In South East Asia

Well it’s finally done. The book I mean. If you enjoyed my bestselling food book Down And Out In Padstow And London, about cooking in restaurants in the UK and the larger-than-life characters that inhabit them, then hopefully you’ll like the sequel Down And Out In South East Asia.

It sees the return of failed chef and hack Lennie Nash - this time setting off to eat his way through SE Asia, with a half-baked plan to buy a restaurant. 

Along the way, Lennie encounters a host of weird characters from frazzled bar owners to Walter Mitty CIA agents to seedy sexpats to ice zombies four years over on their visa.

The book is an adventure story, spiked with a heavy dose of backpacker noir, through the eateries, street food stalls, and hazy bars of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Anyway, I’d be delighted if you read it. It’s only out as a Kindle book to start with, and costs £1.99 - about the price of half a lager in the UK now, I’m told. Go on, you’ll have a lovely warm glow inside knowing you’ve kept me in noodles for another day...CLICK HERE

Bangkok: Water Spinach And War

When I land in Bangkok on my way to Cambodia, the first thing that hits me is the stifling heat and the smell of fish sauce as I emerge from my airport taxi into the warrens of Thailand’s biggest city. I sit down at a street stall on a Saturday afternoon, an hour before sunset, and order one of my favourite Asian meals of chicken noodle soup, but they haven’t got it.

“Pork!” snaps the noodle cook, jabbing a finger at her spidery-scrawled sign. She doesn’t do anything else, and nor does her husband, who’s crouched at the back, busy prepping a grimy tub of water spinach.

I perch on a stool by the roadside, my knees up to my ears. My bowl arrives in seconds. There are a few slices of pork, tandoori red around the edges, a scattering of sliced spring onion greens, a few slivers of crisped garlic, golden brown in colour, angel hair noodles, and beansprouts. The nod to vitamins is the single piece of kale that somehow found its way into my bowl on the back of a spoon.

Four pots of garnishes are thrust at me - pounded dried chillies with what looks disconcertingly like a pube sticking out, an explosive chilli vinegar, sugar, and crushed peanuts. A bottle of fish sauce, toothpicks, and a plastic drum of napkins complete the street food decor.

Except I was wrong about the lack of greenery. As I delve deeper into the last loop of noodles, a piece of water spinach appears in the bowl. For some reason, I think of a story I heard about the Vietnam War, or American War if you live in Vietnam. About how the Americans were literally hoist with their own petards when they bombed the vastly underequipped but ruthlessly cunning Viet Cong making their way from north to south through the mountain passes of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The passes were marked and American bombers flew over blowing holes in the mountainside. The men with their shoes made from old truck tyres were slowed but still they came, clearing the rubble and finding other trails. And as the monsoon rains started, the bomb craters became pools.

Messages were passed and the next group of Viet Cong brought live fish with them and stocked the pools, and the fish slowly multiplied in their new mountain home. Then they planted water spinach cuttings, which quickly spread - long, hollow stalks with a few leaves at the top, delicious when fried with garlic and fish sauce. As each unit of National Liberation Front militia arrived, they found pools full of fish and swamp cabbage to feed them.

I bite into the tube and imagine those fighters sitting around a pot, sleeping off their evening feast provided by the bombs that were meant to kill them. I sip away at my ice-cold Singh beer as the last of the light fades, the car lights come on, and Bangkok puts on its neon clothes and waits for the hustle and shrieks of night.

The noodle cook sends her young son to fetch more beer from a nearby store. Outside it is a newspaper stand packed full of today’s editions of German and British tabloids - they know their tourist market in Bangkok. At the bottom is The Sun. “Pleb And Buried” is the headline. “Cop slur minister quits at last.” London seems a long way away.

MORE: Vietnam: Remnants From A Stricken Land

Bog Standard: Why Some Restaurants Just Aren't Flushed With Success...

I am continually bowled over by how much restaurant toilets vary in Thailand. You get everything from plush lavatories with fresh hand-towels, hand cream, incense, and a lollipop man to, well, let’s not go there.

The importance of good toilets is something that’s often overlooked by eateries, both in Thailand and back in Blightie and beyond. In Bangkok, for instance, I know many Thai and farang customers who choose a place as much for the cleanliness of the powder rooms as for the food.

Most restaurants that have been built in the last ten years or so in the Land of Piles, sorry Smiles, usually have decent toilets. But it’s a shame that many of the older, and in many cases far better restaurants, don’t have lavs that match their wonderful cooking.

There is a fantastic place near Nana Plaza, Bangkok, that is sometimes so packed you have to stand on the pavement and wait for a table to leave before you can tuck into their incredible roast duck and curries. I’ve seen Thais standing around for 40 minutes before getting a seat, the food is that good.

But when I went there, I couldn’t believe the toileting arrangements. When I asked the direction to the gents, the owner looked at me in slight surprise as though it was the first time she’d ever been asked.

Then she escorted me down a side street, and waited at the top of it while I relieved myself behind the bins. I felt quite awkward standing there with the old chap unzipped as people strolled by.

But the stench was far worse, stirring unpleasant memories of Glastonbury. So bad in fact that I couldn’t finish the rest of my delicious meal. The smell of nam pla no longer had the same appeal, for some reason.

Thailand also goes in for novelty toilets in a big way, like the picture (above) I took in a restaurant in Chiang Mai. But there is definitely a limit. The one (below) from an eatery in Chonburi Province is wrong on so many levels, it’s not true.

Its Canadian head chef apparently brought the tissue holder over from Vancouver. If I saw that I’d never dine there again. As I say, the importance of toilets to a restaurant's takings often falls between the, er, cracks.

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