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Food in the Middle East: Part 1 Food is an important issue with me, as you know if you’ve been reading my website, and the food situation here takes some getting used to, even if you’re flexible and adventurous when it comes to food like I am. One of the best meals I’ve had so far is braised camel, which I ate last spring on a rooftop restaurant in the historic market of Doha, an area called Souq Waqif (a “souq” is an open-air Arab market).
I don’t eat in restaurants very often, though, because as you also know, I’m pretty frugal (i.e., "cheap"). Therefore I mostly cook at home. I buy most everything I need at the huge, modern and well-stocked Carrefour grocery story a few blocks away, but they don’t have many of my favorite staples and so, like with everything else here, it’s been an adjustment.
Carrefour has a deli department like most large grocery stories in the U.S., where you can buy hot, take-home dinners. There’s a large Indian population in Qatar, so I’ve become well acquainted with the deli’s Indian dishes, including samosas (fried dumplings), biriyani rice and tikka masala. And, like most grocery store delis in the U.S., they also sell broiled chickens in mass quantities. They’re not the huge, plump rotisserie chickens they sell at Costco in the U.S., though. Nope – they’re small and scrawny. And they cook them exceptionally well, so well that I refer to them as “little burned chickens.” During my first few months here, I was eating so many Little Burned Chickens with plates of biriyani rice for dinner that I was getting thoroughly sick of it.
But then one day while strolling through the aisles of Carrefour, I spotted a new item on the shelf: refried beans from America. Refried beans! How I missed Mexican food! I bought a few cans and brought them home and opened one, then ate the beans straight from the can. Those beans were absolutely delicious. Yes, they were just plain, old refried beans with nothing special about them. But I hadn’t eaten any Mexican food since I’d left Portland several months earlier, so they tasted wonderful.
I had a similar experience with pizza a few months later. The Carrefour deli sells what they call “pepperoni pizza” for about $2 each. They’re about the size of a pie plate – and they taste like a pie plate, too: the crust is hard as a brick, there’s virtually no cheese, and the “pepperoni” is a tasteless meat product, something like bland salami. But then one day at City Center Mall I spotted a Pizza Hut, so I ordered a medium-size pepperoni pizza.
I’ve eaten literally hundreds of pizzas in my life, but this pepperoni pizza was the absolute best pizza I’d ever had. It was just a regular Pizza Hut pizza, frankly, but after surviving on those quasi-pizzas at Carrefours for several months (not to mention the Little Burned Chickens), it was about the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten, with thick and chewy crust, heaps of real mozzarella cheese, and spicy pepperoni. Someone eating it in America would’ve shrugged their shoulders because it was just another Pizza Hut pizza, but to me it was heaven because I hadn’t tasted real pizza in six months. Several months later I still think about that pizza with great fondness – sort of like a long-lost lover – and what a taste explosion it was.
I ate at an Applebee’s restaurant one evening during my first month in Doha. I really missed pasta, so I ordered a big plate of spaghetti, Italian bread and a large soda, and with the tip, my bill was about 100 Rials (about $30 dollars). After I paid the bill on my way out, the Filipino waitress cheerfully said to me, “See you tomorrow night!” in a lilting Filipino accent. I realized as I was walking away that I had just paid $30 for a plate of spaghetti.
I told Nafez, my colleague from Sacramento, about that experience the next day at the CPO office and he laughed at me, having spent $30 for a plate of Applebee’s spaghetti. Now, whenever he and I discuss some rip-off that we’ve heard about in Qatar, one of us will say to the other in a cheerful Filipino accent, “See you tomorrow night!”
Above left: At Souq Waqif with friends after our camel dinner. Above right: Along with numerous restaurants, Souq Waqif has dozens of stalls with eclectic and often surprising collections of goodies.
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