Culinary Desert

As I have said before, exciting and inventive cuisine was left behind in East Asia. Central Asian cuisine is simple, Russian influenced. But moving over to Iran was a huge disappointment in the culinary sense. Mashhad has three million inhabitants and 20 million pilgrims per year, so one would expect lots of restaurants. But no. Fast food joints selling sandwiches with spaghetti bolo, hot mortadella like sausage, sometimes shawarma. The hotels serve pre-cooked meals, micro wave heated. After the first week I was desperate, three weeks of sandwiches and ground meat shish kebabs. Then we found a resaturant in Shiraz, serving real food. Not specially inspired cooking, but cooked to order. We went twice. Rice is the staple food, fish and rice, chicken and rice, kebab and rice. Always mounds of rice. But we didn‘t come to Iran for the food, we had been warned and came all the same. No one to blame but us.
But they do have a brilliant drink for the heat. In the „stans“ it is called ayran, here doogh. It is a yogurt based drink, sour, salty, sometimes fermented and slightly fizzy. Excellent stuff when the temperature reaches 45°and above.
But the lack of restaurants is in fact quite strange. Maybe there are a lot of restos, just unmarked and thus invisible to the uninitiated. Ort, as I suspect, there simply aren‘t that many. Tourism isn‘t developed and the locals do not spend their time in bistros. We went to a restaurant yesterday. It could seat 100 customers, but there were only two when we arrived. On the menu, 1 starter & 1 main course, squashed eggplant, similar to the Syrian moutabal and a soup with meat & vegetables. And resaturants, serving „traditional Iranian food“ all have the same five to ten dishes on the menu.

Coffee.
Coffee is strangely difficult to come by. Yes this is tea culture, but when one sees a sign saying Coffee house, one expects coffee to be available. But no. No coffee. We went in to one of these „coffee houses“ and asked for espresso. Yes of course. But nothing happened. So we asked after ten minutes. „It‘s coming, but the espresso machine was not turned on and it will take 15 minutes to heat it up“. Half an hour for a cup of coffee. We gave up.
Another example. „Do you have coffee?“ „Yes“. „Do you have espresso“ „Yes Nescafé“. „No espresso“ „What is that?“ End of conversation.