A recent arrival in Zimbabwe from the north of Scotland (yes, we do get the odd new immigrant!) asked if I knew where a Rabbie Burns Supper would be held on January 25.
Eating Out with Dusty Miller
Oddly, I didn’t. Either Harare Caledonian Society opted not to celebrate the birthday of Scotland’s favourite people’s poet or Bruce Grant, the often kilted chieftain of the local Caledonian Society forgot to tell me about it.
Maybe, in the interests of “lookin’ after their siller” and considering Zimbabwe’s dreadfully impoverished state, it was decided that two dear Scots bun fights within a few weeks (New Year’s Eve and Burns Nicht) were too demanding on the sporran?
Pity, I enjoy Burns’ Suppers: tartan-filled nights spent to the skirl of bagpipes, quaffing drams of good single malt Scotch, grazing spicy contents of an oatmeal-stuffed sheep’s stomach; respectfully and silently listening to (or sometimes, in my case, reciting) a long, dreary poem in 18th century Lowland Scots brogue.
So we missed out on celebrating the poet’s birthday, but coincidentally didn’t overlook the next excuse for a knees-up on the busy social calendar we enjoy in Ha-ha-ha-rare (Africa’s fun capital.)
Greendale Good Food & Wine Appreciation Society had long decided its first main event of the year would be the January lunch at Great Wall, a Cantonese-Chinese Restaurant on East Road, Belgravia on Friday January 31.
And that happened to be the Chinese New Year, when the Year of the Water Snake slithered away into history and the Year of the Horse galloped in to face the next 12 months’ challenges.
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Feature page deadlines won’t allow me to tell you in this edition what happened roughly 40 hours ago, but in the interests of ensuring everything went swimmingly, with or without a water snake, I called at Great Wall on Tuesday to book a table for “about 20”.
As a society we order the restaurant’s US$15 “banquet” and countless tranches of tasty, often sizzling, steaming, food, just keep being delivered. It has been a very competitive US$15 for several years, although last year they charged us a wee bit extra for pudding.
That’s the way to go with local Chinese or Indian outlets which, generally speaking, charge comparatively more than you would pay for equivalent food in other countries where, paradoxically, salaries are much higher. (Not, of course, if you happen to be CEO of an otherwise bankrupt Zimbo parastatal or line-manager of a Municipality financially incapable of any service delivery…where loot for wages and perks is, or was until the Press opened a massive can of worms, apparently no object!)
At Tuesday’s “recce” I enjoyed a steaming, piping hot bowl of spicy Thai seafood soup: thick with prawns, line-fish, mussels, calamari and deeply complex herbs and spices in a rich fishy broth which was US$4. I’ve said and written it before, of course, but that’s the sort of price soup here should be: say US$2 to US$5. After all you can make a bath-full of the stuff for US$10 worth of ingredients!
Great Wall offers an “unlucky” 13 choice of soups. I recommend wanton (something between a dumpling and ravioli) and chicken-and-sweetcorn although chicken noodle soup, fondly regarded by many, especially doting Jewish mommas, of curing everything from asthma to zits, is excellent.
I don’t go a bundle on sharks’ fin soup, at least not so far from the ocean as in land-locked Avondale, and I’ve not tried thick minced beef and egg soup, possibly as it sounds too much like steak tartar!
Beef and noodle and seafood and noodle soups are filling, nutritious and tasty, but I thought the seaweed in seafood-and-seaweed soup looked rather like the algae in an over-lit tropical fish tank.
For mains I had an old favourite from my earliest days of patronising great value-for-money chop-suey joints in British West Yorkshire: sweet and sour pork with a side of plain chow mein (soft noodles.) I think Great Wall has changed chefs, because although these dishes were quite fine and enjoyable, bite-sized lumps of dead pig were no longer encased in crispy, golden batter as was the case recently and noodles (the globe-trotting explorer and merchant Marco Polo took the recipe for pasta back from China to Italy!) weren’t as al dente as they used to serve and as I prefer them.
However, the one thing consistent about Zimbabwe restaurants is a total lack of consistency; I’ll probably order that dish among the US$15 banquet on “New Year’s Day”
On booking our table for the society the lovely Chinese lady who runs the place was surprised I knew of the Year of the Horse, but offered seasonal special dishes on Friday, to which we’re looking forward If you wonder why I simply didn’t phone and book a table it’s down to a perceived language and communication glitches. Our charming hostess certainly speaks more and better English than I do Mandarin or Cantonese, but on one memorable occasion, after a singleton lunch, on paying my bill, I asked:
“Can I please book a table for about 20 covers for the last Friday in May?” “You wan’ table for 20 this Friday?” “No, my dear. The last Friday in May. I think it’s the 27th.” “Tomorrow 27th, you wan’ table for 20 tomorrow?” “No, no, no. The last Friday in May! May! May!” “How you know my name May?” After a lot of chuckles, I mentally re-Christened her Anna-May Wong (1905-1961), after the first Chinese-American film star. On Tuesday, I’d a generous portion of lychees and vanilla ice-cream (having got the taste from lychee liqueur and champagne cocktail at Meikles a few days earlier.) With two cold Pilseners, the bill was US$25, which shows it pays to buy in bulk! To all readers: Gung Hey Fat Choy! (Happy New Year!) Great Wall, 84, East Rd, Belgravia. Tel 334149.
