Prom the Pilipines

I had dinner in Lidcombe tonight with my friend Ivan. ("Where the f*%k's Lidcombe?" someone texted me.) We started off as tennis partners, and we were well-matched. We'd play, maybe saying a few words as we changed ends, that was about it. Then when I did my ankle we started going out for dinners together instead. We share a craving for culinary and cultural exotica, and we jointly coined the word bizarricality to describe the exact quality we were looking for.

Originally our criterion for restaurants was that they had to be 1) representative of the cuisine of a country or region that was troubled, at the very least, or ideally, at war and 2) yummy and 3) weird in some other way. This last is where bizarricality comes in.

The highlight was probably a Lao restaurant in Fairfield where the waiter was a 10yo boy, the restaurant was next-door to a funeral parlour, the menu was on a series of laminated cards with a barbie-style holder and we had warm beer with ice in big cups (just like in a 'men-only' bar in Taipei, I told Ivan. I'm thinking of 'funky'). Food was great, and the whole evening had a surreal air to it with the wierdness just layering nicely.

Next best was the Polish Club in Ashfield, where the highight was the deli downstairs where the nice polish ladies made a huge fuss of us because we were so enthusiastic about the smallgoods. They recognised kindred spirits, I like to think. They were very pleased with our reaction to the tongue sausage. Then there was Peruvian, African, Burmese, Serbian (where we nearly died because Ivan forgot and called the bloke a Croat), Sri Lankan...

The Filipino place wasn't all that great. I remembered a colleague of mine who'd had occassion to visit the central bank of the philippines and discovered, there in the waiting area on the executive floor, a jukebox. He said that was when he finally understood the Philippines.