The search for the mahjeep

When you’re on the road, food tastes better. It just does. It comes with the travel. You may have been humping a pack around for a few hours. You may have been on a cramped bus for most of the day. You may have had a shitty breakfast of a muffin on some crummy airline and you are so hungry that by the time you reach your destination you are about to pass out. So when you do finally get food, it tastes better. But then again, some restaurants are better than others. One goal of the traveler is to seek out the best restaurants, the Mahjeep, if I may borrow a Korean word. It’s an abbreviated word directly translated as ‘delicious house,’ meaning the best restaurant. So, how do you find the Mahjeep?

First off, throw the guidebook away. Get the hell off yelp and turn off your phone.  This is backpacking. Who gives a damn what some self-entitled asshole thought about the cuisine that he felt the need to jump on his tablet after the meal and begin firing away because his soup was cold? You know why you can find hamburgers, spaghetti and meatballs, and pizza on every menu of every resort and guesthouse in the developing world?  Because that is what these jokers eat.  The locals have no idea how to cook it, but they throw it on the menu anyway because no matter how exotic a location you are trying to get to, nine out of ten people still want to eat what they know.

But not me and not you, right? We didn’t travel thousands of miles in the back of an airplane to sample the spaghetti bolognese at Mama’s Beachside Grill. And don’t forget that when you finally break down and do order it, and you eventually will, because we all do, because no matter how hard we try to remain hard and faithful to our traveler roots, at some point during your trip your brain will break down and say, you know what, fuck it, I think I will try the tacos. Don’t forget, IT will taste like shit. That’s ok, it’s nobody’s fault. It’s not your fault because it is on the menu and you are used to seeing it and it may even be your favorite food. And it’s not the local chef’s fault because they put in on the menu for us, because that’s what we like to eat, it doesn’t matter that we are all way in Asia and even if the cook did know how to make a tacos, most of the vital ingredients are thousands of miles away.  So just remember, its ok to order it, everybody does at some point, but it will not be good.  If you want good food, stick with their local fare that they have been cooking their whole lives.  (in recent years a notable exception I have found to this is pizza.  While the majority of pizzas found on every and all menus will still taste like ketchup and cardboard, some of these places have figured it out.  Maybe it’s the explosion of brick ovens, the easiness of access to the right ingredients nowadays, or just the spread of Italians all over the world, but even on some remote island in Indonesia, you may bump into some killer pizza.)

Back to the matter at hand. You’ve left the book in the hotel and your phone is off. How the hell are you supposed to find the Majeep? If you are like me, when you travel to a new place you do next to no research and you don’t learn anything in the language past hello and thank you. So not only do you not know what to eat, but you don’t know how to ask for it either. Here is where it gets tricky. You have to use your senses. If you pass some food and it smells good, then it probably is. If you see a ton of people eating at one particular place, then there is a reason for it. Think about time of day and things like that. I was traveling with a woman through Kuala Lumpur once and we were walking around looking for food. Fortunately she has the nose of a bloodhound and after catching a whiff, she began leading me down a random alley. Next thing I know she’s following some well-dressed locals into what looked like an office building. Suddenly we were in the middle of an air conditioned food court packed to the brim with the lunch crowd. A killer find.

When dining with the locals you have to be brave. There will be strange smells. Things may look weird and maybe old. But don’t be afraid of getting sick, because If everyone else is eating It, so can you! And if you want to know what something is, just ask. They may not speak English but you never know. They may surprise you; they may know a few words and chances are they want to help. You will never know unless you try. And of course you can always play charades and make animal sounds. That always makes for a good story.

Sometimes it’s fun to follow in the foodsteps of those who’ve come before right? Me, I’m a big Bourdain fan. I mean, how can you not love a guy who gets paid to eat and drink around the world? So before I hit a country I’ll usually fire up a Bourdain ep and see where he went. The problem is, on most of the occasions where I did eat where he did, I left somewhat disappointed. The food just wasn’t as good as some of the others places I found. I wondered why this was. Bourdain has a good palate and he knows what the hell he is talking about. But then I thought about how these shows are filmed. Bourdain recently revisited a city I had lived in for years and I was brimmed with excitement for the upcoming episode. When it aired, I remember feeling disappointed. It wasn’t Tony’s fault. His team worked closely with a local food blogger who set up all the locales. Maybe they were that bloggers favorite spots, maybe they were only places where a foreign TV crew could film? To the uninitiated, the show looked great. But it certainly wasn’t the tour I would have given him.

Food is personal. Finding food is adventurous. The harder you look, the better it will be. So this is my feeling on the way to eat when you travel. You won’t strike gold every time. You may suffer through a bad meal or two. But you will also hit the jackpot and more often than not. And when you do, it will taste that much better. Because you didn’t follow some stupid GPS coordinates after reading what some dickhead wrote in the travel section of the New York Times.  You discovered this heavenly meal all on your own. Practically bumped right into the restaurant. That’s what you will always remember.