THE MARTINI CLEANSE

You want to see a damn good martini?  I’ll show you a damn good Martini.  What makes a damn good Martini?  Well, many things, but a full glass is high on the list of requirements, and if the bartender fills the glass so full that it reaches above the top and forms a meniscus, then you know you’re in business.

Of course it’s not just about looks, but the one above served on a rainy night in the empty and fairly soulless bar of the Balto Tavern and Tap inside the Radisson Hotel in downtown Baltimore tasted every bit as good it looked.

This next one tasted considerably better than it looked, which was a good thing since it doesn’t look that great, and it sure isn’t very full. 

This is actually called a Belvedere Martini, drunk in the Owl Bar, also in Baltimore, which is very soulful place indeed.  The Belvedere Martini consists of “Belvedere Vodka, Dry Vermouth & Bleu Cheese Stuffed Olives.”  I’m never sure about blue cheese stuffed into a martini olive – it always sounds better than it tastes, but in this case (and maybe it was me, or maybe it was the vibe of the place) it tasted pretty great.

The Owl Bar also had on the food menu, would you believe, a “Chesapeake Poutine: Crispy fries, crab meat, white crab gravy, old bay.”

I believe that a man has a duty to order poutine whenever and wherever he can, and in any form whatsoever: I hope that crab was Maryland blue crab, the local specialty, though I can’t swear to it.   And In this case the fries were a very long way from being crispy, but hey it was poutine!

The most enjoyable meal I had in Baltimore was at a Nepalese/Indian restaurant called Lumbini.  You probably know – I’m ashamed to say I didn’t – that Lumbini is where Siddhartha Gautama, the Lord Buddha, was born, in 623 B.C.E.

Here, in this earthly and earthy restaurant, we had goat curry on the bone with “Himalayan spices.”  That’s the bowl on the right, and it was very good.

But the one on the left was the real star - that’s Hyderabadi Lamb, Hyderabad being some 1100 miles south of Lumbini.  According to the menu Hyderabadi Lamb is “Lamb marinated overnight with yogurt and peanut sauce and cooked with delicious Himalayan spices.”  Again with the Himalayan spices.  Man, it was good; creamy, of course, intense, rich, fatty but incredibly bright and somehow uplifting.  I know that doesn’t sound quite possible.

There’s evidently a considerable Nepalese community in Baltimore, and we asked our waiter – very young and exotic looking, with a very stylish haircut – if he was from Nepal.  He was.  How long had he been in the States?

      “Two months,” he said, in a subdued way.

“Do you like it here?”

“I like some things,” he said, now sounding downright melancholy.

 “That’s OK,” I said.  “Nobody likes everything about America.” 

He nodded in agreement but he didn’t seem to find that altogether consoling.

THE FALL OF CHEESE

I was following one of my other mild obessessions, Mark E. Smith of the Fall, and I came across this quotation from the great man, “Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?”

I guess he thinks they should be told so they can run out and buy a couple of pounds of Gorgonzola, although frankly I’d have thought good blue cheese was more expensive than most amphetamines. Admittedly this isn’t really my area.



Obviously Mark E. Smith is a fine character and he certainly knows his way around pharmaceuticals, but I still wasn’t convinced that there’s speed in blue cheese. A bit of research was required.

Smith is not alone in his belief. In fact, according Dr Neil Barnard author of Breaking the Food Seduction, “Cheese holds … drug-like compounds … It contains an amphetamine-like chemical called phenylethylamine, or PEA, which is also found in chocolate and sausage.” (The spelling is more usually phenethylamine, apparently.)



That seems to be saying it occurs in all cheese, not just the blue varieties.

And further research does indeed leave little doubt that phenethylamine-like chemicals do indeed occur in cheese, and phenethylamine is part of the same happy family as methamphetamine and MDMA (aka Ecstasy). There are plenty of sources online that will sell you the stuff as a diet aid.

Other sources say that phenethylamine is usually inactive when it’s taken orally because the body quickly breaks it down, and significant amounts never reach the brain.

So, eating huge quantities of blue cheese, it turns out, is unlikely to speed up your metabolism and give you that lean hungry, meth-head look, but I suppose we might have guessed that.



The best food story about Mark E. Smith appears in Stuart Maconie’s book “Cider With Roadies.” Maconie is in Smith’s flat after a boozy night out and Smith asks if he wants something to eat and Maconie says sure, so Smith goes into the kitchen and bangs around for twenty minutes or so and then comes out carrying two plates of potato crisp sandwiches (that’s potato chips in American parlance).

And because Smith is a good host, he asks Maconie, “Do you want a pickled onion with that?” I know I would have.