Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Sultan Ibrahim and tuna are grilled, fried or barbecued and served with rice and chopped
raw cabbage with the essential half lime or lemon. Sardines, piles of which spangle the
shore in season and are raked into malodorous heaps between houses, are seldom eaten:
they're usually dried for animal fodder.
Pork is haram (forbidden) to Muslims but it's sometimes available in Gulf supermarkets. Pork sections
are easy to spot: customers slink out with sausages as if they're top-shelf items.
Dinner
The evening meal is a ragged affair of competing interests - children clamouring for hot
dogs or burgers, maids slipping them 'keep-quiet food', mothers going for a sandwich in
Starbucks and grandmothers making sweetmeats and aubergine dips, nibbling on dates
and trying to persuade fathers to enjoy the company of the family instead of going out for
a kebab.
City people in the Peninsula enjoy going out and they are as likely to dine on Mongoli-
an lamb chops, crab rangoon or spaghetti bolognaise as any other city dweller. More often
than not, however, they'll opt for Lebanese food with its copious selection of hot and cold
appetisers known as mezze. The peeled carrots, buffed radishes, whole lettuces and
bunches of peppery spinach leaves, provided complimentary, are a meal in themselves.
Locals invariably entertain guests at home and go out to eat something different. For
travellers to the region, it can therefore be difficult finding indigenous food. Ask locally
where to sample indigenous food and you may find you're taken home for supper.
Every town has a baklava or pastry shop selling syrupy sweets made from pastry, nuts, honey and some-
times rose water. Sweets are ordered by a minimum weight of 250g.
Snacks & Sweets
Western fast food has caught on among Peninsula people with the consumption of burger
and fries verging on epidemic proportions. The concept has translated easily from tradi-
tional practices of visiting small eateries that sell kebabs, felafel and other types of sand-
wiches.
Shwarma
(meat sliced off a spit and stuffed in a pocket of pita-type bread with
chopped tomatoes and garnish), usually served with some form of salad, is the snack of
choice across the whole region. Outings to the coffeeshops that sell these traditional fast
