International Cuisine

It's a terrible euphemism for professional hotel chain chef jobbing food slappery. It's the food served in hotel coffee shops around the world, large booming marble-floored rooms filled with desperate people driven to the edge of drivelling insanity to a soundtrack of soothing corporately approved chillout as they sit to their plasticised club sandwiches.

My heart sinks when I hear the words 'international buffet': it's a dead cert that you'll get lined up to a display of tired hummus and other limp versions of Middle Eastern classics, with a range of salads that back up Anthony Bourdain's assertion that buffets are made up of chefs' garbage. Once you've slurped the last of the cheap olive oil and tasteless, over-mayonnaised pea from your plate, you're forced up again to confront some stewed OAP quadruped in an obnoxious and over-seasoned sauce zinging with more monosodium glutamate than a dry roast peanut.

And then there's dessert. Steady now, nearly over. Impossibly dayglo pink mousselines, suspiciously shitty chocolate mousses, nasty dry little cakey things in individual dishettes and somewhere, lurking... yessss, the 'Umm Ali', the Middle East's very own bread pudding: deliciously creamy, nutty and scented with the redolence of the souk. Invariably present and reduced, in the international buffet version, to a revolting, stodgy, semi-set puke cake.

Yum.

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