Pigs and Eating Them

Living in Muslim dominated countries has some interesting side effects.

Some are expected, some are not. I find that I miss pork products like crazy. Being denied something makes you obsess on it beyond your normal attraction. When I found the 'infidel meat aisle' in Carrefour, I was thrilled. It has pork and so I was able to buy some to cook once we lived in a house with a kitchen. At the Berges du Lac, if you ordered something with bacon, you got some weird tough meat that was burned beyond recognition. Kind of like ordering well done meat in a swanky restaurant, they ruin it to punish you.

When we got to Dubai, we ate at the hotel restaurant. It said right on the menu that they served no pork products. So, I was expecting more of the same. But last night, DH had a dinner meeting so I ordered room service.

The room service menu had a different variety of food stuffs on it. One was a club sandwich that said "pork bacon on request." So I ordered it.

Now, I've eaten at Hugo's in Claremore, OK, so I know that you can get too much bacon. There is a threshold that can be crossed whereby you receive way too much of a good thing. I was expecting a 'little' bacon on a "classical club sandwich" that the a la carte menu promised.

Instead, I got a sandwich that looked like a club (see the layers of bread) with the crusts cut off like a kid's meal. And dumped on the top of the plate, like a last minute addition, or a garnish, was a bunch of bacon.

It was a little off-putting. So was the addition of fried eggs with orange yolks as a layer in the sandwich. I expected the bacon IN the sandwich, not ON it. But, guys, bacon is bacon. So I munched my bacon garnish while I ate this very strange sandwich. Instead of any kind of sliced meat, it was made with chicken that had been hammered into thinness and then fried up. That and the fried eggs was the 'meat layer'. It had some very sad lettuce and shredded cheese to complete the sandwich filling. Strange. Not quite a classic club, but it was tasty enough. Should have been called a chicken sandwich or chicken and egg sandwich, but that's marketing.

It does make me wonder about who's cooking in the kitchen though. This is a five star hotel. In the entire city of Dubai, I haven't seen what I consider to be a 'local' working at anything. In every service position, there are Asians, Indians and Bangladeshi. I've chatted up all the hotel staff and none of them are from the UAE, they are all here on work visas.

So, where does this chef come from? Inquiring minds want to know. My best guess is Indonesia. It makes sense based on the fact that most of them are Muslim, and the workers appear to lean to ones from this part of the globe. The chef is Muslim--for sure--based on his treatment of the tasty pork products.

I won't order this one again--not because of the bacon, that was super yummy--but because there is a ton of other stuff that looks good and I want to try it all. If I find something else with pork in it, I'll have to try.

When we first got to Tunis, we heard the ex-pats there talking about smuggling bacon in their checked baggage to bring it back into Tunis from the UK. I considered local sourcing it before trying to figure a way to bring it in from the US. At least now I understand the fixation on the process. I'm developing the same obsession.

--Sandee Wagner