A hunger for home: best places to pick up world foods in Abu Dhabi

It is a busy lunchtime at Mushrif Mall, but the sound of one particularly animated conversation complete with bursts of raucous laughter floats above the usual hubbub of the food court. Four female friends - three Peruvians and a Colombian - all regulars at the Amazonas Venezuelan Kitchen on the third-floor food court have gathered to say adios to a fifth. Mirnoska Scott, the only Venezuelan in the group, is about to return home for a long holiday. It is entirely appropriate that the women should gather around a table loaded with traditional Venezuelan dishes such as cachapas (sweet corn pancakes) and pastelitos (small sweet and savoury puff pastries) because these foods, eaten in a foreign land, have helped them form sustaining friendships that cross barriers of age, nationality and race. For Alexandra Ibanez, eating recognisable comfort food from home is about more than just taste. "This is my first time away from Colombia," explains Ibanez. "I grew up with this food, and I need it to be happy here." Scott points to a plate of tequenos - deep-fried pastry twists stuffed with queso blanco (white cheese). "I cannot make these at home here. The flour and the cheese are not available." Amazonas is the only source of authentic South American food they have discovered in Abu Dhabi and they feel lucky to have found such an important cultural and emotional link, not only with home, but also with each other. Unfortunately, the Peruvians around the table are not so lucky. "We are very proud of our food," says Nataly Leslie, from Cuzco. "Sadly we cannot find it anywhere here." She describes both the excitement and the disappointment of a recent visit to a Peruvian food festival in Dubai. "If I see Peruvian food I always eat it, but it doesn't taste the same. I think they must have used different ingredients or cooked it in a different way. The order in which you do things in Peruvian cooking is very important. It makes a big difference." Leslie misses Peruvian cheeses most. "Whenever my mother comes to visit, I make sure she brings a whole bagful." The relationships between food, identity and our sense of well-being are especially strong. Languages and customs are often lost between one immigrant generation and the next, but food and the rituals and identities that accompany it are far more enduring. "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are," said Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the 18th-century French epicure and gastronome who effectively invented modern food writing with his essay The Physiology of Taste. As the following food tales attest, what you eat is also a matter of who you are, where your heart is and the efforts expats make to retain those vital culinary and emotional links with each other and with home. What follows is a guide to those specialist shops - overlooked, out of the way or just plain difficult to find - that enable some of the city's many nationalities to satisfy their hunger for home. View Have a hunger for home food in Abu Dhabi? in a larger map Chinese groceries, fresh vegetables and tea Chinese City Grocery, Tourist Club, beside the Fortune Hotel Apartments, between Electra, Al Falah and Salam streets, 02 650 7998 Several electricians are still making the final additions to the Chinese City Grocery, a new Baqala-compliant store on a quiet backstreet in the heart of Tourist Club. The shop's lighting and sign are still not finished, but the owner - a smiling Chinese woman with the adopted name Jenny - has found time to hang traditional good-luck charms and red paper lanterns in the windows. They bring the mute storefront to life and provide the only clues to the cabinet of culinary curiosities that awaits customers inside. Packets of fresh lotus root (Dh36/kg), six-foot lengths of gnarled black sugar cane (Dh10/kg) and arm-long yams all bewilder the eye, as do packets of dried jellyfish, goji berries and black "cloud ear fungus", a near tasteless mushroom that is nevertheless prized for its crunchy texture and medicinal properties. The shop is Jenny's third in the capital. She opened her first in 2004, a small Chinese tearoom in Khalidiya, and the beverage continues to be an important part of her business. To keep them fresh, Jenny refrigerates delicate jasmine green tea flowers as well as bags of sought-after Tie Guan Yin, or Iron Goddess tea, from her native Fujian province (Dh300/500g). Of the three specialist Chinese groceries on Abu Dhabi Island, the Chinese City Grocery has the widest range of ingredients and is the easiest to use, as shoppers dazzled by printed Mandarin will find Jenny a patient and very necessary guide. South Asian fruit & vegetables Selected Vegetables & Fruits LLC, Madinat Zayed, behind Ma Wa Weel Restaurant, Al Falah Street, 02 634 4131 The temperature drops as you cross the threshold of this tiny one-room shop and your nose fills with the unmistakably vital aroma of fresh produce. One of Abu Dhabi's best-kept secrets, Selected Vegetables & Fruits LLC has attracted a loyal following among Sri Lankan and South Asian expats from the time when the current owner's father opened his first store in Mina Zayed. That was 40 years ago. A second followed in Khalidiya, but now this tiny shop in the south-east corner of Madinat Zayed is the only outlet that remains. The shop carries a wide variety of dried groceries including peyawa, an ayurvedic herbal mix used as an infusion for the treatment of flus and fevers, but it is the deliveries of fresh vegetables, leaves and fruits that draw customers from as far afield as Mussafah, Shahama and Baniyas. These include Nidhi Jain, an office worker originally from Mumbai who has come to buy coriander, spinach and fenugreek. "I come because of the freshness and the quality and I always find everything I need. This place caters to everyone." Popular ingredients include mukunuwenna, the most widely grown and consumed vegetable in Sri Lanka, katura murunga (edible white flowers and leaves from the agati tree) and the kidney-shaped leaves of gotu kola. The leaves have both medicinal and culinary uses, but when mixed with grated coconut it becomes malluma, a popular Sri Lankan accompaniment to any number of curries and rice. Fresh produce arrives each Wednesday - as do customers in their hundreds - and by Thursday afternoon, most of it has gone. Be quick. Korean groceries Karat Supermarket, Mussafah, near the Cambridge High School, E30/63rd Street, Sector ME9, 02 553 4842 Asphalt may soon give way to sand on the outskirts of Mohammed Bin Zayed City, but the interior of the Karat Supermarket is a glacial expanse of immaculate white tile, tightly packed shelves and enormous freezers. While the shop's owner Kim Myeong Sin watches over the till, his friendly assistants clean, stack shelves and answer questions, no mean feat in a store that attracts customers from all over East Asia. Products like green rice cakes with wormwood, fermented cod gills and sea urchin roe may capture the attention, but most customers come for the very basic ingredients that can help to make daily life in a foreign country more manageable. Karat's best-sellers include popular Korean beverages such as Dongshu Five Grains Tea (Dh15/144g), Maxim Mocha Gold instant coffee (Dh65D/1.2kg) and sikhye, a sweet drink made by pouring malt water onto cooked rice, the residue of which can still be seen at the bottom of each bottle (Dh23/1.8lt). The most valued ingredients, however, are the bags of frozen seafood that fill Karat's chest freezers and the large bags of Kyong Gi rice, stacked shoulder high wherever space allows. "Rice and soup are the basis of our cuisine," explains Kinam Kim, an engineer who has come to Abu Dhabi from Seoul with his young family. "You cannot do anything without the right rice, and whenever we eat it, it reminds us of home." Bespoke Italian bread APi CAE Gourmet, Khalidiya, Block A, Khalidiya Tower, behind NBAD, 02 666 8909, www.apicae.com APi CAE Gourmet is an Italian restaurant whose in-house bakery has established an international following among those who value their daily bread, especially Abu Dhabi's French community. This may have something to do with the fact that APi CAE's bakers only use French butter in their croissants and that all of their bread is made from scratch using flour imported from Italy as opposed to off-the-shelf flour mixes. APi CAE can deliver nine varieties of fresh bread to your door on a daily basis, ranging from plain white pane bianco and pane di Altamura - a mixed wheat and semolina sourdough - to baguette-style filoncino, and Tirolese, a brown bread made with buckwheat flour. "Some of our bread can take a day to rise before it is baked. When you start from scratch and combine your own flour, you get a better taste and complexity of texture," explains APi CAE Gourmet co-founder Gergana Konova. APi CAE offers private baking lessons and will even make bespoke bread to customers' own recipes, something they do on a daily basis for 60 patients with special dietary requirements who are registered with the Imperial College London Diabetes Centre. For Konova, it is the restaurant's commitment to the community as much as the quality ingredients that makes the difference. "I thought that Abu Dhabi needed food made by people who cared," she explains proudly. South African spiced meat Springbok Butchery, Mina Zayed, Shop 37, Butchers' Market, 20th Street, 02 673 6988, www.springbokbutchery.com Operating from a tiny glass-fronted cubicle in Mina Zayed dominated by a central butcher's block and a large industrial meat drying cabinet, the Springbok Butchery has managed to develop, largely by word of mouth, a network of loyal customers that now extends from Abu Dhabi to Dubai and Al Ain. The butchery sells fresh beef, lamb, chicken and camel, but its speciality is traditional South African dried and spiced meats such as biltong (marinated, spiced and dried meat), droewors (dried sausage), boerewors (spiced sausage) and sosatie, a type of kebab that is marinated and then skewered with capsicum and other vegetables. All are prepared, marinated and dried on the premises, as are the butchery's infamous chilli bites - strips of spiced and cured silverside beef - a snack so popular that one customer buys 6kg for personal consumption each week. Given the repertoire, it should come as no surprise that a significant part of the butchery's business is in supplying bar snacks to local hotels. The Springbok's other speciality is that South African culinary institution the braai, a barbecued lamb spit roast and a perennial favourite for parties and special events. The Springbok's experienced South African butcher Neil Pommerel and Filipino brothers in meat Eric and Felix will happily take special orders - cheese sausages are not unusual - and can then deliver your order on request. In Abu Dhabi most palates can be catered for; the sheer quality and range of choice is stupendous, standards are high and service is excellent. In short, the UAE's capital is a haven for the world's fare. weekend@thenational.ae Follow us Follow us on Facebook for discussions, entertainment, reviews, wellness and news.

A hunger for home: best places to pick up world foods in Abu Dhabi

With map Got a hankering for a plate of tequenos? Holding a braai and need some South African sosatie? Here is a look at how various cultures in the UAE have imported their cuisines and where to buy the ingredients.