I wouldn’t be the only one to have drastically cut night-time eating excursions. I think quite a few expat employers have requested staff not to go out at night and of late, it has been a fairly reasonable thing to do. The reach of corporate insurers goes far and wide.

A few months back, I mentioned that “Temptations” was operating just around the corner from the Portuguese Embassy across the road at the eastern end of the Palacio do Governu. It looked like it was off to a flying start but it has fallen away quite a bit now.

“Cafe Brasil” just around the corner is one of the success stories. A month or so ago, it extended its premises on the eastern side and has become perhaps the numero uno coffee shop/lunch place in town. It has a good feel but avoid the sandwiches. I dropped in there several times during the troubled May/June period when almost nothing else was open and I was the only customer (it seemed).

The Terrace Cafe has pretty much finished its construction and seems to be going OK but I haven’t been there for a while.

A new Indonesian restaurant (Riung Kurung ??) has opened about 200m west of the Backpackers about a block before the main Colmera intersection. The food is definitely above average Indonesian and leans towards the health food side of things. I believe that initially it did not serve alcohol and preferred to concentrate on fresh juices. Mercifully, consumer demand convinced them to sell beer so I don’t know how good the juices are. Maybe next time. But one restaurant to watch.

At the eastern end of town along the beach, the Coolspot nightclub has disappeared and reinvented itself with a new restaurant across the road by the beach called the “Erli Sun”. It looks flasher than most of the others on the stretch and is on my dance card for a visit soon. The old Coolspot building has been massively renovated but I am not sure what it will become yet. Even before this year’s troubles started, Coolspot always seemed a bit on the seedy side so we’ll just have to see how that one pans out.

There have been a couple of additional structures built down on the eastern beach strip suggest more eateries to come but no progress on fit-out yet.

Went to Vasco da Gamas (the most up-market restaurant in town) for the first time in quite a long time recently. Everything was the same except for a huge make-over of the menu – better, I think. While extensive, the wine list remains for money market investors only. I also noticed the manager of the Hotel Timor was treading the boards, suggesting they are both linked somehow.

Hotel Dili remains a sentimental favourite for that quiet home-style meal amongst the shrubbery.
As for coffee, I think the quality of some of the coffee in some of the bar/restaurants has gone down. My guess is that most are now using Ensul coffee rather than Delta. Correct me if I am wrong.

Well, it may be hotting up at times out there in the Dili streets but for me, there’s another form of hotting up.

In my early 20s, I lived in a “group house” for a while and quite a number of very silly things happened during that period. One of them occured with my mate John when the house consisted of me, John and 2 members of the opposite sex. John and I developed a very male thing of competing over who could cook the hottest curry. Yes, I admit that beer was involved and we had a quaint “thing” about notching up the number of beers consumed on the fridge door. (I won and still have the graphical beer consumption chart specifically designed to stir up the female members of the household about our superior drinking performance ! Yeah, I know – it’s a boy thing.)

Anyway, the curry competition was quite competitive and involved both exceeding the last curry in heat and seeing who could last the longest before breaking out into an uncontrollable sweat.

This “training” has stood me in good stead but it is possible that I have met my match. I have a few acquaintances who are exponents of the constant acquisition of hot chili sauces and line their kitchen walls with any number of sauces from all over the world. I think they may also have met their match.

Soon after the destruction of the Taibesse markets, I passed by and felt obliged to buy something from the half dozen vendors (out of a hundred or so) who were valiantly trying to resume some sort of normality out of the mess. I bought some woven baskets for a US dollar and 3 small sachets of chili paste for 10 cents a sachet. Each sachet held about 2 teaspoons of chili paste in a small clear plastic bag tied with string.

I tried some of this chili paste and merely passed a teaspoon over one of these sachets and my scalp levitated from my head. I reckon a teaspoon of this stuff would give half a bottle of tequila a run for its money for sheer effect.

You can buy these 20mm chilis at the markets most of the time and often one can buy chili paste which has been bottled in re-used drink bottles (often small juice bottles). It will take a while to sample all of this sinus clearing material but someone has to do it.

Yep, it sure is a chili lovers delight here.

There’s nothing like a shandy on a warm afternoon and well … it is pretty warm 365 days of the year. What’s a bloke to do ?

In cooler climes, I usually place wine pretty high on my consumption agenda but wine has fallen to 3rd place behind beer and spirits. Gin and tonic has made a huge comeback in the repertoire here but the old amber nectar is hard to pass by.

And why should I be worried ? I have conclusively proven that an increase in beer consumption leads to weight loss.

Wine tends to be poorer value. Why ? Because it is often stored at ambient temperature at both supermarket and wholesale warehouse. And ambient temperature is usually around 33 degrees ! And at restaurants, no-one has caught on to the fact that serving red wine at room temperature was never intended for warm climates like here. So red wine is often served at 20+ degrees and I am sure was never meant to taste like that.

At home, we always chill our reds down to a more rational “room temperature” which I suppose is closer to 15 degrees than 30 degrees.

In any case, wine tends to be more expensive. If I use the southern Australia comparison, beer tends to be US$2-50 in bars here but can be anything from US$2-50 to US$4-50 in bars in OZ. The gin and tonics served here are huge and do the job admirably but nothing beats the domestically served variety sitting on the porch using an airport acquired duty-free gin – an essential purchase on any arrival in Dili.

As for beer, most bars have VB, Melbourne Bitter and Crown Lager from OZ. XXXX, Cascade Light, Hahn and Powers are also seen occasionally. Portugal provides Super Bock and Sagres beers (both plain and black beers). Others are Tiger (Singapore), Heineken (Netherlands), Carlsberg (Denmark), Corona (Mexico), Tsingtao (China), Asahi (Japan), San Miguel (Philippines), Kirin (Japan).

The cheapest beer in town is Indonesia’s Bintang beer which I quite like really. For masochists, the Timorese brewed Buffalo and Lion are well worth trying and then leaving alone. Both of these small breweries are now closed.

The Filipino “Pinoy” restaurant near the Hotel Esplanada appears to have changed hands and is now a Thai restaurant. Nothing much has changed decor-wise except the staff and the menu. A pad thai chicken can be had for US$4. Not bad but still not up to the Beach Cafe standard.

The Beach Cafe remains closed and I have been told that this is unlikely to change. But I have also been told that the Shanghai restaurant next door (currently undergoing massive renovations) will be taking on the Burmese cook (or cooks ?) from the Beach Cafe. It still looks like it is weeks if not months away and looks like accommodation will be part of the new premises.

Tiger Fuels (ie a petrol/gas station) now is doing pizzas and is also doing western-style bread making. Its all looking good so far. But large pizzas are still US$12, the going rate at Tiger, Dili Club and Castaways. Tiger is also selling Mrs Macs (imported OZ) pies which are sold from a dedicated freezer. They get a gourmet tick of approval from me.

Its probably time I went back to the Filipino burger joint south of the UN barracks. Its still there but I have tended to avoid that area given trouble around the barracks in recent weeks.

The coffee cooperative “Cooperativa Cafe Timor” is selling coffee beans and ground coffee at their premises near the ANZ bank. If you know where to go, you can also get Ensul coffee from deep in the recesses of their compound not far from Hotel Timor. It looks like you are buying from a garden shed but this is no problem. I prefer CCT coffee myself and the price tends to reflect this.

No sign of the resumption of the 2 breweries Buffalo and Lion who once brewed some very interesting beer.

I know I am speaking from a purely expat perspective here but so be it. Most Timorese do not have spare disposable income to splash on restaurants as us expats do but life goes on nevertheless.

In general, restaurant life has returned to normal for those that can afford it. As mentioned previously, the Monkey Bar has downgraded while Ross concentrates on earning some real money for a change courtesy of the huge influx of foreign troops. Hotel Dili carries on as per normal. Hotel Esplanada is much the same, as is Hotel Timor and Vasco da Gamas.

In the Area Branca direction, the seaside restaurant across from the Enigma bar operates as per normal as does the Balinese Paradise restaurant (security assured by the GNR across the road). The Victoria restaurant remains closed as does Bachky. BanThai is closed but at least it is reasonably safe as the bar/nightclub joint across is used by NZ troops. The CazBar has hardly missed a beat and my favourite juice bar, the Sol e Mar is back after a one month hiatus.

The City Cafe, Metro Cafe, Foodstart, Crazy Sandwich and MyFali all now appear to be running as per usual. (The Oceano department store finally did re-open a week or so ago.)

The Terrace Cafe near the Palacio do Governo continues its decor improvements and is one of the few commercial establishments that actively advertises with special meal deals etc. Temptations next to the Portuguese embassy is also operating, as is Cafe Brasil around the corner which has stayed open for most of the last couple of months.

Castaways and the Dili Club have also pressed on for most of past couple of months. The Dili Club in its new western Comorro Road location has expanded its menu with the addition of a new chef. I think they are doing well with the vastly increased take-away pizza market. “Can you deliver 50 pizzas to the ???? army base ?”

There’s no doubt there is an expectation of increased business from foreign troops and perhaps particularly from the forthcoming new UN setup. The bars will have to wait a little longer as the lads with guns will remain “dry” for quite a while yet – perhaps forever.

I have meant to wax lyrical about Timor and its coffee for some time now but I decided to leave it until I had done a tour of the coffee producing areas and seen coffee harvesting and processing in action. I had timetabled for this months ago but was held back by the fact that harvesting does not start until June.

Now that June has passed, it still has not happened. The coffee-producing centre of Ermera has been one of the bases for the so-called “rebels” and the coffee production facilities have been in general turmoil for a while now. The coffee producers rely on seasonal labour at harvest time and because of all the crap lately, the labourers are reluctant to go to the Ermera/Gleno area for work.

More importantly, over the last month or so, the troubles have dealt a severe blow to us lovers of freshly roasted coffee. My source of high quality beans had closed down for over a month and the street sellers of lower quality beans near the airport had deserted their premises.

The supermarkets have a large quantity of vacuum-packed beans from mainly European and Australian companies – but all of unknown age and many packets which have lost their vacuum-ness. Out of deference to the local industry, in times like this I buy the Portuguese processed “Delta” Timorese coffee which is re-imported back into Timor (and fortunately packaged in a cardboard package to protect the vacuum bag inside).

But I finally managed to arrange for my fix of the high quality roasted beans which were delivered to me by bicycle. They make me feel like I am the only person in town with such exacting requirements. But can’t complain.

Its strange really as I didn’t start drinking coffee until one day at work (a number of years ago) I arrived at work with a hang-over and figured that the only thing that might help was a strong cup of coffee. Tea just didn’t do a thing. It was then that I finally realised why the “Pablo” coffee I once provided for coffee drinking guests was greeted with disdain.

Of course, I had a bad start. My mother drank International Roast and Maxwell House and I recall her once allowing me to try coffee when I was but a wee lad. It was her funny way of ensuring I wouldn’t drink it. I also figured this out as she did a similar thing with wine by allowing me to try some green coloured hungarian wine that sat (opened) in the cupboard under the kitchen sink.

Its all child psychology really. The result is that I have become a coffee konnoyzer and wine lake reduction expert.