Mongolian Pizza, and Other Travel Mistakes

Laurel here, with another traveller’s tale from a trip to Mongolia in 2000 with a regular travelling companion. We were in China and knew someone who knew someone in Ulaanbaatar. And that was a good enough reason to go. Everything about this side-trip was amazing, especially our trip to Lake Hovsgol in the north. The people were utterly lovely, and don’t get me started on Chinggis Khan, whom I developed a wee crush on. (We never actually met.) Mongolia was excellent and you should visit.

But I want to concentrate on the food, because my poor choices taught me a valuable lesson about travel. Mongolian food is simple to the point of boredom: mostly mutton, goat and yak with noodles. And it comes in a variety of formats (soup, dumpling, etc.). There are also a lot of dairy products, including aaruul (dried milk curds), milk tea, and fermented mare’s milk. Vegetables and fruits are scarce and usually canned. And every person you visit will offer you hospitality in the form of sugar, usually hard candies. Nothing wrong with them, but ten a day can start to get to you. So, no excuses but it can be rough going, especially for a veggie lover like me.

During this trip, I had a meal in a ger (=yurt) featuring tea made with yak butter and some hair from the yak floating in it. So when I say that on this trip I ate the grossest thing I’ve ever eaten, I hope you will believe that I mean business.

A Western Restaurant

This trip, obviously, was not about the food, but nonetheless after a couple of weeks of eating greasy meat and drinking hairy tea we were keen for something else. So we went to a place offering ‘Western food’, just the kind of place we normally work hard to avoid. There was a picture in the three-booth restaurant of a reasonable-looking burger and – miracle of miracles – a pizza! Fantastic, I thought; it would be unreasonable to expect a salad, but this ought to work. Who doesn’t know how to make a pizza?

The menu was not in English or even Russian, but the pictures were good enough for us. My companion ordered a hamburger with ketchup and mayonnaise. I think mayonnaise is disgusting but to each her own. I ordered my mushroom and pepper Mongolian pizza and a Niislel (a local beer) and rubbed my hands in anticipation.

Everybody Loves Mongolian Pizza!

While we wait for my pizza, let me remind you that the excellent thing about travel is that it helps you to get out of your comfort zone. The terrible thing about travel is that it forces you to get out of your comfort zone. Sometimes your expectations are unmet because they are unreasonable (like, as it happens, Mongolian pizza), and sometimes they are totally reasonable but still unmet. Once in a while – as when John and I had nachos in India made with Doritos – you realize that other people have it figured out and you should learn from them. (Probably this applies to things besides food but I really only care about food.)

Our food came, an adequate burger and my pizza. This pizza looked very much like the one in the picture. As it came closer, however, I could sense that something was off. There was indeed crust of a sort, and there was a tomato-based sauce, and mushrooms and peppers (canned mushrooms and those Hungarian wax peppers that don’t taste like much). But what had looked like meltingly soft mozzarella in the picture turned out in real life to be globs of mayonnaise. Hot, melty mayonnaise. Please do remember my feelings about mayonnaise, which are not positive ones. And the ‘tomato sauce’ was ketchup, bubbling away from its time in the oven. It was apparent that this pizza had been made with all of the goodwill in the world by a person or persons who had not only never eaten a pizza, but who had never even seen one in the flesh, er – crust, before.

Still. I was hungry, and they had gone to all of the effort, so I did manage to eat about a third of the pizza. I am sorry to report that it did not make it all of the way down before making an unscheduled reappearance in the restaurant’s bathroom.

Lessons Learned?

So what’s the lesson here? Three, I think: first, I’m not sure anybody expecting a pizza would have loved the meal I was served, but they might not have disliked it so much. That’s on me. But why be voluntarily miserable? I’ve learned to ask, always, if there is mayonnaise in something I’m ordering. If you have a similar thing (or, obviously and more life-threateningly, a food allergy), you should too. Even when it is crazy and you feel stupid. Second, the hamburger was fine, bun slightly unusual, meat unidentified, but fine. Mongolians eat beef and they also eat bread. They do not eat tomato sauce or mozzarella. I should have thought more about the many cultural translations that would have to happen before the Neapolitan-style pizza of my dreams appeared on a restaurant menu. And third, when you enter a restaurant offering Western-style food and discover that nobody at the restaurant knows anything about the west (note the hint above about the menu!), your best bet is to turn right back around. However entranced you are by the idea of a pizza, you will be disappointed by the reality.

That said, the lesson is not just to avoid food that is out of place. There are many fantastic outposts of international cuisine, not all of them fancy French restaurants in former colonies. For instance, we were thrilled to discover a place called Jerusalem Falafel in Chiang Mai, run by an Israeli woman married to a Thai man. But there are also many restaurants that will leave you sad and even gagging, so use a little common sense in picking your pizza, as it were.

“Brick-oven Margarita pizza” by uıɐɾ ʞ ʇɐɯɐs is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.