Momo (Nepal / China / Tibet)

 

Talking to old friend Chris Dillon about the Nepalese restaurants on Euston Road in the 80s has woken up another memory.

    I used to go regularly to those two Nepalese restaurants in the 80s.

    One day, I discovered a dish called momo, which immediately conjured up “peach”  (桃 /もも)  in Japanese for me but is a dumpling.

    That was in the 80s.

    Fast forward to about a decade ago, no further back than that:  I then learned that there’s a food item called 饃饃 / 馍馍 mómo (dialect name for it, dictionary says), which is “mántou 饅頭 / 馒头 [steamed bun made of wheat flour]”.

    My immediate thought was:  the Nepalese had borrowed their momo from the Chinese one, i.e., learned it from the Chinese, which wouldn’t be surprising, given their geographical proximity, plus the fact that the influence of Chinese cuisine seems to have spread so much over time (cf. the claim that Marco Polo brought the concept of noodles back to Italy, which googling tells me is not true…)

    Googling the Nepalese momo for this blog, I find that it’s not copied from the Chinese!

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Momo is a dumpling made of all-purpose flour and filled with either meat or vegetables. Inspired by Tibetan dumplings, the dish is a very popular Nepali street food. In Nepal the most common type of momos are buff (buffalo) momos followed by chicken.

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    Googling the Chinese 饃饃 / 馍馍 then produces another surprise!

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馍馍（尼泊尔语：म:म、ममचा，藏语：མོག་མོག་，威利转写：mog mog）是一种源自西藏并流行于尼泊尔、不丹及印度等喜玛拉雅山地区的面食。其外型近似水饺或小笼包。

(Google Translate) Mog mog (Nepali: म:म, ममचा, Tibetan: མོག་མོག་, Wiley transliteration: mog mog) is a kind of pasta originating from Tibet and popular in Himalayan regions such as Nepal, Bhutan and India. Its appearance is similar to dumplings or steamed buns.

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    So, it looks like the Chinese have borrowed it from the Tibetans as well.

    A bit more digging seems to indicate that 馍馍 is mainly common in N.W.China, not so much in the south east nor in Taiwan.  (Not by this name anyway, although there may be versions that look similar — a round lump of dough with some kind of filling inside.)  It makes sense, too, since N.W.China is roughly the same geographical area as Tibet, ditto Nepal with Tibet, so it’d be natural for it to float around in the region.

(Nepal / China / Tibet)

A surreal Nepalese meal (London)

 

(This blog is inspired by a recent conversation with old friend Chris Dillon who mentioned that he used to go to these restaurants in the 80s.  I’m sharing the nostalgia as some of the readers might recognise them.)

There were two Nepalese restaurants on the stretch of Euston Road by Warren Street Tube station.

    My Heart of the Dragon* office on Fitzroy Square was round the corner, which was how I came across them.

    I later discovered that both the little one and the bigger one (called सगर माथा Sagarmāthā / “sky head” / meaning “the head in the great blue sky” in Nepali) shared the same owner — a gentle and genial chap calling himself David (which I suspect is for Davendra / Davindra).

    The food was nice, the service even better:  from the waiters, the cook and the proprietor.  They made one feel so welcome, which is how it should be anyway, as you’re giving them business.  (Not everyone thinks that way, though, in my and other people’s experience of being at the receiving end of the inexplicable rudeness from some of the staff at ethnic supermarkets.)

    David the Nepalese restaurant proprietor would ply between the two restaurants throughout the day, just to look in on how things were going.  If he found me there, he’d always make a point of staying until my order was ready, then serve it to me in person.  How special does that make a customer feel, I ask you?  (I didn’t get the feeling that he was doing it just for the sake of his own business.  He came across as a genuinely nice person, and sincerely pleased to see me.  Ditto the rest of the staff.)

    I’d go to these two restaurants with friends and colleagues, sometimes in a big group.

    It once amounted to 17 people, including me.  Tables were put together in a low row, four per table, with one end left free for the waiters to serve the head of the table from, and the other end against the back wall was taken up by me.

    At one point early on in the meal, one of the waiters came up to me and asked me to read his palm.  I didn’t remember telling him I could read palms (only rudimentary, though, taught by my eldest sister who features in two of the Interpreting dreams series).  Anyway, it was just a bit of fun, so I read his palm.  

    He was pleased with what I had to say, and came back with a half pint of free beer.  Another waiter then asked me to read his palm (for which I got another half pint of beer), with two others waiting in the queue!

    I was glad they only had four waiters in that restaurant (with about 12 tables), or I’d be there all night reading palms (and quaffing free beers).

(London, 1983)

*The Heart of the Dragon:  Channel 4 TV’s 12-part documentary series on China, first aired in January 1984 to inaugurate the launch of the nascent station (alongside two other sister series:  The Arabs, and The Russians; we were to be called The Chinese, but a Canadian team finished their six-part series, with the same name, ahead of us, so we had to change our name).