The High with the Low: Drinking Shrek’s Tears and Sampling Camel in Doha, Qatar

It is our pleasure here at Vanity Fare to welcome Ted St. Christopher into our dysfunctional, Bluth-like family. We raise a glass of Shrek’s tears and salute you. We promise not to make you get hair plugs.

Doha, Qatar just might be the city of the future. Perched on the edge of the Persian Gulf, fat with petrodollars and determined to transform itself into a major international business center overnight, this sleepy desert backwater is on the make. Skyscrapers rise right before your eyes in the twenty-four hour construction site of its downtown, while shopping malls and “big box” mega-emporiums sprout in its suburbs. This doesn’t mean that there’s much to do in Doha right now, though. Alcohol is forbidden to Qataris and available only at Western hotels, the club scene is nearly nonexistent, and the city’s short on accessible public space. Spread out, car-friendly, and oppressively sunny, Doha could be Los Angeles’ long-lost cousin.

This state of affairs means that Qataris and the thousands of foreigners who live and work here entertain themselves mostly by shopping and eating, which makes Doha a surprisingly interesting destination for the gastronomically-minded traveler. “Guest workers” from India, the Philippines, China and dozens of other locations outnumber native residents about three to one and inspire a kaleidoscopally varied restaurant scene. Even better, Doha’s difficult climate - 50°C summers feature an endless, blinding glare and the occasional sandstorm - has taught its residents patience. Cafes do a brisk business both in Doha’s poshest districts and in its dusty, wind-blown backstreets. While you wouldn’t mistake it for Paris, Dohans seem to have perfected the art of the afternoon-long conversation over small cups of tea-clear, cardamom-infused coffee.

Middle Eastern grub, like so many other cuisines, often works best at street level, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of places in Doha where unpretentious, wholly satisfying meals can be got for about six or seven dollars U.S. Doha’s Indian eateries serve up cheap, delicious curries while its shish kebab joints best anything I’ve ever tasted in the UK. Also of interest are paper-thin crepes flavored with cream cheese and honey available at the local souk. Even if you’re just there to browse for souvenirs or Persian rugs, you will also want to check out Doha’s spice merchants, the aroma of whose piquant and impossibly fresh wares can be enjoyed from the doorway of their shops.

Homesick, or just less adventurous, Westerners will be glad to learn that numerous American fast-food chains, from Johnny Rockets to Burger King to the Colonel, have hung out their shingles in Doha. While I’m sad to report that the lamb at the Ponderosa Steakhouse is as tough and woefully overdone as it would be in any of its American locations, the expansion of Western fast food to the Middle East also results in some wonderfully unlikely cultural juxtapositions. There’s a Mexican restaurant over at the Marriot, and while its waitresses are decked out in Mexican peasant dresses, the distances involved, both physical and cultural, are so vast that judging its relative “authenticity” seems rather beside the point. There’s also tabouli and fatoush salad at the Ponderosa’s salad bar and the Dairy Queen and Dunkin’ Donuts logos translated into graceful, and weirdly familiar, Arabic script. Even Hardee’s advertises that its new Mushroom Burger is “100% Halal.”

My time in Doha has done nothing short of reorganize my personal culinary geography. For a long time, I thought that the United States tasted like Mountain Dew, that antifreeze-colored mixture of sugar and caffeine favored by twitchy fourteen year-olds and grad students on impossible deadlines. I’d never encountered it on my travels in Europe or South America. While I sometimes wondered what teenagers in other countries drank while performing totally rad snowboard jumps, I felt secure in the knowledge that only my fellow Americans were tough (or crazy) enough to regularly consume a beverage that has more than one-and-a-half times the caffeine content of Pepsi and is the color of Shrek’s tears. Well, I was wrong. It’s all over Qatar, and I’ve got the photographic evidence to prove it. Now, I don’t know if Qatari video game nerds fuel their all-night sessions of “Team Fortress 2″ with Mountain Dew’s “Code Red” spin-off like their American counterparts do, but I’m going to have to concede that anything’s possible. What’s the lesson here? If we live in a world dominated by the cruel dictates of multinational capitalism, our new overlords have at least decided to make it interesting for us.

As a service to Vanity Fare’s readers, this reporter, who likes his steak well-done and won’t eat seafood, tried some camel. While Doha hosts camel races every week, camel meat isn’t exactly typical Qatari cuisine. I had to visit “Tagine,” one of a chain of Moroccan eateries, to try the stuff. My main course arrived steaming hot in its own earthenware stew-pot and looked, upon first inspection, like beef bourguignon made without any vegetables. The meat itself was long-fibred and extremely tender, if somewhat gamey, and very, very rich. One of my dining companions, who was born and brought up in western Canada, commented that it wasn’t unlike moose. A strong lemon marinade added some contrast to the meat’s natural flavor, but it was simply too much for me. I decided to trade it for a friend’s chicken rfissi with saffron, which I found much more to my taste. While I’m glad that I can tell my grandchildren and you, dear reader, that I’ve actually eaten a bit of this noble desert beast, I’m not exactly sure I’d do it again. Anyway, there’s a Chili’s not too far from here.

- Ted St. Christopher