IT WAS in Venice, of all places, that the first mouthful of an idea passed the lips of travel writer John Krich. While on holiday in the historical Italian city some strange quirk of the gastric juices had led him to a Chinese restaurant for dinner.
'The food was awful,' he recalls. It turned out the family who owned the place had come originally from Wenzhou in Fujian province, like most of the Chinese in Italy. 'Wenzhou is not noted for its cuisine, so it was not surprising the meal was poor.' But what dawned on the San Francisco-based writer was that there was a Chinese restaurant at all in a place like Venice. Of course, it was the home town of the explorer Marco Polo; and it is he who has been credited, in legend at least, with introducing Chinese noodles to Italy (or was it the other way round?). But that was a very long time ago. The point now, for Krich, was that there was practically nowhere on earth without a Chinese restaurant and this surely must be the makings of a good book. The idea was reinforced when he was in Jerez, Spain, home town of sherry, where he found another Chinese restaurant run by an acupuncturist who took him to see a flamenco dance.
Krich has just passed through Hong Kong in what has turned into a year-long search for the world's best Chinese restaurant. If that sounds a bit grand, along the way he will be doing a lot of talking to try to get to the bottom of the phenomenon that is the Chinese restaurant. He's done Taiwan and China and is heading for Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore and then Australia before a mammoth trek across the United States.
'Outside Asia, the only image that the majority of the world has of China comes from the neighbourhood corner restaurant that serves sweet and sour pork and chicken chow mein. It's an institution that we take for granted with its exotic screens, fake bamboo and red lanterns,' says Krich who has already written two successful travel books. The first, Why Is This Country Dancing?, is about the musical heritage of Brazil; the other, Around The World In A Bad Mood is travel writing, warts and all. The fact is travelling is not always fun, he says, it can frequently be disillusioning and disappointing. There are such things as dengue fever and diarrhoea, just as there are beautiful sunsets.
Research for the current book, tentatively titled The Long Munch, naturally started in China. 'My last ounce of faith in socialism was destroyed by the food in China. I thought if this system can ruin something as great as Chinese food then there must be something seriously wrong with it: state waitresses doing nothing and chicken bones all over the floor.' But he notes that food is very much part of the fabric of Chinese society. Food is even considered a perk of the job for officials who reach a certain level - and there is huge rivalry over the ordering of culinary exotica.
But it is more global than that. 'The thing that is so fascinating about China is that we think of it as exotic and far away but what goes on within it affects the whole of the rest of the world. And this is especially true in food,' Krich says.