"The ice cream is just a cover"

Matt O’Connor was once labelled a political extremist. Now he makes a living selling ice cream. But after his headline-grabbing launch of Baby Gaga – an ice cream made from human breast milk – Matthew Lee wonders whether anything in O’Connor’s world has actually changed…


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Westminster Council is digging up the road in front of The Icecreamists. It’s perfect ice cream weather, a beautiful spring day in Covent Garden, but the air out front is loaded with dust and the growl of drills. Matt O’Connor isn’t impressed. It’s bad for business and no one, he says, will inform him when the work will end. We retreat to the far corner of the shop – essentially Häagen-Dazs reimagined by Peter Stringfellow – and he recounts the events of a few weeks ago, his “storm in a D-cup”. Baby Gaga, the Icecreamists’ human breast milk ice cream, went on sale on 24th February, only to be confiscated by the local council five days later. After a week of tests the authorities declared it perfectly safe for human consumption.

Matt O’Connor and the authorities in Westminster have history. Before the dramatic seizing of Baby Gaga, this spiky-haired agitator was a constant thorn in the council’s side. As the founder and leader of Fathers 4 Justice, he saw members of his group throw condoms filled with purple flour at then-PM Tony Blair in the House of Commons and climb Buckingham Palace dressed as Batman and Robin, coming close to getting shot by police. The attention-grabbing stunts may have been more Jeremy Beadle than Jeremy Bentham, but they got him noticed. A man denied access to his sons was getting his powerful message – that family courts are biased against fathers – on to the front page of every newspaper in Britain.

He talks about the Baby Gaga saga with relish. This crusader may have long hung up his cape, but I find it hard to believe he didn’t expect a stranger’s mammary glands to land him in another spot of bother. If O’Connor was seeking publicity, he succeeded spectacularly. After the launch (“Sick shop sells breast milk ices”), the confiscation (“Ice cream causes hepatitis fears”) and the test results (“We boobed – council chiefs admit it’s safe”), there was a more worrying headline: “Lady Gaga puts the squeeze on breast milk ice cream”. The pop star is threatening to sue for alleged damage to her reputation.

The fun started, as all controversies do these days, on Mumsnet, with a post calling for donors. Initially, O’Connor used the milk of 15 mothers but now he’s overwhelmed by willing suppliers. “We could turn this place into a milking parlour,” he jokes, and as if to prove his point, an email pings into his inbox from a willing supplier. She’d like to earn some extra money, she writes. She’s just the latest in a long line of lactating ladies who are ready to join the catering industry. Victoria Hiley was at the front of the queue. The Leeds mother and “qualified breastfeeding helper” provided enough milk for the first 50 servings of “Baby Gaga” and wrote an eloquent opinion piece about it for The Guardian.

“The idea for breast milk ice cream isn’t that original,” admits O’Connor, showing me a letter he’s drafting in response to the pop star’s lawyers that references both the Oxford English Dictionary and the traditions of pastiche and mockery in British satire. “But the concept and mix of ideas is original. Look, Lady Gaga borrows from everywhere, and then she turns round and says she wants to own the utterances of our firstborn: ‘ga ga ga ga’.”

O’Connor doesn’t miss a trick. Lady Gaga’s team, he tells me, has described his ice cream as “nausea-inducing”. He points out that this comes from a woman who has appeared in public wearing cow’s flesh, and claims he’s ready for a fight. But surely, I suggest, he saw the lawyers coming? He doesn’t disagree. “If you put out the bait somebody will come along and take it.” O’Connor, quite clearly, is a man with a whole warehouse of bait. His Fathers 4 Justice stunts were often dismissed as irresponsible, careless and dangerous, but they succeeded in getting people talking about a possible maternal bias in the UK’s child custody laws. Back in the heady days of the mid-’90s, he was using his experience in marketing and his uncanny knack for creating controversy to fight for something worth risking everything for: his children. But surely this is different. Surely it’s just a publicity stunt?

“This is entirely political,” he replies. “The ice cream is just a cover. It’s to challenge how we view food. The food industry in this country is a disgrace. The supermarkets are a disgrace. They’re killing innovation. We need to get back to local farming and reduce travel costs. This is meant to make us think about where our food comes from.”

“I wasn’t going to do it,” he continues. “But then I read about Defra [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] saying they’ve approved milk from cloned cows. I don’t want to be part of this experiment, this fucking around with things; it’s like with nuclear power, they said nothing could ever go wrong. People say breast milk’s designed for babies, but cows’ milk is designed for calves. We are force-fed a diet of indoctrination and stupidity.”

You can draw a straight line from Fathers 4 Justice to the Icecreamists. The message has changed but the methodology remains the same. The personal, the political and now the commercial are fused and frozen together, to be scooped up and served with half a snarl and half a smile. O’Connor clicks off his screensaver, a photo of his three beaming children, and opens the plans for his new shop on the edge of Covent Garden Market. He shows me illustrations of Adolf Hitler and Colonel Gaddafi eating ice cream. It’s called “The Dictators of Cool”. It’s about financial and nuclear meltdown, he says, and it’s partly inspired by the time as a child he dropped his ice cream on the promenade at Margate. He cried but his father laughed, and at that moment he realised ice cream – much like Batman and Robin risking their lives to tell the police and camera crews gathered below that they desperately, urgently wanted to be fathers to their children – could be both funny and sad at the same time. “It’s about shock and awe,” he says. “We want to start a debate, not a David Cameron-style big wank conversation.”

This is how he speaks – freewheeling and unfiltered, with swearwords and puns tumbling out with dizzying speed. You can see why he says he’s inspired by Spike Milligan and ‘Monty Python’. From the prime minister (“a wanker, a lying gobshite”) to the hypocrisy of the Catholic church to Mumsnet (“Guardianistas, up their own arses”), he’s never short of an opinion, a joke or a delightfully filthy turn of phrase. While he’s occasionally prone to laughable self-aggrandisement, telling somebody who suggested “Baby Gaga” was anti-feminist that “It’s the most pro-feminist thing of the past 30 years and it’s taken a man with meat and two veg to do it”, he’s persuasive and consistent. From his uninhibited speech, it’s clear he’s an impulsive decision-maker, not letting fear of prosecution get in the way of a spectacular stunt and another round of tabloid headlines.

“Risk assessment!” he laughs, when I ask a question about planning. “Fucking hell, mate. It’s instinctive assessment. We don’t speak to lawyers unless we really have to. I try to avoid them.” I suggest that some of his stunts came close to breaking the law and he gets a little prickly. “Seven jury trials out of seven we won,” he says, twice. “We were never convicted of anything and even if we were I wouldn’t give a flying fuck. I’ve refused to sign a census form. I don’t trust the government with my information. The government’s tried to finish me off a couple of times, directly or indirectly, and it doesn’t recognise me as a father. You know what? It doesn’t recognise me as a citizen. I don’t vote, I don’t have anything to do with the state. I won’t sign a census form: a “nonsense-sus form”, that’s what I call it. It’s fucking nonsense. I will not sign it. Over my dead body.”

It may come as a surprise that O’Connor was briefly a politician himself. In 2008 he stood as an English Democrat candidate in London’s mayoral elections. He withdrew from the race a week before polling. “I must have been at a vulnerable point in my life where my ego needed feeding,” he recalls. “It was an interesting exercise but I learned that British politics is as fucked at the bottom as it is at the top. And I’m not really cut out for politics.” But then he reveals he’s working on “the most serious thing I’ve done in my life”, something tied to Fathers 4 Justice, which is now managed by his wife. We can safely assume it’s not the Fathers 4 Justice stage musical, another work in progress.

In January 2006, O’Connor disbanded Fathers 4 Justice after press reports revealed that fringe elements of the group were planning to kidnap Tony Blair’s five-year-old son, Leo. He announced that extremists had infiltrated the group and that despite his best efforts to expel the hardliners he was unable to control them and no longer wanted to be associated with an organisation whose legitimacy and credibility had been undermined. A few months later, he announced a reformation with trademark O’Connor panache, invading the stage during the National Lottery show on live television. But he’s no longer at the forefront of the group’s activities. “I had to get out,” he says. “I was getting depressed. It was a labour of love and it cost me a fortune. I’ve worked in ice cream for over 20 years and needed to make some money. I need to keep my soul intact by keeping it edgy, but at the same time I hope it’s commercially successful without compromising my politics.”

Although he insists he’s dropped Spider-Man, Superman and Batman from his act, I wonder if that’s how O’Connor has always seen himself: a superhero. An ordinary bloke battling for justice against institutions that have too much power and are out of control. His critics may call him a rabble-rouser and an attention-seeking merchant of talk radio bluster, and they may question how much he’s actually changed child custody laws in this country. But there’s no questioning his passion and talent for ice cream.

We’ve barely discussed the stuff. We talk about whether breast milk ice cream appeals to people with very specific sexual fetishes (“I don’t know, I’m more an M&S than an S&M kind of guy”) and then he expresses his concern that the quality of his other ice creams will be overshadowed by the controversy.

He’s worked in marketing for ice cream brands over the past 20 years and it’s long been an obsession. He trained in Bologna and travelled around Italy comparing gelaterias. He launched the Icecreamists as a pop-up shop at Selfridges (that infamous hub of anti-establishment activity) and has been working over the years on hundreds of flavours. He’s promising something in the near future involving nudity, which has made his Covent Garden landlords nervous, as well as the most fattening ice cream ever made. “We’re full fat and getting fatter,” he explains. “We’re size maximalists, not size-zero.”

Disappointingly, they’re not serving “Baby Gaga” until new supplies of milk arrive, so I request a portion of the chilli, ginger and lemongrass flavour. It’s the perfect Icecreamists specimen, sweet and smooth until the generously-speckled chilli subjects to me an almighty kicking. I’m loving it, but as I walk out of the shop, a sudden gust of wind sprays dust from the roadworks towards my ice cream. I’m caught in the crossfire of a long-running battle. O’Connor walks me to the new branch, soon to be home to a cone-licking cartoon colonel from Tripoli. Hostilities are unlikely to end any time soon.

Israel and Palestine - uncut!

“To women and girls who pass through our neighbourhood,” reads the sign at the entrance to Mea Shearim, “we beg you with all our hearts - please do not pass through our neighbourhood in immodest clothes.”

I’m male and conservatively dressed, yet my presence in this ultra-orthodox district of Jerusalem creates a stir. Women scuttle away down side streets when they see me, which I try not to take personally, while a group of young schoolboys react aggressively when I attempt to take a photo of them playing hopscotch. It feels like I’ve been transported to the eighteenth century, to a shtetl in eastern Europe, a religious community cut off from the rest of the world.

It’s not pretty here, but it’s certainly atmospheric. Laundry hangs from balconies (with no sinful undergarments in sight) and the walls are covered in posters, mostly news of the latest religious rulings in large Hebrew lettering, along with flags (Israeli and Palestinian), graffiti, and messages in Russian and English. The words “Zionist Murderers” are scrawled on a wall next to the words “Kahane was right”, referring to an ultra-nationalist rabbi who was assassinated two decades ago. There’s no TV, radio or internet in Mea Shearim but there’s no shortage of opinions. Moderation, it seems, is out of style.

The following morning I read another sign. “You are now entering Free Dheisheh,” it says by the entrance of a refugee camp just south of Bethlehem. Dheisheh was established in 1949 as a temporary camp for Palestinians who fled the Arab-Israeli war the previous year. As hopes of a Palestinian right of return faded from view, tents turned into permanent structures and while the living standards here aren’t bad, at least compared to the despair of Gaza, there’s high unemployment while water, controlled by Israel, is in short supply. Portraits of young men who have died in the conflict are stencilled on the outside walls of the apartment buildings.

At the camp’s Ibdaa Cultural Center, I speak to a twenty-something resident who’s lived here his whole life. He explains how the nakba (the “catastrophe” of 1948 when Palestinians were expelled from their homes) and the decades-old conflict has severely limited his life opportunities. He tells me people in Dheisheh have no hope for the future. “Israel”, he says, “has no interest in peace”, while the Palestinian Authority are weak and corrupt. Ominously, he says moderate Palestinians are increasingly turning to Hamas out of desperation.

If there were no checkpoints, the drive between the first sign and the second sign would have taken around twenty minutes. The closeness of everything comes as a revelation. It helps me understand why Israelis feel insecure – their country is only eight miles wide at one point. But it also shows how the occupation affects so many aspects of everyday Palestinian life. The Dome of the Rock and the Jerusalem skyline can be seen from much of the West Bank, but few Palestinians are given permission to visit them.

A holy city for the three major Abrahamic religions, Jerusalem is a beautiful place, albeit a confusing and somewhat maddening one. Here, secular and religious Jews live alongside Muslim and Christian Arabs. I find the city intoxicating, a smörgåsbord for the senses where it’s almost impossible not to overfill your plate.

The first thing I do is head to the Western Wall, at the edge of the Temple Mount. It’s a Friday and the sun is about to set. Jewish groups on religious tours dance in circles and wave Israeli flags. Ultra-orthodox males wearing shtreimels, the furry round hats, head to the wall and begin their Shabbat prayers, swaying back and forth.

At the same time, Friday prayers commence at the Al-Aqsa mosque, in Israeli-controlled territory but run by Palestinian Muslims. It takes less than a minute to walk there from the Western Wall. Half an hour later, the rabbit warren lanes of the old market fill with post-prayer traffic. Jewish and Muslim families shop at the same stalls, with little interaction but no obvious hostility either. And tonight there’s an added ingredient thrown in the mix. It’s Christmas Eve and pilgrims from all over the world are en route to Bethlehem for midnight mass at the Church of Nativity.

Not being religious, I feel excluded. I step inside a souvenir shop where “Free Palestine” and “Israeli Defence Forces” T-shirts sit side-by-side on the shelf. Business, as always, is business, and caught up in the midst of warring tribes it’s strangely reassuring. But the sad reality is that Israel and the Palestinian West Bank are separated by a 700km long barrier.

On my way to the refugee camp on Christmas Day morning, I pass through the Bethlehem checkpoint. A row of yellow taxis waits to take pilgrims to the town centre on the other side. Behind them, the barrier doubles as a gallery - a feast of art and graffiti. Among the provocative references to apartheid (“Welcome to Soweto”) and the Holocaust (“The oppressed becomes the oppressor”) there are many colourful calls for peace.

After a festive walk in Bethlehem and a tour of Dheisheh, I go to Ramallah where I get coffee at the Stars & Bucks Cafe, whose logo bears a striking resemblance to a well-known American brand. I put it down to a remarkable coincidence. After a reasonable attempt at a latte and a falafel from a stall at the bus station, I take the number 18 back to Jerusalem, which chugs slowly down busy Palestinian roads. Out the window I can see not-so-busy roads exclusively for Israelis, connecting Israeli cities with the settlements up in the hills. I return to Jerusalem.

I love CouchSurfing, but it's not without its drawbacks. At 9.45pm on Christmas Eve, having just been told by a hostel receptionist that I've got next to no chance of getting a bed in town on the busiest night of the year, I open my laptop and plead for help. "CS host gone AWOL," I tweet furiously. "Urgently need a bed in Holy Land. Any old manger will do." Just as the fear kicked in - the streets of Jerusalem are chilly at night - I got the call I was waiting for. My CouchSurfing host had lost her mobile phone and hadn't been able to reach me. I wouldn't be spending Christmas on the streets.

I meet my host, Tal, a 25-year-old Israeli woman, for a beer. We talk about what I’ve seen. She’s been to the West Bank before, but only as a soldier in the Israel Defence Forces. She opposes the barrier in theory, but admits she’s happy that she's no longer scared to go out to cafes and bars because suicide bombings have ceased to happen.

While staying on strangers’ sofas in Jerusalem and liberal Tel Aviv, I ask numerous Israelis about the West Bank. It’s a place they’ve all been to as soldiers. Some of them worked at checkpoints. A couple of them guarded Israeli settlements in Hebron. One fought in the Gaza war two years ago. All of them seem to be sick and tired of thinking and talking about the conflict. It’s not apathy, but it might be denial. In secular Tel Aviv, known by locals as “The Bubble”, the conflict feels far away. It’s all too easy to lose yourself in the city’s fantastic bars, cafes, beaches and galleries.

Jerusalem, however, is swamped in religion and politics. I’ve never been to such a fascinating place, although I left feeling pessimistic. I didn’t meet a single person, Israeli or Palestinian, who believed a peaceful settlement was possible in the near future.

Spray-painted onto a wall in Tel Aviv's hip Florentine district are the words “It’s Complicated”. It was probably referring to a Facebook relationship status, but it seemed more meaningful than that.

The Year in Food - My Top 20 Meals of 2010

1. The Meatwagon, Peckham
London's best burger should be experienced in its natural habitat, an industrial estate ten minutes from civilisation (if we can call Peckham civilisation). Here, the music is as all-American as the sinfully gloopy processed cheese, the queues are tiny compared to the two-hour waits you get north of the river, the beer comes in a can from the local shop, and the seating, if you can nab a place to perch, is a pallet. This was the best meal I've had all year.

Tragically, 2010 ended with a bolt of bad news – the Meatwagon has been stolen! The Hamburglar strenuously denies any wrongdoing.

2. Grand Central Market, Los Angeles
Downtown Los Angeles rocked my world for many reasons, not least because the first stall I saw at the Grand Central Market was Las Morelianas, home to the world's greatest pork tacos. A man almost entirely hidden behind a giant tray of pig gave me a sample taco that made my tongue waggle. I promptly ordered the Morelianas Special, a mad, bad and dangerous combo of pig skin, pig tongue, pig ear and, er, pork, all dripping in a fiery salsa.

Main course was a Salvadorian pupusa from Sorita's Pupuseria, which, if you're a Norcal hipster like me, you'll recognise as this decade's answer to the burrito. Stepping out of character, I went for something vegetarian and American, a monterey jack and squash pupusa, a fried disc of stuffed dough served alongside a sweet-and-sour cabbage dish the businessman next to me insisted was known as 'Salvadorian kimchi'.

By the end of my third course at Lupita's Fresh Seafood, a ceviche tostada (mixed seafood on a crispy taco) with fresh avocado and salsa, it wasn't only my tongue doing the dancing - my teeth were jiving, too. And when I was asked for just $3.50, I could have jumped up and down. California uber alles, as ever.

3. Lamb Club, Highgate
The first and only rule of Lamb Club is to eat as much lamb as you can. I managed a semi-respectable two heaped plates. A couple of people in our group managed four. The inaugural Lamb Club, organised by Will Eat For Money, was a spectacular affair, a whole lamb roasted and carved in a Highgate pub garden on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon at the height of summer. The meat came with excellent chips, a choice of three salads and mint sauce, and cost £15 each. Come join the club. Photo used without permission from Will Eat For Money. My photos were rubbish.

4. Hawksmoor, Covent Garden

Hawksmoor lived up to my sky-high expectations by serving top-notch meat (admittedly at very high prices). I visited the new Seven Dials branch in the opening week to take advantage of a 50% discount on food and I wasn't disappointed. Here is my short review. In 2011, I'll be going back for the kimchi burgers.

5. The Karachi, Bradford
The Karachi was the fifth stop out of five on one of the best eating evenings of the year – a curry spree in Bradford (sign in and read it, please - it's one of my better articles!). Four of us guzzled our way through 25 curries and several litres of mango lassi. I did the lion's share of the eating and that night I had strange and vivid dreams. I probably farted a couple of times, too (not mentioned in article). Photo from The Guardian website.

6. La Taqueria, San Francisco
I adore San Francisco. Simply typing its name elicits flutters and swoons. Yet for all its numerous charms and the bittersweet memories of the summer of 2001 that flash and then fade round every corner, it's not exactly the land of milk and honey in the Mission District. (There's lots of rice milk, though). Here, there's a steady presense of city cops as ne'er-do-wells, rapscallions and rascals loiter on street corners exuding well-practised nefariousness. I ate a full Oaxacan dinner at La Oaxacaquena and strode purposefully past the sidewalk zombies to the best taqueria in the world. Here, the formula is simple. Tortillas. Steak. Fresh salsa. Guacamole. Chips. Horchata.

Sigh. Flutter and swoon. Flutter and swoon.

7. Restaurant with unpronounceable and hard-to-remember name, Tbilisi
Tim and I went to a karaoke club in Tbilisi. We wowed the crowd with our no-fi interpretation of Blur's Coffee & TV. Everybody offered to buy us dinner. After yet another spectacular meal (there's no such thing as a bad Georgian meal in Georgia), we said we'd buy dinner for everyone to say thank you. We took our new friends - and several hungry hangers-on - to this place (name requested from magical Georgian guide) and enjoyed amazing beer brewed on site and stunning food.

Best of all were the khinkali, Georgian soup dumplings, large mixed meat parcels with knotted tops to be cracked open, sprinkled with pepper, and downed triumphantly, shot glass-style. Apparently it's quite normal for Georgians to indulge in khinkali eating contests. On this evening I managed 11, only 36 short of the all-time foreigners' record. Since I failed to take any photos of this marvellous meal, I've used the next best thing - the freshly-baked khachapuri we ate that morning, cooked by a lovely farmer called Mrs Nazi.

8. World Cup Braai, Wimbledon pub
My colleague Piet takes barbecuing very seriously. There's no point talking to him when he's in the zone. He won't be listening.

First, he braais crumbly bread rolls, which are served dripping in golden syrup. Then Piet moves onto the meat. A dedicated carnivore, he only goes to butchers that meet his high standards. The boerewurst is a treat, of course, but the highlights are the lamb chops, given zest and zim by Piet's secret seasoning, carefully imported by hand from Cape Town. We were at a South African pub on the night Bafana Bafana were hammered by Uruguay. The vuvuzelas went quiet after the third opposition goal, but the meat kept coming. And we went home happy.

9. Al-Nadjiyah Village, Riyadh
This meal could have tasted like a poached poo toastie and it would still have been one of the best of the year. I was in Riyadh (religious police, public executions, gender apartheid – good times!) and sat cross-legged on the floor in a circle of Saudi lads. We talked about the usual stuff blokes talk about - football, girls, politics, meat - and shared a huge bowl of camel kabsa, eating with our hands.

Saudi Arabia is an awful shithole but I'll always remember eating camel in Riyadh. And the following night I did it again and it was even cooler. Members of the Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Club raced me out into the desert at terrifyingly high speeds. Just past the city boundaries we pulled over and entered a giant tent where we could smoke shisha, rip apart hunks of barbecued camel, and talk about expensive pieces of machinery that go down roads quickly. In Saudi Arabia, I acted like a man. I really had no choice.

10 Burger Joint, New York
2010 was the year of the burger (see 19, Byron). And the Burger Joint at the Parker Meridian hotel provided the second most enjoyable (see 1, Meatwagon) burger-eating experience of the year. (3rd: Byron, 4th: Trueburger, Oakland, 5th: Umami Burger, LA). This place shouldn't really exist, a low-key spit and sawdust burger bar connected to the plush lobby of a five-star hotel. Chandeliers give way to garish neon signs. Service switches from fawning to functional. They only serve burgers, French fries, shakes, sodas and beer (served in a pitcher - nice). The burgers are sensational, far better than the overhyped Shake Shack. Can't wait to go back.

11. Masters Super Fish, London
Danny Blue likes Masters Super Fish. And I do too.

12. Olimpia, Budapest
Olimpia is a modest spot, a low-key antidote to Budapest’s tiresome thing for bling. The painted Parthenon on the walls and the restaurant’s misleading name were inherited from previous owners. Given the decor, one wouldn’t expect a feast of fine dining, but there are clues on the bookshelf by the entrance – Hungarian translations of books by Gordon Ramsay, Adria Ferran, Nobu Matsuhisa and Heston Blumenthal. When chef Lajos Takacs was a child in Balaton, a resort town to the southwest of the capital, books such as these wouldn’t have been available. It’s tempting to imagine the Communist regime would have branded molecular gastronomy as bourgeois and dangerous. Today, Takacs is one of a new generation of Hungarian chefs who are combining their country’s culinary heritage with ingredients and techniques imported from around the world.

At 7pm I tucked into dover sole with caprese salad. At 11.15pm, nine courses later, I scrape the last bits of chestnut moose with green tea ice cream from my plate. Lajos’ creations had also included foie gras with mango chutney and chilli, beetroot soup with wasabi foam and duck eggs, and pigeon breast with fennel mash. Yum.

13. Katz Deli, New York
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” screamed Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, and now I understand why. The deep-filled pastrami & rye sandwich at Katz's had given her an extremely satisfying orgasm. OK, so this place is a bit chintzy, corny and touristy, and the prices are high, but this is the real deal. Just look at how much meat they ram into this bastard and see that value for money. Just don't lose your meal ticket – there's an orgasm-delaying US$60 fine.

14. In-N-Out Burger, Las Vegas
It's now been ten years since I first stepped inside an In-N-Out, marvelled at the cookie-cutter fast food fittings, fake smiled at the fake-smiling college dropouts behind the counter, giggled at the small print references to the bible on the packaging, and ordered a Double-Double with animal fries, please. The menu is so simple: burger, double burger, French fries and soft drinks, all prepared with fresh, high-quality ingredients. And then there's a not-so-secret 'secret menu' based on customers' deviations. For my first In-N-Out since 2003, an hour before the opening act of Matador at 21 (the best music festival I've ever been to) I ordered a big burger with animal fries, which come slathered in gooey cheese, onions, pickles and some kind of thousand island sauce. Afterwards I bought a souvenir In-N-Out hat. I'm wearing it now.

15. Woman's house, Yerevan
The name of the woman has been forgotten. If you want to go, just ask Aris at Hotel Meg. He'll book it for you. This is a supper club not dissimilar to The Parkholme Supper Club or Rambling Restaurant, my two favourite London home restaurants, both of which just missed out getting on this list (23 and 26 respectively. I could go to 100, you know). After the joys of Georgia, Armenian food had seemed slightly disappointing - lots of meat and not much else. But this was a treat - wonderful soups and salads followed by fish, lamb chops and a great dessert, with wine served by the jug. The restaurant is staffed by once-bored housewives who wanted a hobby as well as a source of income. It's a living room so family photos are all over the bookshelves and the owner, whose name I really should have remembered, plays jazz piano during meals. Utterly charming.

16. Dinner, Basata, Egypt
To be honest, I can't remember what I had for dinner at Basata. I recall fish and various dips, hand-cooked potato crisps and various stews and salads. But I do remember it being absolutely lovely. Basata is one of the world's first eco-resorts, a hippie beach in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. I sat at a communal table with some Germans, Brazilians and Egyptians and we quietly talked into the night. At the end of the meal, a little boy offered me a piece of cake. It was his parents' wedding anniversary, and his parents, who founded Basata in the mid-80s and have barely changed a thing since, chose to celebrate their special day at the spot they've barely moved from in quarter of a century.

17. El Vaso de Oro, Barcelona
My favourite meal of 2009 was foie gras and steak at El Vaso de Oro. After Primavera Sound 2010 I popped to this Barceloneta bar for a snack (sandwich, peppers and cheese) and it was as good as I remembered. I've been disappointed time and time again by the food in Barcelona, but Oro always hits the spot.

18. Zaklety Czardasz, Katowice
This is a biggest meal I've had this year outside Las Vegas (congratulations, buffet brunch at the Gold Coast Hotel). It wasn't amazing, but its sheer hugeness (six bowls of goulash followed by a main course big enough for four people) warrants its place on the list.

19. Byron, London
This Movember I grew a moustache and raised some money for prostate cancer. For subjecting myself to such humiliation (as long as I looked more like a porn star than a sex pest I was fine with it, though) I earned myself the right to a free Byron burger every day for a month. Due to unfortunate scheduling conflicts I only managed 18 burgers and some of these were, rather Judasly, made out of chicken or vegetables.

Byron does everything well. The burgers are cooked medium-rare as standard, the bread is dominated by the meat rather than the other way round, the milkshakes are thick and ice-cold, and the sides (twice-cooked chips, coleslaw, mac cheese, French fries, courgette fries, onion rings – see, I know the menu by heart) are all exceptional. Best of all, the staff are incredibly friendly, even when you're not paying for your food. Having tried everything on the menu, I recommend the American cheeseburger above all others.

20. Hakosem, Tel Aviv
“I warn you,” said the man taking my money. “This falafel is dangerously tasty.” He was right. It was the best falafel I've ever eaten. It was green with cilantro and parsley, served with thick wedges of fried aubergine, hummus and tahina, and smothered in a coriander chilli dip.

There have been lots of food wars in the Middle East recently. Here's the truth: Israel stole all the dishes from the Arabs. Then they improved them. I've eaten falafel in ten Arab countries and nothing is this good. Israel, take note. You've beaten the Arabs. You can end the occupation now.