INTERVIEW: BBC celebrity chef Floyd to do TV series on Pakistani cuisine
© Mahim Maher and Anjum Nida Rahman
In an exclusive interview with this newspaper at Pearl Continental Hotel, Mr Floyd said he had just completed a week-long tour of Pakistan and was looking forward to coming back to produce the series, which will most likely be called "Floyd on Pakistan".
"It has been a whirlwind of meals from Karachi to Lahore to Peshawar," Mr Floyd said. "I was sceptical at first, but I have had the best time you could imagine.
"The people were immensely friendly and kind and have a sense of humour and the girls are very pretty." Mr Floyd said the series would very strongly feature the ethnic foods of Pakistan.
"This week has been a blur," he admitted, "but it was a very exciting and privileged experience to gain such insight into the cuisine.
This experience was markedly different from his stay in India. "We only ate in people's homes, which was exceedingly unusual, and different from my experience in India where I was mostly in restaurants and at street stalls," he said.
"We never really got to eat in people's homes in India and it was great here because we got to discover real Pakistani cuisine that was either cooked by the lady of the house or her servants and was very authentic."
Mr Floyd went to the old city in Karachi for nehari at seven in the morning on Saturday. "I never get sick," he commented about eating street food while on his travels. "It's not that I have guts of steel; but I am very sensible about my diet."
While in Pakistan he said he drank a lot of mineral water and milk, sweet lassi in particular. "I'm not a greedy person and just sample the food and watch my diet very carefully," he said. Each meal he has had here has had at least six to seven dishes. "One mustn't pig out," he remarked.
But how can he tell whether the local food being presented to him is good or not? "We went to buy fried fish here," he said, "and we simply went to the stall which had the longest queue; that's how I can tell. You let the locals vote for the food."
It's a wonder that Mr Floyd keeps his physique in control even though he's in the business of food. He said it helps that he has a very active life. "Most cookery programmes are made in the television studio, but mine are on the street, in the desert and in the mountains," he said. "It's like that because we want to show viewers the country, so for example I'll end up having to take a donkey, that is winding through mountain passes." It also helps that he is forever running to catch an aeroplane, he said.
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