As COVID cases rise around the country and shops and restaurants struggle to keep abreast of the ever-changing rules and regulations that affect us at short notice, Taste Tibet looks towards opening our first fixed site in East Oxford. Many of you express concern, and sure - this ain't the dream time for it! But to be clear: we have never conceived of this space as a restaurant, but rather an extension of what you already associate with Taste Tibet: big portions of clean comfort food in an informal environment, with plenty of take-home options for both immediate consumption or a feeding of the freezer. And in many ways we feel fortunate, as we are able to make our new premises COVID complian
Last week one reader asked us to do a "how we met" blog. When I'm feeling a bit more romantic it will land! Meantime we are celebrating nine years of our first born this week and taking stock of how far we've come. Yeshi started the Taste Tibet stall during my second maternity leave from Oxford University Press, where I worked as a project manager on bilingual dictionaries. It seems amazing to think now, but during those early years Yeshi still couldn't drive, so I ran the A to B for him with our newborn and two year-old in the back seat of the family car. As our stall grew, so did the amount of stuff that we needed to ferry, and sometimes our menu boards were propped up over their heads, or
Time is experienced so differently in Tibet. Watch the video sent recently from relatives back home and all becomes clear. This was Yeshi's life for fourteen years - he herded sheep and yaks from the age of six. It was seasonal work, but it followed no fixed calendar. You knew what needed doing according to where the sun sat in the sky and the subtle changes in the land below. When I first met Yeshi he told me that he didn't know exactly how old he was - just the year of his birth, which in the Tibetan tradition is calculated according to the astrological zodiac. As a sheep in the Tibetan calendar, this makes him either 29, 41 or 53 this year... Go figure. One of the many challenges of makin
