Hi there,

Back in the saddle again. Apologies to those readers who use the website there have been some technical problems and I'm having to rebuild it. This edition contains another barely contained rant which, I hope, meets with your approval.

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Enjoy...

London

Over the past few years I've come to dread being asked for restaurant recommendations. Sure I've got a few places I'm happy to go back to - at the right time and with the right people - but asking if there's anywhere I'd recommend is so absurdly broad a request I just get confused.

Do you want to spend money? What sort of food do you like? Do you even like food or would you rather sit in a celebrity fishtank and poke a salad about? Do you feel disappointed if the waiter isn't fawning or does intrusive service embarrass you? Do you always pick the second cheapest red on the list or do you have the urge to come back and firebomb a place for not having sideplates?

If I do come up with a suggestion, there's no guarantee you'll enjoy it as much as I did. I don't feel comfortable recommending the newest and most fashionable places because they rarely live up to the hype and, besides, you'd never get in after 6.30 or before 10.00. Little 'out of the way' discoveries have a way of being either disappointingly inconsistent or have been cleaned up and 'relaunched' by the time you arrive.

There's just too much to choose from, too many variables and that, I suppose is the real reason I love London so much. It's nothing to do with the individual restaurants it's the way that big cities, by sheer mass and demographics reach a point where they are really all about food.

There are seven and a half million people here and the requirement for three meals a day is the only thing they have in common. It's London's diversity of culture, class, wealth and ethnicity that creates one of the most exciting food environments in the world.

Rich and poor live side by side. This guarantees world-class restaurants for those who can afford them but also a vibrant market in cheap street food. We've got as many Michelin stars as other capitals but we still maintain a fantastic variety of independently owned caffs and sandwich shops.

Any ingredient money can buy can be found in our expensive delis yet, around the corner, in some strange little corner shop or market stall, you'll find something solely imported for an ethnic enclave. Every cuisine is catered for at every level - anything is available.

London sits in symbiosis with the other great Metropoli. Global food phenomena affect us as deeply as New York or Paris yet, at the same time, our own national food culture is firmly back on the public agenda.

Back at the height of the dotcom boom an American theorist was asked which industries he felt would be safe from the new technology. He identified food provision, waste management and construction as the only sectors that could survive unchanged.  (He also noted that these were areas controlled by organised crime in the US but that's rather a side issue). These are the fundamentals, the fixed costs, if you will, of urban existence. You need a roof over your head, and when you live in a concrete jungle rather than an open field, you need someone to cart in the food and someone to pipe away the shit.

The capital city of a small country attracts everyone who can survive it. It's kept stuffed to capacity by a constant flow of incomers that's only stemmed when there is simply no more room. Under this degree of pressure food waste and shelter become even more important. Is it any wonder that Londoners only seem to talk about where and what they're going to eat next, house prices and whether they remembered to put the rubbish out.

Whenever I visit friends in other towns they're always keen to show me the latest new place that's opened. 'We've got a new deli/farmer's market/gastropub you've got to try' with the silent but implied '…every bit as good as the ones in London' and of course, they're right. A Michelin star or an organic salmon smokery in Nottingham or Brighton is every bit as good no matter where it is.

But that's where it stops. Thank you, the fishmonger in Leeds was every bit as good as any single one I could find at home - I could even park - but it was the only one. When I go to my fishmonger, every step I take is surrounded by people eating, selling, making, loving food. From the KP standing by the bins, smoking a sneaky rollup and excavating his nose to the pigeon pecking at a discarded arape bun it's everywhere. It's like being an ingredient in a particularly thick soup. Trucks drive past delivering bread from Turkish bakeries to Somali corner shops where Lithuanian countermen will wrap it round Italian salami. Even the pavements and bins smell of food - putrescent it's true, but there's no way of escaping food in everything. God knows how anorexics survive without blinkers and a nose clip.

It's not about restaurants, it's about being immersed in, obsessed with and surrounded by food. In an environment this intense, I can't find it in myself to care about some celebrity chef's latest overhyped excursion into public eating. I'm stuck trying to decide between pho or pirogi for lunch, whether I can fit in one more espresso without getting the creeping jitters, if the bread delivery has arrived at the corner shop yet and …what is that fantastic smell coming from the Portuguese deli?

I can't tell what the tipping point is. I can't tell if it's the size, the relative national importance, the human concentration or diversity of a city that causes it to form this foodie gestalt but I know London has it in big lardy helpings and that's why the only recommendation I can give is to live here.

 

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