I had the incredible good fortune to live happy parts of my life in other places. I got to live in the ‘Deep South’, not just to visit. Being young, broke and inclined to the romantic in places like Charleston or New Orleans, could never leave your soul unmarked. I can’t recommend enough being an idealistic newlywed in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Or sleeping on floors in Paris or Florence with one bag, your last ten rolls of Tri-X, and no real plan, nor inclination, for getting home.

San Francisco was the first place I tried to revisit. I had money this time. In fact, the whole thing was on agency expenses. I went to all the places I’d just pressed my nose up against, back when I lived there. And as I leaned back in business class on the way home … I felt entirely empty.

You can’t go back.

If you’ve ever travelled, particularly if you’ve ‘lived there’ ... you’ll know that it’s not about being elsewhere as much as else-when. You can go back to the exact spot, the precise coordinates, the Three bloody Words, where you were the happiest in your entire life, and all it can do is remind you how much you’re not there right now. You can be in the place you were; but you’re not the you you were.

Which, I suspect, is why smart restaurant critics don’t go back.

Last week, I did.

A very nice man invited me to go to lunch at Ibai. A restaurant I’d reviewed for the FT. Take a look at the review, if you can (this link should work).

It’s not a bad review. Far from it. If you can bear to take a broad overview of it, it says some very positive things about individual courses. And if I’m brutally honest, the negatives look like they took some effort to extract.

What’s noticeable, though, is that there are a couple of brilliant images, a carefully sustained tone of world-weary cynicism, and one or two cracking one-liners. Feedback on the piece was extremely positive. Along with a couple of others that year, it won me awards. Awards for the writing, the tone, the attitude.

I still look at it and think it was a positive review. I don’t think anyone was hurt and, thank Christ, the people who run the place had the decency to have me back and not wee in my cocktail. (It should be pointed out that Ibai still has the kind of clientele who have a lot of money and probably don’t give a rat’s arse about my opinion).

I ate almost exactly the same things. The amazing mound of fresh-made crisps, draped in ham and piqued with their own pickled peppers (I kept requesting more. I kept eating them. I couldn’t sleep that night).

The anchoas and the boquerones were obviously, the best I’d consumed in years - bear in mind that I suck down anchovies like a baleen whale with a hangover. My annual consumption is such that I’m registered as a mid-size trawler in Vigo.

I had a slab of raw tuna that looked like the core of a bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight, sliced into a bath of liquor based, I think, on a cold almond soup. On a hot day, the most inspired combination, with the ever-so-slightly irony fish playing off against basically a smooth nut milk (I can’t believe I typed that), split with tears of some insanely verdant oil.

They took me to the kitchen. Rather pointedly, I felt, they led me past the rank of cooked steaks that sit on the counter, ‘resting’ like an elderly theatrical knight between engagements... for bloody hours - to an actual butcher’s block where I got to choose my ribeye. I wasn’t actually introduced to the steer, but only because I speak no Euskara so it would have been awkward for us both.

The famous croque Ibai? Yeah… hands up. I was just flat wrong about that.

There was a bar manager, I seem to remember, who locked on to me like a Spetnaz sniper. She assessed me, found my weaknesses as a target and made martinis with Japanese gin that made my head rotate like the light at Eddystone.

I will blow no smoke up your ass. It was a faultless meal, and couldn’t have been better calculated to tickle my individual weakness if they’d had full access to my search history. They knew precisely who I was, and seemed, with astonishingly good humour, to enjoy proving I was an arse.

I still stand by the first review I wrote. It was accurate. It was correct (apart from the croque Ibai). But it was also written by who I was, at exactly that time. I judged well. I used my knowledge to assess and my skill to report. But I also needed validation ... recognition.

If I were to review Ibai again, I think I’d write exactly the same piece. But these days I wouldn’t need the validation. I wouldn’t apply the snark. And stripped of that, it would feel very different.

This time, I’m really glad I did go back, because, just like that ill-fated return to San Francisco, it showed me that it’s not the place... it’s who you were, when you were there.

And I can’t help realising I was a bit of an arse.

Did I go for the performative tomahawk? The high-luxe filet? Well, no. The economics of these businesses is insanely tight. And when I saw a big old brisket in the freezer, I thought Yes! That I can use. I’ve met their cows. Happy, plump little buggers... plodding around fields, eating natural stuff and getting... well, basically fat and happy. A brisket might be a second-grade cut to some people, but to me, that’s going to be all about the character of a pretty exceptional animal.

Scroll forward a couple of weeks, and Lib is coming home. She’s graduated. She’s handed her flat back to her mafia landlord, and I’ve done the ‘parent run.’ You fly in low, hover over an LZ that’s defended by withering cover fire from Hammersmith Council Parking Dept in the treeline. You extract your team and their kit and torch anything left. I don’t think we actually touched the ground. To you, it’s a rusty Honda CRV. To Lib and I it’s a Jolly Green Giant.

But the Prodigal’s Return required a good dinner. And I had advance warning. I thought straight away of the brisket. I mean, c’mon. If there’s anything in the world that say’s the warmth of homecoming, it’s going to be brisket. First, I thought about BBQ. But honestly ... it makes me weary. I can tense my forearms and hold my gut in for a certain amount of time, but not while continuing to breathe. It’s too butch. Fuck it.

Then I got really enthusiastic about Italian/American ‘Sunday Gravy’. A big, cheap cut of beef, some sausage, maybe some guanciale. All cooked for a couple of days in a tomato sauce and then served with pasta, on Sunday to a delighted family.

I thought about it. I even started assembling ingredients. And then I went online for a recipe.

There’s a metric shit-ton of recipes for ‘Sunday Gravy’ and all are distinguished by the terrifying level of crap in the comments. Apparently, Italian Americans in Jersey call it ‘Gravy’, but Italian Americans everywhere else call it ‘Sauce’... and ‘below the line’ in online recipe writing, is where they need to fight about this.

Jesus wept.

I really wanted to cook it. But after ten minutes of reading third-rate suburban plumbers slagging each other off like they were mafia bosses, it honestly felt like I didn’t want it in my house. Genuinely. Fuck you! It’s a family-friendly slow cook. It’s Irish Stew. It’s lobscouse. It’s cholent. If you genuinely feel you have to escalate Sunday lunch into whacking Sammy ‘The Bull’ Graziano on the sidewalk outside Springs. Y’know what... go back to your Sopranos box set. Not in my kitchen.

Then I remembered @petes_pans.

Peter Hanley walks an interesting line. He’s all about authenticity, but he also loves food to an absurd degree. He investigates the way food is cooked, forensically, but less as ‘recipes’ than as ‘foodways’. I’ve met Peter. He has a daughter the same age as mine. Whatever he thought was a good way of welcoming someone home was ... well, it was worth listening to.

So I dug out his YouTube about the Gascon Daube. He does his with beef cheeks, which, of course, work brilliantly, but he points out that it can also be done with a macreuse, a paleron, a jarret, or any other powerful but challenging slab.

Marinade your meat with wine and aromatic veg. Sear it. Soften the veg from the marinade, then add the liquid. Simmer, then add the meat back and cook for weeks. Remove the meat, strain the braising liquid. Reduce and serve. That’s a ‘foodway’.

The intriguing difference in Peter’s ‘Gascon’ daube, though, is that the meat is left as a single large piece. Not cubed down. It’s little short of genius. And, of course, it’s the ideal way to treat a big ol’ chunk of fine Cambridgeshire beef brisket.

Watch Peter’s YouTube here. It’s where I started.

If your brisket is rolled, unroll it. Chop up some onions, leeks, carrots, celery, and garlic into coarse chunks and kettle them in a Ziploc bag with your brisket. Add pepper, salt and a bottle of red wine. Store in the fridge for a day or two.

I rendered down some guanciale I had lying around, in a bit of pork lard. If the idea of that doesn’t give you stirrings, leave now.

Take the brisket out of the marinade and sear it on all sides. (I should write ‘Set aside’ but I genuinely can’t. Nobody talks like that.)

Then strain the solids out of the marinade. Soften them in a little olive oil. Add the liquid from the marinade, the meat, and enough wine, or chicken stock, or both, to cover. Put a lid on. Rack the temperature down to something absurd... I mean the braising liquid should be somewhere around 90º... and let it cook for about a week. Peter will hate this, but my induction ring has a built-in probe thermometer. I set it to 92º, hung the probe in the braising liquid, and just let it go for ten hours while I went about my business.

I had a load of dried morels in the larder so I soaked them for ages and then also ‘set them aside’ along with their soaking liquid.

Once the brisket had got to a core temperature of 92º, I lifted it out, let it cool, and refrigerated it overnight. I passed the cooking liquid through a sieve, then added the soaked mushrooms and their liquor. That, too, was refrigerated.

On the day, I set the meat to warm up in the sauce. I turned off the extraction so the kitchen would smell like an anteroom in heaven, and I sweated down a tonne of onion, aiming for maximum sweetness.

As soon as the internal temperature on the brisket hit 75º, I hauled it out onto a serving plate. Then I added the onions and the morels back to the sauce, reduced it, and poured it over.

I also made chips.

There’s no ‘hero shot’. Partly, I didn’t want to be prancing around with a camera; I wanted to be serving it. Carving off thick slices of brisket, the texture of jelly, and ladling over sauce that looked like melted chocolate. And partly it’s the best example I’ve ever seen of Elizabeth David’s idea that photography sells food short.

It was the brownest thing I’ve ever cooked.

Also, quite possibly, the best.

I think Peter would be proud.

It is not the last pub in England. There may be one or two others further out toward Land’s End, but it’s in the hamlet of Treen in the Parish of Zennor, and Zennor’s the last parish in England. That might be alphabetically … but you feel it geographically. So though my understanding of matters ecclesial may be shaky, I’m going to go out on a limb here. If there’s a pub further west than the Gurnard’s Head, God probably doesn’t know about it.

I drove out to it from the nearest large conurbation, the sprawling, neon-smirched Sodom and Gomorrah of the West Country they call St Ives/Carbis Bay. We were somewhere outside of Boswydnek on the B3306 when the bats appeared. Bats, birds, a couple of ex-badgers and something that might, in the half-light, have been a panther.

Christ, it’s a long way. I mean, it’s beautiful... insane, savage, eldritch beauty. People say it’s romantic, but I find it incomprehensible and hallucinogenic - it scares me worse than Lovecraft. Take the wrong turn out here after dark and you might just get eaten by a hill.

SatNav says it’s 15 miles, but then it also says it’s 45 minutes. It took 55. And my average speed was 45mph. That’s not just amusing; it’s messing with our comprehension of space and time.

But then, suddenly, it’s there. A long, low, indisputably agricultural structure, painted, for no reason anyone can explain, in the exact shade of orange the RNLI use for lifeboats. Maybe they heard about a truckful of paint heading for Penzance and lured it off the road and onto the rocks. In case you’re catastrophically drunk, driving in thick fog or piloting a rescue helicopter (all equally likely round here), they’ve painted, in metre-high letters on the roof, THE GURNARDS HEAD HOTEL.

The place has been significant for a while now. It was bought in 2006 by Charles and Edmund Inkin who, since the turn of the century, had been running the screamingly successful Griffin in Felin Fach, Monmouthshire. Charles trained at Ballymaloe, and the influence on the menu - in fact, the general vibe at the Gurnard’s is palpable, but it’s the delivery, from head chef Chris Angove, that’s utterly exceptional.

Though it’s been around since gastropubs started being gastropubs, and could easily claim OG status, it really isn’t. The Gurnard’s Head is really a pub. A proper one, with randomly accreted, instead of highly curated stuff. People park muddy quad bikes outside and nip in for a pint on the way home, seemingly oblivious to the international food appreciators who’ve travelled bloody weeks to get here. As I drove in, I hid my car between a pair of vast blacked-out SUVs, built like a couple of oligarchs’ battle-tanks. As I went to leave, I found myself bracketed by two knackered VW buses, occupied by blissed-out couples, living the “van life” and looking for somewhere to drain their feral offsping so they wouldn’t have to spend the night, kettled with a bucket of warm child pee.

Uptight, no. Formal, it is emphatically not. Artisan crockery? Possibly... but not... y’know, actually matching. More ... enthusiastic.

I don’t particularly want to trawl through the entire menu because a) I’m not being paid, so I don’t have to b) it was uniformly phenomenal, and c) it changes, as you’d hope, with what is good at any time. Which, on the evening I went, was whole plaice.

In truth, I’m not a zealot for plaice. It’s a joyless flatfish. Inshore they are small, adolescent. Inland, you get it served in posh restaurants where it feels like a hangover from Edwardian fine dining. So delicate that there’s no possibility anyone might smell, y’know... fish. Denuded of bone, skin, history and character. Meuniered to within an inch of its life, and offered through primly taught lips, ‘And may I recommend for the lady... the plaice?’

Inland plaice is genteel, jejune*, un-fish with the texture of barely set semen.

But out here on the Head, where the sea has spent the last aeon trying to tear the granite out from underneath you in at least three directions. Plaice is something else.

Or maybe it’s just Chris Angove.

It’s not been been messed with much. They probably didn’t have time between pulling the hook out of its lip and slamming it on my plate. It’s not huge, but it’s hench. A wiry little fucker, muscled like a tin-miners forearm. And Angrove clearly knows this, because he doesn’t tit around with it like some culinary fluffer. He doesn’t mince about dicing skinless cucumber into a beurre blanc...

BTW. WTF is that all about? An insistently, performatively ‘delicate’ sauce. It shrieks from the menu “order me if you fret that people might think you’re unattractively assertive”. I mean, Jesus... what kind of Jane Austen-grade bollocks...

I digress.

Angrove puts it out grilled. And then he sticks a load of flavoured butter on it. And then he mounds up powerful, fighty things... not because the fish needs it... but because he knows it can take it.

Shallots, samphire, capers. Proper flavours that poke you in the chest and accuse you of stealing their pint. Particularly because they know they’ve got backup. That butter is fiercely, properly lemony and shot through with almonds. A textural trick stolen from military technology. Like the polystyrene beads in Napalm-B, the crushed almonds are there to make sure the effective stuff sticks.

Monkfish done ‘scampi’-style would have been good enough, but dipped in a fresh curry aioli and sprinkled with house-made dukkha ... c’mon! Positively Shavian wit. Scallops... what can I say? Hours out of the water and grilled with loads of butter. No Notes. How could I dare?

My companion opted for the “Ribeye of beef, hash brown, charred padrón pepper, green chutney, chimichurri”, (God... I’ve *always* wanted to write that. I should probably finish with “...which was to-die for, especially when washed down with an indulgent glass of Picpoul. Nom Nom!!!”) but, in fact, it was constructed on a very similar armature to the plaice. A well-chosen bit of something very local, cooked à point and then buttressed with a kind of muscular brio. Padrón, chutney and chimi? Together at last? Hell yeah. Why on earth not, when each element is house-made with a preternatural talent for flavour and balance.

Seriously. It was an outstanding meal on every level. But the plaice was something else. A perfect evocation of a much grander thought.

I reckon it’s a Ballymaloe thing...

1. Find what’s beautiful, right where you are

2. Don’t fuck with it

3. When you do, do it “For Cause”.

4. Commit.

Everything at the Gurnard’s Head lives this like a creed.

But the plaice was the ultimate expression.

*I did it! I got it in! I’ve been trying to casually slip jejune into conversation since Adrienne Lowry took me to see ‘Manhattan’ at the Bournemouth Odeon in 1979.

There. I said it.

I’ve already got 10 points on my Middle Class License so I basically I haven’t got a hope.

But it’s true!

Bouillabaise is a recipe - or more correctly a series of hotly defended recipes - codified by a cartel of expensive restaurants for tourists in Marseille. The “Marseille Bouillabaisse Charter”, was created by a collective of local restaurateurs in 1980 to “safeguard the traditional recipe and serving methods of the iconic Provençal fish stew”.

Bourride isn’t a recipe at all. At least not in the sense of a foolproof list of ingredients, quantities, times. It’s a foodway that’s found all over the coast of the Med... and not just the French bit.

Bourride is a rough technique that people who work around fish developed to make the most of by-catch, discards and trim. It is, therefore, infinitely superior.

I will not be taking questions.

If I have my facts straight, Cambridge is the city in this sea-girt isle farthest from all available saltwater. This means that most clouds have dropped their water by the time they reach us, giving us the lowest precipitation, usually less than 250mm pa, making us, iirc UK’s only ‘temperate desert’. So I’m thinking of getting good at grilled lamb and couscous... but my desire to own a small fishing boat is a total bust.

So I don’t have ‘by-catch’.

Except that I do!

Today I was working with the estimable Kenneth Lam on a shoot for an article about fish stews. I had a terrific haul from Waitrose fish counter, the blokes on the stall in the market and via courier Rockfish in Brixham. It was a ludicrously grand catch and I hadn’t even had to don an oilskin and get salt in my beard as I hauled on ropes. I didn’t even sing while I did it. (I’m avowedly Anti-Shanty)

So I built a bourride with my by-catch.

I beat down some leeks, garlic, saffron and thyme in olive oil. Added a can of tomatoes and cooked it down for 20 minutes. Then I added half a bottle of wine and a litre of water (it should have been seawater but, you can’t drink the Cam without some kind of dreadful rat-piss disease so, yeah. Water and salt). I let it simmer for an hour then used this to poach, severally, some mussels, a few prawns, two spare langos and a thick slice of leftover hake. Lifting each out and into a bowl as it cooked to just short of perfection. I whipped up a rouille from mayo and Le Cap Phare Bon, then hoiked up the heat under the remaining juice thickened it with an egg yolk liaison and poured it over like the jism of archangels.

This was so good I don’t ever want to eat anything else. I thought I’d like a baguette and some Pastis but I didn’t need it.

The incredible thing is how simple it is... how opposite to the regimented faff of a bouillabaise. It’s authentically the lunch of aquatic truckdrivers. If they had motorway service stations at sea, transport caffs on docks, they’d slop out bourride. No rules. Ingredients nobody else wants, rendered superb by human ingenuity.

You make the cheapest and easiest possible sauce. You dilute it with water and booze. You poach junk fish in it. Finally, you thicken the broth so nothing goes to waste and pour it back over. Like gravy over a roast.

Stendhal, author of Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), was one of the more sensitive souls of 19th-century European letters. He used to react to objects or images that were overpoweringly lovely by fainting — a fact he first discovered in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, which must have been embarrassing at the time. These days, the tourists would just step over him for a selfie in front of the altarpiece.

I thought Stendhal syndrome was something of an exaggeration. The writer garnishing his own myth. I was convinced it was all fluff. Until I collected my by-catch like generations of horny-handed sons of the sea, and built a bourride.

I needed to take a quick warm break for… well frankly for reasons of sanity.

I genuinely couldn’t face the total ballache of travelling across Europe, where everyone - quite understandably - hates us. My problem was that, having grownup in a British seaside town, I am constitutionally incapable of buying into the sprawling myth of the Great British Seaside.

People in Hackney justify a glamping holiday in Devon, because they still believe in a the Famous Five origin myth. Cubs scouts, picnics, fêtes, caravans, ice cream, fish and chips. But when you grow up in a town where the only source of income is tourists, you acquire a particularly bleak outlook. Other nations don’t seem to have this problem and generally smile upon visitors as they empty their wallets. Here in the UK, anyone who lives in a town that attracts tourists is honour bound to loathe them with peculiar intensity. They need your money desperately … but they really want you to die horribly.

There was, predictably, nothing to book in the entire country, save a last minute vacancy at the Carbis Bay Estate, about which I knew absolutely nothing … though it’s website seemed to offer hospitality without any of the usual signifiers of resentful miserablism.

But then I mentioned where I’d booked to my Mum.

“Oh my goodness. The Carbis Bay! When I left school and joined the Typing pool at The Road Transport and General Insurance Co. all the girls would ever talk about was getting married and having their honeymoon at Carbis Bay. It was the best hotel in the country”

(In writing this, I discovered something absolutely lovely. Mum and Dad got married at 18 and 19yrs old (I was born a year later). They had absolutely no cash for a honeymoon so, after the ceremony, headed off in a cloud of confetti, for one night at The Skyline hotel in Heathrow, then quietly pushed off for a week in the basement of a B&B in Margate).

Maybe booking Carbis Bay was a good idea.

I didn’t have a trainset as a kid and it’s a loss I feel more keenly as I get older. One day, when all my marbles are completely misplaced, I might spend all my daughter’s inheritance on an attic full of HO/OO, with tiny models of postmen and hundreds of sets of points that never work. One day I might buy the hat and the whistle … but until then there’s still Devon or Cornwall.

I know moors and waves crashing on rocks are the Cornish things that St Rick of Rock can bang on about at length, but what fires my synapses is that thing where you’re looking out over a bay or estuary and then, quite suddenly … a tiny train enters the scene from one side or the other. It doesn’t chuff. They don’t do that anymore. But in my head I hear the unique scuttering, scrabbling sound of the wheels of a particularly impressive model train trying to grab some traction on their tiny rails. I love that noise. Sounds like somebody electrocuting a spider on ice-skates.

In spite of appearances, Carbis Bay wasn’t built by Hornby, but GWR… the Great Western Railway, who, bless them, built the hotel on the Carbis Bay Estate, and served it with its own branch. The St Ives Bay Line runs four and a quarter miles, from St Ives to St Erth. It stops at the glittering fleshpots of Carbis bay and, unbelievably, has a request stop at Lelant Saltings, possibly for those who find the Urban grit of St Erth too ennervating.

If you grew up in Bournemouth, you’d recognise the hotel. The classic late Edwardian genteel pile. The sort of place Indian Army Colonels and fragile Aunts might retire. Though now it’s been thoroughly Farrowed &, almost certainly, Balled, the main thing today is - and in fact, always, has been - the view. It might be the UK’s only ‘private ‘ bay. The hotel looks out over a perfect curve of bright sand and turquoise sea. Punctuated with a modest lighthouse at either end. Were it not for the curvature of the earth, the only other thing you’d see would be Newfoundland. There is agricultural land occupying parts of the curve and a very distant and small caravan park. But basically, for the price of a room, what you see is yours alone. You might imagine a setup like this on maybe the Australian Gold Coast or Thailand. But you couldn’t afford it.

The hotel is family-owned and still has a very special low-key charm to it. They are very proud to remind you that the G7 was held here in 2006 and that Boris (of evil memory) was a regular guest.

Carbis Bay estate has obviously put a lot of thought into their food offering. It’s vertically arrayed up the cliff face. Down at sea level there’s a great ‘Beach Club’, open to those members of the public with the determination to get there (the beach is public). There’s a more brasserie-style restaurant called ‘Walter’s on the Beach’ that feels like more of an ‘occasion’ spot and has a great cocktail bar. There’s a deli for coffee, sandiches and pastries. Up at the top, the main hotel ‘orangery’ does a proper breakfast and, half way up, Mor has all the trappings of a serious, International ‘destination’ restaurant.

You walk out of the back of the hotel, down over what must once have been terraces, parterres, possibly ramshackle steps to the beach and suddenly you’re looking through the most perfect dining room I’ve ever seen. Perched in the cliffs, maybe 25m above the sand. You walk in through the doors at the bottom of the stairs and the entire bay opens before you.

It’s a world class room. Which is possibly why, for the last few years it’s been run along Michelin lines by Adam Handling, but it’s now being rethunk, and relaunched by Tom Sellers, through Executive Chef Tom Anglesea.

I’d planned to head back home an unfortunate day earlier than the soft opening but I couldn’t help but watch the complicated stages of setup. Eventually they spotted me pressing my nose against the glass and I got invited in by Tom Anglesea.

I’m going to be honest here. I held this back because I wanted reviews to get out from people who’d actually tasted the food. To be clear… I ate nothing at Mor. And yet it felt like one of the most significant restaurant visits I’d made in an age. (So significant, I didn’t want it mistaken for a ‘review’).

It was at least a couple of decades ago that I walked into another restaurant, on the outer spiral arm of nowhere, with an insane view over the sea and talked to a young chef I’d never met before. It was inspiring because it was the first time I’d heard someone talk about food like I felt about art; who had the cojones to believe he could bring something new and significant to an unsuspecting world by expressing his personal vision through innovation and technique.

Sitting at Mor’s PDR table at 0800 with a cracking double espresso and a 180 degree of lapiz lazuli Atlantic was one of those moment when you pinch yourself… I cannot believe I get to do these things. The crew… a mix of long-service pros from London restaurants and local kids, were unpacking their new uniforms. A kind of utility suit designed by Finisterre, a design and clothing company based a few miles along the coast. Their joy was unbridled, seductive and basically gorgeous. I sat there sucking my espresso and feeling my cynicism fall away like that time they dropped Kierkegaard into basket of labrador puppies.

Anglesea was knackered. But he, too, in spite of having spent every waking second of the last God knows how many months, wrestling this place into shape - patently couldn’t believe his luck.

We talked for half an hour or so, about his people, about the mechanics of the new design, where the view leads but everything else is designed to either physically display the fresh ingredients or to expose the processes of cooking. He has left himself nowhere to hide. But what shone through was his tone.

This chef wasn’t talking about how he was going to impose his personal vision, but how thrilled he was to work in such an environment, with such people and such ingredients. This Michelin-quality space has evolved away from multi-course set menus to something much more accessible, warm and to me, a much more fascinating angle on what hospitality is all about.

The menu is awesome, but I’ll leave reviewing to someone who’s tasted it. Suffice it to say, they’ve worked themselves to nubs sourcing from the seas and countryside around them, and Anglesea is refreshingly focussd on the idea that the cooking should be faultlessly brilliant - a given - but as simple, as unfussy and as honest as possible. The menu, as a result, is ALC and arranged so you could do a Boris and spaff squillions, or bring in your very lucky family and escape with change for an ice cream on the beach tomorrow.

I can’t tell you how important this felt. It was like brackets at either end of an era. The ends of an arc. At the beginning a young chef just about realise he can turn a small, honest local seaside restaurant into Michelin, at the other another young chef who thinks that, in spite of the Michelin setting he’s inherited, that’s not what people want anymore. That’s not where Mor is aiming.

What really impressed me was Anglesea’s attitude. I’ve met very few chefs who sounded like him. The two that spring to mind are Jonathan Woolway at the Shed in Swansea and James Ferguson at the Kinneuchar Inn in the East Neuk of Fife. Quiet men with huge talent, disinclined to thrust themselves into the spotlight, but with a bone deep desire to make people happy with their food.

The room, the ingredients, the people, and no clumsy ‘Michelin strategy’ to insert itself between Mor and my enjoyment of it? I don’t need to eat to know I have to go back. If this is what the future is like, I’m very much here for it.

If I was getting paid for this, I’d probably call it ‘The New Humility’.

You have to put yourself back to about 1985. I don’t know what you were up to, but I was ‘assisting’ a photographer in a grotty studio, four flights up on Goswell Rd. I know it was four flights because I had to run up and down them laden with flashpacks and bloody pig-iron light stands. From the van to the studio and back. Endlessly. For £4 a day (cash-in-hand, obvs).

I lived, though that’s already an exaggeration, in a squat near the Maudsley Hospital. The day went thus. Wake up, dress, pack everything into a kitbag, climb out of the window and stash the bag in the lean-to at the back of the pub where I had an arrangement with a particularly lovely barmaid. Bus out as fast as possible to Clerkenwell for a 7am start.

But the end of the day was worse. There was nothing that qualified as ‘home’ in the squat, so sometimes I sat in the pub ‘til closing time, but usually I walked. Back through Smithfield, Clerkenwell, Holborn, to the crust edge of Soho and The Pollo Bar.

The Pollo was one of a string of cheap restaurants around Soho and somehow related to, I think, the ‘Stockpots’ in other parts of the West End. It was ‘Italian’ but not in the way we’d understand it today. It was run by Italians, the menu ran heavy to cheap pastas and a lasagne the texture of a wet futon. But the signs on the front seemed to deny the very idea

‘Food to take away’ - I never saw anyone take the food away. You wanted shelter and steaming fug. If I’d taken Pollo food back to where I actually slept it would have created a kind of critical mass of despair. No one could have survived that. As far as I could tell, The Maudsley was there for the people who’d tried

It said ‘Pollo Bar Restaurant’, but it didn’t seem to have a bar in any accepted sense. There was wine in a sort of jug but only red, as I remember. No complicated choices.

“Pasta Speciality

English and Continental Dishes”

Which read like a get out clause for anyone terrified of ‘Foreign Muck’.

But the thing that sprang up in my shattered memory yesterday was a dessert they used to make. A hot boozy custard. A thick Duralux glass filled with lightly whipped hot zabaglione. I could remember the taste, the intoxicating smell of cheap marsala and, unbelievably I remembered how they made it.

As it happens, I’ve got an espresso machine on the bench at the moment that I’m repairing for someone. So it had to be done.

1 egg yolk, a tablespoon full of sugar (remove fag ends), a tablespoon of Marsala.

Blitz it with the battered milk-shake maker on the back of the bar, then ply the steam wand on the ancient Espresso machine.

It only bloody works!

So the egg yolk is free-range, the sugar is a little more hygienic than the stuff on the red formica tabletops and the Bamix has to stand in for the milkshake machines that no longer exist - possibly because they could mince the ends off your fingers.

But the taste is still sensational. Utterly warming in a way you can only appreciate when you know you’re about to walk two hours down into the bowel of South London, retrieve your bag and sleep on something the texture of a lasagne. But you’re full of £3.75p’s worth of spaghetti vongole, hot, boozy custard, barbarous ‘Valpollicella’ to stave off scurvy, and a girl from St Martin’s just smiled at you from another booth.

It’s my bloody birthday again. I know this is happening because for the last few weeks I’ve been getting emails. They are all of roughly the same content and resigned timbre.

“It’s your bloody birthday in a couple of weeks. Is there anything, you need in the kitchen?”

And the answer is always a regretful, but emphatic ‘No’.

It’s not a crazy idea. I’m a bloke. I’m a cook. People think that I like gadgets. The algorithm is pretty sure because earnest manufacturers fill my mailbox all year suggesting their gadget as the ideal gift for the ‘cook who has everything’. This week alone they’ve proposed a pocket sized heat sealer, folding barbecue tools, a sous-vide egg boiler and a Japanese toaster, costing £300 that does a single slice of bread with surgical precision. And herein lies the problem… and probably the reason that, yet again, this year, I’ve begged my family not to buy me anything food related.

I’m a cooking zealot. It’s my life, my work, my hobby and my obsession. If I felt a need to toast shokupan to a perfect Pantone reference, I’d not only think £300 was a fair price to pay, but I’d have bought it for myself, instantly, two weeks before it was released to the public. I think I’ve got all the kit. I mean literally everything from a grinding stone for tef through to a digital induction ring that I can control to a tenth of a degree from my phone.

Every one of these things was vital when I acquired it, and I know that one day I’m going to want to use it again… One day. It’s just that the occasion when I’m going to fascinate and entertain my friends with authentic handmade pasta, cut on a chittara seems a very long time in coming and, meanwhile, the kipple is building up. I swear, sometimes, I don’t own it all, I’m just Curator of a Permanent Collection, and, in consequence, I’m riddled with guilt.

I owned, for a while, a Coravin. I first encountered them at a restaurant called the Quality Chophouse which, for reasons not unrelated to Jancis Robinson, has a cellar full of wines I was never able to afford to drink. “Not true, said my charming waiter, waving the appliance in front of him like a priest with a monstrance. For we have A Coravin”.

The Coravin is a sort of corkscrew, but instead of removing the cork, it inserts a slender, teflon-coated needle into the precious fluids below and injects inert gas so you can extract a glass of wine without taking out the cork. It’s close to a miracle. It meant the sommelier could sell me a glass of something, life-alteringly sublime and then put the bottle back in the rack for another customer. Buying one, suggested my lovely waiter, would let me savour the very best wines in my own cellar over time instead of having to commit to an entire bottle.

I was convinced. Pissed and delerious, but convinced, and two days later had taken delivery of their latest model. It looked like something an infinitely evolved alien species might use to extract semen samples from abductees in rural Florida. It would effortlessly broach my bottle, harvest a single glass and, via bluetooth, update ‘the cellar records on my iPhone’.

We know each other quite well by now, and I think you can see the flaw in the logic here. I took the first, large glass of Sassacaia and Lo, I saw that it was good. I poured another…though smaller. Just to be sure. Then I sat, pondered my good fortune, changed the gas cylinder and had another one. I used the damn thing eight times, according to the app on my phone. Did it delight me… yes. Did it resulted in keeping a single bottle of first class wine for longer than two hours? Emphatically not.

I know I am weak. I know I am easily seduced by gadgetry… and I know I am the wrong man for the Coravin.

Then there was the Mighty Thermomix; a hyper-efficient blender, capable, as far as I can see, of reducing the engine block of a 1958, Series 2 Land Rover to a smooth paste in under eight seconds. But this is just half the story, because the Thermomix can also cook the food inside it, with extraordinarily accurate temperature control. It also weighs its own ingredients.

The Thermomix has devotees across Europe. They use them to make soups, stews, risottos - simple family meals, for which it is a truly labour saving device. In fact the latest Thermomix comes with a bluetooth connection to your phone and an electronic recipe book which orders you to insert the ingredients in the right order and scolds you if you’re inaccurate in your weighing… a kind of fascist Satnav Delia

Chefs go crazy for the Thermomix, because you can stick a bunch of ingredients in it and get on with something else. Insert a lobster, get bisque. Drop in some eggs, butter, lemon juice, and it will produce a gallon of hollandaise without a hint of splitting. All of which is good, because when you finally decide buy one, you can only do so via the oddly cult-like process of inviting a Thermomix ‘Demonstrator’ into your house, to show you how to use it, and parting with roughly a grand.

I lived with mine for about a year and discovered three interesting things;

a) The kind of cook who’s obsessed enough to spend £1000 on a blender is not interested in its recipe for soup.

b) The kind of cook who’s obsessed enough to spend £1000 on a blender doesn’t need a gallon of hollandaise and quite likes making his own, and…

c) The kind of cook who’s obsessed enough to spend £1000 on a blender is a weak and credulous idiot, vulnerable to cultists.

Don’t think for a moment that my uncontrolled cupidity is restricted to expensive connected technology. Consider, as I have done, the positively Neolithic granite pestle and mortar. I first saw one when a smiling Jamie Oliver enthused about his on the telly.

So I bought one… in Chinatown - I was that ‘authentic’. I humped it home on the bus - secretly worrying that I should have forked out for the even larger one that I could barely lift - and I made a Thai green curry paste in it. And all the time I was beating the life out of the lemon grass, reducing it from an unappetising stick to a bowl full of unappetising splinters, I was thinking “God, this is hard going’. It would be OK if it was a bit more abrasive, or the thumper was a different shape, or if I had servants, or a bloody Thermomix”…but I persisted. I crushed coriander seed to precisely the gauge that it yielded no flavour but still stuck in your teeth. I chased garlic cloves around the bowl like greasy mice. I beat a cinnamon stick until my shoulder gave out.

It seemed SO important so I kept on. I tried a mayonnaise in it but I couldn’t get it up. I tried pesto but ended up with a kind of compost. I tried achiote seed but collapsed actually weeping in frustration. It seemed that there wasn’t a single job anywhere in the culinary world that couldn’t be done better with something else. It made a good doorstop.

I shared, I think, five kitchens with my mortar and pestle. In four of them it was never actually used. It marked so much of the arc of my life. A symbol of what was so important at that different time, and what we did to be involved in it, but eventually I realised I wanted the bastard off my bench. I took it to a charity shop, where they wearily placed it on a shelf next to four others in various sizes. Mine, shamingly, was the biggest.

You see? I really don’t need more stuff. In fact I need a lot less. When Elizabeth David died, they auctioned her kitchen equipment to adoring acolytes. I’d do that, next week, without dying, and spend the money replacing the Sassacaia. Or I would if I had acolytes.

I realise that this is probably the most first world problem that it’s possible to imagine. That it exposes me as the spoiled, toy-obsessed, nerd and fickle man-child that I probably am.

I know I am weak but please, as they say online, “don’t @ me”. Don’t hate me and, above all, please don’t buy me kitchen gadgets for my birthday.

(A version of this piece appeared in, I think, the FT, several birthdays ago).

Like you, I worshipped Bourdain. But for me, it was beyond standard creepy fandom. On the two occasions I met him, I felt like a pre-teen at a Harry Styles concert. Maintaining journalistic objectivity wasn’t even a consideration; I was too busy concentrating on bladder control and forming a question that wasn’t prefaced with hand flapping and a shrill, involuntary “Squeeeeeee!”.

But it had nothing to do with cheffery. One of the many things for which I’ll forever revere him was the quote...

(Versions vary)

For me, it was maybe half about the writing. More important was the ‘being’. For all the cheffing and all the writing, he got loved most for travelling absurd distances, getting his tiny crew to switch on the gear and just being Bourdain.

That’s what I aspire to. Christ knows, I don’t aspire to ‘be’ him. He was profoundly unhappy. But I would love to be remembered for having been there and eaten.

If you think about it, nobody ever said, “Bourdain’s is the best recipe I know for pâté de campagne” (though that’s objectively true). Nobody who’s read it could consider Kitchen Confidential anything other than a flawed compilation, swiftly lashed up and hurried out, that caught a felicitous wave and rode it. Kitchen Confidential became great as people fell in love with Bourdain.

...But everybody remembers when he ate bún chả, with Obama in Hanoi.

I don’t get that sort of opportunity. I’m not sure anyone’s going to buy my pitch for ‘A Bacon Roll in Cheltenham with Liz Truss’, and frankly, I’m glad. But I do occasionally get to go a long way to eat something particularly good.

You have to imagine driving south from Cambridge. Round the M25, out on the M3 and feeling any connection with civilisation vanishing to a distant point in the rearview mirror. Changing modes with the gears, slickly dropping a cog from the gleaming Ballardesque thrust of the motorway to the dual carriageways of the A30 and then worse. Crushed in the B roads, and slowed like corpuscles in an old man’s veins. The closer you get to the extremities of this sclerotic shithole of a country, the worse the outcomes. 

Heading southwest, you mess with space/time. You slide backward 18 months with every mile. By the time you come down off Bodmin Moor, the roads can’t take anything other than tractors, cardboard caravans and groups of kids on bikes with picnic baskets. Nothing out here was designed for post-‘Famous Five’. 

Bourdain got to quote Conrad and write about going upriver like Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now. 

I get to quote Enid Blyton and a 6hr drive to St Ives.

Just as the ‘major’ roads get too small to thread through, you’re directed by a nearly hand-written roadsign to a one-horse burb called Hayle, that somehow still has the temerity to have traffic congestion, and as the very last atoms of your will to live are dispersing like vape smoke, the road is suddenly blocked.

It feels like you’ve reached the very end of the civilised world, but there is a building that looks for all the world like it’s been built as a barricade between you and your holiday.

In fact, the road drops a little and turns an incredibly sharp left... but you can’t see that. All you can see is ‘Philp’s Famous Pasties’ and, if you don’t brake hard, you’re going to end up in the bakery.

There is a capacious carpark which, as I pull in at 1230 (God, how well I timed that) is filling with mob-handed bikers, old men in VW microbuses, and local tradesmen, their white vans laden with picks and shovels and implements of destruction.

Philp’s is a family business with a few branches across Cornwall…

... and if that doesn’t give you a little Betjeman wood, you’re beyond redemption.

They bake on the premises and have been doing so since the brilliantly named Everett Philp started turning them out in his family grocery shop in the 1950s. Today, his great-grandchildren make the pasties by hand. 

Once you join the substantial but fast-moving queue, you have to choose. Each pasty comes in one of three sizes. The Large One, Standard, and Cocktail. 

In Metric they are 620g, 400g and 200g... but I’m not sure they use that down here. Using standard UK journalistic measurements, The Large One is as big as Wales. The Standard would, outside of Cornwall, qualify for its own post-code, and the Cocktail just reminds me how brilliantly a pasty would go with a frozen martini and so, therefore, how I’m going to pick up a bag on the way back to 2026.

There are flavour variants about which I Have Opinions, but I shall reserve them for now. The original is ‘steak’, then there’s a steak and cheese, beef mince, a cheese, a chicken and a ‘vegan’. (They weren’t clear if the latter is intended for eating or as a substitute for leather shoes).

I’m not a religious man, but I like to think I am not without a spiritual element and it is this is which soars when I see that the steak/original/standard is offered either with short crust or ... and I cannot stress this strongly enough ... flaky pastry.

This is some God-level pasty appreciation, right here. I’m not sure a pasty purchaser on the English side of the Tamar - who, let’s face it, is probably arguing about its price in a Meal Deal - would know such pastries existed severally, let alone be able to express a preference. 

Obviously, I ordered both. For science.

It appalls me that we consider the pasty, one of those things that’s close to a national dish, a food fit only to be served out of microwaves in petrol stations.

I’m pretty hot on traditional British artisanal bakery, so let me break it down for you.

As you stand in the queue, you can look through a side door and get an occasional glance at people, some of them older, in white trilbies or hairnets. There are a few of them. It doesn’t take rocket science to tell that this is a labour-intensive, hand-done operation. 

(Lets’s leave aside for a second the very fundamental question of how the fuck they’re surviving the prevailing economic shitestorm in the hospitality business.)

There’s flour about the place. That means they take delivery of the fundamental ingredients. 

When you order your pasty, the counter person grabs it in a paper bag from a bakery rack behind her. It hasn’t been reheated. The last human who touched this thing was one of those humans in a hat out back. They made it. They cooked it and you’re going to eat the damn thing, right here, right now. 

When you bite into the pasty, it’s really hot. Seriously. We’re talking third-degree burns if you don’t take things carefully. 

Why? Because a pasty is a unique thing. The ingredients go in raw. Meat, potatoes, swede, onions, and seasonings. They are sealed in a structurally substantial pastry. Damn right. Don’t believe that ‘handles for tin-miners’ bollocks. That crust is double-twisted so no steam escapes. 

Now let’s bite in and look at the ingredients. There’s a mass of potato and swede, some shredded quite finely so they collapse, some in bigger chunks that will survive the cooking.

My bet is that they lay out the pastry on the bench, cut the circle and then put down a thick layer of the raw roots. The meat... the ‘steak’... is what looks like a couple of pieces... each about the size and shape of half a Mars bar... of a strongly flavoured, loose-fibred, highly-marbled beef. Not an expensive cut, but lovingly chosen. They go through enough. Christ, I bet their butcher loves them. I’d bet a few quid it’s good skirt. Full of flavour and fast to cook.

Then there’s the seasoning. I’m estimating an absolute metric shedload of pepper, sufficient salt and maybe a faint scrape of mace (signifier for traditional English butcher’s pies).

OK. Lay the meat on the veg, close the thing up and put it in the oven.

Now, just consider what’s happening in there. The crust sears on the outside as it goes into the steam-assisted oven. In seconds it’s airtight like the crust of a loaf that then balloons with the pressure of the steam inside. 

I’m still working on a proof for this, but I’m going out on a limb to say that there’s even a degree of pressure cooking going on in there. Not a lot, but a cheap ‘Instant Pot’ operates at 0.7 to 0.75 bar (10 to 11 psi) which raises the boiling temperature inside to maybe 115ºC. Even a modest pressure effect makes a tremendous difference when rendering ingredients down.

Inside our pasty, the veg is pumping out steam as it cooks and the fat in the meat renders. That coarse structure means the meat breaks down fast... not to rags but to barely-credible softness like a long-and-low Southern BBQ, a French Provincial braise, or an authentic Biryani. The fats it yields are melded into the root veg... the inside of the pastry... the smaller pieces breaking down to form a moist, binding material that’s not quite a gravy.

Yeah.

It’s that good. Only better.

I ate it on a bench overlooking the estuary. Sat next to two bikers bemoaning their daughters spoiling their bodies with tattoos and a couple in his’n’hers mobility scooters talking about their ‘wealth portfolio’.

It was the finest thing I’d eaten in a year.

What really boils my urine is that in France, Italy, Spain, or any other great food nation, if they were turning out a product this unique, this respectful of history and culture. If they were making it with such love … such stunning authenticity. They’d close down the town twice a year and have festivals. They’d have the sapeurs pompier organise fireworks and long tables in the town square. There would be dancing, music, long speeches. And middle-class Brits would visit and never ever stop banging on to their friends about the divine asparagus festival they have in this tiny village in the Dordogne or the wonderfully quirky whelk-fair that always coincides with their month in their place in Provence.

Well, I’m filling up the boot on the way back and, if they ever shut the town down for three days, I’ll be dancing in the streets of Hayle.

It was the last thing I saw before I squeegeed my eyeballs.

“Download a recipe for this flavorful, veg-forward, bowl.”

I estimate between 50 and 100 pieces of communication on an average working day. It goes with the job.  Almost all are about food and drink, which narrows things down a bit. A few are direct from producers or restaurateurs - God forgive me - ‘reaching out’. 

This is not normal, but it does mean that you become preternaturally aware of disturbances in the Force. A few months ago, nobody had trout on their menu at all. Then, within a week, half the chefs in town seemed to offer Chalk Stream Trout. This is how you know that they’re all getting it from the same supplier (and, to be miserably honest, how you also know it will have disappeared within a month).

But the bulk of communication comes from people who, to some degree or another, are professionally generating copy. This is where the eyeball squeegeeing comes into the picture. A buzzword or a figure of speech can crop up like a fungal infection, spread through the discourse, and before you know it, everyone is “reaching out”. 

As I’ve said before, many times. Writing about food is like writing bad porn. When you’re attempting to create something that gives instant vicarious pleasure, you don’t get to beat about the bush. Cliché, stereotype, easily recognisable shorthand tropes, massive repetitiveness, staggeringly over-equipped plumbers - no space, or indeed, demand, for contextualising plot.

So, in general, we don’t want to further restrict our limited toolbox by ‘banning’ certain words (except ‘flavorful’ or ‘veg-forward’. Anyone who types that should be shot in the face).

But sometimes... in the last few months, in fact. You’ll spot an ‘outbreak’ in food communication. It starts, at first, with a hunch, then a burgeoning sense of irritation. Then you start to question yourself. Are you falling victim to some subtle confirmation bias? The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? Frequency Illusion?

But no... it keeps re-appearing.

“Dirty Martini - Our Go-to Pour!” (Exclamation marks copywriter’s own)

There it is again.  

Remember that moment in Aliens (1986) when the trapped space marines are staring at their motion detector screen...

5 metres? 3 metres? That can’t be right. They’d be in the room. 

And slowly everybody stares up at the ceiling...

Bloody Hell. 

Synecdoche!

Suddenly, without warning, half of press releases and 72.8% of headlines contain a form of metonymy wherein the substitution is a literal component or physical part of the whole.

I mean, it was bad enough when it was ‘Best Slice in Hackney’ but... 

“Sensational Sips for Summer!!”

(Truly. By their exclamation marks shall you know them)

As a literary device to make language more concise more vivid? Sure. Using a symbol instead of literal, dry descriptions? Hell yeah. Deeper nuance through imagery. Who but an oaf would complain? 

But “London’s Hottest Bites Right Now!”

Look. I surely do love me a metonym. The pen, after all, is mightier than the sword. 

But this makes me want to drop the Mont Blanc and pick up a claymore.

It had the lot. Collapsing damp plaster that smelled like horses, junkies nodded out on the doorstep, rats, exploding sewers and a landline that, three years after we’d moved in and had a child, occasionally rang with hassled-sounding old men, obviously in phone boxes, wanting to know if Greta still offered her old services. I liked the place. I still do when, every now and again, it pops up on the television, behind Gwyneth in ‘Sylvia’ (2003) or Gary in ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ (2011). Finsbury’s got the proper inner-London atmosphere of which more manicured ‘quarters’ can only dream.

Of course, if you’re a food lover, Finsbury’s got even better bones. At the same time we were Farrow & Balling the arse out of our recycled knocking shop, Quality Chop House, the Eagle and Moro were doing the same within staggering distance, and just a few yards further sat Stephen Bull, Vic Naylor’s (of Glorious Memory) and the lodestar, St John. It felt like Ground Zero. Today, that same strip that starts now at the Yellow Bittern and ends at maybe Cloth was, and is, an unusual and significant concentration of places that have swerved trends, defended independence and basically been brilliant.

Yes. I have a soft spot for it, which is why it felt like a ballsy move when Jackson Boxer, a man I’d always regarded as irredeemably Westside went East Central, took over the classic fishbowl, formerly ‘Grind’, on the corner of Exmouth Market and Roseberry Ave, and transformed it into something immensely old fashioned. Without the visible groundwork of brand creation. Without vast corporate or apparent PE backing, he’s just taken over an old site, stripped it out, painted it up and started serving great food to the neighbourhood, based on nothing more coherent than an adorably naïve combination of enthusiasm and talent.

It’s so unbelievably retro. This is the kind of thing that happened in Finsbury 30 years ago, before this whole ‘renaissance’ farrago span up. (It is, if you think about it, quite marvellous that there are still affordable spaces like this so geographically close to the centre). It’s also quite remarkable that a place that’s been around for mere weeks feels already like a local institution, which, considering the pedigree of its neighbours, is an achievement.

The room is exactly as it should be. Rough brick and enough RAL 9016 (Architect’s White) to cover. There’s a central bar/counter for belly-up eating-in-the-round and tables occupied by the indigenous raffish art/left crowd. (At some point I might need to do a small monograph on the influence of the Guardian on restaurants and the qualitative change in the ecosystem since Central St Martins arrived. Turning Smithfield into the ‘Museum Quarter’ next year is going to add another strange attractor to the equilibrium). They’re a pleasant bunch who gently remind you that this is also ‘Inner Islington’.

Some things have Instagram appeal, some can sell on the copywriting of a good menu “Salt and Vinegar Crisps, Smoked Onion, Pepper Jelly, Trout Roe” manages both. The homemade crisps are excellent and abundant, but the dip they come with looks a little like a pink savoury trifle. The smoked onion is blitzed to paste, the fish eggs jewel the top (Trigger Warning: there has been strewing. Things have been strewed. Strewage!) and then cubes of alarmingly orange gel have spilled, as if by a heathen upon the dusty ground, shamelessly hither and yon. There is little to do here but shovel and love.

I think I’ve always believed that the words gooseberry and tahini shouldn’t share space, let alone be spooning as they do here. Cold shredded green beans are tossed in it then heaped over a puddle of Robiola, a soft, brie-ish beauty from the Langhe, and then sprinkled with toasted hazelnuts. It’s a belter, no doubt. Looking a little like green pasta with pesto, but the sharp fruit enlivening the beans. If I have a cavil, it’s entirely personal. Boxer is a wizard with unexpected flavours, and I’m no lover of the clove. If we can agree to differ, it’s a genuinely brilliant and completely innovative dish.

There’s a lot of this kind of thing on offer…

Boxer has a simple and rather glorious theory that Londoners have highly-developed, extraordinarily Catholic tastes and reckons there are very few cities in Europe where you could confidently get away with mashing things up. In Paris they’d clutch their pearls, in Rome, they’d stab you in the neck. In a London neighbourhood full of reasonably well-heeled Bohemians, you can mix this stuff up on the fly and anticipate appreciation and loud Hosannas.

Jimi Famurewa has already tagged Boxer as a poster boy for a new urban eclecticism - that may or may not be a backlash against the crushing moralistic tedium of authenticity and the abject terror of appropriation. I can only agree and celebrate. Attempting to describe the place I find it uniquely refreshing that one can’t actually say what Vesper is beyond a great restaurant. Whether by omission or brilliance, it has no concept.

A ‘Coal-Fired Herb-Fed Chicken’ sounds amusing. I can’t shift the image of Boxer, stripped to the waist like a stoker and shoveling glowing coals up the yawning chuff of a giant bird. “She’ll no take it Cap’n. She’s gonnae blow!” But on the plate, it’s half of a neat and well-treated little chook, possibly part-poached for juiciness, possibly brined but definitely marinated and then seared in a varnish of agrodolce richness. It’s a great presentation. Unfortunately the bread sauce is not in a large steaming bucket alongside but rendered to a very smooth smear under the chicken… and the bloody cloves have been subtracted to be added to the gravy.

‘Green Leaves, Spenwood’ is an inadequate warning for a pile of salad hung with a thousand yards of fine-grated cheese. Dangling like Spanish moss from a cypress, draped like incendiary cheese tinsel strips over a 1970s Christmas tree. It was like staring at the Trevi Fountain after an ice-storm… in cheese. The dressing on the leaves was sweet, which played nicely with the tsunami of cheese.

Did I mention the cheese?

I love that Boxer’s done this. It does my heart good to see an opening that isn’t another cynical, corporate five-knuckle-shuffle. He’s making great, innovative food, he’s hung out a shingle; and he’s keeping his prices low while he pays his dues and earns a reputation.

It’s so old-school I could weep.

A friend sent me a link to an obscure old video on YouTube. Dated 1990, it’s a clip from some sort of TV special. He sent it for several reasons.

Principally I guess, because I love Mel Tormé. I inherited this from my Dad who had to carefully explain to me how this shatteringly be-toupéed parody of a lounge singer, with a face like a smashed frog and a stage presence so ingratiating it could strip the veneers off your teeth... was in truth a phenomenal jazz musician. I was besotted. I love him, particularly when he regularly drifts off into vocal extemporisation.

I actually ran into him once. Must have been the late nineties. Charleston International Airport SC. He was coming out of the gents, fiddling with his flies and I came round the corner like a runaway rhino and flattened him.

The second reason is that I also revere Donald Fagen.

The clip is five minutes and forty seven seconds too long for anyone who doesn’t share my peculiar combination of interests. But check it out nonetheless.

The song is The Goodbye Look, which might be one of my favourites. What Fagen can do, with amazing economy, is create a scene, an image, in an almost filmic way. Whenever I play it, it stuns me again. The name may or may not be lifted from a hardboiled detective novel by Ross MacDonald, the story of which has nothing to do with the song... but does remind you of the skill of the American detective genre writers, in constructing a world entirely of atmosphere. Plot is convoluted and ultimately impenetrable.

The narrator of the story is an American ex-pat ...

Marimbas, congas, a lot of tightly arranged Tiki tat... all enriching the happy scene. And then…

I love Ross MacDonald, but he doesn’t have that kind of economy. This is Chandler or Hammet, but by way of Hollywood screenwriting. I’d sell my soul to write like Chandler or Hammett but neither of them can start a story in four lines, spin it on it’s head in another four and have the reader gagging to know how the hell it’s going to end.

I’d write phenomenal books if I could paint pictures like Donald Fagen.

My friend loved the clip because the song is delivered by someone who shows absolutely no awareness of its darkness. Brilliantly but with the oleaginous gloss of a guy doing a dinner show at a tropically themed bar. This is Graham Greene, but delivered by Nick Apollo Forte in Broadway Danny Rose. And if the cognitive dissonance of that doesn’t give you a nose bleed, you might want to consult a therapist

Hold on...

WT actual F is a Cuban Breeze?

There are a few recipes online, but they all smack of commercial tie-ins from booze companies. Apparently it was ‘Popularized by the movie Glass Onion’ and is supposed to be made of vodka, Amaretto, pineapple juice and lime and sounds frankly revolting. One of those utterly abominable pan-tropical combinations you might expect as the signature drink at a swim up bar in a luxury resort. But now... today! Not in 1982 when Fagen wrote the song, nor indeed in 1952 when the last American diplomats were fleeing Cuban coup d’etat.

In ‘52 Gretchen would have made a Daiquiri. But in ‘59, the Ocean Spray cranberry growers’ collective began heavily promoting cocktails including the Sea Breeze (Vodka, cranberry juice, grapefruit juice). By the 70’s it was one of the American Association of Bartenders top cocktails.

In the 80s, when Fagen was writing The Goodbye Look, the Absolut vodka company recently launched in the US, were promoting the hell out of a series of vodka-based cocktails, including a revitalised Sea Breeze.

And sure enough, in the Absolut archive, there’s a forgotten ‘Cuban Breeze’ that swaps out the vodka for Cuban rum.

Now that, I can get right behind...

• 45g Eminente Claro Cuban Rum (Havana Club would possibly be more authentic)

• 75g Cranberry Juice. Ocean Spray’s ‘Cranberry Juice Drink’ is now a repellent sham of a thing that tastes like 90% HFCS. Alain Milliat does a real juice in small bottles. It’s criminally expensive and hard to find, but worth the inconvenience

• 50g Grapefruit Juice. Fresh if you can. I note that Waitrose has just started stocking huge pink Sicilian ‘Radically Seasonal’ ones via Natoora

But that actually makes quite a long, fruity drink, to be served in a highball full of ice. This might be my last drink. Lets spin the proportions to a classic Daiquiri that Gretchen would have know intimately how to knock up

.

• 100g Rum

• Then use the cranberry and grapefruit to make it a sour

• 30g Pink grapefruit juice

• 20g Cranberry juice

• Dash of Falernum

• Frozen glass in the shape of a cheap RGD-5 Soviet fragmentation grenade

I know what happens, I read the book. I think we’ll call this ‘The Goodbye Look’.

Edited to add…

Just reading Fagan’s memoir Eminent hipsters I note he mentions en passant Gretchen as ‘Faust’s Girlfriend’ and, sure enough, via Cliff Notes…

“Gretchen (short for Margarete) is the tragic heroine in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's masterpiece, Faust. An innocent, pious young woman, she falls victim to Faust's seduction, aided by the demon Mephistopheles . Her relationship with Faust brings about ultimate ruin , culminating in her spiritual salvation.”

I’m tout seul this evening so obviously an opportunity to enjoy things that might otherwise be frowned upon.

The fishfinger sandwich is one such.

It’s one of those things that everyone has a ‘take’ on - 90% of which are utter, pointless bollocks. It’s a sandwich. Made with fishfingers. It’s not supposed to be zhuzhed, improved or pimped. It should not be made elegant or ironic. The more original naffness you can preserve, the better it’s going to taste.

That said.

I have opinions.

Don’t make your own sodding fishsticks! What are you? Mad? And don’t buy Waitrose premium organic cod batons either. If they fanny with the basic physical proportions of a fishfinger, making it ‘chunkier’ or otherwise more artisanal, they mess with the physics. A chip has a ratio of exterior crunch to steamed soft interior. If you make a chip thinner, you get more ‘case’ and less filling. If you go large, you have to do absurd things like ‘triple cooking’ to get that huge mass of centre cooked before the crust overcooks. There is only one size for a chip: 8mm. This was handed down by God and if you have questions I suggest you consult a priest.

Bird’s Eye. Cod or haddock. Their proportion of crumb to flesh is ideal. They cook from frozen.

The bread needs to be ordinary. Sourdough completely doesn’t work. If you happen to have access to a phenomenal bakery, go for the simplest they’ve got (@fitzbillies standard bap in my case).

Of course you can make your own tartare! It’ll be lovely. But remember to keep some properly populist flavours in there. I make mine with 50% salad cream, 50% Hellman’s. I will not be taking questions. If you genuinely are a diagnosed, certified irredeemable hipster, you could use Kewpie... but only because the rest of us are entirely aware that it’s just Japanese salad cream. Of course we’re judging you.

You can have lettuce. Just not much.

Cook the fishfingers (3 per person) in a dry skillet. There’s loads of shortening in the crumb so at 175ºc the crust crisps and browns without extra help. At that temperature, if you’ve gone from frozen, the core will be perfect flaky steamed as the outside reaches the correct Pantone reference.

They spent millions on this. Making fingers taste good, even if they’re thrown at the pan by a stoned student. Use that technology to your advantage. I tried frying them in clarified butter once and ended up with lumpy fishbutter.

You could, at least theoretically, do this with frozen cod portions in batter but it’s an entirely different proposition. If the idea of frozen cod in kid-friendly finger offends you, use the battered pieces to make fish tacos.

Your tartare should contain minced onion, extra Dijon, capers (rough chopped), cornichons (fine chopped), dill parsley and chives. Chervil or tarragon optional. No lemon juice or vinegar, just the stuff the cornichons came in.

Finally, eat half a bag of Scampi Fries then run a rolling pin over what’s left. Stir this stuff into the tartare, sprinkle over the fishfingers as you’re cooking them and then ‘strew’ the rest over the top of the tartare during assembly. Unfortunately fishfingers don’t crisp up quite as well as they used to back when they contained radioactive isotopes and Agent Orange. You need the Scampi Dust.

Dry toast the inside of the bun/bread.

The Gibson is Beefeater, direct, Brutto-style.

Pickled onions just want to be with fishfingers.

Nunc Dimittis

I’m thinking too much about Formica.

So here’s how it breaks down. I’m supposed to be thinking about photography at the moment. I really enjoyed shooting The Cocktail Hour because it wasn’t just a simple matter of setting up a shoot and getting a picture. It was about organising a way of taking pictures I could continue over a year. Each individual shot small, slow, and considered, but the ‘arrangements’ around it, sustainable over time so the results would ultimately cohere. 

Practically, it involves settling on a style of lighting and developing/acquiring/whittling a limited suite of props, tabletops, and backgrounds. For TCH, I thought about traditional materials for bars (polished mahogany, zinc, marble, scrubbed wood) and then built them up. Glassware and liquids need back-light, so I trawled architectural salvage yards for old glass, built frames... and that led to things like curtains, muslin, odd specular light sources to take advantage of imperfections in the glass... and on and on.

I’m not sure what I’m shooting next, but I learned a lot and I’m putting it into action. I want the set to be smaller... as tiny as possible. I had the weird notion of building it on a turntable so I could reorient the entire set to take advantage of north light. I’m finding new old glass - though I’m making the frames smaller this time, and I’ve also become obsessed with artist’s canvases. Not paintings, but the processes of sizing and priming... or better still, old canvases that are scraped and reprimed to be painted on again. No idea where all this is going... but the textures are amazing and something will grow out of it.

If you read my waffle, you’ll know I left art college with a stubborn UTI and semiotics. Only one responded to erythromycin; I’m still stuck with the elements of communication that can signify more; and how we use them to pack in more ‘message’.

I had one piece of bar top; it took me three months to get right. Originally a bench from a school science lab. I scraped off most of the graffiti. I applied a dark stain I’d actually sourced from a place that made coffins, and I was about to French polish it when I saw an episode of Tokyo Diner where there was a close overhead of the countertop. It was gorgeous. I spent ages trying to find out how it was done, and it turned out that bars were traditionally scraped regularly and then treated with camellia oil. 

Nobody will ever know from the picture. But it doesn’t look quite like a pub bar; it’s a bit like the bar at Harry’s in Venice, but there’s something else in the back there... a kind of ghost of an idea of Japanese-ness. It doesn’t even matter if anyone can identify it or parse it out... it’s all about the layers... the hints. Tickling up something right at the back of a viewer’s memory.

Jesus! It’s just a bloody tabletop.

«Which is how I ended up with the Formica problem. It’s a weird thing. Cheaply manufactured since around 1930 by laminating paper and plastic resin under pressure. It was waterproof, heat-resistant, hygienic, but above all it was a ‘designed’ surface. Someone, somewhere, had to choose a pattern. And then enough people had to like it to make it a commercial success. A Formica pattern from America in 1953 says ‘1953 America’ like no other physical surface can. It’s almost as if it was researched, designed, and tested to signify.

There’s a lot out there. A constantly updating string of spavined kitchen tables on eBay (the laminate strips off cleanly if you use a particularly noxious solvent). And they, in themselves, are a story. These are your Nan’s tables. In the corner of the kitchen. Drop leaves so it could be pushed ‘to one side’. Nan could sit at it while prepping Sunday roast for 8 using one crappy serrated, round-ended knife and cutting towards her thumb (the very idea of standing, at a bench and using a large, sharp knife as a ‘tool’ is so inherently male, so resolutely ‘un-domestic’). You’d never find Formica in a professional kitchen. Just your Nan’s... or maybe a local greasy spoon.

God... drop-leaf tables! So you could fit a nuclear family round it, even when your post-war social housing unit was too tightly fitted for the full-time ‘dining table’ the posh might own. There’s so much in there it’s heartbreaking.

Charity shops don’t take dining tables and chairs anymore. That’s why they’re £20 on eBay. Nobody can remember why they need a table anymore, not now they order Deliveroo and sit, eating ‘picky-bits’ and watching other people doing the same on Gogglebox. Certainly nobody’s interested in buying a table designed to fit neatly in a ‘Prefab’ for a family that really, desperately, wanted to sit down and eat together.

I’m typing this sat at my own dining table... a bloody huge thing that hints at feasting in some imagined farmhouse, or giant, sprawling dinners. Probably gets used twice a year. Funnily enough, if I pay to enjoy a meal, it’s for the intimacy of an 800x800mm table in a restaurant. Even smaller than a Nan’s drop-leaf.

Buy a Nan table... save your relationship.»

And that’s the amazing thing. Everything between the brackets above is known stuff. Shared information. Part of our culture and social history. It’s easy to write out. It almost flows. All you have to do is avoid cliché.

And as you read it, you were nodding and smiling and recognising stuff. (One of the worst elements of food writing is how often it stops here. Like tedious observational comedy, you’ve succeeded when you get nods of recognition and a mild chuckle. It’s sufficient to be ‘relatable’).

But you can take the semiotic ‘load’ as a given. You don’t have to unpack it. You consciously mention the ‘signifier’ in passing, and rest easy knowing that the reader’s got at least as much as they need of the background. 

In pictures, some things have the same signifying power. Some props are loaded, some lighting setups - think how ‘Hollywood’ b/w portrait can now unpack into an entire decade. But Formica is, as far as I can see, just insanely effective. A scrubbed pine tabletop says ‘farmhouse’. French polished mahogany says posh and formal. But light blue ‘Boomerang’, (formerly known as ‘Skylark’) says “1954, designed by Raymond Loewy, (who also designed the Gestetner machine, a decade’s worth of finned Studebakers, the Westinghouse classic refrigerator and the Coca Cola bottle). It says dusty diner on the interstate. It says insane post-war optimism and American consumerism”.

I’m (naturally) a William Gibson fan. In his book Pattern Recognition, there’s a recurring atmospheric theme. His protagonist is an American design specialist who travels in England, Japan and Russia. All modern countries need, and have evolved, the same ‘stuff’, but there’s a weird, not unpleasant semiotic dissonance in realising that none of it actually looks quite the same. The handles on windows. Can openers. Telephone boxes. This he calls ‘Mirror World’. (He posits the phenomenon is strongest in cultures sufficiently industrially advanced that they were already manufacturing their own stuff before imports became cheaper).

Which is why other people’s Formica is even more exciting. Our own is quite miserably utilitarian. The sludge colours of post-war austerity. The stuff of Ministry of Works desktops. Barracks and hospital. Remploy and plywood. (And that, in itself, is useable load).

American Formica is all Jet Age optimism. Chrome in the kitchen and gadgets. 

I tracked down some Soviet. бумагопластик recently. Incredibly Mirror World. Proof that they could do industrial production as convincingly as the Americans, but skewed in the aesthetic. Less colour passes. More restrained tones.

This is why the real connoisseurs want the Yugoslavian stuff. Stol Kamnik. Not Western, yet too defiantly independent to ape the Soviet laminates produced in East Germany or Czechoslovakia.

This one’s in two greys and a beige on a cream ground. Partly a spiky space-age abstract, partly barbed wire, or crucifixion nails from some ancient and terrifying religious fresco.

Entirely sui generis. Provoking a pleasurable semiotic dissonance.

Totally Mirror World

I’m not sure there’s anything that boils my piss quite as much as Out-Of-Office messages.

I’m sure one was actually useful once... maybe. Like once somebody actually let the fucking paperclip help them write an ‘informal business letter’.

But look... here’s the thing. I’ve had about 9000 emails this week asking me if I want to ‘opt-out’, in case the forthcoming, crashingly cynical, entirely AI generated, ‘Celebrate Father’s Day with our dreary product’ email is going to trigger me.

(It doesn’t trigger me, BTW. But the warning is exactly the kind of thing that would have given Dad an aneurysm).

So. I’ll tell you what. Over there in the HR Dept. Why not think about this...

‘Dear Colleague,

A while ago, we installed on your laptop a facility to use an Out-of-Office message, to alert clients and co-workers to your absence and to reassure them that they would have your full attention on your return.

We thought it was OK when you started being amusing...

“Kevin is away from his desk today on an Elven Quest across The Shire but will return to do your bidding w/c the 12th”.

... That’s amusing, we thought. That showed a kind of... Hey guys... we like to kinda hang loose here at Soma Media. Disruptor Informality!!!

When one colleague in marketing OOO’d “Woo. Prosecco O’Clock!!!!” We took a holistic view and only insisted on 6 months suspension and Addiction Therapy.

But please, as of today, be aware of this...

When you put up something like “I don’t work Mondays or Fridays” or worse “I’m away from my desk, enjoying me-time, contemplation and self-actualisation”... you will FUCKING ENRAGE A FREELANCER.”

That triggers my ass!

We work as parts of teams, with people in corporate environments. It’s pretty much the job description. So when somebody in that team drops off-grid for 4 days of random mountain biking, hiking to Machu-fucking-pichu or just sitting at home and doomwatching ‘Rivals’ while banging down Whispering Angel and weeping snot... remember we don’t do that. We can’t.

Tonight’s martini is a P.O.T - though obviously I won’t put that on my autoreply - it’s a Push-on-Through. I can, when necessary, which it often is, overlay the Cocktail Hour on work... when it looks like I’m going to be up ‘til 0200.

I also don’t get weekends. I often have to cancel holidays. I can’t remember the last ‘quality time’ I had to myself because, frankly, I spend half my working life trying to get anything fucking quorate amidst a screaming batshit-tsunami of whinging, pass-agg OOOs from people who basically hate the jobs that give them a regular cheque and the privilege of a channel through which to whinge.

I was supposed to do an interview tonight.

I got a message at the last minute. He had 14 things to do, back-to-back that were going to take him through the weekend, which he would terminate on Sunday night with ‘150 Negronis’.

That, my friend, is the sort of OOO I can appreciate.

This one’s for you mate.

I’m spending a few glorious days in the Languedoc... I know... the absurd privileges of the job… and yesterday I found myself in Narbonne

And no, before you ask, not Les Grands Buffets - the legendary all-you-can-eat-Escoffier gastrobarn. I want to go so badly it hurts, but I can’t do it alone. It’s a job that requires a crack team of committed sybarites and, unfortunately, I don’t roll with that sort of entourage.

Les Halles de Narbonne, though, is more than adequate for my modest needs. Every second year, this covered produce market wins some sort of florid gong or sash for being the meillieur marché de France, only to be supplanted the next year by the market in nearby Sète. Sounds like a deeply dubious stitch up if you ask me, but if you’re the kind of person who knows that you eat best in a market, you’re going to have to find an excuse to get down to this corner of France.

I am precisely the kind of person who knows that you eat best in a market.

As our latest ‘BREXIT Bonus’ is the inability to bring anything of interest back through UK customs, I can’t really do any shopping. I could take loads of market photos and pout at the camera a bit, but honestly, I felt a lot better plonking down at the Bar Central and having the meat-and-chips.

This is chalked on a blackboard and reads, year in, year out...

…plus a ‘Special’ which today was cœurs de canard

The market has half a dozen meat stalls of gratifying variety. There’s one that seems to specialise in offal, a tempting poultry specialist, one that does horsemeat, and one run by a retired rugby player with an excellent gimmick. If you order a steak or chop at the cafe on the opposite side of the aisle, they yell your order across, he wraps the meat in paper and then hurls it spinning through the air to be caught by the grill man.

I only get down here once every year and I’ve got as far down the list as the rognons.

Sauce moutarde has been my preference hitherto but that’s not how the Central is set up. It’s strictly a grill and fryer rig, so the kidneys are sliced about 8mm thick and lashed on the griddle so the outsides crisp but the insides stay bang-on-the-button rosé. These things are tiny. No more than 25mm across, which is probably why no-one has fussed to core them... and there is absolutely no need. They’re dressed in persillade, a kind of parsley/chive/chervil pesto... yes, I know you can use garlic but this is subtler.

They rush them to the table à point, concupiscently, indecently intermarried in chips. I mean, there’a big old mound of kidneys on one side, but they’re also tucked underneath and hidden inside a chip Matterhorn. You’ll notice I’m assiduously not referring to ‘fries’here. I’m troubled by “French fries”. It seems unfair to curse an entire nation for McDonald’s offering; a crisp, dry product, lightly tanned. They’ve got nothing to do with real French chips. I’m positing a theory that here they use high-quality fats, perhaps duck fat or olive oil, and therefore fry only once, at a lower temperature than us. Some might call the result soggy but actually the potato is almost confited, so the inside is soft and has developed a genuine sweetness while the outside is a deep mahogany shade. Not oily, but emphatically and proudly not crisp. Fried, French, but not French Fries.

A small but considered salad garnish, the dressing for which, alone, I’d have congratulated a Michelin chef, though this one seemed to have been mixed in a wine bottle by the waitress.

Two double espressos and a Badoit for health

My hand to God, this could be my double death row meal. It would be my last choice, then I’d have my lawyer make a last minute appeal. Delay the drop so I could have a second helping.

Which, in this case is going to take another twelvemonth, but I’m already scratching the days off on my bedroom wall.

Next Year The Tripe.

I want to make something clear from the start. I’m a Berry Bros. & Rudd No.3 kind of guy. I’m the sort of man who seeks out bottles of High West Bourbon, of Eminente Claro rum. I love my hand-crafted Valentia Island vermouth that they don’t even import to England and the Noilly Prat Extra Dry that I have to get a friend in France to ship over because it only goes to the Americas. Arcane, prestige booze ‘R’ us. I am a man of wealth and taste, and happy to express it by spaffing insane amounts of cash on branded ethanol. It seems I’m a sucker for liquor with a narrative - no matter how fictional.

But I also love “Rail Booze”.

You know when you’re sitting at your bar stool and you look behind the barkeep’s head and you can see all the expensive stuff. Carefully arrayed on the backlit glass shelves. All those premium brands at a suspiciously similar £50 a bottle pricepoint?

I love every bottle of it. I’ll pay to drink a world class gin. I mean... seriously... do you think I wear a Rolex because I want to know the time?

But if you go in to an ordinary bar, with a decent barman annd you ask for a martini. The barkeepdoesn’t reach up to the glistering shelves, the premium bottles. He (or she) will reach down, into the Well, or the Rail. The place where the commodity spirits lurk. And here’s the thing. If they’re even half damn good, they’ll make a cocktail that will blow you away.

Top notch restaurant cooking is all about finding the most exclusive and expensive ingredients and combining them in innovative ways. If ‘Chef’ recommends a carrot, you’ll be told how one part time farmer in the arse end of nowhere, coaxed it into life by hand, in a bed of volcanic sand flown in from Hawaii. Your steak will be infinitely better if the cow had a name and a home address. It’s all about the obscure and the artisan.

But cocktails aren’t like that. The very best cocktails in the world are made from bulk manufactured, industrial products, marketed and sold by large companies. The best have had the same flavour for a hundred years. The best martini in London is made of components designed and manufactured to exactly the same tolerances, at the same scale and with the same attention to technology and brand science as a Big Mac.

I buy small-batch gins with semi-artisanal cues in the packaging, with a narrative about a 200 year old family recipe of curated aromatics, of a hand-built and extremely small still, in a barn somewhere attractively rural... but we’re talking about something made in a large machine. A product that the the government has an unreasonable amount of legislative control over. If you like, you can build a still, grow your own juniper, and lick your own labels, but the Revenue still hold you to the same rules as Diageo... which is quite possibly why an alarming number the ‘curated’ small batch liquors out there are actually made on contract, by the industrial giants.

And, truth be told, if you tinker with your flavour profiles enough that I can tell it’s not regular gin then you’ve created something that I might, occasionally enjoy as a novelty but will ultimately screw the classic cocktail I actually want.

A couple of weeks ago I bought my usual bottle of BB&R #3, I mail ordered my bottle of Eminente Claro, so I would have Martinis and Daiquiris in abundance and at will £40 for the gin £32.50 for the rum. Then, alongside I picked up bottle of Beefeater (£21.50) and Havana Club (£21.50)

So the idea of a martini actually should be “To create an astonishingly good drink out of utterly standard booze. Anyone can mix £50 a bottle “curated” gin with £50 a bottle “curated” vermouth and make a martini I’ll pay for... but what really floats my boat is the kid who’s got Beefeater and NP dry on their rail and can turn that into a creditable martini.

It can be done. It’s the most glorious secret of the cocktail world that the ingredients of the The Best Martini in The World are in stock, right now, at your corner offie.

The really scary thing is that any single element that distinguishes your premium product from the rail stuff actually diminishes its utility. Blue gin? Gin that tastes of chrysanthemums and a hint of Yuzu? You might be able to make one interesting and entirely evanescent proprietary cocktail with it, but you’ll never supplant what a culture sees as the kind of ‘throughline’ of gin. The throughline that rail gin is evolved to express perfectly.

This makes things interesting. Food and wine can rely on this idea of scarcity and exclusivity of ingredients and, if they get it right, can subsequently set price as high as the market will take.

But I recently noticed quite a number of premium gins are marketing on simplicity and purity. BB&R have been assiduous with signifiers of ‘old-school and un-messed with’. The peerless Boatyard Double is offers no fancy claims of innovative, complex flavours but has become a huge cult success with the almost self-effacing positioning that it’s designed for Martinis. Even faithful old Tanqueray Export now flags on the label that it’s made with ‘only 4 botanicals’.

To anyone interested in brand science, this is, how to put this... a head-fuck?

The messaging that they’re actually managing to pull off is “Our state-of-the-art, premium product... tastes unadorned, simple, honest. Like Rail Gin”

Imagine. “Romanée Conti. Tastes how you remember commodity red wine. Designed for mulling”.

“Big Tosser Craft IPA. Made in small batches in our Dalston microbrewery to taste exactly like a really cold can of Hofmeister in 1986”

The funny thing is, though, that this is not the first time the booze industry has addressed this brilliantly. Vodka only really appears on the American market in quantity in the 40s. They could sell it on its strength, the fact you could drink it and not smell like a total lush when you went back to work, and (at least until McCarthy) on a certain fur-coat-and-big boots, Dr Zhivago exoticism. What they didn’t have was any narrative or scarcity, exclusivity or complexity of taste. It was cheap, strong, clear and made by Commies. How do you turn that round?

Remember Absolut? Strong, pure, utterly clear and tasteless. Made in neutral Sweden and great in a Cosmopolitan. Absolute balls-of-steel marketing.

So I find myself in a fascinating position. I’ve got BB&R #3 in my freezer, right next to a bottle of Beefeater. I’ve got Eminente Claro in the drinks fridge door right next to the Havana Club and about 90% of the time, I’m damned if I can express a preference.

And no, I’m not going to toss the premium stuff in favour of rail booze because all those quality luxury cues are as pleasurable a part of the drink as really good glassware. I can make a premium gin martini exactly as good as a rail gin martini and love them both equally.

This is a gorgeous martini. This is a gorgeous expensive martini. This is a gorgeous expensive martini in a £75 glass.

Part of my planning - the unhinged Gantt chart in finger paint and crayon that makes my existence possible - is, you’ll be relieved to know, a cocktail at six.

I’m happy to neck espresso, pull all nighters, wheedle and lie to editors and shovel all domestic responsibilities into the oubliette of ‘the work’, but I can’t do it without booze.

This is a working definition of ‘self awareness’.

The drinks fridge is just behind my right shoulder. I use a Herman Miller Aeron Operator Chair, customised with rollerblade wheels. I can shoot myself 5m across the room to the coffee machine at will. And yes, I am actively considering a catheter.

But I’ve got the drniks fridge set so I just need to spin. All the gear is on a tray, on the bench over the fridge. Nobody can say I haven’t considered maximum efficiency.

I CAN MAKE A MARTINI WITHOUT STANDING UP

But tonight I took it too far.

You remember the last scenes in Goodfellas?

It’s a masterful piece of Scorsese direction. Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, is in the full, ice-sweat grip of cocaine paranoia. He knows the mob are closing in on him, the FBI have a wire taped to him and he can hear the Police helicopter hovering. It’s perfect. He leans forward, looking up through the windscreen... up at the chopper... sweating bullets. Eyes scanning the sky like overclocked radar...

…and then the voiceover...

“Basically, my plan was this: I’d go get a job, I’d get a Cadillac, I’d get a few bucks, and I’d give the rest to Jimmy...”

It’s the most masterfully perceptive piece of screenwriting I know. The juxtaposition of those words over the face of Liotta. Desperate, but powered through everything by the last artificial fillip of chemical hope. As driven as he is deluded...

The pace of the cutting and the monologue racks up... relentless... unbearable. Gabbling faster and faster. And as a viewer - in common with anyone who’s ever watched addiction unwrap* - you find yourself experiencing that awful precipitous realisation ….

“You have a plan. And it has less zero hope of happening”.

Sometimes I think of deadlines like Henry Hill thinks of NYPD choppers. Hovering, beating... cranking up the pace.

I digress. I needed a drink and fast. So...

Basically, my plan was this:

I knew enough of the maths of a Martini that I could build one from first principles and be back at my keyboard in a matter of seconds. Frozen glass, check. We’re going for a Montgomery so 1:15. 5g chilled NP vermouth using a bulb pipette, followed by 75g of -7ºC Berry Bros. & Rudd No.3 from the freezer. I knew the gin temperature would come up, that’s obvious, but not by enough to screw things up.

Stirring from room temp ingredients drops the temperature at the expense of dilution so, by the time you’ve dropped what’s in your mixing vessel to -5c you’ve probably added 15-20% of melt water.

Are you getting this?

I got chilled water in the fridge.

5g + 75g = 80g.

Let’s not go crazy... 15%.

15% of 80 ... that’s ...

What the fuck is that noise? Is that some kind of fucking chopper?

Twelve! Fucking twelve!

Twelve g of fridge cold water is not going to mess with the system.

It’s gonna work. That won’t raise the temperature beyond, like what? Half a degree.

Jesus... even Jimmy’s gonna go for a -4 martini.

Cut.

Thing is... it was shit. It was a dreadful, dreadful drink. Correct in every principle but lacking any iota of the ritual that gives it all meaning. Hollow. Meaningless. Tooth-grinding, neon-hot vapidity. It was mathematically, proportionally perfect. The perfect plan. But it was never, ever going to survive contact with reality.

I poured it down the sink.

I took a deep breath and mixed a Daiquiri.

A lemon Daiquiri. Shaken in the Alessi.

It took a deep breath and a couple of extra seconds to turn round the timeline crunch. The collapsing telescope, motorway pileup, Hitchcock zoom, trainwreck. It took some breathing and a little ritual to turn it all around and open it up.

God it feels good. Now all I have to do is sort out this copy.

So.

Basically, my plan is this:…

*Scorcese’s own relationship with coke is a matter of comprehensive record

I’m sure it started, as so many of these things do, with trauma in childhood. No, I was never thrashed with a bunch of dried parsley stalks by a pederastic choirmaster, I never watched a beloved relative choke to death on the stuff.

The dark ground in which my hatred germinated, was made fertile with boil-in-the bag cod. My Great Grandmother used to prepare it by hanging ‘the bag’ in her electric kettle, off a knitting needle. It saved fuel, I suppose. And after she’d slithered it out of the bag onto a plate, she would gum it with relish.

There were two kinds, if I can reexamine this psychological scar without re-opening that Great Wound: ‘Cod in Mornay Sauce’ which was the colour of teeth in a mug on a bedside table, managed to smell both fishy and cheesy simultaneously, a cocktail you’d usually encounter only in a corpse. ‘Cod in Parsley Sauce’ was additionally the colour of gangrene.

Later, I got my first kitchen job. I must have been around 14, a potwash of staggering ineptitude, paid - rarely - in small amounts of cash, but mainly food. Most of my work was too horrible to recall and has mercifully been excised from my mind, but a high point was ‘Doing the Garnitures’. The least repellent of the tasks.

I had to lay out three hotel pans before service. One was tinned pineapple and glace cherry, to go with the gammon. One was ‘salad’. A single leaf of lettuce, a weeping quarter of over or under-ripe tomato and a slice off a detumescent cucumber. The third was The Parsley (pronounced “PAAs-lay” with a soft S, by the chef Clive. A truly rum cove who’d been drummed out of the RAF for unspeakable crimes, went on to run a successful chain of sex shops, bought a small hotel in Bournemouth on the profits and became a Jehovah’s Witness.

I had to wash the parsley, shake it dry, throw away the rotted bits, bunch the sprigs in threes and lay them out for easy access. Christ alone knows what Clive’s training was, but he was a pretty good cook by the standards of the time and, as was the prevailing doctrine of those halcyon days, was congenitally incapable of letting anything over the pass lacking ‘a bit of green’.

It was bizarre. Nobody would tell me why.

It tasted like it had bolted in a suspiciously damp place behind the chemical toilet on a building site... or soap. It enhanced nothing. It provided no accent, no counterpoint, no surprise nor joy. It was just ‘a bit of green’.

The first time a girl took me out for dinner (her dad owned another hotel nearby. She was called Liz and looked like young Bacall in Key Largo. The words ‘above my pay grade’ seem inappropriate when I wasn’t getting paid enough to take her out for dinner... but it’s nonetheless true. She was radiant. I was scabrous. I was base and unwholesome. My motives were impure and my mind vile. Most shamefully, I was impolite) but there was parsley on the Steak Diane, so perhaps in some ineffable Freudian way, my loathing of parsley was finally cemented by sexual incompetence and humiliation.

I have hated parsley in way you mortals cannot conceive. It ruins a jambon de Paris as surely as a chine de Lincolnshire. It is horrid with fish meat or poultry. I’ve seen great shoals of it scraped into pig bins when self evidently, no punter knew what the hell to do with it either. I made a parsley soup once. It somehow gave me, bowel-tearing, near-terminal squits.

I loved Pogles Wood, Ivor the Engine and the Clangers but I could never watch anything with a lion in called ‘Parsley’. I’m sure Paul Simon was a lyricist without peer but the fucker was a Parsley apologist of the first rank and I cannot love him.

I reserve nothing but the profoundest respect for St. Rick Stein. I still can’t decide whether I admire him most for his cooking, his charming and easy manner, his erudition or his comprehensive misanthropy. I will die, unsuccesful in my attempts to match him in any of those four fields. But the man is unsound on parsley. He hurls that shit on everything. He strews it hither and yon like Cleopatra’s handmaidens with the bloody rose petals. He puts it in things, on things and I swear I once watched the man tuck it under something.

Does he own shares in Big Parsley? Is he like that bloke Hellman, and his covert cabal of mayonnaise billionaires, who secretly own Pret a Manger so they can push the slop within 300m of schools.

St. Rick’s Herb!

WT actual F is the man’s Agenda?

Not really a review at all, just an enthusiastic report back from an unexpectedly remarkable afternoon.

I needed a venue for a lunchtime meeting. It looked like being a sunny day, the first one for a while, so I looked at my notebook, at this list of places I have in mind. There on the list was Parson’s in Endell St. I reviewed it a few years ago for the FT. It was lovely. I never seemed to find the time to go back. So I clicked on the website and, mirabile dictu, they had a table at 1.30.

Already. This is looking unusual. So I turned up, smartly dressed, method of payment in hand, met my guest and we went in.

It was just... well lovely really. It was full... not rammed, but pleasantly full. There were people sitting out in the new, sort of shack they’ve got out on the pavement. There were couples eating at the weirdly idiosyncratic ‘inside/outside’ tables built across the windowsills. There were staff. A sufficient number. Bright, engaged... knowing enough aboutthe job to leave you the hell alone when you didn’t need them and then suddenly cropping up like a silent wraith when you did.

The place is an old shopfront which, at some point, someone’s tiled.

‘Fuck. Said my guest. This is could be Paris’. Which was partly true. Parisian it certainly is, I’m just not sure Paris is still this good.

It’s bright with sunlight, full of happy people and the menu is sensational.

In The Beginning, there were martinis.

I had a pile of cured anchovies, enlivened with slices of sweet-pickled chillies. We shared a fritto misto which I think has forever moved the goalposts for me on fried fish. One huge prawn (I ate the shell, the batter was so good, and sucked the head like some kind of parasitical alien brain-felcher). Squares of squid of as tender as a putti’s buttock and pieces of mackerel so fresh from the coast they still had sand in their shoes.

The batter, it seemed, ran heavy to cornmeal or polenta, so there was a heft to it. Tempura’s all very well but it stands apart from the business in hand, protesting its neutrality like bloody Switzerland. I grew up on Carolina crabshacks, I came of culinary age in an oyster bar in Louisiana. I like batter thats not scared to get involved.

Parson’s has small plates. I like that. Not ‘small plates’ like ‘Before you order can I just explain the concept. We’re a small plates...” <Reaches down beside chair, lifts suppressed Glock out of bag and quietly racks the slide> No they serve on modest sized plates. Just the right size for a proper but not immodest adult portion. Something that a man planning four courses, spread over a leisurely afternoon can work with.

I hate the word ‘perfect’ but here it’s merely a mathematical or philosophical statement rather than an aesthetic one. The size was precisely correct. Perfect.

For main I had a piece of wild sea bass with a piece of braised fennel and a langoustine sauce that managed to extract everything that’s good about a langoustine and play it back through the medium of cream. Seriously. The whole thing. Salt sea tang, the bitter umami of seared chitin from a barbecued shell, sweet meat and funky brain goo... all of it in a pink ointment. The bass had been thoughtfully butchered. A square fillet, the skin crisp, and slashed to reveal a heathy layer of brown subcutaneous fishfat. The kind of stuff mimsy cooks pare away to leave an anodyne protein block for soulless diners. Quite simply this was cooked by somebody who likes fish. Sounds daft but it’s vanishingly rare.

Business was concluded quickly and satisfactorily. Gears changed.

I decided to skip dessert because the afternoon was slipping gloriously away and this was feeling more and more like droppining through a wormhole in space/time to a place when going out for lunch was a joy rather than a massive ballache.

I have no time for the idiotic ‘five cheese plate’ Doctrine of the Davidian Era. It’s stupid overkill. For a long time, I cleaved to the Hendersonian Orthodoxy of a single, superb cheese, curated and presented like a holy object. No... I’d forgotten how really good Brie de Meaux can be. I’d shamefully dropped my friendship with Bleu d’Auvergne. A seductively silky, creamy washed rind and a complex, nutty but not fighty blue. Have a Comté on a separate plate somewhere else. Melt your Baron Bigod in its box, but a two-piece post prandial cheeseplate achieves a kind of ‘form-follows-function’ Modernist intellectual purity in a Brie-n-Bleu. Only a churl would disagree. Nothing else is needed save maybe some bread... and...

“How about a digestif? There’s a bar over there.”

And so there was. On the other side of the sunny intersection was Parson’s louche little sister, Baudry Greene. I’ve also reviewed BG - extremely positively - in the past. It’s also got it exactly right. The kind of slightly theatrical mise-en-scene that delights me. There are tables outside. People chatting, drinking laughing. Nobody queuing... nobody fucking influencing anybody. I bumped into a friend. It was like the most natural thing in the world.

It was the street I’d always dreamed of living on... maybe in Paris in 1950 or Florence. Soho in one of its cycles of being pretty good. Maybe Greenwich Village in the late 70s. A place you could drop into your local, have an exceptional meal, then go and sit around in a corner bar with outdoor tables and piss away the afternoon with a mate you ran into. Maybe write a book… make a film…

The sun continued to shine. It was the first perfect afternoon of summer. I looked at my receipts. All this looks like it cost about as much as it would have done a decade ago. The barman, it turned out, liked Daiquiris as much as we did. I got home around 8.00, walking on air... abrim with joy. I had a wonderful afternoon

I don’t live on a street like this.

I wish with all my heart that I did.

And yet, the last couple of years of solid restaurant-going, both in the metropolis and out in the sticks, have forced me to acknowledge what can only really be described as an age-based phenomenon. I wouldn’t want to claim to have been ‘the youngest person in the room’… but often, looking carefully about, there’s nobody noticeably younger.

Of course, this should cause no surprise. Restaurant prices are rising inexorably. If young people can barely afford to rent, let alone buy flats, it’s hard to imagine they’re going to be as keen to stump up for a posh night out with quite the enthusiasm that their parents are spaffing the inheritance.

Dining in good restaurants has always been a luxury, a discretionary spend, and the old have been pushing the young out of that area since … well, to quote Generational Theory, since we Boomers apparently started ‘pulling up the rope ladder behind us’. But quite a large part of me doesn’t enjoy sitting in a place where everyone is my age or older. I’ll be honest, though. That large part is mainly vanity.

But I’m beginning to believe that this has ramifications. It doesn’t really matter if you’re older or younger than the couple at the next table. If you’re eating in the West End right now, it’s a racing certainty that you’re older than anyone on the floor or in the kitchen.

For a frighteningly long time now, certainly back to before the pandemic, we’ve seen a change in the young people coming into the industry. For a while, all they needed was talent and drive, and they could find a place to hang their shingle. But commercial property prices and private equity screwed that. A talented young person now needs old people’s money to start a restaurant.

And now, post pandemic with pressure on the workforce, we’re seeing further change. The person serving you or cooking your food can almost certainly not afford the experience you are expecting them to provide. For a while there, our hospitality industry was run by engaged enthusiasts. You could hope that your server knew what it was supposed to feel like to be served, that your cook was eating widely and experiencing the work of fellow chefs. Not any more. You have to go back to Orwell in Paris and London, to find a time when the income and attitude chasm between server and served yawned so wide and grew so fast.

Of course, things haven’t always been democratic. And that’s what opens the ultimate, even scarier worm-can.

Two decades ago, I came of age writing about a new face of British food. One that wasn’t happening in posh places inhabited by old gits like my dad. Back then, restaurants were, almost by definition, for older people … uniformed wine waiters… flaming food on carts. You maybe got to go once a year if an old person was paying. But we saw a revolution. Suddenly everybody was going to restaurants, many on most days of the week. Cool young people were opening places … because they could afford to. Oddly enough, it was what Mannheim would have recognised as an indicator of generational change. Sure, it wasn’t the scale of the Civil Rights Movement or the Depression of the 30s but for a culture like the Brits, forged by class division and austerity, an easygoing restaurant scene was earth shattering. It changed the economy and the attitudes of, yes, ‘a generation’.

I wrote hundreds of thousands of words about cool, young, democratic eating places. How ‘Modern British’ was a re-appropriation of our own tradition or a celebration of our multiculturalism. I cheerfully attacked pretentious, expensive places. The joyless elitism of Michelin and ‘International’ luxury restaurants. I was even had a go at Elizabeth David, and her patrician writing for an earlier generation of aspirational ‘gourmets’. Food and restaurants had been for the elite and the old, and I didn’t like it. I was happy and proud that things changed. I hoped, forever.

A generation in itself doesn’t necessarily cause change. Instead, its collective experience forms its attitudes. And the behaviour of the young presages what’s going to be ‘relevant’ to the future. What, then, if the absence of the next generation of consumers in hospitality environments indicates some kind of attitudinal change? Resetting to a reality in which, just maybe, we shouldn’t be eating out of five days in seven. Maybe cooking food was never something that ordinary wage earners, in a functioning modern society, could subcontract permanently to others. What if we’re supposed to take proper grown-up responsibility for buying ingredients, cooking for and feeding ourselves and our families?

If young people can’t afford to eat out now, it shouldn’t surprise us, but I can see no way in which restaurant prices are going to come down. No curve on which eating out becomes more affordable and democratic. Quite the opposite.

The Age Thing will not wipe out the restaurant industry by any means … but what if it signals something bigger? What if the idea that restaurants were ‘for every day and for everybody’ was a shared delusion we could only support for a couple of decades … for a generation? And what if the disappearance of a young generation from the West End indicates that hospitality is pricing the heart out of itself.