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.

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.

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’.

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 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.

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.

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.

They told me I was going to Rome, so I called my mate. He has a flat there, his daughter works there, he was at university there, he’s an absolutely colossal foodie. It is an understatement to say I respect his opinion.

“Romanè, he said with reassuringly little pause. I have been recently and it was all very good… But all real food for real locals - so no frills when it comes to service or decoration”.

Sounds good.

“Other places I used to go until recently, he said, have disappointed”

You see why I love him?

You Take the A Train, which I think I’ve wanted to do since Duke Ellington suggested it (and which has infested me since with a fortnight-long ohrwurm.) And you have to get off at Cipro, round the back of the Vatican. It’s a station named after Cyprus and, tangentially, a broad-spectrum antibiotic - Ciprofloxacin - used to treat gonorrhoea, and bubonic plague. I wonder if the Pope’s aware of that.

It’s a wonderfully unassuming spot. It must have been, at least until comparatively recently, some sort of shop front. Obviously the term ‘comparatively recently’ is pretty useless in Rome, but the apartment block of which it forms the base, looks like it was knocked up in the mid Sixties (1960s, you bloody pedant).

Inside, they’ve given it the E8 Makeover (remove unironic fittings with a cold-chisel and roll on a couple of coats of RAL 9016 ‘Traffic White’. Upcycled tables. Institutional chairs) I’m not sure what it says about society when the chairs longer deemed suitable for screwing to the floor of a prison visiting suite are suddenly meet for the arses of the better classes … but hey! There’s a lucrative 1500 in that at some other time.

There are two remarkable decorative themes in the room. First, the largest collection of ‘Buon Ricordo’ plates I’ve ever seen. These things are amazing: joyously primitive ceramics in the ‘Majolica’ tradition, painted with a more enthusiastic than talented hand - or possibly, foot. To give you a cultural cross reference here ‘Buon Ricordo’ means ‘happy memories’, which might in this case be translated as ‘Souvenir of …’ Obviously by the third day in Rome, your art history glands are throbbing like a pit-bull’s scrotum, but there’s no way round the fact that these are naff holiday tat. The problem here is that I’m culturally deracinated. This place is about 200m from the Vatican as the putto flies. That’s the largest single repository of high camp kitsch on the planet. I have to belief that this is a conscious thing. Please…God!

And then there are the doilies. Adorable, cheap paper doilies that your nan would love. I’d heard of them, obviously, but I had to give a talk on royal icing to a WI in Frinton before I ever saw one in the wild.

But here’s the thing. It’s out of the centre, a fairly ordinary suburban street, it’s run by what appears to be a gang of enthusiastic 17yr olds and at 1830, there’s already a queue out the door of young Italian families.

The menu is dead simple - timeless Roman classics, done by keen young Romans

From the starter/nibble end of the menu we order polpette di bollito wherein beef, boiled to death is given CPR by mortadella, potatoes, Parmesan and nutmeg, panéed, fried and served with a green sauce so good, so pure and so verdant that I’ve kept a small vial of it. I shall wear it round my neck, close to my heart, in case, one day, things go tits up and I have to eat a badger.

There was parmagiana di melenzane that looked like 50 shades of beige but tasted smoother than a pastel cashmere, draped artfully over the shoulders of a minor count and Gennargentu. A lovely word, and the most poetic way one could ever imagine to describe fried cheese and jam.

As in all the best Roman joints there’s what one might call ‘the Gastro-Intestinal tract’ - the paragraph on the menu that deals with the inner organs. The ‘quinto quarto’.

The family at the next table were enjoying steaming mounds of trippa alla Romano. Most hearteningly, they were all spooning it into a stout little 2 year old with the kind of curls that would have driven MIchaelangelo to drink (he was, along with most of the painters featured up the Vatican, great at arses, bloody awful at hair. Not sure what that says.)

Later, as the family moved on to other courses and more of the surprisingly agreeable cloudy beige wine, the child was released to wander round the room. Each family table tried to draw her to them with strips of tripe. It was, at one level, adorable, on another, possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in a dining room

I’d had tripe the night before and so considered ‘Coratello D’Abbacchio - heart, lungs, liver, and trachea of suckling lamb, sauteed with olive oil and onions’. I really pondered this one hard. Lots of things went through my head. It was a genuine first-world dilemma. Do I look more like an arse if I order this … or if I don’t? Most noticeably, nobody else seemed to have ordered it - perhaps they knew that strips of warm lung don’t work as child-bait. Most of my culinary inquisitiveness was sidelined as I recalled having once, to do a simulated tracheotomy on a training course. Don’t ask. It was a plastic throat and I remember asking the medic ‘do the real ones crunch like that?’

‘Pretty much, she said, but worse’.

You know what? I’m on bloody holiday. Nobody’s paying me for this. So I had the boiled veal tongue with more of the miracle green sauce. Three slices. And I realised it was quite unlike the ‘ox-tongue’ we serve in the UK - a slab of grey meat the size and texture of a fell-runner’s thigh that nobody ever actually asked for - this is the small soft, pink tongue of a suckling calf and as such, pervertedly sublime.

The ‘Pastascuitta’ section led with an excellent rigatoni alla carbonara - with mirabile dictu, free-range eggs rather than the pasteurised ones they seem to serve everywhere else in the city. Spaghettoni all’ (a)matriciana with guanciale crisp enough to be audible. I want to write separately about the Roman Four pastas (IV pastae?). I got into a couple of kitchens while I was there and consequently have opinions. What was noticeable though was that these were specified in the menu as ’130g servings’.

Any restaurant in Rome that doesn’t hurl English or American tourists back into the street on general principle, is having a pasta problem at the moment. A small serving of one of the four, simple - one might call them ‘emulsion’ pastas, fits beautifully between a starter, and a main that’s just protein. No more carbs required. Maybe a vegetable. But not many people get that.

Everyone feels forced to comment on the oddness of the ‘extra course’ then either goes for one or the other. Even Romanè serves the ragu-based pastas - a meaty gravy over a starch which someone from Peoria or Peterborough can recognise as ‘Proper Dinner’ - in clearly marked 160g portions.

(They do a non-canon but no less splendid Rigatoni con sugo di coda at 130g, but the meat is homeopathic. The flavour is still predominantly tomato, and it’s been saturation bombed with Pecorino so good that mere Parmesan suddenly seems about as damn relevant as Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction)

Saltimbocca was billed as alla Romana so I’m now fixed in my belief that the Romans; like their veal, ham and sage assembled with the structural coherence of a flung trifle. They don’t really ‘jump’ into your mouth. They need to be helped there like getting a duvet into its cover. Taste though? Like putti on a mandoline. Little slices of angel.

And finally, to sit on the evening’s chest and pound its head into the pavement, Polla alla cacciatora (not Romano). A revelation on more levels than a lasagne. The meat, according to the menu, was ‘Thighs and Overthighs’. There’s a joke in there about either a Bond Girl or a lisping tailor, but I’ll leave that one to you. I’ve done enough work already.

The best thing was that whoever had owned the thighs had worked out pretty consistently, possibly, I judged, as a dancer at the Crazy Horse. It was, as they say, no Spring chicken, in fact it was a properly cocky old fowl, cooked back into tenderness in a sauce that contained a surprising amount of vinegar. A completely delicious combination of flavours that had absolutely nothing to do with the sort of turkey bolognese crap that’s been false-flagging it for generations.

I loved every moment of it. Every mouthful, every second. I loved the collapsing saltimbocca, the pervy tongue and the whole weird ‘kid-whisperer’ situation. I loved the souvenirs of Rimini, the doilies.I even loved the brown wine. I only had one glass and it was a weak as rat piss so I’m absolutely positive my judgement wasn’t clouded. This, I said to myself as I climbed back onto the A Train, is why we do this.

Honestly.

Romanè, a perfect bubble of hospitality, is precisely what it’s all about

Everybody wants to talk about Impala. I just want to make the bad dad joke about Bambi’s vampire cousin*.

It’s routinely described as North African influenced and, indeed, column inches have been spent in discussing whether Impala represents the start of a trend. Christ, it’s desperate, isn’t it? Are we really that drooling to know where the herd is heading, or are magazines just aching to be seen as leading us.

Repeat after me.

One is a happenstance

Two is coincidence

… You need three for a trend.

Meedu Saad, the brain behind Impala was born in Tottenham to a mum from Chicago with parents from England and Poland. His dad was from Ismailia - though some of the ample advance publicity for Impala talks about inspiration from ‘Cairo Markets’.

I don’t mean to sound flippant, but the truth is that Saad’s genius lies not, as we’d all love to report, in his interesting ethnicity, but rather the phenomenal talent of an international kid, to effortlessly fuck with it.

The way we talk about restaurants and the origins of their cuisine has become, to be honest, completely screwed in countervailing currents of culture warfare, authenticity, appropriation, and what can and can’t be claimed in the all important back story/origin myth of every new restaurant. I can’t understand why every PR and restaurateur with a new project doesn’t just throw open their window, hang out and with one voice shout ‘It’s Just a Fucking Restaurant and I’m not going to take it anymore’.

Aish Baladi, is brought to the table with full ceremony and a backstory. It’s been the bread of all classes of Egyptian society since they were building pyramids and, to be honest, it looks like it. Small, round and sprinkled with echt grains and chaff. I can’t work out if it’s a loaf or a parable. But then you rip the bugger open and it’s soft, airy and full of nutty complexity. All the ingredients of a European health/punishment loaf somehow turned into a little fat cloud of joy. It would be sacrilege to apply it to any form of dip. Maybe that is the parable.

Kibbeh appears across the Levant as a pounded paste of, usually, meat and bulghur. Saad does something similar with raw Scottish langoustine and sun dried wheat, which he then wraps in a rigorously East or South Asian Perilla leaf, bringing it somewhat into temaki-zushi territory. And why the hell not? His most recent success has been Kiln, the restaurant so famously authentic to Northern Thailand that it cooks only over charcoal and is staffed entirely by posh English kids on gap years.

Our brilliant server was very keen we should try the raw brill with mashua root, dressed with garum and wild honey. Mashua, in case, like me, you wondered, is an Andean tuber, looking a bit like a Jerusalem artichoke and related to the nasturtium. The brill had been hung in an ageing cabinet, achieving tightness but stopping blessedly short real funk. (There’s a Donald Fagen joke here, but it’ll take a braver geek than me to go there).

Beef tartare will henceforth always be made with Djerban harissa. I won’t be taking questions on that.

I’m coming back for the ftira, with a nine martini hangover. Let’s parse this little beauty. It’s a doughnut, kind of smashed flat and with a ‘hen’s’ egg cracked into it before deep frying. It puffs up like a liferaft while the egg fries (to runny, obvs) and then they top it with dollops of harissa. It’s a gorgeous thing and I really want to watch one being fried in a market somewhere because, truth is, this is a real streetfood banger that, while delicious, sits uneasily amongst the more refined starters. I want my street food tasting of the fat it fried in, possibly watching the paper bag go transparent before scalding my palate ’till shreds of skin hang down from the roof of my mouth like torn curtains and the yolk dribbles down to gild my beard. Just maybe not while forking out for what I’m told is “the hottest table in Soho right now”.

Sheftalia, is a Cypriot sausage/faggot, which Saad makes out of impeccable Tamworth pork and wraps authentically in caul fat. It’s served with an ‘off-menu’ harissa that’s smokier and darker than the usual stuff and all the better for it. I was two thirds of the way down the second bottle of Nebbiolo at this point, so my note taking was sketchy. I’ve written ‘maDe b jewish MOnks!!!’, but you’d better not hold me to that.

Duck roasted in molasses with fig sauce is even better than le tout de londres is saying. The skin is part of the treat and, possibly because it’s the only cuisine I haven’t been able to reference yet, I’d say it had a touch of Chinese influence to it. The skin isn’t quite candied ‘Peking’ style, but it’s lacquered-up good-and-proper - to the extent you suspect the skin might be what it’s all about. To accompany (because I’m still afraid of my mother) I ordered a ‘Heap of blanched greens and herbs with tomato, olive oil and lemon’, but mainly I face-planted into the pilaf. Green with herbs, bejewelled with barberries and cooked in that ‘separate-slightly-chewy-grains’ way that so uniquely Persian…

BINGO!

I’m still just a little resentful, though. I mean, it’s no-one’s fault but my greed, but I hit this one with my brain set for some sort of Maghrebi mezze, so I ordered loads at the beginning, ‘small-plate’ style. What I learned is that every single one of them (save maybe the hangover ftira) was entirely worthy as a proper, grown-ass starter, and that duck was a real paradigm-shifter of a main. Saad is self-evidently a cook not a whisper short of genius. I’m going to take this meal as a recce run and next time I’m coming back wearing a bloody tie out of sheer respect.

But don’t believe the hype. I don’t reckon Impala is any more ‘North African’ than it is French/Cypriot/English or Thai. Saad is a truly inspired chef with an unashamedly rootless CV, turning out blisteringly good food entirely of his own creation. The fact that they’ve settled on ‘North African-ness’ is a bewildering product of marketing, and his menu would be as inspired if they’d randomly chosen ‘Welsh’.

His talent is based in proud eclecticism and the true ethnic root of his genius is where he was born…

Tottenham.

Postscript: There’s only one dessert on the menu at Impala. Bottom of the page.

Date and pistachio tart.

No frills … no adjectives… no clues.

You might think they’re only doing one dessert because they’re proud of it. They should be. It’s a pastry base, smeared with date paste, with a sort of custardy cheesecake layer and then a fluorescent green pistachio gravel on the top.

I honestly don’t have the words.

There’s only one dessert on the menu at Impala because there is now only one dessert.

All others are rendered permanently obsolete.

*What’s the name of Bambi’s vampire cousin? Vlad the Impala. Ask your dad.

I’m a bit stuck, really, trying to describe Trattoria Vibrato. I mean, it would be useful if they’d coined the name as some sort of misplaced gag about Soho being the commercial epicentre for the purchase of sex toys, but I honestly don’t think they did. The place is too pure-hearted.

The setup is intriguing. It’s a very Italian restaurant, in the sense that it has absolutely none of the cues of a standard London Italian. Not a hint of chequered tablecloth, fiasci or dodgy murals. It has no signifiers of peasantry; it’s not disarmingly bucolic. No … instead it’s like a proper, real restaurant in a smart Italian town … the sort of place you can imagine the Italian equivalent of yourself going. Granted, because it’s Italian, it’s a holy terror for traditional dishes, ferocious regionality and superb ingredients. But’s Italian like Scarpa or Ponti. Austere and effortlessly elegant. Understated but impossibly stylish. Unassuming leggiadria.

This isn’t helping, is it? It’s somehow the most Italian restaurant I’ve encountered in London … and the least.

There’s very little branding on the front, just one, small illuminated sign high up. You’ll probably miss it, particularly if you’re haring round the corner from 3-Sheets on the outside of a pre-prandial livener (which, of course, you should be). The interior is dark, warm, welcoming. Nothing irritating obtrudes. So you notice the small touches: a mid-century Scandinavian telephone on the desk, you know … for actually talking to customers. Candles. Not sodding tea lights or miserable electric things that look like they were bought from Temu when you were expecting them to be a couple of metres high and made of chrome steel. God, it feels like a thousand years since I saw a proper restaurant candle. It’s certainly a millennium since anyone cared. I’m suddenly aware that my shirt is 3mm short for the jacket. I’m not sure about the roll on my lapel. I need a manicure, and I have the overpowering urge to wear my watch over my shirt cuff.

There’s good bread. Dense artisanal sourdough with decent butter and some sort of crisp baked flatbread that the jolly waiter tells us is called ‘Mother-in-Law’s Tongue, because it’s crisp, sharp, dry and brittle’. That’s more like it … I bet they’ll get the meter-long pepper grinder out later. I’m somehow not surprised they’ve swerved the Rat Pack soundtrack. Instead, there’s a turntable in the corner and some very manageable Miles Davis playing. These guys really didn’t get the memo, did they?

Insalata di carciofi, scaglie - shredded raw baby artichokes - is a really ballsy thing to stick on a menu. There’s absolutely nowhere to hide in texture or flavour. Here it’s been dressed just enough to lose some of its attitude and then tossed with just enough flakes of a very suave Pecorino. Not enough so the cheesiness deflects you from the artichokes. Just enough so that you appreciate them. They specify an oil for each dish so ‘Le Coste’ was all about ‘intentionality’.

Battuta de coltello - a veal tartare was, quite brilliantly, exactly the same dish. Main ingredient cut to manage texture. Thoughtfully dressed and just enough of a finely shaved cheese to balance, and Jesus … yes! They actually do have a Porfirio - a metre-high comedy pepper grinder - hidden round the back. I almost want to cheer. Until I realise that there were two, black and white pepper, as appropriate to each plate.

There’s a plate of langos about the size of a dustbin lid. A tangle of antennae and carapace that looks like some hellish xenomorph massacre. ‘Trulli Ulivi’ oil and lemon juice have been applied in abundance, but it’s the cuisson that’s stunning. Hot, a little coloured by searing but basically so raw that I picked one up by the claw and checked for a pulse. It’s not just that they bothered to have these bastards personally escorted in mere hours, from their Scottish loch to an untimely end in the kitchen; it was the absolute assurance with which they were prepared. Utter simplicity. Nowhere to hide.

Alla Gricia is one of Rome’s ‘Four pasta dishes’, classically made from guanciale, pecorino, pasta and black pepper. The pork fat emulsifies and combines with the cheese to make a creamy sauce. (Take out the meat and you’d have a cacio e pepe. Add an egg to it and you have carbonara. Swap in tomato and maybe onions for the egg and you have Amatriciana. That’s the full set). So at Vibrato they’ve pulled the guanciale from an Alla Gricia and subbed in a shredded artichoke - possibly because England is bothered by vegetarians. One could debate whether it’s actually Cacio e pepe… e carciofi … well for really quite some time. At least you could if you weren’t shovelling it past your tonsils like a starving charcoal burner. Once again, the flavours are subtle, simple and well-judged. I am reminded once again of the motto of Rutland, displayed on a board on the A1 as you pass through the county in 8 seconds: ‘Multum in Parvo’. Truly, much in little.

To crown the evening, a Gordian knot of fresh tagliatelle with farmyard ragu. Yep. Ragù bianco di cortile, which does indeed sound a little more pleasant. It’s made without tomatoes, hence ‘bianco’ and with the finely ground meat and giblets of whatever animals one might find in the ‘cortile’. Usually rabbits, the odd hen, a duck or so, and the cat. Well, maybe not the cat. In fact, quite a lot of this particular version was made with ‘Legghorn’ a mince blended from the thigh meat of 420-day-old breeder chickens with their hearts, livers and gizzards. It’s punchy, and you’re going to need to be an offal enthusiast of Bloomean scale, or some other species of gut-nutter to truly appreciate this stuff but, if, as I am, you are, you will leave positively vibrating with joy. There was a very fresh salad of lightly dressed Castelfranco, which was subtle, pure and cleansing, but by this point I’d gone fully visceral. I had about as much restraint as a hyena with its head in an antelope.

I swerved dessert because, it should be mentioned, at the back of the dining room, there’s an extremely pleasant bar, part staffed by the irrepressible Jack, who used to man the stick at Brutto. His martinis remain unimpeachable, so it’s the ideal spot to let the evening unravel. As if this didn’t bode well enough, you can sit there to eat too.

Which is good news, because quite aside from the elegance of the room and the charm of the staff, the food is some of the best I’ve eaten, well… outside of Italy. And as everything else on the menu looked stupendous, sitting here and eating is precisely what I propose doing.

Write a cocktail book.

The research is enormous fun and, of course, entirely tax deductible. When I’ve finished this one, I might just do another. In fact, I’m planning to have a cocktail book on the boil now, pretty much constantly, for the rest of my life.

Last night, though, ‘research’ took me down an unanticipated rabbit hole. There were two cocktail bars on my list that are 300m apart on Old Street, so I set out to drink at both.

Tayēr + Elementary isn’t new news. They’ve been successful for a while, but I’d never got round to visiting. If I’m honest, my personal prejudices against anything molecular or overtly hipsterish had meant that I’d routinely prioritise anywhere else. One perches on a high stool and the counter comes up to your chest, but that’s about where the comforting visual cues of the bar end. There’s a lot of exposed ventilation ducting, blonde wood, a cast cement ‘screen’ with artistic intent and a long slot window into the work space behind. That is ‘Tayēr’, inspired by the Spanish for ‘workshop’. It’s what Ferran Adrià used to call his creative space

I exert privilege to get taken back there by Alex - half of the founding partnership - where, surrounded by all the personnel and materiel of a top-level restaurant kitchen, there’s a three-sided bar with more high stools. This space, he explains, is for the ‘fine dining’ side of cocktails. Devoted to ‘mixology’. Here backed by a complex stainless steel ‘well’, custom made of biomimetic hexagonal stainless cells, bar people can hand craft individual drinks. Here, Alex explains, the customers don’t know what they’re about to be delighted by. Outside, perched in ‘Elementary’ - a name which , now I know, suggests I’m being kept back a year from junior school for being insufficiently promising - customers ‘know what they’re getting’.

I realise I haven’t seen a shaker out there in the playground and he confirms, yes … all the drinks out front are pre-batched and on tap. But here was the revelation. Most of the drinks served in Elementary contain tiny proportions of complex flavour ingredients. A gram here or there of an aromatic botanical in maybe a thousand of alcohol. There’s no way, using their standard armoury of jiggers and spoons, that even the most precise mixologist could produce those drinks reliably and consistently.

I ordered a ‘One Sip Martini’ as a pipe opener, which arrived in a tiny shot glass at perfect temperature and slightly yellow rather than clear. The ‘setup’… the ritual… was to place this next to a minimal wide/low tumbler of water and a small chrome pot of commercial pretzels on a very intentional black rough paper mat. There couldn’t have been less traditional bar theatre, but the placement was purest Japanese. No less of a performance … just more minimal.

The martini was wet. Something like 20% vermouth. But that was Martini Ambrato - A really unusual choice and, according to the menu, there was also fino sherry. I’m not sure I’d have ordered a full-size wet martini with ambrato vermouth and sherry unless I’d had some kind of catastrophic stroke, but it was sensational. It was sensational even if half the space in the tiny glass was taken up by a Nocellera olive the size of a quail’s egg stuffed with gorgonzola.

My problem here is that by any of the rules I hold dear, that is not a martini. Yet, with a skill that eludes - I’m going to say most - chefs of the ‘set menu school’, they have given me something new, that I’d never have thought of ordering and I have been delighted by it. No. More than that. Moved by it.

I ordered a Morello Cherry Sour (they have the menu on the wall like a coffeeshop) but I want to give you the whole description…

MORELLO CHERRY SOUR

Chivas Regal 12yo Whisky, Oloroso Sherry, Lemon + Morello Cherry

You see? It’s that thing they do in the 14-course joints, where they just list the ingredients and it’s as irritating as hell. Except that here, it isn’t.

I’m just marvelling now at the economy of those words, the near genius of the writing. Every word lands, and the combination instantly sounds like one you know you’re going to love. Of course it’s not just a copywriter’s legerdemain. Behind it there’s a mind dreaming the combinations up. But its almost like Alex had said; we know what we’re getting…. even if we’ve never had it before.

The Morello Cherry Sour was superb.

But then, we already knew that.

Here are a couple more. Just for fun…

CEDARWOOD OLD FASHIONED

Makers Mark Bourbon, Tayēr Aged Aquavit + Cedarwood

SANDALWOOD MARTINI

Tayer x Hepple Gin, Noilly Prat ‘Original Dry’ Vermouth + Sandalwood

I find myself in an interesting position. I can’t add anything by describing what those were like to drink. Merely that they entirely fulfilled the promise that you’ve just read. I don’t remember ever feeling that about anything on a restaurant menu.

300m is not long enough to formulate any kind of analysis but my brain is absolutely churning by this point. On one level, I feel I’ve had an astonishingly enjoyable drinking experience. Possibly one of the best. But on the other, there’s a nagging question. This bar is creating drinks, combining alcohol and flavouring elements in, if not ‘industrial’ quantities, then certainly greater than strictly artisanal. There are precise recipes. Inspired and brilliant, but researched and developed to be repeatable. It seems logical, scientific and it tastes an order-of-magnitude better than 99% of cocktails I’ve ever drunk, but I’m now walking down Old Street, shoulders hunched against freezing rain and asking myself in increasing panic…

“What even is a cocktail?”

It’s a horrible thought and I wish I hadn’t had it. Am I over-thinking this. Hell no! This is like a priest questioning the existence of God… that’s pretty high for me on the scale of existential crises.

But when the rain is leaking down your collar and your brain is squirming in ontological spasm, the thing you want to see is The Prince. It used to be a green-tiled Victorian corner boozer called The Checkers. One room, a bar halfway down one side and a running bench all the way around the outer wall. If you could find a sixty-year-old Parisian sex worker and a black and white camera, you could shoot a Brassäi in here without effort. It’s better than a film set. And no matter what’s happened to it in its long life, it’s got drink, conviviality, hospitality and human warmth soaked into its fabric like nicotine in plaster.

In fact, it’s recently been taken over by Will Hawes and Aaron Wall. Two young cocktail barmen who’ve worked their whole lives behind other people’s bars, some of them very good. And with quiet hard work, and incredible personal risk, they’ve set up on their own. It says cocktails on the front door now, but their website adds something that fleshes out their story. “Sharp, Strong and Social”. There’s none of the hotel bar glitz about The Prince. In fact, they’ve had to look to America for their model. The shell might be a pub, but what they serve seems much more like urban, neighbourhood bars in American cities. Leading not with wine or beer but ‘mixed drinks’. Simple, strong alcohol with a little something to cut it back. ‘Alcohol-forward cocktails’ to use the (revolting) current jargon. Or ‘Cocktails’, to use mine.

They mix me a Martini. In a proper glass. There’s loads of ice so when it’s stirred, the outside of Will’s ‘can’ freezes. We talk about the gin - Berry Bros & Rudd #3 … lots of martini enthusiasts favour that at the moment. Martini & Rossi vermouth … as little of it as you like. A guy with wild hair and a beard at the other end of the bar throws in an opinion. About bitters. They cut their lemon peel as ‘coins’ the better to shoot the oil onto the drink’s surface before rubbing it round the rim. Maybe a little on the stem too. Flash, but reassuringly so. In fact, it’s things like that. The care, the ritual, the attention to detail, and the shared nerd’s delight that makes it perfect.

I order another and we talk about the bottles along the back bar. The plain, famous brand old boozes, and the special ones, the fortified and aromatised wines with ancient secret recipes, the amari and ‘bitters’ with flavours unchanged for centuries, the consistent reliability of vermouth, the new rarity of Chartreuse … and I realise with an only partially alcohol induced sensation of vertigo, that every single ingredient of my cocktail has been industrially produced, to a carefully developed recipe. All contain tiny proportions of complex flavour ingredients. A gram here or there of an aromatic botanical in maybe a thousand of alcohol. All designed to be delivered with 100% consistency.

The method of making and the service at The Prince might be more raw, more personal. It might draw on deeper shared cultural touch points. It’s got a feel of ‘neighbourhood’. You might even say it was more craft than science. But what they’re doing at Tayēr + Elementary is conceptually, philosophically, technically identical to what they’re doing at Martini and Rossi or Berry Bros. & Rudd. Where the treasured components of my perfect Martini have been honed.

Tayēr and Elementary, like the most influential Modernist restaurants, is designed to avoid all traditional tropes and focus the on the purity of flavours and the creativity of their combination. And it is fair to argue that traditionally, ‘Cocktails’ have been around 75% trope.

Can you see my difficulty here?

But actually, my ‘compare and contrast’ research trip has helped. I think I know what a cocktail is now, because, though they couldn’t be more dissimilar, I like Tayēr + Elementary and The Prince equally. They form new brackets at the ends of my perception. Though their products are entirely different and their rituals a thousand miles apart, I experience both as ‘cocktails’, and, until I can work out a better one, this is the definition I’m going with.

I suggest you go to Tayēr + Elementary and The Prince. Maybe start with the one you think you’ll like least. Physically, at least, there’s only 300 metres between them. And what’s that between friends?

At the turn of the century, I didn’t know I wanted to write about food. I was planning an exit route from advertising, so I started doing screenwriting courses. Just like every other tosser with enough spare cash for a PowerBook G3 ‘Pismo’ and a desire to be seen with it in Coffee Republic. ‘Colossal twat’ was a phrase I guess I knew, but had yet to realise how significant it would become in my life.

There was a screenplay. I even finished it. A four-hander that bestrode that difficult line between monumental pretension and emetic whimsy. It was so far sub-Richard Curtis as to be immeasurable. Even if you understood how much I hated his films. A that point in my life, I was in ‘an unhappy place’... but I still can’t explain why I sublimated it into unspeakable dreck instead of doing something more positive for humanity…. Like climbing a university clock tower with a hunting rifle.

The terrible thing was that I set this anguished tripe in the old Victorian pub in Borough Market. I worked near there at the time. My protagonist (female chef) would have a flat, one room, semicircle of windows … up above the trains. (You see what I mean? Curtissy.)

I think it was probably 5 years later that I finally saw Bridget Jones. Late at night and utterly smashed. I remember howling at the screen. My one screenplay had been completely derivative of something that didn’t even exist yet … and would be shite when it did.

Anyway. Her flat is now Barang. A ‘Cambodian inspired’ residency by a little team out of Kiln, about which le tout Londres will not STFU.

I was greeted at the door by a chap in a knit waistcoat and a flat cap. I don’t know why this troubled me. I suppose north of the river and heading east, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d had a crocheted balaclava or a neon plastic Stetson. But in a Victorian pub, in a bloody fruit market? I went into a sort of site-specific brain lock. Was this ironic? Witty? Fashionable? Did he have a cold head? I was lost. If everyone had been wearing one, I could have concluded it was part of the brand, but no. The rest of the crew went teasingly bare-headed.

God, there were a lot of them too. All extremely handsome and all practicing that thing you get in pop-ups, where everyone looks like they’re really enjoying being ‘part of something’ - rather than actually working in it. The service was great. Warm and friendly, but informal to the point of melée. In the end, I just decided to go with the flow, that wearing a felt hat indoors was somehow unhygienic, but that he’d probably forgotten to take it off when he came in.

There are a couple of cocktails on the menu. The ‘Night Market’ is a very passable margarita skewed with longan, smoked green chilli, Thai basil and lime, all of which is pleasant, though running a little sweet. The ‘Bassac Lane’ combines white rum with tamarind and makrut lime, which is then lengthened with soda and served in a thick, chilled beer mug. The rest of the meal absolutely defied any attempt to get on with wine, so I should probably have stayed with the Bassac Lane. It was cool, refreshing, and I’d even have considered dropping the rum, if it meant I could pack in three or four virgin versions.

This was dinner with a distinct narrative arc. Lots of excitement in the first act, solid second, but kind of petering out toward the finale. Obviously there was a short pitch presentation, enjoining the hopeless diner to choose many things and share them, to start at the beginning and work through. Though obviously disclaiming that the kitchen may not necessarily wish to cleave to such weary bourgeois conventions.

Apparently, Cornish bluefin tuna is now a thing, so there were slim slices, laminated with compressed melon. A cheery little combination that raised up by a coconut sauce ‘split’ with a virulent makrut lime oil and strong hints of tik trei, the Cambodian fish sauce that was going to develop as a strong B-story throughout. For some reason, I’d spent £30 on Kiehl’s post-shave moisturiser on my way through King’s Cross. Now I wished I hadn’t. The sauce was more emollient, more soothing, organic, smelled a bit nicer, and was about half the price.

Prahok ktis is a pork mince and coconut dip. We know this because it comes in a small bowl and tastes sensationally rich and intense. ‘Khmer crudites’ were interesting though. I speak neither French nor Khmer, but I deduce it means ‘Lumps of vegetable that you can’t balance mince on’. Wedges of apple and aubergine cannot be employed to ‘hold’ a dip from any angle, nor does their surface encourage adherence. I tried plastering the mince onto the side of it with a fork, like a cowboy builder cramming filler into a collapsing wall, but I just ended up wearing it.

Grilled hogget chops with Cham spices and burnt tomato relish were a triumph. The meat was pink and running with all kinds of juices. The marinade was life altering but it was the fat that did for me. A broad belt of it round the outside. Huge, dark, uncompromising and just a bit foreboding vc, like those mysterious lengths of shed remould truck tyre you see at the edge of the hard shoulder. God, I’d have sold my Nan into serfdom for another piece of that.

Things were getting pretty ‘animal forward’ and I’m not going to tell you I don’t love it that way. Laab of venison could be as dry as hell, but not if combined - it felt about 50/50 - with pork fat. Hell yes! Now I can see what the fuss is about. God! Can you imagine how good morbidly obese deer would taste? Utterly beyond … it would rewire your amygdalae. We’d eat no other meat. We’d just ride round the countryside, hunting them down. Too slow to flee. Too fat to hide behind trees. Just follow them on a quad bike for a mile or two until they dropped from exhaustion and cook ‘em with Khmer spices and wild pepper leaves.

Sadly, the third act denouement fell short of stellar. A whole deep-fried turmeric sea bream looked ‘grammably good. The tik trei was back. And the Khmer herbs. But it had spent just a few seconds too long in the fryer. I’d be an arse to say it was overcooked, but it was fully done down to the bone. Deep-frying whole fish is a crap-shoot at the best of times, so they’re brave to try it in a pop-up kitchen. I just kind of wished I’d quit at the laab.

Look. I’m being here critical here. Was the food good? Apart from a few ‘technicals’, yes … lovely. The initial courses have a kind of shock-and-awe effect ‘Jesus … these flavours are novel, powerful … amazing.’ But as the courses keep coming, the same patterns repeat.

Like most multi-dish … 3 ’sizes’ of course… sharing … no particular order ‘concepts’, I find myself really enjoying the small stuff, but that things run out of steam when they feel they need to come up with ‘mains’.

Did I have a good time? Yes. The staff were lovely. I was well looked after.

Does it have what it takes to become a full-on restaurant?

That’s becoming an increasingly hard question. If you took this model and polished it up a bit, the result would not be somewhere you’d spend a whole evening and a lot of money. You’d go, have a few small plates and a cocktail, and move on. When we take another culture’s street or bar food, we can reinterpret it, re-present it, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised when it sneakily reverts to type. I mean … I don’t think you should be forced by the Authenticity Cadres, to eat, sitting on a plastic stool outside in the market … but I also find it hard to see how one could evolve it into something that would justify the markup to pay West End rent. As things get tougher in the industry, this is going to be a tougher and tougher step to take.

I loved the soundtrack though. Back-to-back 90s House. The last time I heard CeCe Peniston and Steve “Silk” Hurley, it was on a MiniDisc… sitting in Coffee Republic and hammering a PowerBook.

The first time I heard the term ‘Cultural Cringe’ was from the lips of the immortal Clive James. It was, I later found out, the title of a 1950 essay by the Australian critic and social commentator A. A. Phillips. It meant the bone-deep feeling that one’s culture, literature and arts were fundamentally inferior to, in the case of post war Australia, the UK and US. I didn’t like the term then and I don’t much like it now but it came back to haunt me because I picked up some decent lemons in Waitrose.

A while ago, I had the best daiquiri of my life in Venice. It was a rainy night in a dark little restaurant in Dorsodoro called Trattoria Anzolo Raffaele. It was run by a couple who seemed exceptional. She ran the floor, a devastatingly handsome woman, preternaturally serene, maybe in her sixties, who looked like she’d taken to running this glorious place after a career of doing something incredibly important... I don’t know. Head of Art History at the Acaddemia... human rights lawyer... she probably had a Booker prize propping open her bathroom door at home. He was behind the bar. Polishing glasses, looking out over a largely empty room and, in the fullness of time, making me the daiquiri. It was one of only two cocktails on offer.

What made it utterly exceptional was that it was made, not with limes but with gorgeous fresh lemons. I mean you could smell them across the room as he squeezed them. God know what his proportions were because these things were obviously sweet too. Nothing like the mean little buggers we buy in the supermarket that now have all the appeal of a Glade plug-in or one of those squeezy plastic jobs Mum used to buy for pancake day.

So when Waitrose (rarely) gets huge Sicilian lemons, I take out a small bank loan and buy a couple. The skins make a week’s worth of the best martini garnish but the juice gets extracted and mixed with half the quantity of cane sugar syrup and bottled. It starts to lose its magic around Day 2, and two lemons give you enough for 4 good size Daiquiris. You do the sums

I should call this ‘sour mix’ but that’s nowhere near poetic enough. It gets mixed, once again 2:1 with Eminente’s Ambar Claro. A 3yr old (just off-white) rum. Also a couple of drops of Falernum for JFK, and shaken vigorously with ice.

The shite cherries? Indulge me.

So drinking this takes me straight back there, every time. The food was, iirc, outstanding but I’m going to have to go back to check because, once the cocktail was finished, a large English family arrived and sat down nearby.

The noise was unholy, but they had the skill, that moneyed people have, of telegraphing the full panoply of their privilege, in a few loudly brayed words. They evidently owned house or apartment somewhere nearby. A daughter and her friend, dressed, as far as I could tell for an imagined Glastonbury, poked at vegetables while two sons were like unhinged teenage Roman Roys. They were, apparently studying at one of those ‘institutes’ at which the wealthy pay for their children to be occupied in a single lecture a week, to enrich their CV’s. One was concentrating on radiating boredom on a telepathic level... a Midwich Cuckoo of performative ennui. The other had decided it was amusing to engage everyone at the table, against their will, in amusing religious dispute - though a more Godless little fuck, I couldn’t imagine.

The mother Touretted her phone book. Barking out the names of influential people she knew, with about as much intervening and contextualising narrative as a straight-to-VHS porn film. The father paid.

But their main conversation, for the interminable 90 minutes before I hid in the bathroom and tunnelled out with a dessert spoon, was how Venice had been ruined by Foreigners.

I wanted to stand up in the room and apologise for my entire country.

The cocktail lives on. But every time it reminds me of them. Their awfulness and the calm, restrained elegance of the Italians.

I must go back to Venice. Cringe in a corner. Stay very, very quiet.

“Pie & Mash” has both fuelled and delighted working class Londoners for centuries. The pie is made with minced beef in gravy, with a simple crust and it’s served with mashed potato. The original ‘likker’ with which the pies were served, a white gravy packed with parsley, would have been made with the liquid used to cook eels. It would be hard to find something cheaper to produce, or easier to serve and eat. It’s filling, hot and even when made at cynical commercial volumes, hard to really dislike.

Most of the surviving businesses are of the original format ‘Eels, pie and mash’. These were purpose built, Victorian, tiled emporia with many of the design detail of the grandest pubs, but also, in layout and function, much more akin to the classic US diner.

But Maureen’s doesn’t quite fit that pattern. It’s in the shopping ‘precinct’ of Chrisp St, a large concentration of social housing, built post-war over streets either flattened by bombing or levelled by ‘slum clearance’. The café, like the pubs, the shops and the library and even a clocktower were built into the development as social amenities.

It’s a shopfront. I’m trying to find even a single adjective to take that forward and failing. Chrisp St was designed by Frederick Gibberd and re-built in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, it is resolutely and completely unremarkable, perhaps as you could expect from something designed on careful budgets, for total functionality, at a time when we were quietly good at such things.

Given the committed socialism behind the design it’s impossible not to love it, but the same spirit means that ‘design’ is invisible. The designer’s work is not intended to show, just to function beautifully. It defies the definition of any aesthetic.

There’s a name on the front but nothing you could call ‘branding’. No ‘retro’ or ‘vintage’ cues. No concession to heritage. Just the most direct, computer-screen typeface, blown up big to fit the space. It’s like a stall holder shouting his wares, not advertising but announcing, as loud as is decent.

There are two small black and white pictures on the wall that might hint at an older family connection to catering, but that is as far as historical reference goes. London’s East End culture is famously forged of Victorian or wartime nostalgia but Maureens doesn’t seem fussed with any of that old toot.

The business is 61 years old and was set up to serve its community as the old style pie and mash shops would have done. The floor is a clean, grey resin ’system’ you’d see in a hospital or factory. The walls are tiled, but with contemporary 300mm square ceramics. Like the clean back room of a modern butchers. The chairs/tables are disconcertingly welded together as single units. Comfortable, easy to clean. The light comes from squares of LED in the modern suspended ceiling. A single orange juice dispenser, towering over the counter is the main splash colour, hi-vis in a functional monochrome palate.

The food is superb. The crust is thin and crisp. They take in large deliveries of beef every day, grind their own mince and cook the filling from scratch. The pies are cooked daily in big commercial ovens but they’re ‘hot-held’, in glass-fronted tanks before serving. It’s this step that reinforces the unique flavour and texture of the pie. Spot-on in flavour, and seasoning.

The mash is not laden with butter, but clean and tasting of purely of potato. There are no lumps. The likker is a smooth, chef-level Bechamel based on a great stock. There’s no eel involved these days, and it’s almost fully green with great handfuls of chopped parsley… not the curly stuff they’d have used back in the day but the flat-leaf stuff.

This is not a reflection of Mediterranean culinary aspiration, but the sort of parsley you get in big bunches, in a market, in a multi-cultural area in a big modern city. Historically we’d have used the native, curly variety but today, curly parsley is harder to find, a middle-class affectation, used with nostalgic irony.

What’s really noticeable at Maureens is that there’s no pointless fixation on tradition. Yes, the mash is still scraped onto your plate with another plate. Granted, you are only permitted a spoon, never a knife and fork, but otherwise, modern techniques and ingredients have been used where contemporary tastes require it and the result is humblingly brilliant. In a re-purposed bottle that once held spiced rum, there’s malt vinegar, but it’s packed with macerating Kashmiri chillies.

They also serve an astonishingly good salt beef beigel, an unrelated East End culinary tradition, that seems just as popular with the crowd of locals. There are two huge guys from a local boxing gym discussing West Ham, an East Asian man, from his hat, a tech bro from a local startup, who orders three pies in succession. A bloke in hi-vis walks in and reels off 13 detailed individual orders that are assembled in seconds, packed in flat boxes and driven back to the site where they’re throwing up another unnecessary office block.

I’m sitting in one corner while two Korean food tourists have just walked in with a local guide. The crowd isn’t anything as intentional as ‘diverse’, it’s just an assembly of people drawn by a good meal. Nothing, no part of the food, the place or the people is knowing or ironic. To describe it as ‘authentic’ is to be disrespectfully arch.

What’s really remarkable is how the food follows the ethos behind the environment. Intense functionality, honourable diligence in design, construction and materials. Proud, ego-less cooking amidst proud, ego-less design.

What do we even call it when something goes from pre-ironic to post-ironic with nothing in between? I don’t know. I don’t have the words yet. But until then “Maureen’s Pie & Mash” will have to do

Pulp Fiction (1996) and one of the most recognisable moments in modern cinema.

But I don’t notice Tim Roth’s fidgety, rage-fuelled malevolence, or the deranged glint in Amanda Plummer’s eyes. The spitting, hissing profanity prefiguring the hair-trigger psychopathy that will give the final scene all its tension.

No. I’m interested in the way they use the furniture.

She pulls a grotesquely overpowered hand-cannon out of her bag and hops up onto the seats. She creates a clear field of fire, and establishes dominance by scaring the living shit out of the customers. Well, all but two of them. And I’m lost in my admiration for Tarantino. Because you can’t do that sort of thing on a Thonet bentwood brasserie chair or one of those mid-century plywood school jobs they have in Hackney coffeeshops.

This, for me, is the high point of the Furniture Directing in film. What we might call The Booth Shot.

I’m fond of Jack Nicholson’s booth-work in Five Easy Pieces. (Denny’s. I5. Nr Eugene Oregon). The way he occupies it. A temporary home for the drifter. And he owns the space with a shit-eating grin, expansive manspreading and weapons-grade cockiness. The arm along the back of the bench, taking up the space of two and not giving a rat’s ass. He’s not taking petty restrictions from The Man… well the waitress anyway. Yep, that’s the kind boss level booth acting you couldn’t pull off in a tea shop.

Christ!, come to think of it, possibly the only improvement they could have made to Withnail and I would have been to have booths in the Penrith Tea Rooms (actually in Milton Keynes and now a chemist). Richard E. Grant sprawled across the banquette like a Gin-slain Chatterton. God what a magnificent bastard! Bruce Robinson was asleep at the wheel for that one.

Diner (1982), should have had the Booth on the cast list between Bacon and Barkin, and Daly, Guttenberg, Reiser, Rourke and Stern. So key it was to the idea of the space enclosing and defining a group. Barry Levinson used the booth to trap his cast of young people, like specimens in a collection and to play out the brilliant banality of their conversations and relationships

I’ve got a soft spot, at least for the visuals of Paris, Texas (1984) Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockton, backlit by the headlights of a Ford truck outside the window, but surely the ultimate ’Two-scenery-chewers-face-off-in-a-booth’ Oscar has to go to Michael Mann’s Heat (1995)

Directors and actors love booths as the perfect setup for for close up ‘Face acting’

Two over-shoulder cameras. Intimate work between talented protagonists where the camera and director are literally outside, excluded by the physical enclosure. They lean in. Close. Face-to-face. And Christ… they act. With two old pros like De Niro and Pacino the chemistry is insane. They don’t need anyone else. In fact De Niro insisted that the booth scene in Heat was completely improvised.

It’s the same sense of enclosure and intense intimacy that makes customers love booths. The perfect setting for a date. Business people love them for their discretion.

Though the booth powerefully signifies ‘America’ they long predate that. They were popular in the coffeeshops and chophouses of Georgian London where their discretion was valued for legal discussions, political plotting or commercial skullduggery.

We all love booths. But modern restaurant designers hate them. They are too difficult to clean. Too hard for staff to lean into, but above all, booths guarantee empty seats. Once you’ve sat Pumpkin and Honey Bunny in that big booth in the window, you’ve denied yourself a more lucrative table for six until they decide what on earth they’re chatting about over there. Customers love booths more than any other restaurant setup, but restaurants simply can’t afford them anymore.

Which is why the Park restaurant, led by Master Restaurateur Jeremy King - where, in fact, I’m writing this - is so interesting. A few booths for large groups, or favoured VIPs and then a room divided by low walls and banquettes - the padded benches in a booth - each facing out over a two-top and a regular chair. A kind of aura of boothery, but flexibility of form. Somehow they’ve had the confidence to let a few seats go empty in every sitting. It telegraphs ease, comfort, going the extra mile to make guests happy

I like it. It feels comfortable, exclusive. I feel strangely empowered and, yeah. I reckon this banquette could definitely take my weight….

“EVERYBODY BE COOL! THIS IS A ROBBERY”

A couple of days ago I did something I try never to do. I got a bit “cross in the comments”.

When I was first writing, I did a lot of work for the early Guardian Online. It was one of those deals I seem to have had dropped in my lap an embarrassing number of times. The pay was shite, but you could get away with writing almost anything. The editors who commissioned me and made my stuff look great were, much like me, scrabbling to find rules in a new field… but they loved food and they loved writing.

The Guardian commenters were brutal. As one editor explained it… ‘They all got decent degrees in reasonable Universities in the subject you write about. They love their ‘sections’ and they all think they could do a better job than you. Some of them are right’.

I don’t mind admitting that sometimes it got pretty soul-sapping.

When I moved to the FT the comments dropped away to just a few. All charming, friendly, supportive… the digital equivalent of fountain pen, usually saying ‘thanks for an entertaining piece’. I took this up with my previous editor who explained, of course they were like that. FT readers all had jobs doing something entirely different, they didn’t want your job, they didn’t envy your slot, they just liked it when you entertained them. He was right.

But as I watched colleagues and online friends descending into lifelong emnities over trivial slights, I just swore I’d never rise to the bait. I’d never slap anyone down, take umbrage or score points BTL. Sometimes that meant not reading the comments, but usually I managed to stick to it.

I have a pleasantly quiet life.

Last week, I did something for an American podcast in support of ‘Steak’ and I started getting people popping into my feed.

Most of my audience has grown organically. People bother to follow me because they’ve liked something I’ve done… it’s kind of self-selecting for pleasantness. But when you do something that’s ‘broadcast’ to a much larger audience that has no context for you… you catch flak. A remarkable number of one-line comments basically saying ‘That thing you said - It’s fucking shit’. No discussion, no rationale. Knee-jerk, frat boy aggression.

But I didn’t respond. I didn’t snap-back… There’s no point. But I felt kind of edgy.

And then I ‘grammed something innocuous about drinking a Martini in Harry’s Bar in Venice and a few people commented about Venice being ‘ruined’ and Harry’s being a Tourist Trap and I sort of couldn’t help myself. I feel lousy about it, but I sounded off.

But this wasn’t the first time I’d gone off on this attack line. Here’s something I’d written a few years ago, now buried somewhere in the FT archives, and with a certain amount of Esprit d’escalier, I realised that it said what I’d felt so strongly about, just more elegantly and at length…..

Whenever I travel abroad for work or pleasure, I do some advance research. I might find a place worth reviewing, maybe even somewhere to take the family for a decent meal, but I invariably run into a peculiarity of foodie behaviour. The weird culinary Catch 22 you might call the Tourist Trap Trap.

I think my entire adolescence centred on the ambition of sitting outside Caffé Florian, sipping an espresso with Helena Bonham-Carter. It formed me. What I read, how I dressed, the tastes food and drink I developed, an obsession with art history… and yet, when the chance came… when I told people I was going… it was like I’d suggested walking into a free-fire zone with a target on my back “Are you mad? You’ll be ripped off there, like some kind of tourist”. Then they’d suggest somewhere else… which, when I mentioned it to the next opinionated foodie, would be shot down as a hopeless, fraudulent clip joint and so on, and on until finally it became apparent that, rather than go to Venice at all, I should stay at home and feed £50 notes into a shredder.

A logical human might think it would be fun to go and do the things that are unique to Venice. The things that we can’t do at home. Y’know, gorgeous architecture, museums, gondolas, alfresco eating in sunny squares, local food and great wine. But the minute you get specific, the advice turns toxic. I mean, it’s good to have the tipoff if it’s a ripoff, but is there’s also a kind of engrained dread of actually ‘being a tourist’

It’s illogical. Florian is all about being a tourist. Venice is only there because of tourism. And dammit, I am a tourist. I don’t go to Venice to replicate the experience of a middle-aged Venetian restaurant goer who’s lived there all his life; I am openly and proudly an eager visitor.

We really, really need to stop doing this to ourselves. Let me tell you why.

A friend suggested I try La Cambuse du Saunier in Gruissan, when I was on holiday in Coulliore. “It’s a bit of a drive, she said, maybe a bit touristy, but they filmed Betty Blue near there and the food is really good.”

I was travelling with Tris, my best mate, and longest-serving culinary wing-man. He was ideal for the gig. He speaks French beautifully. He’s an editor, and cineaste which makes him a congenial companion on long car journeys and he can pack away more seafood in half an hour than a Russian trawler.

“Jesus. This is surreal.”

And it was. As we walked past the screaming warnings of a tourist attraction - the carpark, the giftshop, the weird little scooter-hire stand - and in between the sun-bleached shacks, the sky opened up before us. Cloudless, deep lapis lazuli, all the way down to the razor-line of the horizon and then to the endless bubblegum pink of the water. Yep. Salt flats as far as the eye could see, the colour of of a Barbie tricycle. Entirely other-wordly, and on an impossible scale. The very slightly raised banks holding the brine in form an imperceptible false horizon and fool the eye that they represent infinity. We just stared. Immobilised by weird beauty.

We were already late. They wanted to close the kitchen, so we ordered everything at once. Bang, half a dozen oysters, slurped like they were trying to escape. Bang, a big crab, cloven down the centre line so we could get half each and take it like hyenas cleaning out a giraffe.

We hadn’t said a thing since the food arrived. The sun was dappling through the rush matting on to our heads. There was sand and salt underfoot and when we finally paused, we just grinned, big easy happy grins, wiped fish out our beards and jerked the cork out of the wine.

“That was incredible.”

“I know. And I still can’t stop staring at the horizon.”

It was a white. Cold, crisp, a bit fruity… am I imagining a bit salty? Glorious local stuff called ‘La Clape’. Remind me to get a case. Then the mains came. Tris sat and laughed at his for a whole minute.

“It’s about 40 degrees out there and I’m eating cuttlefish cassoulet. And it’s stupendous.”

The beans were soft, smooth with cubes of cephalopod lurking beneath the surface in Lovecraftian threat. In case you missed the point, there was a spare, little cuttlefish, grilled on the side. We found a sausage buried at the bottom. God knows how it got there. Maybe it was some kind of test.

I love salt cod. I love the way the salt tightens the flesh and enhances the flavour. I love the way they do in this part of the world, Catalan-style, in a slow-cooked with tomatoes, onions, capsicums and espelette pepper. But since La Cambuse, I love it best ladled over a mound of chips. Yep. Olive oil fried potatoes, a healthy mound of them, buried under a kind of hot stew, hiding a piece of fish the size of a car battery.

“You know what? The French do ‘Cod and Chips’ better than we do”.

I’m still getting over La Cambuse du Saunier, but not just the company, the food, the wine and the bonkers view. No, what’s waking me up in the small hours right now, startled and shaking, is the realisation that, if I’d listened to most of the people I usually consult, I’d never have gone near the place. I’d have avoided the queues, the autoroute, the carpark and the gift shop and gone to some tight-arsed winery.

I wouldn’t have disgraced myself by being a tourist and I’d have missed one of the most extraordinary, joyous and memorable meals of my life.

What I never mentioned was that, as Tris and I ate that fantastic food, looking at that ludicrous view, we both knew he was dying. Prostate cancer. The same thing that had killed Dad just a few years earlier. It wasn’t germane to the piece and it would have been revoltingly mawkish to mention it. But looking back, I realise this was one of the events in my life that changed my perspective. I resolved that it’s all too nasty, brutish and short to worry about the crap. To worry about somewhere being a ‘tourist trap’. To not go somewhere because of what people might think. To bitch about it to others. Or even belittle them for enjoying it. It’s just so nasty. When what really matters is this…

…and this…

… and definitely this