You Can't Go Back

Ibai, Smithfield

Absurd!

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.