Zabaglione "Pollo Bar"

Now with ‘VIDEO’ -The Wonder of the Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pasta Speciality

English and Continental Dishes”

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

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

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

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

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

It only bloody works!

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

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