Spectator Life

We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up. Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The food writer Elizabeth David recounted a Scottish schoolmaster’s wife who recoiled in horror at her freshly gathered chanterelles. A fisherman did the same on spotting her with a crab, both reacting with the same appalled cry: ‘You’re never going to eat those dirty things?’ Few in Britain praise dishes of pig’s ears or chicken knees, but over the past 30 years our culinary character has improved.

How’s this for a bargain? A Pizza Express margherita for only 33p, if you dine in and order between 5 and 6 p.m. tomorrow, to celebrate 60 years of the chain. ‘In 1965 we brought proper pizza to the UK, and what better way to mark those 60 years than with 60 minutes of our original pizzas at their original prices,’ reads the promotion. I love Pizza Express. I don’t often go there, but I’ve never had a bad time in the place. I almost always choose the American, which has been on the menu since it opened, and the service and food is always consistent. I have no expectation beyond my pizza being fresh out of the oven, and everybody being served at the same time, however big the table. That’s not, by any means, to say the menu is perfect.

This morning, as usual, I was woken up by the large ball of golden fluff that is my dog, Honey. At a time she considers decent, she bounds on to my bed, tail wagging furiously, to tell me it’s time for her breakfast. Honey still has the puppyish bounce she has always had – even though, at the age of almost 12, she is gently settling into canine old age. And I’d go so far as to say that what I give her to eat has a lot to do with her youthfulness. Eye-roll as much as you like, but I believe one of the key reasons Honey is thriving is because she hasn’t eaten meat for more than six years. Yes, my dog is vegan. Not that she realises that, of course: as far as she’s concerned, she still gets the same sausages, dog chews and choice of dry and wet foods as she’s always had.

The regular’s stage is the fetid pub carpet, the creaky floorboards, the cramped smoking area where they can sneak a shot between rounds. Their audience is the jaded, spotty bartender, the unsuspecting family looking for a quiet Sunday lunch, and any poor soul too cowardly or inebriated to walk away. Regulars are the backbone of the British pub trade, but their time has come to an end. Gen Z has rung the bell for last orders. A recent survey found that 43 per cent of 18-to-34-year-olds have given up booze altogether. Thirty-six per cent of that same demographic are using non-alcoholic substitutes to curtail their drinking, and ‘bingeing’ – drinking more than four pints in one sitting – appears to be on the decline.

Following the closure of Hungarian restaurant the Gay Hussar in 2018 – that Soho institution and virtual museum of Labour party history – it seems Londoners are about to lose another Central European landmark. The Polish restaurant Daquise has finally had time served on it by Transport for London, who wish to redevelop the buildings round South Kensington station, where Daquise has been serving its loyal customers for nearly 80 years. Formerly a wartime canteen for Polish officers, Daquise opened as a restaurant in 1947. Even its name is rather romantic – a portmanteau word put together by the restaurant’s uxorious founder (he was Dakowski, his wife Louise, therefore Daquise).

Walking into this crowded and clattering restaurant for the first time in more than 30 years, two things strike me almost immediately: 1) it seems to be largely unchanged and 2) the prices have scarcely risen. I can’t claim to have tried every wine list in Soho, but I can tell you with certainty that this is the first time in a very long time that I have seen a glass of wine for under £5 in the West End. But, incredibly, here it starts at £4.50 – with cocktails from £8.The restaurant is Pollo, as it’s still popularly known, or La Porchetta Pollo Bar as the sign outside calls it. It crams 100 covers on to two floors at the eastern end of Old Compton Street, just behind the Cambridge Theatre, in Soho.

Is there any more evil influence on the world than Gail’s the bakery? It has thrown thousands of poor people out of their homes by gentrifying their neighbourhoods; it has destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of hard-working owners of independent coffee shops by drawing away business; it has scorned the poor by throwing away its old sandwiches rather than give them to the homeless; and it allegedly supplied a box of pastries to the White House for tea last Friday, which so poisoned the atmosphere between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump that it could quite possibly lead to world war three. OK, I made the last one up. But as for the others, Gail’s stands accused of them all.

The Cherry Tree on Southgate Green began life as a coaching inn on one of the historic routes from London to York and beyond. It has been trading since 1695, when what are now the north London suburbs were open fields. But the other evening, the pub – my local – rang last orders for the final time. The brewery that owns it is having it refurbished as a brasserie, its pub status coming to an end after 330 years. I went on its final evening for the closing-down party. It was like being in an episode of EastEnders, in the sense that it was a pub full of faces you dimly recognised from events long past, drinking and being jolly, like the Queen Vic at Christmas. Becoming a brasserie seems an unlikely route to financial redemption for the Cherry Tree, though.

In a world of bewildering uncertainty and breakneck change, where a pack of butter now costs about the same as a small family saloon in the 1950s, there is at last some good news to cheer the soul. It concerns the lobster, that culinarily appealing crustacean which has sustained us nutritionally since the Stone Age – albeit in recent times mainly for the wealthier sort. Suddenly, the lobster has got the wind in its sails. It’s thanks in no small part to Britain’s rather quixotic, headlong dash to become, seemingly, the only net-zero country in the world, and the enormous wind turbines that have been springing up off our shores to help this take place. Because – would you believe it?

My local gastropub, which is very popular, serves a hot, freshly made and runny-yolked scotch egg. It's billed as a ‘Cackleberry Farm Scotch Egg with Maldonado Salt’ because part of hospitality is marketing. If you just chalk up ‘scotch egg’ on a board, it doesn’t entice the appetite in quite the same way. But call it ‘œuf écossais enrobés de chair à saucisse’ and serve it on a cracked slate tile – you’ve got yourself a stampede. A couple who live in the village visited the pub and ordered two of them. Shortly after being served, the husband of the couple returned the plates to the bar and asked the staff to reheat their partially eaten scotch eggs. The landlord explained that he could not reheat them once they had been partially eaten.

It’s somewhat risky to make the case for lard for a publication whose cookery columnist is the author of a book on butter. But so be it. Because lard has generally been at best overlooked and at worst openly maligned, and that is madness. The cost of cooking oils has rocketed in the past couple of years – sunflower oil has trebled in price, olive oil doubled. Butter is much dearer too. Yet inexplicably no one has suggested lard might step in to save the day. The cheapest pack of butter at Tesco will currently cost you £1.99. A block of lard is 50p. It has long been a slight object of ridicule. A ‘tub of lard’ is somehow crueller an insult than the Shakespearean ‘fat as butter’.

When a press release for solar-powered sex toys popped into my inbox on 3 January, it dawned on me it could only mean one thing: we were already in the build-up to Valentine’s Day. A few days later, it was followed by the new aphrodisiac version of the Knorr stock cube, Knorrplay, and a set of champagne glasses adorned with red hearts. A couple of years ago I found myself overnight in Newcastle, with a male colleague. We were working hard on a harrowing story and decided a nice meal out would cheer us up. Not a chance in hell: neither of us had realised that the dreaded Valentine’s Day was upon us. Every single restaurant, from low-rent kebab joints right up to Michelin-starred gaffs, was full to the rafters with courting couples.