Spectator Life

I love salad but there need to be rules. Salad should never be squashed in with hot food (e.g., in burgers); must never be dressed with anything from a bottle; and salad must never be served buffet style. Oh, and if it’s warm it’s quite simply not salad. For this reason, today I am speaking out against the horror story that is the salad bar. Landing after a very long flight from London to Melbourne, I was looking forward to dinner with my hosts who promised me ‘a real treat at a gorgeous restaurant you will love’. But their email also informed me that we would be going to a vegan, raw food place, heavy on the avocados, and with a no onion or garlic section for those adhering to the plant-based Jain diet that excludes roots and underground vegetables.

The other week I popped into my big Morrisons after the school drop-off. It was a biggish shop, including things like socks, olive oil and washing powder, hence going to a proper supermarket rather than just whizzing into my local Tesco Express. Not being able to find the correct type of fruit or vegetable on the touch screen scores highly in the irritation stakes But lo and behold, when I came to check out my shopping, not a single manned till was open. ‘There’s nobody on them until 10 a.m. love,’ explained the apologetic cashier who inevitably had to help me with an unexpected item in the bagging area (a packet of toothbrush heads that were too light to register on the pathetic shelf they give you at a self-service till).

Visiting San Sebastián last month, I was reminded of the joys and hazards of grazing. The speciality in this chic city, and throughout Spain’s northern Basque region, are pintxos – miniature open sandwiches topped with everything from chorizo and padrón peppers to anchovies and baby eels. Pintxoing, as I’ll call it, becomes almost like a game in San Sebastián’s labyrinthine Old Town, in which the regional delicacies are colourfully displayed in bar-top glass cabinets. The goal is to eat enough pintxos to keep hunger at bay, but not so many that you don’t have room for one more. You’re never starving, but the flipside is that you’re never entirely satisfied, either.

I used to think that chefs were egotistical maniacs. Some of them are. But the vast majority of chefs are hardworking individuals coping with enough stress to send a beta-blocker into cardiac arrest. I spent more years than I care to admit moonlighting as a bartender and waiter. I worked with dozens of chefs. Some were brilliant, some had trouble frying an egg. Others spent more time with cocaine than flour. One tried to drunkenly glass me in the face with a bottle of Moretti, another became a very good friend.  I learnt a lot from chefs: how to shuck an oyster, how to tastefully plate a dish, how to chain-smoke a pack of Marlboro Reds without throwing up. I also learned that a chef is the pacemaker of any good establishment.

It’s 7.54 a.m. and we are waiting for the doors of the Intermarché St Remy de Provence to open. A vast sense of excitement is building within our group that spans the ages of nine months to 68 years. My mother wants espadrilles, my husband wants wine, my brother-in-law wants cheese, the children want toys, et moi? Just the experience, the delicious joy of the French supermarché. And possibly some soap.

When you live abroad for long periods of time, you get accustomed to certain foods which, returning home, you can’t find anywhere, and the sense of a habit unwillingly broken is acute. If the foreign country is Thailand or Italy, you stand a good chance of finding dishes approximate to those you’ve left behind in a local restaurant. But if your working life has been spent in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and you live well outside London, you must learn to make them for yourself or do without. In the warm hotel restaurant, after freshly brewed black coffee, I was given a glass of heated honey vodka The first foreign country I lived in was Estonia.

Can you imagine how great it must have felt to be a Pret a Manger executive in late 2019? There was a Pret restaurant. They’d just bought Eat and its 94 stores. Veggie Pret was taking over the south east. London mayoral candidate Rory Stewart said Pret was his favourite pub. There was a Twitter account called Pret L’Etranger where visits to Pret were written in the style of Albert Camus. They started selling lobster rolls. That starts with getting rid of 90 per cent of the rubbish sandwiches Pret bigwigs were Masters of the Universe. But then Covid, then lockdown, and disaster. Revenue in 2020 dropped by £299 million. Their survival plan was to beg: for £20 a month, you could get five drinks a day (it later went up to £30).

The moral absolutist in me believes that in every city, with its finite number of restaurants, there is such a thing as the best of all possible lunches. I don’t have to find it, but I have to get close. Mediocre doesn’t cut it. In fact, on holiday, the idea of wasting a meal on mere ‘mediocre’ fills me with crippling guilt over wasting not just money but time. What if I die before I see Paris again? I would be ashamed that I had wasted my precious mortality eating that Pret tuna niçoise salad. Laurie Lee described Spain as a place of ‘distinct appetites...

Recent research has revealed what many of us suspected: that fake meat is highly processed and contains junk such as exotic emulsifiers, stabilisers, flavour enhancers and artificial colourings, all of which are designed to make them feel, taste and look like the real thing. Often, they are loaded with salt, sugar and fat. Many Britons become vegan (or vegetarian) precisely because they want to cut down on this stuff, but end up with even higher blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Lots of my friends’ offspring are vegan for ‘save the planet’ reasons – but they subsist on chips, cola, and fake burgers, not even realising that avocado farming is killing off the rainforest. Facon (‘This isn’t Bacon!’ – no kidding!), chickin and cheeze substitutes are hellish.

Older Japanese women are boozing more than ever, according to a new survey conducted by Tokyo Metropolitan Government. The study found that while binge drinking by men decreased over the last ten years in all age groups, the percentage of women in their 40s, and especially those in their 50s, drinking dangerous amounts of alcohol, has shot up. For the latter cohort the figures were particularly alarming: 9 per cent a decade ago and 17 per cent now. Public displays of drunkenness are not especially frowned upon Why would this be? The most popular theory is that life for many middle-aged women has simply become much more stressful in recent years as a result of heavy-handed and perhaps ill thought through government efforts to get a more gender balanced workforce.