Spectator Life

As far as chefs and food writers go, Yotam Ottolenghi has been pretty influential on my life – a life that revolves quite heavily around food. Choosing it, thinking about it, pathologising it, eating it and sometimes even cooking it. I was one of those who was delighted when supermarkets started stocking pomegranate molasses, rose harissa and Middle Eastern spices like sumac and za’atar, all courtesy of the seismic influence of the Jerusalem-born Ottolenghi and his Palestinian partner in crime, Sami Tamimi. The Ottolenghi deli is a cliché of noughties London food trends I had, like everyone else in 2010s centrist middle-class Britain, got my hands on his recipe books Jerusalem (2012) and Plenty (2011).

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.

I tend to steer clear of large group meals but the last time I went there was a very awkward moment. When the bill arrived, I saw two individuals tapping away on a calculator app before announcing the exact amount of money they were prepared to put on the table. ‘I didn’t have a starter,’ chimed one. ‘I only had one cocktail,’ said the other tightwad. When the bill came it was divided equally – except that the couple counted themselves as one person We were at an inexpensive Mexican restaurant, with two cocktails for the price of one, yet this pair insisted on working out to the last penny what they had each consumed.

With Britain so sluggish, Keir Starmer and the Labour party should want to reenergise the country. Indeed, they are preoccupied with energy, and not just the dire state of the British electrical grid but energy drinks. Labour is set to propose a ban on the sale of energy drinks to under-16s. Most British supermarkets have already introduced voluntary bans but this would make them comprehensive and legally binding. Our governing class doubtless sees energy drinks as being rather coarse compared to coffee There’s an irony here. Labour wants to extend the right to vote to 16-year-olds.

At 5 a.m. one morning in December, I found myself cycling as fast as I could to the bakery I worked at in Clapham, trying to get keep the blood pumping. My fingers felt like frozen gherkins, which made using the brakes difficult. Shivering and exhausted, I asked myself: what am I doing? At work, my hands thawed over a cup of tea, and I set about mixing dough, laminating croissants, and doing all the other things bakers do. After a year in the bakery, my mornings passed on autopilot. But that day, I couldn’t stop thinking about Naples. My girlfriend is from the city and we’ve been back to visit her family. That chilly English morning, all I could think about was the sweet tomatoes, coffee granita, and having a tan.

I’ve always loved Porto and need little excuse to visit. Not uncoincidentally, I’ve always loved port and need little excuse to drink it and so, invited to stay in this fine city and road-test its latest attraction, the ambitiously-monikered World of Wine, who was I to resist? There’s been a mixed reception to Wow locally. One person told me that it was garish and vulgar Porto is really two cities, Porto itself and Vila Nova de Gaia, separated by the mighty Douro River, along the banks of which lie the precipitous vineyards responsible for the finest of all fortified wines and some increasingly tasty red and white wines too. I was billeted in the swanky Yeatman Hotel.