Spectator Life

Last year, a large group of young people gathered outside the Trevi Fountain, one of Rome’s most popular attractions, to protest against ‘food crimes’ committed by tourists in Italy. Armed with signs reading ‘No more cream in carbonara’, ‘No more cappuccino with pasta’, and ‘Putting chicken in pasta is a crime in Italy’, they drew the attention of a large crowd of tourists. The protest was sparked by complaints from a number of the city’s restaurant owners about non-Italians (Americans in particular) asking for unorthodox ingredients to be added to the classics.

A group of four stagger out of a pub in Britain at around 11.20 on a Thursday night. The search begins for somewhere to have one more drink without a £20 entry fee. Men on doors say no by shaking their heads. Pubs show their appetite for more visitors by turning their lights up a little brighter than an exploding sun. There are bars open, but the mark-up on a glass of white seems out of sync with the occasion and the bank balance. Half an hour’s increasingly muted search ends halfway across the other side of town. Nothing is open. Google maps is opened. Everyone mutters goodbye. If we were given late-night pubs, it would be carnage for two weeks, and then we would shun them Some of us younger Brits have become agitated at how early everything shuts.

London has seen a string of celebrity restaurants, mostly with disappointing results. David Beckham and Guy Ritchie opened a pub in 2018 – the Walmer Castle – but it didn’t last. They handed it on in 2022 and the pub has changed hands three times since its opening. Ed Sheeran set up his grastropub, ‘Bertie Blossoms’ just two months before the pandemic, and while it is still open, Sheeran has admitted that it's not gone smoothly. He’s learned that unless you have a large chain, making money off a restaurant is very difficult. Lewis Hamilton and Leonardo DiCaprio have tried the chain business model, opening eight locations of their plant-based ‘Neat Burger’ in London and one each in Dubai, New York and Milan – but it doesn’t look like its working wither.

London’s food scene is a Petri dish of Michelin-starred bistros, gastropubs, and overpriced tourist traps where waiters crouch by the table and call you ‘bud’. The days of staying at home, watching Raffles, and eating tinned fruit with evaporated milk are long gone. London’s new culinary culture is an expensive one. But one institution has remained true throughout this tsunami wave of progress: BYOB restaurants. Or so I thought. It’s not that they don’t want us to finish our drinks, it’s that they can’t afford for us to finish our drinks BYOB stands for ‘bring your own bottle’ or, if you’re boorish like me, ‘bring your own booze’. I think the ‘bottle’ gives it an undeserved prestige.

‘We English prefer brown eggs,’ wrote J. B. Priestley in the 1970s, ‘they seem to us to have a more reliable look of rusticity.’ The mottled chestnut shell of a Burford Brown is surely more genuine than the clinical, white-shelled variety favoured by the American market. It’s a charming point, but there’s really no relationship between shell colour and the egg itself. Eggs from the Chilean Araucana hen are a beautiful blue, and if you were to crossbreed an Araucana with a brown egg hen, the pigments mix and you get green eggs. The Chinese Cochin dapples her eggs with delicate yellow spots. The colour of yolks is enhanced in factories by adding dried marigold leaves to the chicken feed Yolks are deceiving too.

I love certain sour flavours, such as the sprinkle of lemon on a piece of oily fish, or fatty meat. It is perfect with food that is naturally sweet, such as brown shrimp, scallops, or young, fresh peas. But spare me the heavy hand with the acid, which seems to be getting more and more frequent when it comes to pre-seasoned food in restaurants. Lemon juice should be a background note, helping the main flavours to stand out. It should not make you wince as though you are chewing a live wasp. We should resist drowning our food in lemon juice in the way that we would ketchup or salt I am just back from lunch at a lovely little Cypriot joint where every single thing is made from scratch.

Picture the scene; you’re Kate Middleton and it’s Saturday lunchtime. You’re out enjoying suburban Windsor. The Audi is safely stowed – along with hundreds of other cars mostly produced in Germany, the Czech Republic or the West Midlands – in a nearby car park the size of the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman and about as eco-friendly. The farm shop is a kind of Peppa Pig World for adults There’s a faux 1950s Citroen van-lookalike with corrugated panels from which a pair of stressed teens in brown aprons are selling overpriced macchiatos, almond lattes and stone-cold hot chocolates, to a lengthening queue of gilet-wearing mums and dads. Most of them are too busy pretending not to watch their children tormenting each other to notice they are being royally ripped off.

Chicago residents bristle when you ask them whether they eat deep-dish pizza. ‘Yeah’, they sigh, ‘we might occasionally when someone visiting wants to try it out’. Sigh. ‘We have great thin crust though’. But lots of places have good thin crust. I came to Chicago to try the deep dish. But deep-dish pizza is stupid. It’s not a pizza, more a dense pie: the sauce sits at the top, and the filling beneath is quicksandy cheese. Sausage meat, jalapeños, chorizo, bacon, red onions and mushrooms are thrown into it and expected to learn how to swim. I got a deep dish on my last day in Chicago and found it wasn’t good. Not for any explicable reason – something like this can’t taste bad — but from my own somewhat pompous sense that God must be against it.

In 1909, London’s first Chinese restaurant was opened by Mr Chang Choy off Piccadilly Circus. Named simply ‘The Chinese Restaurant’ – so exotic! – Choy specialised in what was described as ‘imperial banquet’ style cuisine which required at least half a day’s notice to prepare. Customers were then required to pay a hefty deposit in advance to cover the purchase of ingredients for such imperial delights as ‘sturgeon bones’, ‘fish maws’, ‘gelatine’, ‘dried cabbage stalk peel’ and ‘chrysanthemum shoots’. A 1937 edition of Where to Dine in London declared that, ‘Englishmen who have spent their lives in the East will appreciate the traditional menu’. Hmm, I wonder.

It is said that asparagus was Emperor Augustus’s favourite food. And France is, despite its Gallic spasms, a fundamentally Roman civilisation. Ask nine out of ten Frenchmen if they will have asparagus on their Easter table and they will say ‘mais oui’. The crunchy, slightly bitter stalk has enthralled humans for millennia due to its strange flavour and supposed medicinal properties. Those proto-French Romans were huge fans of the plant. You may even learn an asparagus recipe or two from studying their methods. The French smother their asparagus spears in hollandaise or béarnaise sauce Most of the information on Roman cuisine comes from visual depictions found in frescoes and mosaics that depict what went on during banquets at the time.

Sick of sriracha? Try Sambal Oelek, an Indonesian chilli sauce that’s easy to make in minutes, by blending red chillies, salt and either vinegar or lime juice together. Or buy a jar ready-made. If I were to be consigned to a desert island and could take only one spicy condiment it would be molho apimentado from Brazil Will 2024 be the year of hot sauce? The Guinness Book of Records recently certified the world’s hottest chilli, Pepper X. In case you’re wondering, hot peppers are rated for heat on the Scoville Scale, created by American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in 1912. It measures the amount of capsaicin (the chemical compound that causes spicy heat) in a pepper and assigns it an SHU (Scoville Heat Unit) rating.

One of the perks – a perilous one – of visiting the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s was the cheapness of the vodka. I was used to paying London prices for it but in Estonia (where I lived for two years) you could find bunker-bars where they’d serve you a generous tumbler – enough to blitz you for an evening – for about 40 pence. Most people wanted nothing more from alcohol than that it should anaesthetise them and help them forget, and vodka was ideal for this. Unlike whisky or brandy, you couldn’t crow over its ‘vanilla overtones’, its ‘hints of butterscotch’ or its ‘aged in the wood’ qualities. It simply got you drunk, no more, no less. And the bars served it that way: doled out, clinic style, in a measuring beaker.

I remember going to Westfield Shepherd’s Bush to visit my first food hall, still a relatively new concept for British diners. They’re big rooms filled with shared seating and different kitchen stalls, serving everything from Thai to burgers, wontons to bratwurst. You can have a burrito and your friend can have a pizza. Oh, how I loved it. I was instantly gratified, gloriously free from the convention of menus, courses or ‘cuisines’. I was excited. These places were born in a boardroom to the sound of marketing ‘insights’ I was also a teenager. And that’s the problem: food halls are childish places. Surely the more choice there is, the better? Nope, it’s not true.