Spectator Life

The big London restaurant opening of the autumn has been The Devonshire in Denman Street, Soho, close to Piccadilly Circus. There was a run on bookings as soon as the reviews appeared. Giles Coren in the Times wrote: ‘What a place. What. A. Place.’ Jimi Famurewa's review in the Evening Standard appeared under the headline: ‘Nothing beats a good pub – and this is as good as it gets’. Because – as well as being an exciting new restaurant – The Devonshire is also very much a pub. What must foreign visitors make of all this confusing disconnection between pub name and location? There’s been a pub on the site since 1793.

We’ve all been there, dragged along to the office/company/feminist protest group/a cappella throat-singing-society Christmas meal out. The idea of sitting around a huge table eating bad food with a group of people who either bore you rigid or who you actively dislike doesn’t seem particularly appealing. Why will the food inevitably be terrible, wherever you go? Because ‘tis the season to be scamming – restaurants make a large share of their annual income around Christmas and New Year and the general idea is to part you from as much of your dosh as humanly possible while serving you food that would normally be rejected as staff gruel.

Self-pity and Deliveroo go hand in hand. You can’t have the latter without the former. It’s impossible to watch a rain-drenched driver fight with his moped’s side stand – while you sit torpidly in your pants by the window – without the heavy feeling of self-loathing. There’s something shameful about it, something pathetic. If Dante were alive now, he’d add another layer to hell: Deliveroo users. And I’m one of them. If using Deliveroo is a sin, call me Hester Prynne. I too have tasted the nectar. I too have dribbled over a box of tungsten nuggets and a semifluid dipping sauce. I’m not anti-technology. I’m anti-technology that makes us a worse version of ourselves We know it’s not a good idea.

It is a truth universally acknowledged – at least by anyone with a developed frontal lobe – that seasonal enjoyment and growing up are inversely proportional. As the stranglehold of middle age tightens, I am incapable of conjuring the Christmas excitement I felt as a child. And it seems to have been replaced with intense festive angst.  The mood is less holy and more fisticuffs, as it presents an excellent opportunity to ratchet up the festive stress Samuel Johnson was talking about second marriages when hatching his aphorism about hope over experience, rather than what Americans refer to as ‘readying the home’, yet every year I still try to summon those seasonal spirits of childhood.

Have you taken the pickle pill? Pickles and the liquid in which they often come are proliferating across western cuisine. They have been praised for their health qualities, with gut-pleasing, sodium-rich pickle juice becoming a post-workout favourite in Britain and America. It’s even being incorporated into cocktails and beer. ‘Putting a pickle in cheap beer makes it taste better’ claims one food website in what may or may not be a prank on its readership. If your friend is organised and generous, you may find a jar of pickled peppers or pickled mushrooms A fad? To some extent, I’m sure. But in Poland, where I live, the qualities of pickles will come as no surprise. They could hardly come into fashion in a country where they’ve never been out of style.

To my great disappointment, I was never (knowingly) fed qarta – a popular dish of boiled and pan-fried horse anus served without sauce or spices. I did, however, get to try the next best thing – kymyz, mares’ milk fermented in a goatskin. It was the second day of a horse trek in Kyrgyzstan and it had begun to hail. Not exactly golf ball-sized, but close enough to the golf ball sweets you bite into to find bubble gum. The horses coped, perhaps because getting pelted with hail is a fair trade for not being on a Kyrgyz menu. We stopped under a tree and our guide’s blank stares gave no indication of whether the weather was normal or not. The following two hailstorms suggested it was.

I’m in a car embarking on a road trip through one of the great foodie regions of the world, charged with the onerous task of scoffing and boozing my way through five days of epicurean heaven. But where am I? Trundling along the Rhone valley from Lyon to Provence? Barrelling down the autostrada to Bologna? No, I’m on the A458 just outside Shrewsbury. Because this is a tour of the Welsh Marches, England’s foodie frontier, from Shropshire through Herefordshire to Gloucestershire, where a food and drink revival over the last three decades has turned this lush, fertile, famously green corner of Britain into a gastro-destination as good as any in Europe. My first stop is the Haughmond, a hotel/gastropub with a cute attached bakery, in the village of Upton Magna.

I like the Art Deco apartment block where I live; the building is beautiful and the neighbours are nice. Just one thing; they keep having their old kitchens torn out and new ones installed – two of the three nearest flats to me have done this in the space of six months.  I don’t complain about the noise as I’ve been a very noisy neighbour in my time, but this architectural fetish has made me realise how out of step I am with the national psyche. For I would no sooner have a new kitchen installed than have a minaret erected atop of my building. My flat has its original tiny galley kitchen; like many of the swanky 1930s apartment buildings in Brighton & Hove, it once had a restaurant in the basement – Marine Gate along the seafront even had its own off-licence.

I always thought drinking cider was a bit lame. But then I did a Camino pilgrimage that took me through Spain’s northern Asturias region. I now think cider is cool.  Cider is a phenomenon in Asturias, where the art of imbibing sidra, as it is called, is elevated to a ceremonial form. We have the Trooping the Colour; they have sidra pouring.  When the barman pours the sidra bottle from above his head, the glass down at knee level, while looking dead ahead with the subsequent mini waterfall hitting the glass through dead reckoning: that’s not lame. The pourer even tilts the glass away from him, dramatically shrinking the ‘aperture’ available at the top of the glass.

If you work in politics, chances are you have drunk in the Westminster Arms. Located just off Parliament Square, every night it hosts the collection of hacks, wonks and mandarins that comprise the SW1 bubble. For 30 years, Gerry Dolan has run the pub with his mix of Irish humour and no-nonsense determination. When we meet, three days before his retirement, his roving eyes still flick up every time to scan each new patron that enters his beloved bar. ‘I have loved the Westminster Arms. It's been a great mistress’ he says. ‘My wife ran the wine bar downstairs, and she probably worked harder than I did. I was like a Redcoat, really.’ Dolan is one of a dying breed of lifelong landlords in the capital, tied to one establishment.

I did not plan to cook a loaf cake when I embarked on concocting a traditional honey cake recipe. The original plan was to explore the Russian honey cake, or medovik, which dates back to the 19th century, and has a rich history. It is the War and Peace of the cake world: thick and a real undertaking. A long, careful assembly process, with up to a dozen layers of thin sponge – flavoured with honey and baked ever so briefly – interleaved with honey-flavoured buttercream, followed by a long chill, and then covered in more buttercream and cake crumbs. It is what we cookery writers like to euphemistically call ‘a project bake’.

Balsamic vinegar, according to a recent poll, is now considered an essential store cupboard ingredient by a quarter of all Brits. I detest it. This dark, syrupy fermented grape juice is like Marmite – you love it or hate it. Partly because it is overused, and also the numerous versions produced, I find myself flinching when I see it on a kitchen or dining room table. The Italians still behave, at least on the culinary front, as though they are a series of different countries When I first started travelling to Italy in the 1980s, I was given invaluable lessons in food crime: one, never, ever, under any circumstances, order a cappuccino after 10 a.m.

From the outside, it appeared derelict – not an uncommon thing to find when visiting an unknown establishment based solely on a listing in an old copy of ‘The Good Pub Guide’. But a chap walking past with his labrador reassured us: ‘She usually opens at noon.’ When we returned an hour later it was immediately plain that the pub was still in use – you could hear music coming from inside. This turned out to be from a five-piece acoustic string band who were seated by the fire, playing ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’.