Spectator Life

In autumn when apples cascade off the trees and bedeck the orchard’s floor with fields of red and gold, thoughts naturally turn to an ancient survival instinct: foraging – or, as we tend to call it in my part of the world, scrumping. Yet although scrumping seems as English as Shakespeare, conker fights and Bonfire nights, it is quite a recent word borrowed from the Middle Dutch schrimpen, meaning shrivelled (or perhaps a derivation of the verb ‘to scrimp’). Crab apples are a bit small and dry, high in tannins but very good sliced and fried up with smoked bacon When sugar was scarce in medieval times, fruit was an obsession and the autumn harvest closely guarded. Not just apples either.

The Flower Pot in Aston, near Henley, was one of my favourite pubs in the country, a charming, eccentric time capsule cluttered with esoteric decoration: dozens of cases of stuffed fish and animals, angling paraphernalia and Edwardian art; there was even a resident parrot.  It was always rammed, with everyone from vicars to Hell’s Angels The pub opened in 1890, at almost exactly the same time as the publication of Three Men in a Boat, and in a certain light, after a few drinks, it could feel as though one was actually inhabiting the quirky, late-Victorian England described by Jerome K. Jerome.

One of my favourite restaurants of all time serves mediocre food, has a limited menu, and occasionally brings a dish containing none of the advertised ingredients.  Why do I love it so? Because the service and the ambience are both a delight. The warm greeting from the proprietor who always remembers his customers’ names; the attentive (but not fawning) waiter who immediately produces menus and water without being asked; and the sommelier who recommends a perfect aperitif before talking us through the wines in a matter-of-fact way that belies the usual ‘You can really taste the terroir,’ and ‘This one is like a summer’s day in Provence.

In 2030 I will turn 30. I hope to be in the pub, but maybe a little less often than I am now. Judging by the way things are going, that might be easier than we’d like to admit. And not just because we lost 383 pubs between the start of the year and the end of June.  I’ll set the scene: it’s seven years from now. Off I go, to one of the last four pubs in London, and park my e-bike next to three thousand others. I walk through the entrance, the etched Victorian glass door replaced by government-mandated energy-efficient double glazing, and there they are: eight 0 per cent beers on draught.  Human beings like pork scratchings and a fag and a pint, and will do forever ‘Do you have anything alcoholic?’  ‘What?

I was invited to speak at a conference in Barcelona in the late 1990s. At the end of a very long, hard day, my genial Spanish feminist hosts invited me to dinner, telling me they would meet me in the hotel lobby at 10.30 p.m. I almost went into some sort of traumatic shock. I was aware of the Catalonian reputation for eating late – sometimes as late as midnight, at weekends – but I was having none of it. I have been told by waiters that a bottle of wine is ‘too much for a lady on her own’ I bade my colleagues farewell and found myself a gorgeous little tapas bar that was open at 7.30 p.m. I ate bread with deep green olive oil, deep red tomato and roasted garlic, octopus salad with waxy potatoes, jamon croquettes, and a plate of marinated anchovies.

It didn’t matter that it was 33˚C. Starbucks staff across Britain spent the beginning of September putting out pumpkin-themed menus, selling customers pumpkin spice lattes in pumpkin-shaped mugs, to be drunk alongside a slice of pumpkin-flavoured loaf cakes, a pumpkin seed cookie, or a brownie cut into pumpkin shapes and frosted in hazardously orange icing. Happy fall, y’all.   The minor humiliations don’t stop me – I'm a creature of nostalgia and these drinks don’t taste bad, either The hot early autumn didn’t stop us obsessives: there is, inevitably, an iced pumpkin spice latte. The spice mix in question, of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove and sulphur-based preservatives doesn’t necessarily have to include any pumpkin.

There are certain things that are so shocking they can only be said by close friends. And as the British have been in a close friendship – an entente cordiale – with the French since 1904, I am here to say it to our neighbours across the Channel: I’m sorry, mes amis, but your food is the worst in the world. There are more McDonalds in France, per head, than anywhere in Europe Such a claim needs evidence. So let’s start with that essential emblem of aspirational French cooking: the menu degustation. Over the years, as a travel hack, I have learned to shudder when I see this phrase – ‘tasting menu’ – on le carte of any restaurant, but particularly a striving restaurant in the French regions. Why?

I hoped that we would soon see the back of Jamie Oliver, once a ubiquitous presence on television, as his youthful Golden Labrador-ish appeal waned and his mouth increasingly looked like something you’d find on the end of a fishing rod. But regrettably, like many of the cor blimey pretend meritocrats of his era – from David Beckham to Jonathan Ross – he has proved as determined to hold on to his place on the dung heap of fortune as any old landed toff. It seems the ceaselessly acquisitive Oliver clan want some more of whatever pie is being divided. Is the world ready for Buddy, his 12-year-old son, who has just been awarded his own BBC cooking show?

Finishing my latest mini-shop at my closest mini-supermarket, I witnessed something I hadn’t seen before. A couple who had used the self-checkouts were stopped at the exit by a staff member who asked to see inside their (store-branded) plastic bag. The customers obliged without demur and a half-smile sent them on their way. But it could have been different. Recent reports suggest strongly that aggression towards staff at supermarkets is on the rise.  Whatever the reason for the check, I have to confess – as an observer – to a tiny frisson of satisfaction. This was partly that someone was checking; I have seen people quite brazenly leave past the machines without paying, which means higher prices all round, does it not?

In an attempt to sell vegan diets to parents and children, Team GB, recently partnered with Birds Eye’s vegan food brand Green Cuisine. The programme will be delivered in primary schools across the UK. Now, the Guardian is reporting that hundreds of academics are urging British universities ‘to commit to 100 per cent plant-based catering’. Why? You guessed right: ‘to fight the climate crisis’.  Some reports suggest that as many as one in 12 British parents are now raising their children vegan Research shows that veganism is intimately associated with nutritional deficiencies. A vegan diet negatively affects a developing brain, whether child or late adolescent.

Hotel restaurants have come a long way since they were dingy add-ons geared towards a captive audience, once the preserve of holidaymakers too lazy to leave the lobby. London is in the midst of a literal feeding frenzy of swish new hotel restaurant openings. The whole ‘dining experience’ – what is dining if not an experience? – has become a way for hard-pressed hoteliers keen to make a bit of extra cash. My dream has always been to live in a grand London hotel with every whim catered for. The dowdy old Dorchester, once a second home to reprobates such as Burton and Taylor, always held a particular appeal, even more so now that the hotel has finally received the facelift she deserves and with it the launch of two celebrity chef offerings.

The service was stylish, the menu superb, the vibe effortlessly chic. This was the Coal Office, one of London’s best Israeli restaurants, situated in the old Victorian goods yard at King’s Cross. My fiancée and I dined there last week. It was a blast. But something didn’t feel right.  Fish and chips was invented by an Ashkenazi Jew, and we all like a good kedgeree or a korma, yet British food is no fiction In many ways, you couldn’t find a more Israeli establishment. Weeks earlier, In Jerusalem, I had taken my children to the Coal Office’s sister restaurant, Machneyuda. The same type of stuff was on the plate: Sephardi spices, chickpeas and aubergines, matched with Ashkenazi bread and fish. The atmosphere was similar, too.

If called upon to declare the seven greatest cocktails of all time – a Magnificent Seven, as it were – what would be your line-up? The struggle is less in naming seven than in sticking to so few. The ubiquitous gin and tonic must be on the list, of course, along with the Old Fashioned. And surely the Bloody Mary deserves a place… but can the Bellini be left out? And is it legitimate to include not one but two brunch cocktails, when we haven’t even mentioned the mighty Ms – martinis, mojitos, margaritas and Manhattans? We’re already past seven, and what about the whisky sour, the Negroni and the Long Island iced tea?

I’m always a bit wary when invited for the first time to a dinner party at a friend’s home; some of the least enjoyable social occasions I've ever attended have been misleadingly advertised as such. The inevitable email about ‘dietary requirements’ has been duly responded to. You’ve muttered to yourself about the time (8 o’clock? Why so late?) and worked out that because your hosts (and I use that word advisedly) live on the other side of London, you won’t be in bed before midnight. And the route is terrible – but never mind, it’s lovely to be invited to someone’s home for dinner, isn’t it? Why would anyone cook you a meal they've never attempted before? And how come some people are incapable of understanding cooking times? Welcome to a bad dinner party.

Everything about Greggs is fake. You can smell it as you walk down any British high street. There’s an astringency, a hint that what lingers in those ovens is more than butter, flour, eggs and salt – that their food has been adulterated with something unnatural. What you’re smelling is an approximation of pastry, an attempt by the Greggs customer development unit to ‘curate an authentic baked goods experience’.  Of course, we all secretly know the food is fake. The texture of the baguettes suggest that they’ve been salvaged from a 1970s deep freezer found buried beneath a Midlands business park. And the fillings. All that slimy pink ham. The medical cross-sections of boiled egg.