Spectator Life

In his novel Coming up for Air (1939), George Orwell has his benighted protagonist, George Bowling, bite into a sausage, only to discover that it tastes of something else altogether: ‘...pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish!’  I thought of George Bowling as my disgruntled family sat outside Felbrigg Hall in North Norfolk last week, eyeing me balefully — and I envied him. At least his sausage tasted of something. For I had just spent £43.

It’s a funny thing, being a feminist surrounded by women on weight-loss drugs. As someone who recognises the health risks of being clinically obese, I’ve never been a fat liberationist – but pretty much all of us used to be against prescribed beauty standards. In practice this meant we would critique the harmful impacts of the ‘size zero’ or ‘heroin chic’ trends rather than obsess over having gained a few pounds over Christmas. Yet, with the rise of weight-loss jabs, skinniness has become a norm rather than a feminist discussion. And twee ideas about ‘being good’ or ‘cheating’ have been replaced by – well – feeling too nauseous to cheat at all.  Which is why Easter is a fascinating holiday in this era of weight-loss jabs.

When we describe something – or someone – as an ‘acquired taste’, it is rarely a compliment. If we say it of Sharon, for example, it means that she is a bit of a pain in the neck. It's the same with food: olives, anchovies and oysters are some of the finest foodstuffs on God's earth but sometimes, in order to truly enjoy them, you have to first quiet your inner doubts by tuning out all the reasons why other people don’t like them.  Those of us who like to devote time to thinking about matching food and booze get called snobs – but we all do it all the time. You would probably choose to have a mug of tea rather than a cup of coffee with fish and chips – and fair play to you if you do.

Bottomless brunch: it sounds disreputable, to start with. There’s the suggestion of indecency; that lower garments are optional, perhaps on the part of the poor waiting staff, like those ‘Butlers in the Buff’. And ‘brunch’ is surely the louchest of meals, invented purely so that people could roll into a restaurant after a long lie-in and commence drinking before noon. There is none of the briskness of ‘lunch’ or the cosiness of ‘dinner’. No one’s going to go for a ‘constitutional’ after brunch. No, they’re going to have ‘just one more’… I’ve had some lovely brunches in my time.

When you think about Simpson’s in the Strand (never Simpson’s on the Strand), it is impossible to consider the 198-year-old restaurant without remembering its literary antecedents. P.G. Wodehouse praised it as ‘a restful temple of food’ in his 1910 novel Psmith in the City. It has popped up in everything from Sherlock Holmes to Howards End and, when that epitome of thespian Britishness David Niven wished, in the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, to speak wistfully about a golden idyll to a dying friend, Simpson’s was the idyll he chose.  Yet all good things decline at some point. Before Simpson’s closed in 2020, another victim of the pandemic, it had been weakening.

Do you remember the Cereal Killer Café? The year was 2014: a time of sleeveless plaid shirts, Mr Pringle moustaches, man buns and undercuts. This was the era of proto vapes and misplaced millennial hope, of the indie band Vampire Weekend and trilby hats mistaken for fedoras. When the Cereal Killer Café opened in Brick Lane that year to sell cereal and milk for stupid prices, it signalled the acme of hyper-gentrification and the ‘peak’ east London aesthetic. Many of us saw its pandemic-related closure in 2020 as a sign that sanity had returned to the capital’s restaurant scene. We were wrong. The Cereal Killer Café might be gone but the public’s credulity for overpriced Instagrammable restaurants is piping hot.

What do you consider the distinguishing marker of wealth in Britain today? Is it privately educating the kids? Is it the £60,000 Tesla parked out front with a black cable running to a gleaming box attached to the wall? Let me tell you what I think signifies real wealth today: it’s eating at Gail’s.  Because you can’t have failed to have notice the conspicuous unaffordability of Britain’s fastest rising bakery – the one that began life in London in 2005 and now has some 170 branches nationwide.   At Gail’s a box of five of their cookies costs £18. You can buy a kettle in Robert Dyas for that — and not a bad one either.

The daffodils are out, and so, therefore, are the optimistic diners. A couple of rickety tables and wonky chairs are dragged out from their storage and plonked on a bit of uneven concrete on what passes as pavement in London. They are a strange breed, this first flush of outdoor diners who think a tiny ray of weak sunlight breaking through the two-degree cold heralds the start of summer. I’m not talking about the people braving the elements under a leaky conservatory roof, crowded around outdoor heaters and wrapped in blankets, who are best known as smokers or vapers. No, I mean the hardy, ‘freezing fresh air is better than indoor air’ lot we are about to see shivering through their fake smiles as they push aside a bowl of freezing cold soup that can’t quite pass as gazpacho.

Anyone paying attention to the pumps at their local recently might have noticed something peculiar: a swathe of old-school logos. There’s the red triangle of Bass, the red right hand of Allsopp’s, the yellow bees and barrel of Boddingtons.   Despite fighting long-term decline, cask ale is having a moment. At some of London’s trendiest new pubs, like the Robin in Stroud Green, McIntosh Ales in Stoke Newington or the Pocket in Angel, cask makes up a significant portion of available beers.

Bradford, West Yorkshire, is not known as the curry capital of Britain for nothing. The city is home to more than 200 Asian restaurants. In the main, these are Kashmiri and Pakistani – driven by the city’s Pakistani-Muslim population which is one of the most concentrated in the country – and much of the local economy relies on them for jobs and income. My memories of Bradford curry houses go back to the late 1990s when I worked at the university. Commuting from London and therefore living in student digs meant I would eat out more often than not. That meant curry almost every night I was in the city as it cost little more than a sandwich.  Bradford’s curry houses are known for their homestyle cooking, rather than fancy, westernised, Instagram-aesthetic grub.

At Gordon Ramsay’s launch party for his new Netflix show, Being Gordon Ramsay, influencers could be found in every corner of the room. Soon after getting another ‘lemongrass cha’ and walking past Victoria Beckham, I came face-to-face with Eating With Tod, a man whose wide-eyed hand rubbing and hyperbolic cries for enormous dinners has earned him 2.3 million followers and counting – impressive however you bill it.   Next to Ramsay, near the pulled pork bao station, was Jesse Burgess, one half of Topjaw and the presenter on another one of the chef’s food programmes Knife Edge on Apple TV.

I’ve long held firm to the adage that you can’t truly call yourself a local in the town, city or village you reside in until you’ve spent over half your life there.  By my own calculation, I’ve just tipped over into becoming a Londoner: as of this year, I have spent 24 of my 47 years in the capital.   Not only that, but I’m marrying into the clan too. My fiancée – whom I’ll be tying the knot with in the spring – is a born-and-bred Chelsea girl whose proximity to the sound of Bow Bells has never strayed further than Crystal Palace.

Last week I was in a branch of Greggs, in the small market town in north Wiltshire where I live. Behind the sausage rolls, steak bakes, corned beef pasties and trays of vanilla slice was something that almost made me drop my Tesco meal deal in shock. A machine dispensing matcha lattes.  Greggs, the last bastion of brown food in the post-Ottolenghi era is now retailing aspirational green, radioactive TikTok slurry … in Wiltshire. A cheerful, democratic, brute-force provider of cheap calories in culturally legible form has collided with a beverage whose main function is performative wellness. It felt less like innovation than a stitching error. Two incompatible worlds roughly bolted together, animated despite never quite cohering.

There are relatively few restaurants in London – or anywhere else, for that matter – that have made it to their centenary. There are even fewer that have been threatened with the closure of their premises in the precise year they are going to turn 100. And there are practically none so popular that news of their possible eviction has resulted in a petition with tens of thousands of signatures – which will be sent to the King in the hope he can reverse what would be a heritage-threatening disaster for one of the capital’s most historic establishments.  Such is the recent story of Veeraswamy, the country’s oldest Indian restaurant which was founded in March 1926 and has been a haunt of the beau-monde and demi-monde ever since.

Guinness Zero reminds me of the judge. I heard about him years ago. He was driving home from the golf club, seven G&Ts to the good. Or rather – he realised as he saw the flashing blue lights in his rear-view mirror – to the bad. This is it, he thought in horror, end of career. But he went through the motions, blowing into the breathalyser and, as he waited for the result, miserably contemplating how he was going to break the news to his wife. ‘Well, sir,’ said the policeman after a moment, ‘that all appears to be fine. Have a pleasant evening.’ Dumbstruck, the judge turned his car straight round and drove back to the golf club.

I’ve long clung hold of one small crumb of comfort from my encroaching blindness. Namely that if and when my deteriorating vision (I have albinism and nystagmus) packs up completely, I can become one of those blokes who takes his guide dog to the pub and teaches it to drink beer from an ashtray.   But I won’t be doing that at any branches of J.D. Wetherspoon as things stand. As of this week, flyers alighting at Alicante airport can get a morning pint at the first branch of the chain to open on Spanish soil. Back at home, however, the issue facing the pub concerns hounds, not holidaymakers.

It was the longest pub crawl of my life – visiting numerous boozers across 250 miles over ten days – in homage to one of Britain’s most infamous drinkers, Dylan Thomas. I’m not, I must qualify, a Thomas obsessive, as this enterprise might suggest. If exposed to Thomas at length, I find myself recalling Private Eye’s 1980s characterisation of Neil Kinnock: ‘The Welsh windbag.’ Although, in fairness, even Thomas himself described his own verse as ‘a steaming pile of Welsh whimsy’.

I’m in Mexico City and spoilt for choice as to where to go for a lunchtime taco. Taquerias are everywhere, each entrance best described as a hole in the wall: you step in from the street into a dark, cavernous stone vault and go past the bar, stocked with dozens of bottles of spirits and a fridge full of beer. I honestly feel like I’ve never had Mexican food before, except once in San Francisco. On that occasion, I went to a canteen close to the border with a friend, where we were the only two non-Mexican people eating. The salsas were bright as traffic lights and there was charred corn doused with chilli and lime salt, fresh white cheese and lime butter. The tortillas were the soft corn ones, unlike any I’ve seen in UK outlets, with hard, U-shaped shells made of wheat.