Spectator Life

Even if you couldn’t care a fig for sustainability, it’s hard not to be impressed with the Nostradamus-esque foresight of the milk float. In an era when Old King Coal ruled the roost and recycling meant pedalling backwards on your Raleigh Grifter, the pre-dawn hour across the UK was the stage for a phalanx of electric vehicles trundling along our streets and lanes delivering our order of gold or silver top in reusable, pint-sized bottles. The decline of the milkman in percentage figures would cause palpitations to the most hardened of economic wonks. In the 1970s, 94 per cent of Britons had their milk delivered to their doorstep via an electric float – while in 2016 just 3 per cent of milk was delivered by milkmen, according to Defra. What happened?

I love dogs. I love lunching. I love seeing dogs in restaurants where I’m lunching. But one thing I don’t love one bit is a dog being brought to a luncheon which I’m participating in – and, most likely, paying for. Luncheons are for humans – not for our furry friends. Let’s face it, it’s not like they’re particularly thrilled to be indoors while their owners indulge in a little light character assassination. They’d be having far more fun running around outside eating vomit and sniffing each other’s bums. They can be big dogs, like the one belonging to my friend K. His gentle nature is swamped by the physical reality of him being the size of a small horse and taking up enough room for two people in a snug bistro.

Two British cities, Dundee and Nottingham, have been chosen as trial sites for a new government scheme to be piloted next year: state-subsidised restaurants. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has put up £1.5 million for the 12-month trial, initiated by the campaign group Nourish Scotland. If the restaurants are successful, they’ll be rolled out across Britain – nourishing us all – with a subsidised meal for £3. Inspired by second world war state-funded canteens, they’re going to be called ‘Public Diners’ – clever branding, with its quasi-American vibe.

In the depths of winter last year, an ice cream and wine bar opened in Islington. The Dreamery serves ice creams and sorbets in silver goblets with tiny vintage spoons. On the ceiling is a glowing mural of happy cows and a sun with a face, resembling a child’s finger-painting (the artist is Lucy Stein, daughter of Rick). Outside, neighbours whisper about a recent Dua Lipa spotting. The Dreamery is inspired by the Parisian ice cream and wine bar Folderol, and makes fairly sophisticated flavours such as salted ricotta blueberry and Greek mountain tea. It is TikTok chic – a gamble, after Folderol unwillingly became a viral sensation and ended up sticking up signs saying: ‘No TikTok. Be here to have fun, not to take pictures.

We Jews make up 0.2 per cent of the world’s population but have won 22 per cent of all the Nobel prizes ever awarded. And we have not done this with a tailwind. Mark Twain thought the reason Jews tended to do so well in business was above-average honesty. Jewish success has been so extravagantly out of proportion to their population that their finest gentile supporters have long sought reasons. Clive James, wondering about our influence in the arts, felt exclusion may have had its benefits. ‘Whole generations of Jewish literati were denied the opportunity of wasting their energies on compiling abstruse doctoral theses. They were driven instead to journalism, plain speech, direct observation and the necessity to entertain.

I will never forget the horror of walking into the breakfast room, jet-lagged to hell, in a hotel in Chicago, looking for coffee and a sugar hit to wake me up. I was hit with the stench of barbecue, in waves. It was being deliberately wafted through the ventilation system. Apparently this is to help get the appetite going, but it had the opposite effect on me. As I discovered during that trip, barbecue can be a beautiful thing; Chicago is known for its great smokehouses and rib tips. The fake smell, manufactured especially for hotels and the kind of smokehouses that buy their ribs in, bore no relation to the real thing.

Maybe it was when M&S began selling chicken katsu sando-flavoured crisps, or launched its Plant Kitchen range with its inedible alternative to chicken, or began slathering ‘green goddess sauce’ on already clammy ready salads. Or maybe it was the thousandth time I traipsed, freezing, through the tightly packed rat run of a station M&S Food – there are no fewer than three in King’s Cross – in search of something that I never found. Namely: something nourishing and delicious, rather than a freezing piece of over-marketed randomness. At any rate, many of us in the more high-falutin’ bits of the middle class fell out of love with what was once the high-water mark of grocery.

I have been in charge of a pizzeria in St John’s Wood for less than a year and already I feel misanthropy taking hold. Most notably, a complete disdain for the general public; I used to think I hated them, but now I can confirm that I definitely, really, hate them. Service is the heart of the hospitality industry, but there’s a certain kind of person who mistakes the waiters and chefs for a cadre of private staff. I used to moan, but now I just numbly get on with putting ketchup in a ramekin for them to have with their sweetcorned pizza. They win – they always win. Then there is the sycophancy. Is there anything more embarrassing than a fully grown man going doe-eyed at the thought of a mention on a website or Instagram page?

There’s not one thing I don’t love about the street in Hove where I live, with the sea at one end and the restaurant quarter at the other; if I had to fetishise a non-sentient thing, like those women who ‘marry’ rollercoasters, I’d be kinky for my street. (‘Avenue’, rather.) One of the lovely things about it is that I can see a section of Hove Lawns from my balcony – the manicured green spaces which differentiate our seafront from Brighton’s in one of many ways. (We smell nice, for a start.) Even better, I can hear Hove Lawns, which was always pleasant for me but – now I’m a cripple – keeps me connected to the beat of the neighbourhood I adore. Recently they hosted a 12-hour tribute band festival and a Soul 2 Soul show in the same weekend – that was fun.

Farmer’s markets are a very cheeky wheeze and we all know it. Their promise – getting back to peasants’ basics of veg yanked from the ground – carries a hefty premium compared to supermarket food, which actual peasants have to buy. Indeed, supermarket food, from veg and fruit to eggs and cheese and bread, is generally two or three times cheaper and tastes just as good. But it seems that we are already in a world so dystopian that only the rich want – and can afford – soily spinach sold loose on a table. Certainly, the rich will queue for sorrel and strawberries, yoghurt and kimchi, raw milk, chicken and sourdough. Especially the sourdough.

Our homegrown wine was, until fairly recently, regarded internationally as a bit of a joke. Peter Ustinov could quip that he imagined hell to be ‘Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine’. Likewise, Lord Jay, serving as a diplomat in Paris, recalled the British ambassador rubbing up against resistance from the home side – let alone foreigners – as he sought to be an early advocate. The ambassador was hosting Edward Heath, President Giscard d’Estaing and the governor of the Bank of France for lunch: ‘I remember [ambassador] Ewen Fergusson saying, ‘Sir Edward, wonderful that you’re here. I am tempted to serve you a delicious English white wine”. “I hope, ambassador, that you’ll resist that temptation,” was his reply.

One of the most memorable dinners I ever had was about 20 years ago, at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Fitzrovia called Pied à Terre. It’s still going, and indeed remains a stalwart of the city’s fine dining scene, but what I especially remember, rather than the food or wine, was how deliciously louche an experience it was. I couldn’t get a booking before 9 p.m., and by the hour that I turned up, it was packed to the rafters with well-heeled diners. My guest and I were kept happy with complimentary champagne until we finally sat down for dinner sometime after 10 p.m. In my (admittedly hazy) recollection, we didn’t finally leave the restaurant until well after 1 a.m. As we were staggering out, I asked our waitress whether she minded being kept out so late.

The Lake District isn’t really meant to be about eating. It’s about walking and climbing and gawping. The guide one carries is not that by Michelin but Alfred Wainwright, whose seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells turns 70 this year. Food is mainly to be consumed from a Thermos rather than a bowl, and eaten atop a precariously balanced upturned log rather than a restaurant table. The culinary highlight should be Kendal mint cake, gratefully retrieved from the pocket of your cagoule. And so I was as surprised as anyone to find real gastronomic delights on a recent trip. Not from Little Chef, though that was where Wainwright religiously went for his favourite meal: fish and chips, a gooseberry pancake and cup of tea.

I love having friends over for dinner, and like to think I’m rather good at hosting. And while I always strive for a relaxed atmosphere and dislike formality, there are a few hard rules that my guests should adhere to if they want a repeat invitation. Let’s start at the beginning. When checking on any foods you don’t eat, I am asking if you are vegetarian or coeliac, or if you have an actual allergy; what I don’t want is a list of your preferences. One person I invited replied telling me all about how, although she quite likes fresh tomatoes, she can’t eat them cooked, adding that she’d rather the food wasn’t flavoured with cumin or oregano. I felt like telling her to stay home and order from Deliveroo.

Before the arrival of strawberries, and not long after the coming of the swifts, the elder salutes the coming of summer after its own fashion: emerging from roadsides and hedgerows, gardens and wasteland, and scenting them with its blooms. Almost a century ago, Maud Grieve, in her 1931 Modern Herbal, said ‘that our English summer is not here until the elder is fully in flower, and that it ends when the berries are ripe’. At this time, when thorn blossom – which made our hedgerows look set for a wedding – has faded, the elder, like cow parsley, offers its own floral exuberance.

‘Another pint of bitter, love, when you’re ready.’ To those of a certain age the request slips off the tongue like the opening line of a sonnet. A pint of bitter is as English as the first cuckoo of spring or the last rose of summer. It brings to mind a pub, the people in it, and that social phenomenon which binds us to those we trust – the round. And, of course, one pint may lead to another. Television adverts used to be full of jolly pint-swillers. Whitbread ‘Big Head’ Trophy Bitter was ‘the pint that thinks it’s a qua-art’. Tetley of Leeds, a big player in those days, introduced viewers to their ‘Bittermen’, with the declaration: ‘You can’t beat ’em.

There’s a joint in east London that describes itself as a ‘family-run osteria’ and posts about the ‘Italian tradition of generous hospitality and simple, beautiful food’. The menu is a combination of several Italian dishes with Japanese ingredients, and I can’t think of anything more inappropriate. One of the dishes described as dolce (meaning ‘sweet’) is a cheese panna cotta with herring caviar. This restaurant has soy sauce nudging the balsamic. Is there no end to the revolting madness that is fusion food? I can understand why young chefs – those tattooed to within an inch of their lives – think they are a cross between Anthony Bourdain and Marco Pierre White and love the idea of mixing miso and chocolate pudding. It has all gone too far.