Spectator Life

The drift began with the Anglicised version of tapas – a word meaning ‘to cover’, or ‘lid’, that originally described the small pieces of food used to cover and protect drinks. But ‘small plates’, now a mainstay of those fashionable, overpriced restaurants that pride themselves on being the antidote to stuffy and formal, have dominated the restaurant world for more than two decades. In Venice once, in the early 1990s, I ended up in a backstreet bacari, which is a booze and snack joint, as I couldn’t afford the restaurants in the centre. It was full of working men, and cheap as chips. Huge platters of cold mussels, cured ham, anchovies and crispy gnocchi sat behind a glass counter. Perched above the bar were a barrel of red, and one of white.

I assumed that the headline in the Mail about ‘pasty wars’ would involve some grievous insult to Cornish pride, including something other than beef, onions, potato and turnip; perhaps pointing out that the turnip was actually a swede. Instead, it was about how a deli in Mousehole, where I live, was charging a tenner for a pasty – albeit served on a plate (presentation is half the battle) with a side salad. The Mail journalist wrote that it was ‘shocking’ that a pasty in a restaurant overlooking what Dylan Thomas called ‘quite the loveliest village in England’ [sic] would cost more than a pasty from an industrial estate off the A30. It’s not rocket salad, as the saying goes.

Almost 50 years ago, in a hotel bar in central Paris, French wine faced a reckoning. Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, decided California deserved a spell in the sun: at the time French wine was the dominant force in Europe, with bottles from the New World – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the like – considered their poor cousin. Spurrier came up with the idea to pit the very best French Bordeaux against Californian cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays against white Burgundies, and have a panel of experts – all French – rank them in a blind tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris. California won both categories. Odette Khan, a well-known critic, reportedly demanded her scorecard back so news of her grave error wouldn’t reach the papers.

Dubai-style chocolate, viral star of TikTok and Instagram, is so popular that Waitrose is limiting sales to two bars per customer. The upmarket supermarket chain has taken the move, the Times reports, ‘because we want everyone to have the chance to enjoy this delicious chocolate’. Some are sceptical. Steve Dresser, who heads up consultancy Grocery Insight, has questioned whether this is a marketing ploy, with Waitrose ‘trying to generate scarcity’. The supermarket says no, assuring the Grocer of the ‘incredible popularity’ of these £10 confectionery bars. It’s incredible all right. Even Waitrose’s yellow sticker fare is beyond my budget, so to me a tenner for a slab of chocolate sounds not so much indulgent as fall-of-the-Habsburgs decadent.

We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up. Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The food writer Elizabeth David recounted a Scottish schoolmaster’s wife who recoiled in horror at her freshly gathered chanterelles. A fisherman did the same on spotting her with a crab, both reacting with the same appalled cry: ‘You’re never going to eat those dirty things?’ Few in Britain praise dishes of pig’s ears or chicken knees, but over the past 30 years our culinary character has improved.

How’s this for a bargain? A Pizza Express margherita for only 33p, if you dine in and order between 5 and 6 p.m. tomorrow, to celebrate 60 years of the chain. ‘In 1965 we brought proper pizza to the UK, and what better way to mark those 60 years than with 60 minutes of our original pizzas at their original prices,’ reads the promotion. I love Pizza Express. I don’t often go there, but I’ve never had a bad time in the place. I almost always choose the American, which has been on the menu since it opened, and the service and food is always consistent. I have no expectation beyond my pizza being fresh out of the oven, and everybody being served at the same time, however big the table. That’s not, by any means, to say the menu is perfect.

This morning, as usual, I was woken up by the large ball of golden fluff that is my dog, Honey. At a time she considers decent, she bounds on to my bed, tail wagging furiously, to tell me it’s time for her breakfast. Honey still has the puppyish bounce she has always had – even though, at the age of almost 12, she is gently settling into canine old age. And I’d go so far as to say that what I give her to eat has a lot to do with her youthfulness. Eye-roll as much as you like, but I believe one of the key reasons Honey is thriving is because she hasn’t eaten meat for more than six years. Yes, my dog is vegan. Not that she realises that, of course: as far as she’s concerned, she still gets the same sausages, dog chews and choice of dry and wet foods as she’s always had.

The regular’s stage is the fetid pub carpet, the creaky floorboards, the cramped smoking area where they can sneak a shot between rounds. Their audience is the jaded, spotty bartender, the unsuspecting family looking for a quiet Sunday lunch, and any poor soul too cowardly or inebriated to walk away. Regulars are the backbone of the British pub trade, but their time has come to an end. Gen Z has rung the bell for last orders. A recent survey found that 43 per cent of 18-to-34-year-olds have given up booze altogether. Thirty-six per cent of that same demographic are using non-alcoholic substitutes to curtail their drinking, and ‘bingeing’ – drinking more than four pints in one sitting – appears to be on the decline.

Following the closure of Hungarian restaurant the Gay Hussar in 2018 – that Soho institution and virtual museum of Labour party history – it seems Londoners are about to lose another Central European landmark. The Polish restaurant Daquise has finally had time served on it by Transport for London, who wish to redevelop the buildings round South Kensington station, where Daquise has been serving its loyal customers for nearly 80 years. Formerly a wartime canteen for Polish officers, Daquise opened as a restaurant in 1947. Even its name is rather romantic – a portmanteau word put together by the restaurant’s uxorious founder (he was Dakowski, his wife Louise, therefore Daquise).

Walking into this crowded and clattering restaurant for the first time in more than 30 years, two things strike me almost immediately: 1) it seems to be largely unchanged and 2) the prices have scarcely risen. I can’t claim to have tried every wine list in Soho, but I can tell you with certainty that this is the first time in a very long time that I have seen a glass of wine for under £5 in the West End. But, incredibly, here it starts at £4.50 – with cocktails from £8.The restaurant is Pollo, as it’s still popularly known, or La Porchetta Pollo Bar as the sign outside calls it. It crams 100 covers on to two floors at the eastern end of Old Compton Street, just behind the Cambridge Theatre, in Soho.

Is there any more evil influence on the world than Gail’s the bakery? It has thrown thousands of poor people out of their homes by gentrifying their neighbourhoods; it has destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of hard-working owners of independent coffee shops by drawing away business; it has scorned the poor by throwing away its old sandwiches rather than give them to the homeless; and it allegedly supplied a box of pastries to the White House for tea last Friday, which so poisoned the atmosphere between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump that it could quite possibly lead to world war three. OK, I made the last one up. But as for the others, Gail’s stands accused of them all.

The Cherry Tree on Southgate Green began life as a coaching inn on one of the historic routes from London to York and beyond. It has been trading since 1695, when what are now the north London suburbs were open fields. But the other evening, the pub – my local – rang last orders for the final time. The brewery that owns it is having it refurbished as a brasserie, its pub status coming to an end after 330 years. I went on its final evening for the closing-down party. It was like being in an episode of EastEnders, in the sense that it was a pub full of faces you dimly recognised from events long past, drinking and being jolly, like the Queen Vic at Christmas. Becoming a brasserie seems an unlikely route to financial redemption for the Cherry Tree, though.