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Food & Drink

Food and Drink

Angus Colwell

What ‘London-style’ pizzerias could learn from America

“London-style pizza.” People think there is such a thing. Somewhere over the past three years, the pizza hype in Britain’s capital city has gotten out of control. Our economy is struggling and chefs have turned to the food that literally nobody dislikes. Loads of new places have opened: we’ve had Vincenzo’s, Carmy’s, Breadstall, Gracy’s, Lenny’s, Dough Hands, etc. Can’t you tell they’re all incredibly different? All of them really (although they would quibble) have been putting out the exact same style of pizza. The problem is: what do you call it? It’s hard to describe. Critics say it’s “burnt.” There’s some truth to that.

Roger Kimball

Drinking with Geoffrey Madan

Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947) was an English aesthete of the first water. Although he fought and was wounded in the Great War, his main passions were quiet: wine, old silver, and books, especially books. Madan was an accomplished classicist – he procured a schoolwide holiday while at Eton for his account of the establishment written in Herodotean Greek. He published no books. He did compile a large collection of aphorisms, mostly in English but many in other languages. A selection of these were published in 1981 by Oxford under the title Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks. In one of the handful of entries Madan himself contributed to this chrestomathy, he described the collection as “an anthology of the forgotten sayings of great men, and the great sayings of forgotten men.