Food

I had this meal where I was perched on the end of a dining table inside a kitchen. My friend and I had to sit side by side. There was a dog there. I think it was a restaurant, but I’m not really sure. We were in a converted Victorian horse stable. Most of the space was outside, in the stable yard. You couldn’t book it: you had to pop your name down then head to the pub for an hour. And there were just six things on the menu, all of them cold. And the only people working there were a couple, and one waitress. And the guy from the couple went round the restaurant at the end with a bucket of his homemade vermouth, topping up people’s spritzes. And when the bill came, you just told them what you’d had.

Salade Lyonnaise is often translated as ‘bacon and egg salad’ and I can’t stand it. Not because it’s inaccurate – beyond the salad leaves and the dressing, the only other non-negotiable elements of the dish are, indeed, bacon and eggs. But it feels like it misses the point. To the English ear, bacon and egg salad sounds like a lacklustre version of a full English – two items chucked into a bowl of leaves because we’re trying to cut carbs. It also – and I am aware this is just me – makes me picture the egg scrambled, and the thought of scrambled egg in a salad is horrible. ‘Bacon and egg salad’ doesn’t do the elegant, balanced and punchy salade Lyonnaise justice.

Grasshopper pie is an unlikely dish: bright green, mint-flavoured, combined with obscure liqueurs and set with marshmallows, all sitting in an Oreo crust. It feels like the fever dream of a sweet-toothed teenager who’s been let loose on their parents’ drinks cabinet, and will regret it tomorrow. The pie is based on the cocktail of the same name, which combines equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao blanc and cream. It’s a heady mix of mint, white chocolate, dairy and alcohol. The cocktail hails from New Orleans and its origin is claimed by Tujague’s in the French Quarter, where it was supposedly invented by the owner, Philip Guchet, in 1918. It tastes exactly as you’d imagine and is, forgive me, far better suited to a pie filling than it is to a drinks party.

Everyone knows the story of the Earl of Sandwich: keen not to interrupt a late night card game at his club, he asked for roast beef to be sliced and put between two slices of bread, to allow him to eat it with his hands without stopping his game. And lo, the sandwich was born. But perhaps less familiar to us is that 140 years later, some 4,500 miles away from the Earl’s cribbage game, another problem was being observed, and was solved in a strikingly similar way. The turn of the 20th century saw an influx of Sicilian immigrants to New Orleans; almost 300,000 arrived in the city between the 1880s and 1920s, setting up shop (literally) in the French Quarter, in an area that became known as Little Palermo.

It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’ve just walked into The Pineapple in north London, thus becoming the 4,825th journalist to do so since Keir Starmer became Labour leader. He once described this pub as his ‘church’. What that means is unclear. Does he take his sins here for absolution? Does he feel a sense of obligation to it? Does he come here on Sunday mornings? As the prime-ministerial handover takes place, it’s worth considering the old guy and the new guy’s approach to food and drink (this column thinks so, anyway). Starmer didn’t have a favourite novel and he didn’t have a favourite poem. But what he did like was food. He said he enjoyed going to Rossella, an Italian restaurant in Kentish Town. The tandoori salmon he made on Sunday Brunch actually looked nice.

Can there be, in Britain, such a thing as a destination Greek taverna? There are some cases where proximity is the most important thing: gyms, cafés, defibrillators. A Greek taverna falls into this category. All you need is harmless food and ambient fake vines for a catch-up with your relatives. But I’m in need of a new one. Lemonia in north London was a good option until halfway through my final meal there. A bit of lamb kleftiko decided it wanted to remain in the entrance to my father’s trachea. Choking, mouth frothing, screaming for help, oh thank God there’s a nurse over there, Heimlich, hospital, then, seven hours later, home.

When it comes to home cooking, we’re obsessed with optimisation. Today this manifests itself in reels on Instagram offering a ‘hack’ to make the time you spend in your kitchen shorter and your dinner to arrive more quickly. Harder, faster, better, stronger. None of this is new: there was a time when every Jamie Oliver cookbook shaved ten minutes of the promised cooking time off the last. Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking caused a public outcry (can you believe she advocated for frozen mashed potato?). The whole appeal of air fryers is that they’re fast, and while slow cookers don’t exactly get to their destination quickly, they do so with as little intervention as possible from the cook.

The obvious thing to say about themed restaurants is that they are usually bad. The Rainforest Café in London, for instance, was nothing like a rainforest, though it is slightly more like a rainforest now it has gone. But there are exceptions. The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop in Bakewell, Derbyshire, for instance. Perhaps the sort of tourists who go to Bakewell for tarts are more dangerous than the ones who go to Bath for buns. They certainly look as if they read a lot of crime fiction and are capable of murder in their heads. But The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop out-gilds its myth. It’s rare.