Food

Véronique arrives 45 minutes late, a vision of practiced nonchalance and rustic affectation in a loose-fitting linen smock dress, clutching a wicker basket suspiciously devoid of wear. She regards my zucchini seedlings with mild distrust and incredulity, the way the French eye giant Spanish strawberries when they first start appearing in the local supermarket. The plants’ robust stems and glossy leaves look almost too healthy, especially given their minuscule nursery pots. Something is amiss. “C’est bio, ça?” she asks, though her tone suggests this isn’t really a question –more an ideological verbal tic than a genuine inquiry into my choice of potting mix. “Ben oui!” I smile with the practiced ease of a man who has told this particular lie many times before.

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.

Chet Sharma – physicist, DJ and award-winning chef – only needs to sleep for four hours a night. “I inherited [this gift] from my mother,” shrugs the Londoner when we talk one morning before lunchtime service at his restaurant, BiBi. “She has unlimited energy!” Raised in Berkshire, England, to parents with Indian heritage, Sharma has a master’s degree in clinical and experimental medicine from University College London, as well as a master’s in physics and a PhD in condensed-matter physics from the University of Oxford. It was during those seven years studying that he also moonlighted as a cook and a DJ. “I’d do university in the morning, dinner service at a restaurant [at night], and at 11 p.m.

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.

July, and the morning sun blazes over fields of pick-your-own strawberries. The black bears scope out the blueberry patches in the national parks. Skin-destroying raspberry canes trail across the path, ready to spring out and scratch the faces of passers-by. The berrying season is upon us: scratched faces and stained clothing are on the cards. Have you ever seen a child pack a handful of wild raspberries away into a shirt pocket for safe keeping? I hope so. It’s one of the joys of life. Their faces, on seeing the inevitable results, are completely worth the ruined outfit. However, if you don’t have any young relatives to cheer you up with their berrying misadventures, pick-your-own farms aren’t just pick-your-owns but pick-me-ups.

Oysters have recently achieved near-meme status as one of several “pick-me” foods alongside the dirty martini, pickles, tinned fish and other briny staples popularized online by Gen Z. These foods are noted for their slightly polarizing air – expressing a preference for them communicates an evolved palate, a niche preference, a willingness to see past an aesthetically questionable facade (the bumpy pickle, the barnacle-encrusted oyster). However, unlike its fellow “pick-me” travelers or its late, meme-ified millennial predecessor, avocado on toast, the oyster itself cannot be readily dismissed as a passing fad.