Margaret Mitchell

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.

I’ve always heard Americans describe the food in Rome as “authentic,” though maybe that’s only relative to our three square meals of Little Debbies, reconstituted meat and freeze-dried astronaut food. The things we eat are not authentic food. But abroad, authenticity means anything sourced locally and served by a very small old woman with limited English. If a nonna told me she’d fished anchovies out of the Trevi Fountain and plucked chicory from cracks in the sidewalk, I’d swoon and think: they really know how to do it right in Europe. Authenticity, to me, also means a little discomfort. Bones in your rabbit stew. Lugging a suitcase up a dirt road. Getting pickpocketed.

Is Claude your confidant? Is ChatGPT your yes-man? Your wingman? Artificial intelligence seems more like a friend than the apex predator we feared. Maybe it’s not gearing up to enslave us or turn us into paperclips after all. But I find there is something just as malign about AI posing as our friend. Slowly, subtly, politely, it is changing how we think of ourselves, other people and our relationships. The friendliness of AI is a user-retention tactic. OpenAI, for example, relies on its models to be informative, yes, but also on them being more agreeable than humans. Sam Altman recently announced that OpenAI was rolling back its latest model of ChatGPT because it had become ‘sycophantic’.

Last week, the London restaurant St John opened reservations for a celebration of its 30th birthday. For much of September, the Smithfield restaurant will bring back its 1994 menu at 1994 prices. Tables were snatched up within minutes, possibly seconds. I sat at my computer refreshing the OpenTable booking site like a monkey at a slot machine and got nothing but a manic adrenaline rush that ruined my morning. I’ve seen the algorithm create Soviet breadlines overnight Please, reader, don’t pity me – it was, of course, just a minor inconvenience. What does wind me up is the principle: fun now has to be meticulously planned and booked weeks in advance.

It’s great having toilets with warm seats that shoot water up your bum until you need somewhere to throw up. After eating two kilos of raw, vengeful tuna, I was leaning over a hotel loo in Osaka and all I wanted was to rest my clammy forehead on a cold plastic seat. Six hours earlier, I had watched a man carve up a metre-long bluefin tuna on Dotonbori Street. It appeared very much still alive, apart from the limp way its mouth fell open when the fishmonger turned it upright on its belly. ‘Very, very fresh!’ he hollered, whacking it to bits. ‘Very, very, very delicious!’ I took his word, like the tourist sucker I am, and ate an entire bowl filled with chunks of chutoro and kamatoro, and 13 more pieces of nigiri.

The moral absolutist in me believes that in every city, with its finite number of restaurants, there is such a thing as the best of all possible lunches. I don’t have to find it, but I have to get close. Mediocre doesn’t cut it. In fact, on holiday, the idea of wasting a meal on mere ‘mediocre’ fills me with crippling guilt over wasting not just money but time. What if I die before I see Paris again? I would be ashamed that I had wasted my precious mortality eating that Pret tuna niçoise salad. Laurie Lee described Spain as a place of ‘distinct appetites...