The packet came, with its unmistakeably Japanese garishness, its jarring colours, fonts, slashes and squiggles. Inside it lay the Kracie Happy Kitchen powdered hamburger meal: a new and unsettling miniature. Six foil sachets filled with powders, some plastic cutlery and plastic tubs. You open the box, slice along dotted lines, cut out the plastic tubs, get some water, mix the powders separately, spread stuff, microwave stuff, and gradually assemble a fast food lunch, or what such a lunch might look like if it was designed by an alien working to a five-year-old’s drawing of a Happy Meal.

I was in Japan recently for the first time, and experienced one the most refined and elegant cuisines in the world. But much of it isn’t half strange. This is the country where someone – or, more likely, a group of people – decided that the best image with which to decorate a packet of Doritos was two men in wetsuits kicking each other in the balls.

This is the land of tinned bread, 80 different KitKat flavours, octopus ball crisps, candied squid on sticks, food that moves, and cuboid watermelons.

There’s a lot of rote and ritual around food, and there’s a love of small things – tiny fish eggs, little bowls of ozony sea-stuff. People obsess over presentation. And you can see these aspects in the powdered hamburger. Assembling it took me the best part of an hour. I couldn’t read the instructions, so I copied a YouTube video.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Venison. Photograph: Alamy

A piece for The Guardian’s Comment is Free on the rise in venison sales across the UK

The British have finally embraced venison. Sales of the meat have risen by 50% in Sainsbury’s compared with last year, while Marks & Spencer sold three times as much in 2011 as it did in 2010. Total UK sales have more than doubled in the past five years, as British consumers haveshown a preference for more unusual meats and more game.

As a meat, venison has a lot going for it. Its ferrous, gamey flavour is far more interesting than flabby pork or cheap chicken. Gram for gram, it contains less fat than a skinless chicken breast. It has the highest protein and the lowest cholesterol content of any major meat. It’s thoroughly sustainable and always free-range. Why, then, has it taken so long to become popular?

A clue lies in the name: the word “venison” comes from the Latin verb for hunting: venare. For centuries, venison was restricted to the wild meat that landowning families sourced on their estates. The Normans and the Plantagenets demarcated much of England into royal forests, preventing farming on those lands in order to promote the growth of deer, wild boar and specific birds they enjoyed hunting. It thus became almost impossible for ordinary Britons to eat any venison unless they poached it, and the penalties for that were severe.

This entrenched a perception that venison was intrinsically high-end or “posh”, the effects of which linger to this day. It isn’t helped by the fact that a deer – perhaps especially the majestic red deer of the Scottish Highlands – is an exceptionally handsome creature, in a Landseerish sort of way. When Country Life magazine launched a campaign in 2008 for the UK to eat more venison, it knew it would have to brook fierce opposition from a public inclined to sympathise with good-looking mammals.

Continue reading at The Guardian

A piece for the Independent on the new trend for high-end marshmallows

Sweet foods, all comforting, soft and pappy, have proved popular in this recession. Over the past few years we’ve seen revivals or rediscoveries of cupcakes, whoopie pies, syrups and bacon jams, of posh ice creams and doughnuts, the American-style pairings of pig and sugar. Mouth-coating sweetnesses that help people stave off fears of the debtors’ yard. Now it seems to be marshmallows’ turn. Those lurid, chemical, factory extrusions are suddenly all-natural, imbued with fresh fruit, natural flavourings, authentic fillings and sweet gourmet prejudice.

Columbia Road flower market

This is a guest post, for which I accepted a fee

“London is a cultural hub, home to art galleries, festivals, theatres and amazing food markets. From spicy curries in Brick Lane to bakeries in Greenwich, London offers a whole variety of cuisine. In addition, buying products from a market means that you are supporting your local community and having the chance to enjoy authentic, fresh cuisine.

If you are like me and you love travelling, exploring and trying new foods, then you might be interested in finding out about some great food stalls around London. On the weekends, I much prefer to explore the city with my friends – where I often stumble across new places, pop into cafés and try the local food – compared to just staying indoors and playing partypoker with a takeaway pizza by myself. The great thing about food markets is that the produce is fresh and you can see your meal being made right before your eyes. It’s wonderful to walk around a market, look at all the huge pots of food cooking and smelling the different aromas of various cuisines.

Brick Lane is known for its curries and its bustling, vibrant market. In the summer, the cobbled streets become busy with tourists who are eager to try out some of the authentic Indian cuisine, while others admire the colourful scarves and jewellery on sale. Not only is Brick Lane a great place to pick up a fresh curry, but there are plenty of vintage clothes shops and music stores to explore. Brick Lane is also known for its bagels. Two very popular cafés sell huge bagels very cheaply and stuff them with salt beef and mustard.

Another great place to pick up food is Greenwich market which is home to a whole variety of food stalls. Greenwich market is a much more up-market place than Brick Lane; the prices are higher but the quality of the food is exquisite. You can choose from many worldwide cuisines, from sushi and German sausages, to jerk chicken curries and Italian olives and breads.”

A couple of brownies that may or may not contain 'special seasoning'

The pretty town of Ashland in southern Oregon puffed its way into the news this week, when a restaurant opened there specialising in a particular kind of baking. The legal position of the cannabis cuisine which the restaurant serves is rather sketchy. Oregon, like 15 other states and Washington DC, permits marijuana use for medical purposes. (Similar legislation is pending in a dozen further states.) Local cops say that the totally unhippyish-sounding Earth Dragon Edibles is breaking the law, but news reports say the restaurant opened “without a hitch”. Apparently sober customers – or “patients”, as they must be known – all seemed keen. One of them, an ex-law enforcement official with a lovely white beard and a tie-dye T-shirt, said: “I’ve seen the bad sides and the good sides [to marijuana], and for 30 years I’ve been disabled and it saved my life so far.” Which is heartening.

I should have predicted what a gargantuan quantity of lore and expertise surrounds cooking with marijuana. My own involvement is limited to a rainily predictable afternoon as a student, resulting in a tray of mulchy, green-flecked brownies. They tasted as if a rodent had died on a compost heap, but nonetheless exposed a previously unseen hilarity in Richard and Judy’s You Say We Pay. (Adam Buxton recognised almost the same thing a couple of years later.)

Inevitably, it turns out we did it all wrong. The psychoactive components of cannabis are best released in warm fat or alcohol: connoisseurs apparently make a kind of butter using the leaves and stems of the plant, or steep them in rum or brandy to produce a liqueur bearing the neat if tautological name of crème de gras.

Cooking with weed has a long and not ignoble tradition. Mixed with ground almonds, milk and sugar into a drink happily called bhang, it’s used in religious rites across much of northern India. Chinese cannabis recipes go back to the 7th century BC, and Bartolomeo Platina included a recipe for “a health drink of cannabis nectar” in the world’s first printed cookbook, De Honesta Voluptate Et Valetudine (“On Honourable Pleasure and Health”), published in 1475.

The brownie is arguably the most famous recipe for weed thanks to Alice B Toklas, who published a 1954 cookbook full of anecdotes about the famous people she had known, particularly Gertrude Stein. (Stein in fact wrote Toklas’s 1933 “autobiography”, which in itself sounds like a fairly stoned thing to do.) The Alice B Toklas Cook Book included a recipe for “Haschisch Fudge”: readers were assured this was “the food of Paradise … it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR“. Indeed it might.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Time to tell you about something that’s been gestating for a while. I’m setting up a street food venture with James Ramsden called Kebab Kitchen. We’re going to be selling beautiful unminced doners using free-range meat (Suffolk chicken, West Country lamb), hot lavash bread, smoked garlic buffalo yoghurt sauce, red cabbage lightly pickled in pomegranate molasses, onions with sumac and lemon zest, fat roasted chillies, searing hot sauce, crunchy cucumber and tomato sprinkled with nigella (not Nigella) … that kind of thing.

James and I spent a couple of cold, rainy, raki-soaked weeks travelling round Turkey plundering ideas and methods for the ‘babs. In Gaziantep by the Syrian border we found a recipe for the most stunning, bright-red marinade; in Istanbul we pulled sizzling wood-roasted lamb off skewers with our teeth; near Izmir we found the perfect roasted chilli. Without making any bold claims of authenticity – we’re only ‘Eastern-ish’ – it’s all gone into this project.

We’re a mobile outfit – stalls and markets and so on; we’re on the lookout for the right permanent pitch but are itinerant for the time being. We’re launching this Friday at The StockMKT in Bermondsey Square – 10 minutes from London Bridge. Other events are planned over the summer, and we have some private parties booked.

It’s been tremendous fun setting this up – even the headachey bits like hygiene certificates, HMRC forms, health and safety courses, meetings with accountants, business plans and spreadsheets. We’re still working out how it’s all going to run. But we hope you’ll come down and join us for a proper British kebab.

Stargazy pie

It’s the British Pie Awards today, in Melton Mowbray of course, where a vast panel of judges will masticate their way through 18 categories of stuffed pastries. As well as predictable pork, banal beef and stalwart steak and kidney, there are classes for “football”, fish, “celebration” and “other meat”, which offer more to the imagination.

The event takes place in a church hall bedecked with bunting; the logo has a union flag emblazoned athwart a handsome pie. It’s touching and quaint, this English obsession with name-tags and rosettes for everyday stuff: white coats and serious, critical faces staring at a table of marrows.

We’ve loved pies for a long time in this country. Alan Davidson thoughtthe word might be a contraction of “magpie”: those birds collect a variety of things, and pies once contained a variety of ingredients.

The pies we have today, with their edible pastries and crinkled crusts, are probably indigenous. But until the 1600s, when people really started to systematise cookbook-writing, hardly anyone bothered to mention how pastry was made or what you did with it. We know that some cooks would get a lump of rye flour, mix it with hot water into a greyish putty, then punch this with their fists and raise the edges of the pie around the flattened bit. The meat – more usually, meats – would then be baked inside it, with water and flavourings. Once it was cooked, you’d drain off the gravy and fill the pie with clarified butter: it would keep for weeks or months in the larder. When you wanted to eat it, you’d make a fresh gravy, heat the pie up and discard the inedible pastry.

One of the loveliest things about pies is their universal appeal. From the start, everyone from the king down enjoyed them. At Hampton Court, the largest oven in the pastry house was 12ft wide and baked pies containing entire venison. Everyone else’s pies contained a mishmash of meats or whatever birds they’d managed to snare. Dorothy Hartley includes a recipe for rook pie in her overrated and turgid tome Food in England. Most rook meat is “bitter and black,” she says: you boil the breasts only in water and milk, put them on top of a steak, “weave bacon into a lattice over the birds”, cover everything in pastry then bake it. “Serve with mustard,” she enjoins (presumably before brisk vomiting).

Continue reading at the Guardian

Spoons made from different metals

A piece for the Guardian on a singularly bonkers dinner I recently attended

Has anything amusing ever happened to you in connection with a spoon? When Private Eye asks the question, the answer is usually no: the Me and My Spoon column features spoons because spoons aren’t especially interesting. Or weren’t until now. The other day I went to a dinner about spoons. Or, more specifically, on what spoons are made of, which would be a good name for an inspirational movie about spoons. It was at the Indian restaurant Quilon, and the idea was to see whether using different metals in cutlery affected the taste of food.

They sat us down in front of seven shiny spoons: copper, gold, silver, tin, zinc, chrome and stainless steel. We were about 12: Harold McGeelooking owlish, Heston Blumenthal with his arm in a sling, some academics, journalists and PRs. The dinner was organised by something called The Institute of Making, which sounds like a university for toddlersbut is in fact “a multidisciplinary research club for those interested in the made world”. “Artist and maker” Zoe Laughlin, one of its founders, was there. Her website, asifitwerereal.org, includes “a selection of biographies” variously written by “a friend”, “a parent”, “a sibling”, “a stranger” (someone she met on the Tube) and “a pet” (“Zoe has no pets,” we’re told).

In front of me was a booklet with background research. “In this project,” it informed, “we asked ourselves how do these materials taste, do they affect the taste of food, and is it possible to understand, and thus design, the affect (sic) they have?” Overleaf was a series of tasting notes on spoons. Copper, I read with a creeping sense of terror, is “found to slightly inhibit saltiness”, silver has “a slight bitterness”, zinc carries an “earthly, dry, rasping tendency” while poor old stainless steel was prosaically glossed as “familiar”.

The food at Quilon is deliciously spiced and complex: it was impossible to focus on the spoons. To me, these varied only in their metal-ness – copper tasted more metallic than stainless steel, which tasted more metallic than gold. As far as I could tell, this was more or less it. But around me cooed a table in raptures at different “flavours” in the metals. “I dare you to try the copper spoon with the grapefruit!” challenged a dauntless soul. “Check out the taste profile of silver with beer foam!” raved another. Even Blumenthal, who looked thoroughly baffled by proceedings, gamely chipped in by observing “there’s a bitterness to the zinc”.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Food for Louis: eating eyeballs, raw heart, a live scorpion and a frog. Photographs: YouTube

A piece for the Guardian on Louis Cole, who eats strange things

A YouTube channel called Food for Louis reached 1m hits on one of its videos last week. Louis Cole is a shaggy-haired 28-year-old living in Roehampton, south west London. Since he started posting videos last May, Cole has filmed himself eating, among other things, 21 live locusts, a raw bull’s heart, a turkey leg crawling with maggots (the “Christmas special”, that one), a rotting dead frog , a “mouseshake” (10 dead mice blitzed in a blender), a large, live lizard from the Brazilian jungle, a live tarantula, live crayfish, live scorpion and, most controversially to judge by the “dislikes” and comments, “my pet goldfish”.

After the bush tucker trials of I’m a Celebrity, Bourdain with his balut,Bear Grylls and Fear Factor, the British public is now familiar with this kind of stunt eating. But Cole takes things rather further. I don’t know which is worse: the dead lizard spasming as it pokes out of his mouth, the way he grips four tarantula legs in each hand before biting the creature’s head off, the crayfish pinching his tongue, or the money shot of the mashed-up scorpion, disconcertingly resembling beef stroganoff. No, I do know which is the worst: the ragworms. Cole manages three of these, each a little under a foot long. They bite him back when he puts them in his mouth. As he delivers the coup de grace and begins to crunch, his gag reflex is so strong that a half-chewed ragworm corpse splatters out of his mouth. Undeterred, he slurps it back in like a ribbon of fettuccine.

If it all sounds idiotic, pointless and embarrassingly laddish, the most surprising thing about Cole is that he doesn’t talk or act like an extra from Jackass. He’s softly-spoken and rather unassuming in person. Before he started earning what he tells me is “enough to survive on” making his YouTube videos, he spent five years as a community worker helping to run an organisation that sought to protect inner city children from gangs. He has taken troubled youths to countries such as Zambia, and says it was terrible when one London council ended its association with him after it became aware of his YouTube channel.

Cole started eating strange things for dares a few years ago. “My mates would get me to eat a spider,” he says. “I never had any problem with it.” He began with the easy stuff – a wasp, a rotten apple – before graduating to more challenging delicacies.

Continue reading at the Guardian

The Pizza Hut hot dog stuffed crust: 'delicious'. Photograph: Pizza Hut

A potentially career-ending piece for the Guardian on Pizza Hut’s hot dog stuffed crust

Those Americans who think of Britain as a backward food desert are this week eating their words. For we are the first to experience Pizza Hut’s latest wheeze, the “hot dog stuffed crust” – a sausage coddled in the crust of a large pizza. (Don’t all start hieing ye to your nearest branches just yet: it’s delivery only at the moment.) The Sun understatedly calls this creation “the stuff of dreams”. Fox News and the LA Times deem us “lucky” to be so honoured. No less an organ than Time magazine hails a “caloric coma”, and in an existential cri de coeur, laments that Britain is “one step ahead in the heart-attack-in-a-box department”. How, it wonders, can America “redeem its title as most unhealthy country … Come on Paula Deen, where are you when we need you the most?”

It was Pizza Hut, you may remember, who unleashed the stuffed crust on to a peaceful world in the distant 1990s. They got that discriminating gastronome Donald Trump to flog it; Trumpy barked that we had to eat the slices “crust first”. (A Brooklyn family who owned a patent for crust-stuffing sued Pizza Hut for $1bn at the time; they lost the lawsuit in 1999 (pdf).) You’d have thought that mucking around once with crusts would be enough for these people. But no. “The new range,” gushes a spokesman, “builds on our proud tradition of creating innovative dishes to enjoy on a night in with friends.”

I hadn’t eaten a Pizza Hut in around a decade, since I worked in one during the school holidays. I remembered frozen discs of dough which we sprayed with a canister of “developer” so that they rose like boils in the pans. I remembered lumps of beef and pork distinguished by different shades of brown. I remembered sloppy tinned pineapple and anchovies that smelled of infection. Hopes were low.

Continue reading at The Guardian

Pret staff: a cheery bunch. Photo: Garry Weaser for the Guardian

A piece for The Guardian’s Comment is Free on Pret a Manger

Pret a Manger’s plans to create 550 jobs in the UK and open 44 new branches are good news in an industry still reeling from the pasty tax bombshell. The company’s sales are up 15% on 2011, the profits by 14% to £52.4m. As the economy continues to founder, such expansion is impressive. They’re not a perfect company, but Pret’s success is worth celebrating.

The rise of Pret typifies the improvements in British eating over the last generation. The company was founded by college friends Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham in 1986, with a shop in Westminster. At the time, Metcalfe says: “Eating in London was very grim. There were lots of Italian sandwich bars. Italian food is amazing, but it was like the worst Italian chefs came here.” Towers of pre-buttered bread, greasy counters and tubs of slop were dispiritingly common: Pret was clean, sleek and sensibly designed.

The product it served was, and remains, better than the standard offering of the British high street. Compare its sandwiches with those of Boots: Pret’s are of course more expensive – around £3 apiece instead of £2 – but often taste more than 50% better. The avocado salad wrap is lovely, but they do continue to produce monstrosities – the “famous all-day breakfast sandwich”, the various tepid, salty wraps, the chewy bits of bacon. And they have a strange addiction to mayonnaise.

Still, Pret sandwiches have no sell-by date: 95% of stores give their leftovers to homeless charities. (The company also runs a training scheme for homeless people and ex-offenders, and claims more than 70 people have been “taken off the streets” as a result.) Pret has introduced the public to potentially unfamiliar dishes such as miso soup. Its porridge is lovely on a hoary winter commute. If the nation’s sandwich shops have improved since the 1980s, it is in part a reaction to the higher standards of Pret.

Continue reading at Comment is Free

A HotCan advertising image, accompanied on billboards by the strapline 'Chefs hate us'

A piece for The Guardian on self-heating food

So there are these tins that heat themselves up. HotCan. “No microwave. No kettle,” they seem to scold from the label. They’ve been around for 30 years but the company has just started to promote them more intensively: rebranding the tins, opening a new factory, releasing new flavours and so on.

There’s something almost alchemical about them. The tins are fixed in thick, insulated pouches. You take the plastic lid off and there’s a sort of pointy Allen key inside, which you use to pierce three little holes in the insulation surrounding the tin. Then you wait a couple of minutes, an ominous bubbling begins, steam starts to hiss from the holes, and you panic the can is about to explode and shower you in shrapnel and lava. So you gingerly reread the label through slitted fingers, and it tells you you should have opened the tin first. You hold it at terrified arm’s length like a bomb you’re trying to defuse, lift its ringpull with a spoon, and give everything another 10 minutes to warm through. Or at least that was my experience.

They come in seven inescapably tinny flavours such as beans with meatballs, chicken curry with rice and cheese ravioli in tomato sauce. I had “spicy beef pasta” (at 8 o’clock in the morning – the things you’ll do to deadline). The contents reached 52C according to my kitchen thermometer: emphatically tepid, and best described as a brown, lumpen, heavily spiced sludge. HotCan also sent me “bangers & beanz” but, since that tin didn’t heat properly and its sausages were shrivelled like salted snails, you’ll forgive me if I merely tasted it with my eyes. In all, they’re better than Pot Noodles, in the way that a broken finger is better than a broken arm.

Continue reading at The Guardian

Heston Blumenthal's snail porridge at The Fat Duck

A piece for The Guardian on signature dishes

Signature dish. There’s something old-school and stolidly Escoffier about that phrase, suggesting carpeted dining rooms and soaring toques, curly moustaches and copperplate menus. It carries a uniquely cheffy vanity.

They are vital to almost every restaurant, and customers tend to seek them out. It’s only when you start to think about it that you realise to what degree the restaurant industry relies on the concept of signatures, from steakhouses to Pizza Express.

McDonald’s has so many a list of them reads like a petition. Its most famous dishes are decades old. The Filet-O-Fish arrived in 1962; the Big Mac is a soixante-huitard; the Quarter Pounder appeared in 1973, the McNugget (such a pretty word) in 1979. These signatures – I think it’s fair to call them that – are embedded in customers’ minds and perhaps were part of their childhood. Repeat custom is the basis of McDonald’s business model, as it is for any restaurant.

Restaurants use signature dishes to entice as well as keep customers. Many of the high-profile openings around London in the last year have had a signature: the cod cheek popcorn of Mishkin’s, the lobster brioche roll from Burger & Lobster, The Delaunay‘s tarte flambée. “Have you had the such-and-such at such-a-place,” restaurant fans like to ask each other in knowledgeable tones. These dishes done well create a buzz around the restaurant; it would be a brave or foolish chef who took no time over them.

Continue reading at The Guardian

A woman using a Wonderbag in Soweto, South Africa. Photo: Mark Lanning

A piece for The Guardian on the Wonderbag

I made a batch of chilli last night. Two, actually. One went into a very sleek and impressive slow cooker that Cuisinart sent me, the other into a brightly patterned, spongy bean bag of an oven called a Wonderbag. After six hours, both gave me a rich, smooth stew, and though the slow cooker’s was probably richer and smoother, the Wonderbag’s was more impressive for a number of reasons.

“Eco cooking that’s changing lives,” they call it. I honestly can’t remember when I last felt this positive about a recent addition to the kitchen. The principle is: you start your cooking on the stove, get everything hot then stick the whole pan in the Wonderbag, which is well insulated and will allow the food to continue cooking for up to 12 hours. Rice takes about an hour; I reckon lamb shanks would need two or three.

A South African entrepreneur named Sarah Collins, whose background is in social development, created the Wonderbag a couple of years ago for the townships of Durban. Many of the people who live there spend up to a third of their income on fuel, usually paraffin, or a large proportion of their time gathering solid fuel in the form of wood or dung. When burned these release toxic smoke that fugs houses and poisons lungs; the environmental journalist Geoffrey Lean says that 2m people, mainly women and children, are killed every year by these fumes.

Continue reading at The Guardian

Two buckets of popcorn. Photo: Alamy

Perhaps it had to happen eventually. Joshua Thompson, a Michigan “security technician” furious at being prohibited from carrying his own food and drink into the cinema, last week filed a class action against a large American cinema chain. His lawyer claims that for AMC to charge around $8 for a Coke and some chocolate-covered peanuts amounts to price gouging. A professor of business law at Eastern Michigan University has called the suit “a loser”, but Thompson is not the only cineaste horrified by the price of snacks.

From a business point of view, cinemas are only partly about films. “When we bought [Odeon],” Guy Hands of private equity group Terra Firma famously said, “the management team really believed they were part of the film business. I had the difficult job of explaining to them that they were in the popcorn-selling business.”

Cinemas are obliged to split money from ticket sales with the film studios, but get to keep almost all the cash they make from selling food. That means that the “concessions” (popcorn, sweets and the like) make up 20% of a cinema’s revenue but 40% of its profits. A box of popcorn is around 85% profit to the cinema, and salty foods of course encourage people to buy more soft drinks, increasing receipts further. “Without the hefty concession profits,” declared an article in Time a few years ago, “there would be no movie theater business”.

Continue reading at The Guardian

A feature for G2

It is just after prime minister’s questions, and it’s all rather lively in the Strangers’ Dining Room in the House of Commons. Sir Peter Tapsell, father of the house, is at a corner table, burbling contentedly. Tory and Labour MPs are rigidly segregated. A staff member with Charles Darwin’s beard spoons out crumble and custard. Down the corridor in the empty bar they are serving “Top Totty Blonde Beer”, with its bunny-eared model. By the following day this will be withdrawn, after a complaint from the shadow equalities minister, Kate Green.

I am here as a guest of MP Kerry McCarthy, having read recently of theappalling hardships our Honourable Members endure in their dining rooms and refectories. “Literally uneatable” was Tory MP Laurence Robertson’s verdict on the food served in the Commons last year. Another member bewailed their “bucket” of chips, adding that while such presentation is “no doubt trendy”, it makes the chips “soggy”. (“The tower arrangement is better,” this gourmet claimed.) Packets of crisps from Commons vending machines are 10g too light. The beetroot is “tasteless”, the eggs are “watery” and the salads are “cold”. In all, despairs one MP from the wood-panelled dining room with its sweeping views of the Thames, eating in the mother of parliaments is “a dismal experience”.

There are, remarkably, 28 different food outlets in the Westminster complex. The grandest and most traditional are the adjacent Members’ and Strangers’ Dining Rooms. These share a menu, the former’s being heavily subsidised. Only MPs and officers of the Commons are allowed in the Members’, the Tea Room and various other places. “I don’t like the food and can’t eat most of it,” says McCarthy, who is a vegan. “I think it’s generally pretty OK – though some of the combinations are a bit bizarre.” Starters at the Strangers’ include rabbit and apricot terrine or roast partridge breast, both £6.75. I have chicken with cabbage and black pudding potato cake: tepid but tasty and, at £13.55, cheap compared with many central London restaurants.

Continue reading at the Guardian

I was in Milan for fashion week. I say ‘for’, but ‘during’ is probably more accurate, or ‘despite’. It was a one-night job to visit a pop-up restaurant called The Cube, a postmodernist construction designed or commissioned by Electrolux, perched like a pigeon atop various European landmarks. They started in Brussels; Stockholm and London are coming up, and this time they stuck it on the building next to the Duomo.

Milan hardly feels like Italy: in most meaningful senses, it’s northern European. People stomp around looking grim and serious, swooshing silk and designer clobber. Boulevarded and boutiqued, the whole place struts. If Italy is a default, 19th-century compromise, then Milan is the resentful party. Most of the Milanese I spoke to griped about the south without prompting.

My cousin is at university there and I arranged to come out the day before so I could crash on his sofa. I joined him and his gilded friends for dinner at a film-themed place called Papermoon, supposedly frequented by Hollywood types when they’re in town. It was pizza and pasta, and the place is overlit, but we ate and drank well for a little under €50 a head, which I’m told is a miracle in Milan. At the next-door table gabbled perhaps 18 models, there for fashion week, scarfing pizza and pasta as if they’d never heard of lettuce. Henry – my cousin – says that the Milanese eat carbs like famished Stakhanovites, but you rarely see a fat one. They’re just less neurotic about food than we are.

The day I went, the chef at The Cube was a chap called Andrea Sarri, whom I should have heard of but hadn’t. He runs a place called Agrodolce, and though sweet and sour is characteristically Sicilian he’s based near Sanremo by the French border. Sarri is a slim and gregarious chap, and his food matches beautifully abstracted presentation with winning, ingredient-led Italianate simplicity. It worked well in a place that seats just 18, all sitting round one table.

We ate almost no meat. Scallops in English-trannied “acidolous salade” were wibbly bivalves with crisp frisée in a trickle of broth. I loved a pre-dessert of yoghurt cream with persimmon sauce and popping candy coated in chocolate, but the best dish by far was a langoustine risotto, gunged with rich, sweet tomato pulp and a dollop of mozzarella cream. Italian cooks tend to work within specific constructions: not for them – or more particularly their customers – the extraneous pairings and gallant nonsense of other Europeans. Predictably, Sarri worked best with seafood, simply treated.

The Cube is coming to London in time for the Olympics. They won’t tell me where it’s going to be but I heard it might be plonked on Tower Bridge, which would be a hell of a venue. It rotates high-end (read: Michelin-starred) chefs from the countries that host it, but again I have no details on who the English chefs will be. I hope they avoid the obvious London ones.

The Cube by Electrolux, 1 Via Ugo Foscolo, Milan
Bookings at: electrolux.co.uk/Cube/Milan
Much better photos than mine here

A piece for The Guardian on how restaurateurs design menus so that people pay more

Restaurateurs and those who advise them have long argued that people read menus in predictable ways. The received wisdom holds that a diner will start on the right-hand side of a menu, a little way above the middle, before zooming up to the top right-hand corner. Then he’ll jump backwards to the top left and down the left-hand page, then finally fill in the gaps in the bottom-right and the middle.

Not so, apparently. New research from San Francisco State universityclaims to overturn this notion. Once they had hooked people’s heads up to computers, presented them with menus and studied their eye movements, the researchers found that participants read menus sequentially from left to right, like books. (In part, this confirms Gallup research (pdf) from 1987.)

The findings could have important implications for menu design and the way we order in restaurants. Restaurateurs might need to rethink placing their showcase items at the top-right of their menu or just below it. The menu from Keith McNally’s majestic New York brasserieBalthazar, deconstructed in this paper a couple of years ago, proudly places “Le Bar à Huîtres” at the top-right of the page, with its high-margin plateaux de fruits de mer at $70 and $115 and half a lobster at $23. (It also sticks a prawn cocktail there for $15: this might look expensive in isolation but seems almost cheap beside such expensive dishes.)

Continue reading at The Guardian

Kettle Chips: the only acceptable fancy crisp

Something for The Guardian on supposedly ‘posh’ crisps

Following their horribly named “Do us a flavour” marketing campaign of a couple of years ago, Walkers have just announced a new gimmick - what’s that flavour? - introducing three “mystery” crisp flavours for the public to identify. I’ve just tried them. Packet A tastes of salt and stale milk, and a glance at the ingredients reveals it contains “mystery dairy seasoning”. Packet B smells of concentrated tomato syrup and tastes of dried blood (that’ll be the suitable-for-vegetarians “mystery meaty seasoning”); while packet C is vaguely curried and yoghurty and may turn out to be chicken tikka masala (it has pictures of chicken breast, chillies and coriander on the packet “for inspiration”).

I pine – don’t you? – for a time when crisps were just crisps. Why this need to take nice shards of fried potato and dust them in weird chemicals that never resemble what they’re supposed to? Walkers have decked their latest packets in pictures of fresh sage, chives, ripe tomatoes, crumbly parmesan and – good God – yellow peppers. This is presumably supposed to make the crisps look more upmarket, but it just seems grasping and odd.

“Posh crisps are the biggest scam of our time,” said Jay Rayner a while back. Four quid is too much for a small sachet of fried potatoes, even if the spuds have been “fried in extra virgin olive oil” (a stupid idea) or “dusted with pink Himalayan rock salt” (posh salt being an even worse scam than posh crisps). India Knight is another journalist who can’t abide expensive chips. They’re “annoyingly crispy,” she says, “so there’s no meltiness at any point, only these spiky shards – and to me they taste overwhelmingly of stale oil … Crisps are fried potatoes. They are not a thing that needs to be faffed about with.”

Continue reading at The Guardian

Pigs at West End Farm, Wiltshire. Photo: Oliver Thring

A piece for the Guardian on the welfare of British pigs

Red Tractor pork is high welfare pork – or so the adverts say. The UK’s pig industry is in the midst of a £2m marketing campaign encouraging people to consider the welfare of British pigs. Around 80% of British pork farms unite under the Red Tractor scheme, which has specific welfare standards. These turn out to be more or less the legal minimums, but at least guarantee that the pork is British.

Supermarkets, which sell most of the pork in this country, care about profits first and are thus happy to sell lower welfare Spanish, Danish or Polish pork to British consumers who often want the cheapest product. This is helping to put many UK pork farmers out of business. The total UK pig herd shrank by 40% in the last decade, while UK pig farmers lost over £100m last year owing to the rising costs of pig feed and because higher welfare standards than many EU countries mean our pork is more expensive to produce.

It’s broadly true that British pigs enjoy better living conditions than most of their European counterparts; the British pig industry claims that most of the pork we import from the EU could not be produced legally in this country. In 1999 sow stalls became illegal in the UK, as they are in Sweden: they remain commonplace in much of the continent and some US states. These monstrous cages, which maximise the number of pigs which can be housed in a space, restrict a sow’s movement during almost all of her four-month pregnancy to an area little bigger than her own body. (Sows have litters every four months or so, usually with just a few days between pregnancies.) Unable to turn around or even lie down comfortably, she is utterly unable to engage in the natural activities of a pig: rootling, exploring, or building a nest for her piglets.

Sow stalls are to be phased out across the EU by 2013, though farmers will still be permitted to use them during the first four weeks of a sow’s pregnancy. British pork farmers echo concerns about enforcement of the EU ban on caged hens which came in to force on 1 January, worrying privately that many European farmers will simply ignore the legislation. As one said to me: “We know jolly well they’re not going to implement it.”

Continue reading at the Guardian