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June 21st, 2011

Bad Taste of London

26 comments

You will notice that I haven’t written much recently. This is because I am happy with my lot. I am content rather than miserable, chirpy not blue. And it is an absolute bastard for the creative process. But then I went to Taste of London and worked up a nice bubbling fury that got the old juices flowing.

I have been to The Taste of London festival a lot over the years and in fact went to the first one ever with my friend Jo. Those were the days. For ONE  POUND , Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay would cook lobster in dragon’s breath and feed it to you with a runcible spoon whilst tossing each other off. And you always had change for a hap ’worth of chips and a Dandy on the way home. Those were the days my friends. Good times.

Now though. Now! It’s a joke. A cynical escapade in the art of corporate money making. A machine, a clinical humbuggerance designed to empty your pocket faster than The Artful Dodger on crack.

That it is sponsored by British Airways should be a clue, that Waitrose has the biggest stand another. This isn’t a celebration of British food, or even British restaurants. It’s a shopping mall. Without a roof. In London. In June. So what you have essentially is a flooded shopping mall. It is Westfields with pissing rain and mud. Joy of heavenly joys.

Oh wait though! Give us £26 quid for the pleasure! So a dank, wet shopping mall with no parking, surly security guards, ridiculous currency and an exorbitant entry charge. How wonderful. Can I get a ticket for next year please?

‘But it’s a celebration of British restaurants you miserable git!’ Is it bollocks. It’s an opportunity for celebrity chefs to unleash their commis chefs from their basement manacles to slop tepid pork belly onto a polystyrene plate. Oh and charge you 14 crowns.

Ah yes. Crowns. They sound nice don’t they? Sort of medieval and quaint. You can imagine a troupe of travelling jesters doing their weekly shop with Crowns in Dribblecock-under-Wold or similar as they pass verily and merrily through.

Well think again friend. Crowns are not quaint and cute and dripping with historical chutzpah, they are yet another cynical and manipulative way for The Taste Corporation to extract their pound of flesh. For should you ever be daft enough to exhibit your product at one of their festivals you can expect to pay thousands of pounds for a tiny stand next to the loos AND, then at the end of each trading day you MUST hand all of your crowns in. These will be counted and you will then be sent a cheque months later. Less ten percent. Yes that’s right. They charge you for your pitch and then skim off your profit margin for good measure. Of course if Taste  just used cash the evil exhibitors might slip a few un-taxed quids out in their knickers. Oh, and if you, the punter, happen to have a couple of crowns left at the end of the day? Bad luck! Take them home and wipe your arse with them for all the value they have. Cha-ching! Bless Taste and their joyful ‘celebration’.

Half an under seasoned Scotch egg cost Four Pounds at the Quo Vadis stand. Half a Scotch egg. That means (keep up) that a SCOTCH EGG costs EIGHT POUNDS That’s essentially an egg, a slice of white bread and a few chipolata sausages. For eight quid. It’s not even a Golden Eagle egg. I’d pay eight quid for a lovely Golden Eagle Egg. And wash it down with dolphin tears and a fat cigar. But eight, new shiny pound coins for a stupid chicken egg in sausage meat makes me want to suck out my own eyeballs and Scotch them.

It gets me down, it really does. It’s not really the restaurants fault, God only knows how much they are paying for one of the premium stands, but why do it? I genuinely don’t understand what benefit for example Le Gavroche or similar get from being there? The food cannot be anything like as good as that served in their restaurants and the public are alienated by what looks from the outside as extreme stinginess.

But what do I know.

I know that I am a consumer, that I eat for pure joy. That I book every holiday I ever go on because of the food. I cook for people and make a living from it and dream of the perfect Scotch egg. And I know, most pertinently of all,  that I trudged out of The Taste of London with a heavy heart and an empty pocket and said to myself that never again would I support this corporate behemoth, posing as something, somehow wholesome and something, somehow good.

Posted in Luke's blog
May 18th, 2011

Liar

5 comments

I had foie gras stuffed into a sausage last night. At Bocca di Lupo in Soho. I’d love to tell you all about it but you know already. It must be the most reviewed restaurant of the last couple of years. Just go there, it was fantastico, if initially more than a little clamoroso….

See. What I’ve done there is find an online translator tool and typed in fantastic (could probably have done that one by myself….) and loud. Clamoroso means riotous which is actually much better than loud so I have been intellectually  outdone by the power of t’internet on several levels there.

I think that my point is that it is very easy to look clever/qualified/funny online. You can even buy dissertations.

Not mine you can’t. Although why anyone would want to plagiarise ‘Roddy Doyle and the ethics of male feminism’ is beyond me. How desperate was I to get laid at University? The Ethics of Male Feminism….. yup, sure, and what Doyle of course fails to deliver is a solid de-construction of post feminist male doctrine… now grab yer coat treacle and hop on the fun bus.

Everyone cheats and steals and fabricates and the walls come tumbling down. Except they don’t. Because the world tolerates creative manipulation of the facts. And thank God. On my CV right now (I have it open on screen)- are seven small lies, three quite big ones and one whopper that probably makes my CV an illegal document. But if I hadn’t done them I wouldn’t be making a living out of food. Shuddup. That’s a GOOD thing.

So I found myself in Antibes with no cooking experience, no money and no idea. But I did have an illicit CV and the gift of the gab. And to cut a long story short I talked my way onto the largest single sloop luxury yacht in the Mediterranean. As the Head Chef! I look back now and wonder in disbelief at my youthful temerity. And after a week the Captain said, unfortunately we are going to have to let you go when we get to Malta because you are clearly not a Chef.

You didn’t see that coming did you…..I have to say, at the time, I did.  But Skip liked me personally and I got him a bit drunk and agreed with his bonkers socialist conspiracy-theory nonsense and he gave me another chance. He also told me that the guests loved my food- my cooking was great. But I was supposed to be a Chef and that’s not just about cooking. I couldn’t get my head round the cleaning…? Stock rotation….? Staff food…..? Budgets…..? Accounts….? Sharing a miniscule cabin with a repugnant kiwi called Mal….? It was a learning curve. Apart from seven days off, I worked non stop from six in the morning until midnight every single day for seven months. And then in bed, I read Larousse Gastronomique until the small hours to ensure that I could knock up a decent brioche the next day, like an old pro.

It was by far the hardest I have ever worked, the furthest I have ever been out of my comfort zone. I wept quite a bit and despised it and myself at various times along the way. But it changed my life for ever and on my last day on board, the Captain asked me to come back the following Summer and in that instant I was vindicated, my lies didn’t matter because I had walked the talk. I sat on an Easy Jet flight from Nice to London and started laughing and genuinely punched the air as the most total and utter feeling of pride and achievement flowed through my veins. Never to return, as I could not readjust to polite society and was a homeless crack addict for ten years. This is my story..

See that’s a lie! I wasn’t homeless or a crack addict- but I bet I could get away with it and knock out a book about my time on the street…. Street Chef, 12 ways with rat and bin juice.

So, don’t believe everything you read, and always, always make ‘chefs’ cook for you before you give them a job….

Posted in Luke's blog
January 14th, 2011

Smile

2 comments

It’s barely perceptible. It crosses my face in a flutter of wings and is gone before you knew it was there.

I might be alone, I might be with people. But I know it when it comes because it warms me up, gives me a tingle of optimism, hope and joy. It is a smile. Only a smile. But an involuntary one, a REAL one. I don’t do pointless smiles. I am default, de-mob, grumpy. My face is set in a Neanderthal frown and I rarely expose my teeth because they are gappy and it’s a hangover from self-conscious puberty time. But I have this tiny, enigmatic (I think-it isn’t really) smile that I can’t predict or control that means more than the rictus grins of multitudinous others.

And it mainly happens when I put something nice in my mouth.

There are other times when it happens. Like when I am on a bus after a good meeting and I look around and hear the voices of my city. I think about  a bit of new business, a piece of paid writing and I see the river and smile. Almost inwardly, but my body feels like bursting because I am exactly where I want to be, the right age, the right place, it is all just right for those few seconds. Not for long mind, the walls of optimism come crashing down sharpish, but those lovely moments are mine to keep.

Or when I hear the right song. The one that is missing from my head at that particular moment, the one that makes me remember something that I wish I hadn’t forgotten. Then I smile.

But mainly it is when I put something in my mouth.

And when somebody that you love buys you dinner at the best restaurant in London on the eve of your birthday, you end up smiling more than you ordinarily would. Which is what happened on Wednesday when I was taken by SV to The Ledbury in Notting Hill.

I did the smile a bit earlier though- in The Lonsdale where I was just waiting. I had an hour to kill before our meeting time so I went to the smartest place I could think of, near to The Ledbury. A tall beautiful woman ushered me in to the dark empty space and I just sat at the bar, like an American man. It was empty and there was loud music that I didn’t know. It was nice. And I ordered the perfect drink for me, at that time, in that place- A whisky sour. If I’d ordered something fruity, long or even with loads of crushed ice I would have looked like a dick. Alone in that bar. So I drank my delicious whisky sour and half way down did a smile.

And she arrived, so beautiful I smiled again and then we went to The Ledbury.

And ironically the first thing I had to do was a massive fake smile because the nice French waitress smashed a wine glass all over my place setting and lap. God bless her, she was utterly mortified. She couldn’t have looked more appalled if I had caught her doing unspeakable things to a myopic donkey in front of my nephew in a convent. So I had to do the DON’T WORRY SMILE followed by ‘its fine!  It was probably my fault actually-Shall WE leave?  Are YOU ok? I really couldn’t give a tinkers cuss about such things but, being all English had to KNOW that she knew that.

But that was the last fake one. From then on in, only genuine. You probably want to see pictures now, don’t you, of all the lovely food and listen to  how  ”the apple counter balanced the foie with a tart acidity that one thought could only come from the genus Granny Smith”. But I haven’t taken a photograph for 25 years and there are myriad better food blogs than mine, where you can read about the food at The Ledbury. Here is how the food at The Ledbury made me FEEL. You don’t need to see pictures, they can never truly represent what is on the plate anyway*.

A plate of raw scallops, cut thinly and placed in a circle. Green oil and white ice crystals. It was essentially the best sushi roll ever. So simple- raw fish, seaweed oil and frozen hoerseradish- the seaweed and horseradish, northern European versions of nori and wasabi. And when I made that connection, seconds in, I laughed a litte and it made absolute sense.

Then the most beautiful and delicious of all sea creatures, the mackerel. Charred black skin, cold cucumber, a little raw flesh and shiso- more Asian influence, more deftness of touch and superlative control. I wanted more of this so badly I nearly cried as I dragged my finger across the remaining meagre juices.

Plump foie gras, crispy seared on both sides, melting voluptuous mess within. And the first little glimpse of actual genius. Something new, something wonderful. Christmas pudding puree. OF FUCKING COURSE. Its sweet fruit and spices. Of course it matches foie gras like a glove. But that thought had never popped into my head. Staggering. Beautiful. A new combination making my mind swim.

Then another sense. Smell. Truffle, shaved and pureed. I smelt it coming from behind my head. And it turns you on. Doesn’t it? It smells like animalistic sex on a forest floor and you know that’s what you want. But you eat your moist skate wing and cauliflower and banish such thoughts from your mind and. Smile.

Some post coital Pyrenean milk fed lamb for the Gentleman? Why thank you, don’t mind if I do. Can it be the softest, most intensively flavoured lamb that I have ever tasted please? With sticky reduced braising liquor that is the essence of every lamb that has ever gambolled. Nutty artichokes and crisp skin? Wonderful and I smile again.

Pudding was rubbish.

Cheese was good.

The wine tasting menu was perfect .

The company was breathtaking.

And just writing about the whole thing, this entirely hedonistic experience makes me happy. But I’m not smiling. One day in years to come, I will be driving and I will remember that food, how it felt in my mouth and there and then a smile will break across my face and only I will know the real reason why.

 

 

 

*if you really do want to see pictures of the food then check www.thehappinessprojectlondon.wordpress.com next week.

 

Posted in Luke's blog
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