I was first proud, and then terrified, to be invited recently on Monocle 24 Globalist show for an interview with Tyler Brulé himself. The subject, a recent survey showing that fast food in France had overtaken meals eaten in traditional sit-down restaurants. Continue reading
It used to be so simple. A palate-swamping Yorkie bar, gobbled down so quickly it hardly touched my tonsils let alone my tongue. Mashed potato with too much salty butter, toast with too much salty butter, scones with too much salty butter, soda bread… Sneaky roast chicken underbelly pickings or carrot cake cream cheese glaze, (mostly without even bothering with the cake) were my fixes when I needed something to trigger a million subconscious, nostalgic connections and soothe my stress. Continue reading
To be published by Flammarion in France, US & UK in September. (English title “Trish Deseine, The Paris Gourmet.”)
All about loving food in Paris, my favourite restaurants & foodshops.
1 stalk of lemongrass (optional)
Break the chocolate into 2cm pieces and place in a bowl large enough to contain the liquid. Mix the coconut milk and passionfruit nectar in a small saucepan, and heat. (If you are using lemongrass, allow it to steep some in the hot coconut milk mixture). Pour the hot liquid over the white chocolate pieces and allow to sit for 3-4 minutes before stirring.
Serve warm.
(Photography by Kristina Gill; dipping bowls, medium pebble bowl, espresso cups, and square by mud australia)
Words, Stephen Bayley. Link here.
Dinner Musings:
“Restaurant” is an idea whose time has gone. But it has had a good run since the concept of serving food to complete strangers emerged just after the French Revolution, when chefs dispossessed of their roles in country houses looked for work in Paris. Only people with severe psychological problems nowadays want fawning service by paramilitary regiments of liveried flunkies and all the preposterous cloche-lifting and crumb-sweeping and bowing and scraping that go with it.
The more sophisticated you are, the less likely you are to want the faux-sophistication of a traditional restaurant. You will prefer a dive, a burger stand, a bodega, a bacaro, a cervezeria or a winkle stall. Obviously, no one wants to eat filth, but style and success in the matter of eating out are matters of social competition and cultural modeling, not gastronomy or nutrition.
Thus, Russell Norman’s Polpo formula is exactly right for the tenor of the times. The Beak Street, London, HQ has been roaring since it opened three years ago. The food is cleverly conceived, but, to be honest, a bit erratic in its execution. Service is charming, but hopeless. And I always go back. That Russell Norman came from a family involved in architectural salvage and once taught drama are significant. The Polpo interior is high-concept crud, but achieves an intimate theatricality, which is endlessly attractive. It doesn’t feel like a laboratory. It feels like a party.
And no one except insiders knows who cooks at Polpo. This is exceptionally clever because the suggestion, quite correctly, is that the restaurant as a whole is much more important than the sun-dried ego of the annoying big-head chef. If Polpo’s chef walks, who’s to care? The menu is a reliable formula, which any semi-competent could replicate. It’s the ordinary thing extraordinarily well done.
This is what I want to see more of this year: the higher ordinariness. Less fuss. In food as in all things, simple is not the same as commonplace.
As the novel and biographies tend to decline, so travel and cookbooks are in ascent. There’s a fundamental link between the two genres. At a silly level, people buy books about places they never intend to visit (I recently bought a 50s classic about eastern Afghanistan) and books about food they never intend to cook (I have one example of preposterous French ambition with a recipe calling for five liters of veal stock and two of single cream).
But, more interestingly, food and travel, especially food and travel literature, are about journeys. Real or conceptual, it doesn’t matter. As Picasso said, if it can be imagined, it’s real.
So it is with restaurants. Eating out is an invitation to a voyage. You don’t get fed, you get transported. I only ever eat the cooking of places I want to visit. I only drink wine made in places I want to be. Yes, of course, I know about the excellent wines coming out of New Zealand. But I want to pull the cork on a dark red fantasy about a sun-baked cabanon in the Minervois with Laetitia Casta expected for lunch. I don’t want to unscrew the top and release a Sauvignon Blanc nightmare about sheep-farmers in knee socks, creaking Land Rovers and bungalows.
On the small Soho street where I have my office I can go to a Seville bodega, a US Interstate Diner, a noodle shop resembling the canteen of Nanking Technical University, a New Zealand dive bar and a barbecue pit that would look at home in West Texas. Never mind what you actually eat and drink, these premises are mind-altering substances.
Yes, this sort of architectural fantasy threatens to become kitsch, but if kitsch involves appropriation, collages, quotations, reflections, echoes, pastiche, fakery, charlatanism and ventriloquism, then kitsch is very interesting. In this interpretation, Venice, Paris, London and Rome are kitsch. Turns out, it suits me very well.
