THE EEL AND I

 A year or three back, the inamorata and I went to a restaurant in London’s Chinatown, and 

ate salted eel.

 

It was really good, and as the days went by we thought about it and decided it was one of the best things we’d ever eaten. So a few weeks later we decided to go back to the same restaurant and have the eel again. But either the restaurant had gone or we were looking in entirely the wrong place, or our minds had been so clouded by the joy of the eel that we’d become totally disoriented, but whatever the reason, searching then and later, we failed to find the restaurant.  At times I wondered if I’d dreamt the whole thing. 

 

And you might say we could have looked through our bank and credit card records but we’d paid cash and we hadn’t kept a copy of the bill because we didn’t think there was any reason to - we thought we knew exactly where the the place.  We gave up on our search for the restaurant though we didn’t give up on salted eel.

 

On recent summer meanders through Chinatown, the whole area has looked like a tourist refugee camp, with long queues to get into many of the restaurant.  And OMG have you seen the prices?  25 quid seems about standard for half a Peking duck.  They’re having a larf aren’t they?

 

So it was that we ended up recently in a Chinatown restaurant called Lido, where there was reasonably priced salted eel on the menu, and there was also salted squid so we had that too, along with some noodles.

 

The eel and the squid, and indeed the noodles, were all very good.  Was this the salted eel of my dreams?  No, but then I suppose it couldn’t have been.  That’s how it is with dream food.