GEOFF DREAMS OF CROQUETTES

 Somebody (was it Giles Coren? AA Gill? Brillat-Savarin?) said somewhere that the ‘secret’ of a good restaurant is that the people running it know what they want to do and then they do it as well as they possibly can. Which of course means it’s no secret at all, though a lot of restaurant managements seem not to know it.

 

So if you’re a proper English pub you don’t start serving fried silk worms and duck fetus – you serve steak pies and ploughmen’s lunches.  If you’re a Bangladeshi restaurant you don’t serve steak pies and ploughmen’s lunches. And so on.  It’s not about authenticity, it’s about understanding the mission.

 

On Sunday afternoon I was in Dirty Dick’s in Spitalfields, and saw there were ox cheek croquettes on the menu, and I was slightly thrown.  In one sense that’s not standard pub fare, on the other hand pig cheeks are surely an ancient and noble British tradition, even if croquettes aren’t.  Well, I’d have taken a chance on them but they were off, so a sausage roll was had instead: that’s Bloody Mary ketchup on the side.

 

PHOTOS BY GANNON STUDIOS

And so to Taro in Walthamstow, a newish Japanese restaurant, part of a small chain that knows what it’s about and delivers as promised.  It may not be the sushi that Jiro dreamed off, but it seemed everything a small local Japanese restaurant ought to be.

 

There was sashimi of tuna, salmon, mackerel, and shrimp

 

tempura vegetables (which actually weren’t that fabulous but I think I’m coming to the conclusion that I don’t really like tempura vegetables)

 

octopus balls - takoyaki

There were Japanese pickles too but we didn’t photograph them.  And here’s the beauty part: the premises used to be an eel and pie shop, and most of the relevant features, especially the tiles, have been retained. 

 

Taro do in fact serve eel, and I might like to think that’s a nod to local culture but then any good Japanese restaurant would serve eel anyway.  So that’s a double win.

 

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.