BUNKERING

There was a fine (and provocative) piece by Jay Rayner in the Observer about the ‘binary choices’ facing the happy eater.  Do you go for tea or coffee, white sliced or sourdough, jam or marmalade?  These I found easy to answer but some of his other examples don’t seem quite so binary.  Vodka or gin he asks, and he doesn’t like gin, but for me there’s no definitive answer.  Gin in a martini, obviously, but vodka in a gimlet or a Bloody Mary.  Anyway I’m not here to pick a fight with Mr. Rayner – I’m no fool, unlike Gordon Ramsay.

But his ideas fitted in with some thoughts I had at The Grocer, a decent bar/restaurant in Spitalfields Market.

 

First impressions were great.  Our waitress, named Anneka, (lot of tattoos, one or two facial piercings – which I guess is standard for London waitresses) met us at the door and said ‘Sit anywhere you like.’ These are the best word I can ever here when entering an eatery.  The alternative is a server who insists on putting you at a small table, in a dark corner next to the toilet.  Hurrah for Anneka.  We went for a booth.

 

We ordered fish and chips which were good but they did, for me anyway, raise a binary question; does a pickled onion go with fish and chips? I know this is not one of the great existential questions but in fact I’ve got through my life this far without wanting a pickled onion with my fish and chips, and I’ve very rarely had one. What does that say about me?

 

However, The Grocer’s fish and chips came with a very small pickled onion, perhaps a bit large to be a cocktail onion but only just, and it was impaled on a cocktail stick which was in turn impaled in the fish, like this:

 

It was, of course, no problem.  I ate it and it didn’t trouble me, and if I hadn’t wanted to eat it I wouldn’t have, but I was still a bit surprised to find it there at all.  Jay Rayner says this kind of thing has a lot to do with where you’re born and raised, saying ‘Tell me whether you are chips with curry sauce rather than chips with gravy and I’ll have a strong sense of where you’re from.’  I think this is true, though for me personally the choice between curry sauce and gravy largely depends on if I'm in Yorkshire, and how many pints of Tetley’s I’ve had.

 

Anyway, the real beauty part of fish and chips at The Grocer was the vinegar: artisanal, old fashioned, slowly oak matured, and all this done in the Old Nuclear Bunker at Coverack in Cornwall, which looks like this:­

 

And some people claim to prefer ketchup with their chips.

 

PRETTY AS A PLATING

I saw this thing on Jay Rayner’s Instagram: “The best tasting food is rarely the most beautiful” - and I’ve been wondering if this is true.

I think Rayner's a good egg, and I’m definitely prepared to give his opinion some credence , especially since the other night I had this stuffed squid at Josephine’s:

 I thought it tasted great, but I’m sure some diners would have been put off by the way it looked. Well, that’s their problem, innit?

Certainly I like food that looks good, as when the beloved Anne Fishbein photographs it for LA Weekly, though I sometimes suspect the food looks better in her photographs than it tastes in reality:

I certainly don’t like prettified food, but ugliness per se isn’t a guarantee that something will taste good. This kebab didn’t look good and didn’t taste good either, but I’m sure others might have thought differently on both counts:

And then of course you get all those kitschy, and sometimes horrifying, old food ads that people on the internet seem to love, like this:

 and this:

And usually anything that involves Jello gets a lot of flak online, but you know, this image may be pretty strange looking:

But you know it contains cottage cheese, vinegar, onion, mayonnaise, lime and seafood salad.  I’ll bet it tastes great.