IN FRONT OF THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM

 Word is that Ferran Adrià, he of the restaurant El Bulli, the epicenter of molecular gastronomy fame, which closed in 2011, is about to the premises as a museum.  I like restaurants and I like museums but a food museum strikes me as tricky thing.

As far as I can tell, Adrià’s museum will consist of a lot of photographs of food, making it seem like a living Instagram, along with paintings by Adria, which from what I’ve seen are likely to make it look somewhat like a charity shop. Here’s some art he did earlier:  

 

But perhaps there’ll be art by other people too:

 

It appears there’ll be no museum café, and I don’t know whether or not there’ll be a gift shop.

 

Needless to say I never ate at El Bulli but my old late pal did Jonathan Gold  did, right before it closed, and reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal.  He compared it toYoko Ono’s art and an edible infomercial, which doesn’t sound as though he loved the place, but he talked about it on KCRW radio and I think his main point was it pays not to overthink what you were eating at El Bulli, which obviously is not going to apply in the museum.

 

Closer to home Bompas and Parr did very briefly, for about 3 months, set up The British Museum of Food, in Borough Market.  The museum's aspirations, they said at the time, were ‘to change peoples’ lives by helping them consider what they eat, spread knowledge around nutrition and health and to recognize its role in culture.’  Which sounds fair enough.  In 2016 the museum was looking for a permanent home, and as far as I know it still is.  I believe they have a very good menu collection.

 

In Japan there’s The Museum of Fruit, which I only know about because David Toop made a CD of music for the place. 

 

Originally I thought this must be some ironic conceptual art piece, but no, it’s an actual museum of fruit (kind of). The website says ‘Itsuko Hasegawa 長谷川逸子designed the Fruit Museum in the Yamanashi Prefecture near Mount Fuji in Japan, completed in 1997. The three shell-shaped buildings symbolize the “fruits” of spiritual sensuality, intelligence and lust. 

In a general sense, the buildings are trees producing fruits of creativity in the visitors who themselves will spread a sensitivity to our frail environment, and hopefully produce green buildings themselves.’

So no, not your average museum of food or anything else, but it does exist in the real world.

As most certainly do the two noodle museums dedicated to Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Food Products and inventor of instant ramen.

 

There’s one branch of the museum in Ikeda and another in Yokohama. The latter ‘offers the virtual experience of being a noodle in a huge factory, and going through the entire manufacturing process from making the noodles to shipping them.’

I think I might give that a miss and head for the tasting room. Yes this is a food museum where they actually give you food.  

 

And finally, I was thinking of the Brighton Pavilion, some way from being a museum of food but it’s the kitchen that I always remember best.  It looks pretty good as it is now, 

but it was probably more fun before it became an exhibit. 

HEART ATTACK AND HIGHWAY 62

No doubt you’re dying to hear what I ate during my sojourn in California.  Truth is I ate pretty ‘low’ most of the time: I felt that was what the late Jonathan Gold might have wanted.  His presence still looms over the Los Angeles food scene, not least in this mural:

Here’s some beer and some seafood ramen that I ate at a restaurant in Little Tokyo, called Kagura.

You know, I’m increasingly not sure that I really like ramen and I certainly don’t see what all the fuss is about. The seafood was fine, and the broth was OK, though I could probably have done without the sweet corn. It was the noodles I had trouble with.  I mean they weren’t bad noodles and of course some noodles are better than others but in the end noodles are always just noodles.  The beer was fine.

At Cindy’s on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock I had the shrimp and grits, largely because it contained tasso ham which I’d never had before, hadn’t even heard of it. 

Apparently Tasso ham it’s a Louisiana thing, made from the hog’s shoulder, so not actually a ham if we’re being picky.  I’m sure it added to the general flavour but it was well back in the mix.  Tasso ham looks like this:

In Yucca Valley I went to the 62 Diner and ordered the "Buddy Holly" for breakfast. 

It’s just corned beef hash and scrambled eggs, but the items on the menu are named after pop performers of the 50s and 60s.  After I’d ordered, I heard the waitress tell another customer that the Beach Boys Fish and Chips was the specialty of the house but it was too late by then.   
          The waitress also said she really liked my hair and asked if I dyed it.  I said I didn’t, which was true, and this impressed her even more, though the notion that waitresses go around thinking that I might have dyed my hair is somehow unsettling.

This is a Cali-Club in the Denny’s in 29 Palms:  

Denny’s is always ‘reliable’ without being good, and has been for decades.  What seemed to have changed, in this branch anyway, was the waiting staff.  My waiter was a 300 pound, tattooed, muscled man mountain.  Maybe they need guys like that in 29 Palms in case the marines from the nearby base get a bit fractious late at night, although this was in the morning and my waiter surely have finished his shift long before the night.

This is carne asada from Kokopelli’s in Yucca Valley.  

They used to have this very fine figure outside but it’s gone now:

The carne asada was fine though I’ve had better, tastier, moister versions, even at Kokopelli's, but I've been going there so long that it almost feels like home.

And here is a Reuben sandwich, with potato salad, which I ate on my last day in LA, at a restaurant called Teddy’s Café at the corner of Pico and Bundy.  

I went there because it was easy walking distance from the rental office where I’d just returned my car.  I wandered in, ordered, ate, and when the bill came I asked if I could pay with a card and was told it was cash only. The bill came to a very reasonable $11.75 so I dug through my wallet and pockets and came up with all the cash I had, a grand total of $12.20.  

On the one hand I’m not very worried about this because I won’t be going back there any time soon, but I did feel like a bit of a heel.  The service was worth considerably more than 45 cents, and I’d hate any waitress in Los Angeles to think the English were a stingy bunch when it comes to tipping.  I mean, in general many of them are, but I like to break the mould.

THE BREEZE AND I

I used to be pathologically indecisive when it came to picking a restaurant, especially if I was in a place I didn’t know well, or at all.  I’d walk the streets, annoying my companions, saying, Oh this one’s too full, this one’s too empty, this one’s two bright, the menu at this one is way too long to be any good, and so on. 

I have got better, and it’s in part because of reading Jonathan Gold’s food writings.  If ever there was a man prepared to venture into an unpromising mini-mall to eat in an unpromising hole-in-the-wall restaurant it was Jonathan.  The economist called him "poet of the strip mall eatery" which somehow doesn't quite get it, though I'm sure they meant well.

I’m sure Jonathan sometimes ate some less than stellar food, but he was a man who always knew that another meal was just around the corner.  And when an unpromising restaurant turned out to be really pretty good you experience a satisfaction that doesn’t come from a restaurant for which you had justifiably high expectations.

 And so a couple of nights ago, for perfectly good if slightly complicated reasons, my companion and I were walking down Green Lanes, in Stoke Newington looking for somewhere to eat, increasingly prepared to settle prepared for anywhere that was open, wasn’t lit by bare fluorescent tubes, and had at least two customers.

We ended up in Mediterranean Breeze – a Turkish fish restaurant, which looked OK from the outside, was decently lit, and had just one occupied table, a party of three women.  It was in fact way too big to be considered a hole-in-the wall.

We sat down, and the three women immediately left, but we were already in so we stayed.  For the rest of the time we were there it was just us, a waitress (who I think went home after a while), presumably a chef though I never saw him, and Tony the wonderfully welcoming maitre d’.

The food was good, but on the night it seemed absolutely wonderful – the bream was fresh, the fried potatoes were perfect, the wine was cold and decent and cheap, Tony was a gem; and it seemed like we’d made the restaurant discovery of a lifetime.

And you know, it really didn’t look like the kind of place that would give you an amuse bouche, and they probably wouldn’t have called it that, but before the main courses we were presented with two gorgeous, plump, rich, briny oysters. 

For a while, admittedly quite a short while, it felt like I was sitting in the best restaurant on earth.

ALL THAT GLISTERS

The terrible news over the weekend was that the peerless food writer Jonathan Gold has died: a shocking surprise to most of us.

No doubt a lot of people who knew Jonathan much better than I did will be writing about him.  We didn’t see each other very often, but we’d eaten together, been at various events, exchanged emails from time, and I thought of him as a friend. I’m sure a great many did.

A few things to say immediately –

The best thing about his food writing - he wasn’t only interested in food – he knew and cared about music, literature, painting and much else besides, and it showed in his writing.

 He was wonderfully skilled at making you understand what a restaurant was actually like.  I’m not sure I ever read a really scorchingly bad review by him (though I know a few exist) and yet from his descriptions I absolutely knew there were some restaurants I’d never, ever want to go to.

I once asked him why he drove a big pickup truck, and he replied “Because I’m a  big man.”

Photo by the blessed Anne Fishbien

And finally, and forgive me if you’ve heard me say this before – he is the only Pulitzer Prize winner with whom I’ve ever shared a plate of pigs’ trotters.  The only one I’m ever likely to.  These are the trotters in question:

IF IT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR HELEN MIRREN ...

My pal Anthony suggested we go for lunch to Versailles, a Cuban restaurant on Venice Boulevard.  I’d never heard of it and he was surprised, and I’m sure I should have.  Everybody else seems to know it and most people seem to love it.  It gets 4 stars on Yelp (which of course means nothing much) but some reviewers say they’ve been going there happily since the 90s, and it was, apparently, founded in 1981.  

According to an article in the Daily Telegraph Helen Mirren has been known to eat there, and considers it part of her “perfect weekend,” though perhaps she doesn't go there dressed like this:  But hot damn, in any case.

As for why a Cuban restaurant would be named Versailles, I have no idea.  The waiter we asked certainly had no idea either, but then I didn’t really expect him to. I had a Cuban sandwich, which was as good as any.

And the oxtail stew was probably better, without being absolutely spectacular - those mushy things you see there are plantains.

But the place had a good vibe – cavernous rather than cozy, rough at the edges, waiters who are a long way from being obsequious.  I had no complaints.

But afterwards I thought, as I often do, what does Jonathan Gold have to say about this place?  And I found an LA Weekly review.  He wasn’t keen but it was one of those generous bad reviews that he’s rather good at. He writes “everybody but me, it appears, adores the crisp-skinned roast chicken.” “As usual my friend Margaret tells me I don’t know what I’m talking about." A bad review that would leave most restaurant owners feeling not too hurt. 

But then I noticed the date of that Gold review - December 9, 1998.  Blimey. I suppose it’s just conceivable that he might have changed his mind in the last 20 years.  

But that left me thinking, whatever happened to ephemerality?  Thanks to the Internet a 20 year old restaurant review remains “current.”  In 1998 I’m not sure I even really understood what the Internet was.  But I do remember a time when I used to think that a piece of writing wasn’t “real” unless it was printed on paper.  Now I tend to think the opposite.  Eternal verities – they’re a bad mistress.

A WALK ON MOM'S SIDE

It was Nelson Algren who, in A Walk on the Wild Side, wrote. "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

I am in the clear with the first of these rules, although if you’d ever played cards with my Uncle Frank, you might well have thought he could and should have been called Doc.  The third rule is a subject for another time, but until last month I could safely say that I’d never eaten at a place called Mom’s.

And then I went to Pahrump, Nevada where Mom’s is regarded by many as the best place in town to have breakfast.  It took a little finding but a local pointed me in the right direction, “It’s up the hill by the jail” and so it was.

The breakfast was good, the place was friendly, and those potatoes you see below were a knockout. 

However it was the men’s bathroom that I’m really going to remember. It looked like this: all custom cars, and a fake (perhaps homage to) Von Dutch. 

I know there’s a widely held opinion that if you don’t like the look of a restaurant’s bathroom, you’d definitely better not see the kitchen.  Sounds reasonable.  But I really liked the bathroom at Mom's, and if there’s as much attention to detail in the kitchen as in the bathroom then I think Mom’s is onto a winner.

Anyway, this Mom’s business has been on my mind recently, partly because I’ve been listening to music by Carl Stone, not least an album of his titled Mom’s, released in 1992.

Carl Stone, should you need bringing up to speed, is an American, avant-garde, electronic composer who uses sampling, looping, musical fragments that go in and out of phase, repetition, and endurance.  The overall effect is amazingly, sometimes mystically, uplifting and transporting.  I gather he divides his time between California and Japan, where he’s on the faculty of the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University.

But here’s the psychogourmet part: a lot of his compositions are named after restaurants, many of them from Los Angeles.  The compositions on the album Mom’s are titled Banteay Srey, Gadberry’s, Shing Kee, Chao Nue, and of course Mom’s.

I’ve been trying to research these restaurants, and my research is admittedly patchy, but I’ve not been able to find a Los Angeles restaurant named Shing Kee – though there’s certainly one in San Francisco.  (In fact I discover from Mr Stone himself that the Shing Kee in question was in New York's Chinatown, but the restaurant is gone). And there are a lot of places around the world named Banteay Srey (it being a 10^th century Cambodian temple) but again I haven’t been able to track one down in the City of Angels.  Internet know-it-alls may be able to help me out here.

On the other hand I do know that Gadberry’s was a barbecue joint in downtown LA, on Broadway, though it’s long gone.  And Chao Nue was a northern Thai restaurant on West 9th Street, though I can’t find a review later than 1990.

However Mom’s Bar.B.Q is still there on the Imperial Highway in Westminster.  Hurrah! It doesn’t look exactly the same as in the album cover image (which is hardly surprising given the passage of time), but it sure looks like the same place.

I claim no acquaintance with Carl Stone beyond Facebook, but I do find his postings there more interesting most, since they consist largely of photographs of his meals, many of them eaten in Japan.  This kind of thing:

And I also just found on Facebook (and it didn’t take much finding – Stone himself put it there), this quotation from Jonathan Gold:  "Spicy Asian cooking is to Carl Stone what the Immortal Beloved was to Beethoven, what opium was to Berlioz - an eternal source of inspiration."

Carl Stone’s latest album (and I’m not trying to come off like a big shot but I yes, I have it on vinyl, signed by the man himself in both English and Japanese) is Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties.  Thanks to liner notes by Jonathan Gold I now know that at least two of the titles refer to Los Angeles restaurants – Gold also makes a comparison between sampling sounds and sampling food (sounds coherent to me).  

The two restaurants are Dong Il Jang – Korean, and Shibucho – a sushi place, both still very much in business.  Below is chef Shigeru Kudo of Shibucho with Ron Wood.  Music and food make for some strange bedfellows, but I suppose we always knew that.

OUTSIDE THE WHALE

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You know me, if I see something on a menu that I’ve never had (or even heard of) before, then I always feel duty bound to order it.  And so in the FuRaiBo restaurant on Sawtelle Boulevard, (over 100 locations in Japan, just two in the USA, according to their business card) I obviously had to order an item called “Hanpen Cheese”  The menu described it as “Fish cake w/Cheese Panko Breaded.”  When it came it looked like this:

Of course, I grew up eating fishcakes from fish and chip shops in England – they were essentially a lump of deep-fried mashed potato with a minimal quantity of fish, this kind of thing:

The Hanpen Cheese was a different kind of thing, although I suppose just about recognizably from the same extended food group.  It seemed to be a kind of sandwich: two slices of white fish (I couldn’t possibly have told you what kind of fish) with a slice of cheese in between them, (is that a line of seaweed in there too?) these slices then pankoed and deep fried. 

Did it taste good?  Well of course it did.  Deep fried fish and cheese, you can hardly go wrong, but it took a bit of research when I got home to discover exactly what I’d eaten.

Yes, hanpen is generally a kind of fishcake, though ham and tofu may be involved, as well as or instead of both the fish and the cheese.  Those mysterious slices of white fish were almost certainly made from surimi – the kind of paste they use in imitation crab sticks or fish sticks, that starts out looking like this:

So mystery solved, and really not all that mysterious as these things go.  Will I order it next time I see it on a menu?  Well I may or I may not, but I'll no longer feel duty bound.

After the FuRaiBo, and still with an urge for novelty blowing through my taste buds, I went to the Nijiya supermarket across the street and bought some of this to take home with me.

It was a curious, sweet, sticky salad of sand lances and walnuts.  The Japanese name for sand lance (which I’d never even heard of before let alone eaten, and is sometimes known as the sand eel though it’s not a true relation of the eel) is Kugini.  And I believe this salad, made by boiling the fish with soy sauce and sugar, is called Tsukudani, but don’t shoot me if I’ve got that wrong.

                               *

I have never seen whale on a menu, not even in Japan, though I did see it in supermarkets there, and (don’t hate me) I’ve eaten it, and it was an interesting rather than a great experience.  The taste really was somewhere between meat and fish, as I suppose befits a marine mammal.

Now, life being as it is, I happened to be reading Jonathan Meades’ An Encyclopedia of Myself.  I’m very fond of Jonathan Meades’ work, and was once mistaken for him.  I was once also mistaken for food writer Jonathan Gold.  Perhaps a pattern is emerging.

Anyway, Meades generally comes across as a pretty thorough-going omnivore, so imagine my surprise at discovering that there’s one food he’ll never eat and that’s whale.  It seems to me that he had it in fairly grim circumstances, on Osmington Beach, in Dorset, and baked in a pie.  (I had my whale as sashimi)  He writes:

“It was a scuddy, billowy day when I ate the whale. Not the whole whale--I was only four--but enough whale to get the idea of whale's quiddity, to get a mnemonic fix, which persists over forty years, and is ocular and palatal and olfactory and haptic.” 

(If you think he’s overcooking his prose there, I think you may have a point.)

Anyway, he hated the whale pie and tried to hide it under the pebbles on the beach.  He concludes, “Since then, I've eaten the tripe of kine and sheep, sea slug (a.k.a. beche-de-mer), ox brain, lamb brain, pig brain and trotter and ear, duodenum and other intestines, spinal cord, flying fishes' eggs, beaver, salmon entails, testicles (rognons blanc), locust, etcetera. But there is a limit to omnivorous curiosity and carnal abandon. Whale is mine. Not another cubic metre will ever pass my lips.”

Does he really mean cubic metre?  That’s a large amount of any kind of food.  Perhaps he meant cubic millimeter.  Also, interestingly, in an earlier version of this piece that appeared in the New Yorker in 1996 he included dog on his list of the exotica he'd eaten, but I suppose he now feels that’s unacceptable, and doesn’t want to be hated.  Even so, given that it’s some 60 years since he last ate whale I’d have thought it might be worth giving it another try, maybe next time he sees it on a menu.