TRENDS, YEAH RIGHT

 I was in London for a couple of days, not specifically to check out the latest food trends but you can’t help noticing some developments.  For example it seems that some Londoners have gone mad for salad, as seen here with these people queuing for The Salad Project; perhaps not as soaringly ambitious as the Manhattan Project but it obviously has its fans.  

The Salad Project is apparently a ‘new casual dining concept’ which hopes to become a major chain.  There are apparently ‘customizable salad options’ which I think means you make your own salad from the salad bar; not the most revolutionary concept I can think of.

Did I try it? Obviously not.  There are very few things I’ll queue for and salad definitely isn’t one of them.

 

Elsewhere I saw that cocktails are still popular, as proved by this window display at a Nicolas wine shop where they will actually sell you ingredients!

   And there was a temporary, I assume movable, falafel hut right there on Oxford Street.  No queuing necessary.

 

         But if you’re looking for a concept it’s hard to beat Redemption Roasters,‘The UK’s First Prison-based Coffee Roastery’ – yes really.  The coffee is roasted inthe prison roastery at HMP The Mount, all part of an effort to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce reoffending.  We went to the one on Gate St, close to Grays Inn.  My Americano was perfectly decent and there smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel had a very generous filling.  Again, no need to queue.

 

And then I started thinking about Iain Nairn, the British architectural critic (1930-1983), because I’d been browsing through Nairn’s London in mild preparation for my London visit.

 

Quite a bit of what I know about Nairn comes via Jonathan Meades.  The first time they had lunch together Nairn ate a packet of crisps and drank fourteen pints of beer.  The second time, says Meades, Nairn was ‘thinking about his figure’ so he didn’t eat anything at all and drank a just eleven pints.  ‘He died a few months later of cirrhosis,’ says Meades.

 

Meades describes Nairn’s London as ‘a sort of characterless novel of the capital by the greatest topographical writer of the past half century.’ This was written in 2007, and of course he doesn’t mean that Nairn’s book lacks character but that it has no dramatis personae.

 

I’d been especially drawn to Nairn’s description of the ‘Long Bar, Henekey’s, High Holborn,’ which starts with the lines, ‘Any long bar implies serious drinking, but this has a sense of dedication that is far beyond mere commerce.’  So I thought I’d better go there.

 

The pub is now called The Cittie of Yorke - there's a sign on the front saying there's been a pub on the site since the 14th century so either it's kept up with trends or it's immune to them - and the reality still matches Nairn’s description: gigantic barrels position high up behind the bar and linked by a dangerous looking catwalk, with cabins along one wall, which look like confessional booths, and in fact there is something ecclesiastical about the place.  Nairn concludes his piece, ‘but this place needs no stage props.  They sell spiced buns.’

 

I think they’ve stopped selling spiced buns, though I didn’t seek them out.  But they definitely do sell plates of nachos with cheese and salsa and guacamole and whatnot, which we ordered and they looked like this:

 

Probably a little better than a bag of crisps for soaking up fourteen pints of beer, but only a little.