ALL YOU CAN STOMACH

You’ve probably been hearing about this place Les Grands Buffets, an all-you- can-eat restaurant (though they don’t use that term) in the city of Narbonne, in France.  It’s been mentioned in various places but an article by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker promises to be the defining word.

They serve what they consider real French food, the price is fifty-two euros and ninety centimes for the food, which sounds kind of reasonable though the drink costs extra.Reservations are incredibly hard to come by which I’m sure adds to the desirability for some people. 

 

Two things in the article stood out for me. First, that Guinness has certified the restaurant’s cheese platter, with its 111 varietes of cheese, as some kind of world record, although Lauren Collins says it’s more of a cheese room.

 

That picture actually vaguely reminds me of the cheese department at Harrods, a store that I worked in for much longer than I intended to. (I was in the furniture department). 

One of the small perks for employees was that first thing in the morning before the shop was open, you could wander into the food hall and ask the man setting up the cheese counter if they had any left over offcuts from the previous day.  Sometimes he had, sometimes he hadn’t, and sometimes even if he hadn’t he’d just cut a chunk off a perfectly good slab of cheese, put it in a bag and say, ‘Now it’s an offcut.’  Good times.

 

The other thing, as the article attempted to investigate the economics of the business, it quoted Pierre Cavalier, the general manager, who said that the average customer goes through 1.3 oysters and 7.4 plates.  That surely means that quite a lot of people must eat no oysters at all.  If I was at an all you can eat oyster bar, I’m pretty certain I could hit the 2 or 3 dozen mark and possibly many more besides.  But I’m also pretty certain that I won’t be going to Les Grands Buffets. I’ve never much enjoyed buffets, generally because I  eat too much and yet still feel unsatisfied. 

 

Whether the success of Les Grands Buffets signals the return of the buffet, I don’t know, but a riffle through the archive reveals several postcards of 1960s American buffets, or perhaps more accurately smorgasbords.

 

This is The Stockholm, in Manhattan: 

This is Bit of Sweden, in Hollywood:

This is Old Scandia in Opa Locka, Florida:

 

Of course I’ve never eaten in any of them but they look better than any buffet I've ever eaten from – just one more use for a time machine.

WORLD EATS

You know, a lot of people say to me, “Old father, old artificer, is there one thing I should know as I travel around the world feeding my face?”

 

And I say yes, it’s this, that when you arrive in a brand new place for the first time, the first meal you eat, whether good or bad, is always going to be the least representative.

 

I’ll give you an example.  When I went to Tokyo for the first time, I emerged from the hotel in Shinkjuku, unpleasantly jet-lagged but quite pleasantly culture-shocked, I had it in my head from reasonable sources that if you wandered into any Tokyo  department  store you could always get something decent to eat.

 

But I was so off the clock and I got up so early that when I went out of the hotel, the department stores hadn’t yet opened, and the only place I could find to eat was some kind of deserted but open touristy tearoom (name and location lost in the mists of memory) and I stumbled in there and sat down and the waitress brought a menu and the only thing I liked the look of was the croque monsieur.  It looked like this (note the Japanese pickles), and it tasted very good, but it was hardly typical of Tokyo eating.

Now, I know I’ve had a few croque monsieurs over the years, and I think I must have had at least a couple of them in France but my recall is very vague.  Then last week, just a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus, I was in Zedel ‘a Parisian brasserie with a 1930's interior’ and that interior in itself would be reason enough to go there though in fact I sat outside at table on the pavement watching the world go by, and I ordered a croque monsieur - it looked like this and it tasted fine:

 

Was it ‘authentic’?  I suppose it must have been; Zedel has Frenchness oozing from every pore.  Was it better than the one I had in Tokyo?  Well yes, probably, but not nearly as much better as you might expect.  Maybe there’s a limit to just how good a croque monsieur can be.

 

PIECE BE WITH YOU

I can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about the eating habits of Sharleen Spiteri, from the band Texas, but there she is in the Observer Food Monthly telling the world, ‘Every time I come off stage, I always have a piece and crisps and a cup of tea. I call it a piece and crisps because I’m Scottish, so basically for your readers that’s a crisp sandwich. Two slices of bread, proper butter – you can’t have crappy butter – and a pack of crisps and squeeze it down. I have that everywhere apart from when we get to France. Then it’s baguettes. Because then you’re getting the good shit.’

 

Hair and makeup: Sarah Reygate. Photograph: Alex Lake/The Observer

 

I hadn’t actually heard of a ‘piece’ in this context, but good for her although later in the article she says she doesn’t like lamb or pork so that’s probably less good.

 

Naturally my mind drifts back to a story about Mark E. Smith in Stuart Maconie’s book Cider With Roadies. Maconie is in Smith’s flat after a boozy night out and Smith asks if he wants something to eat and Maconie says sure, so Smith goes into the kitchen and bangs around for twenty minutes and comes out carrying two plates of crisp sandwiches. And because Smith is a surprisingly good host, he asks Maconie, “Do you want a pickled onion with that?” 

 

You don’t have to be Scottish or a Mancunian to enjoy a crisp sandwich, below is one I made much earlier in Los Angeles: 

The eagle-eyed may spot that I used mayo rather than butter which some, including Sharleen Spiteri, would consider a mistake.

And here's another one with crisps and bacon:

 

And shortly after that I started to fantasize about the BLP sandwich.  For one blissful second I thought I’d had a really great idea, if not a money-making one. 

Whereas the BLT contains bacon, lettuce and tomato, I abandoned the tomato and replaced it with potato, and not just crisps but fried potatoes – they’d be called scallops where I come from in Yorkshire - but I’m sure there are regional variations,

 

Obviously it’s slightly time-consuming because you have to fry the bacon and the potatoes: opening a bag or crisps is a whole lot easier, but I thought it was well worth the effort.

 

It didn’t catch on but you know, I never really thought it would.

 

THE WORLD YOUR SARDINE

 Did you know (and I certainly didn’t until about 24 hours ago) that sardines belong to the clupeoid group of fishes, in which there are  over 300 species?  These include Sardinia pilchardus pilchardus, Sardinella  aurita,  and Sardinops melanosticus, to name but a few.

This is only to say that I have no idea what kind of sardines we bought and ate last weekend from our trusty local fish man, who had gutted and decapitated them in advance.  But unidentified though they might be, heck they were good – dredged through a little seasoned flour, fried rather than grilled (though I gather grilled is the approved method) and served with samphire - how could you go wrong?

ABOVE PICS BY CAROLINE GANNON

After the fact I consulted Alan Davidson’s  The Oxford Book Companion to Food which tells us, ‘Canned Sardines are among the few canned products which have their own retinue of connoisseurs.’

I can see how that might work, though I think mostly I’d be in it for the design of the cans, which can be deeply wonderful:

 

And just in case three sardines each weren’t enough (though they were), and despite there being no R in the month (though only 2 weeks to go) we had a few oysters as well.  

They were some of the most difficult oysters I’ve ever had to open, but I got there in the end, and they tasted great - and no, I can't tell you what family they came from either.

 

 

IT BURNS, IT BURNS

 Well, it’s been over six months since Burns Night and a spare haggis has been lurking in the freezer since then, so it seemed time to eat it.

 

PICS MOSTLY BY CAROLINE GANNON

We couldn’t be doing with the whole neeps and tatties business (Google just autocorrected that as “neeps and tattoos”) so we thought we’d make a pie.  But the local supermarket didn’t have any ready-made pastry and we weren’t in the mood to make it from scratch, so we made a haggis shepherds pie instead.  

 

I mean it’s assemblage rather than cooking - you heat up the haggis, and yes I admit a microwave oven was involved, and then you boil and mash some perfectly ordinary potatoes, put it together and place it in a non-microwave oven for a spell, and there you have it.

 

I thought it looked all right in the pan, if a bit unnecessarily deconstructed on the plate.

 

But it tasted absolutely fine, exactly the way you’d imagine a haggis shepherds pie would.  And there were leftovers the next day.  A summer treat and no mistake.

WHOLE LOTTA FISH

 I’ve always thought that John Paul Jones did well to stay sane while playing bass for Led Zeppelin but I think he was probably just that kind of guy.  And it seems that his eating habits are equally undestructive. 

 

In Friday’s Guardian there was an interview with Gillian Welch who did a tour with JPJ in the States.  She  says, “He travelled in the Cadillac.  I’d say: ‘John would you like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?’ He’d say he would. I’d make one and we’d roll on down the road."  Pretty wild eh?

 

Well you might say, he’s probably calmed down over the years, but my researches led me to an article in the Times magazine dated 2^nd October 1991, admittedly not the year of peak Zeppelin madness, titled “Our First Meal” one of a series of articles with a self-explanatory title – this one about when John Paul Jones met Robert Fripp.

 

JPJ talks about being a pescatarian, about finding good places to eat in Chicago and New Orleans “for the blackened cat fish and shrimp’  and Japan for the sushi.  He says, “I’m not a great restaurant person” but then says  “We go to Ravi Shankar in Drummond Street," which is in London, and it so happens that I’ve been to the Ravi Shankar in Drummond Street.  It’s still there as far as I know.  JPJ implies that it was a vegetarian restaurant when he went but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t when I was there.  And I’ve never known whether there was any connection between the restaurant and the  Ravi Shankar.

 

         JPJ also says, “You can’t live on drugs and alcohol alone.”  Words to live by.

 

         Robert Fripp, when he was in King Crimson, did record the album Cat Food, 

 

and he also appears to be a pescatarian.  In the Times article he says, “When I go to Nashville to visit Adrian Belew, my friend from King Crimson, we go to a vegetarian Mexican restaurant called Loco Lupe.  They have a Margarita called ‘the monster’ that comes in a 52 ounce glass."

There are a few Loco Lupes still in business but as far I can tell the one in Nashville isn’t among them.  It appears to have closed down in 2002.

A 52 ounce margarita glass is impressive but I think it all comes down to how much ice and how little tequila they put in there.

 

 This is Adrian Belew:

This is from Adrian Belew’s Facebook – posted on Sandwich Day 2018:

And I decided to have a deep dig through the archive because I reckoned I’d taken one or two pics when I was at Ravi Shankar.

 

I found them in the end, and yes, if the sign on the front to be believed it was indeed a vegetarian restauarant – this was in 2018.

 

I don’t remember exactly what we ate but there are pictures.  This:

 

And also this – top photographer Jason Oddy included for scale.

CONFUSION CUISINE

 Seemed like a good idea at the time - gyoza and black pudding.

But just because it's fusion doesn't necessarily mean it's good.