SLICK AND STAINLESS

A couple of days ago Pulp Librarian posted this deeply strange and wonderful image on his Twitter feed:

It would have been good enough on its own at any time, but it was made even more relevant because on Sunday I went for lunch at the Daquise in South Kensington, with Margaret who is the sister of an old girlfriend.  This is Margaret, artfully out of focus:

and I ordered a Polish sausage that came looking like this, which was way more mutilated than the ones in the Pulp Librarian pic:

And then another picture appeared on the Pulp Librarian’s feed:

I’d never heard of Stainless Stephen but it’s a helluva good name – better even than Seasick Steve.  It turns out that Stainless Stephen was a Sheffielder,  variety comedian, real name Arthur Clifford Bayne, who’d been a schoolteacher In Crookes.  And – it gets better – he got his name because he wore a band around his hat, and also a sort of waistcoat, both made from Sheffield stainless steel.  Doesn't strike me as a great gimmick, especially when he was on the radio, but it was a different time.

And so I started thinking about Seasick Steve, which I hadn't done in a while – this is him at a diner counter. You know, I could grow a beard like that:

And I found a Q and A that Seasick Steve did with the Guardian, which included this gem

“Q: Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

 A: I've never had a dinner party and I surely don't dream about it.”

Good old Steve.

POLISHED

Isn’t this fantastic?  Isn’t this what all restaurant bills should look like?  Four simple statements: pig troters (sic), rabbit, duck, bottle of red. Isn’t it also, arguably, what all meals should be like?

The trotters were in aspic – the blandness of the aspic and the intense porkinesss were a winner, especially since it came with a little jug of vinegar:

The duck looked like this, it’s stuffed with apples, and you can’t lose with that can you?:

The rabbit was in mustard sauce and was good too, but not very photogenic, and though not as good as the duck, and I did have some food envy.

This was all, as you can see from the bill, at the Daquise, a Polish restaurant in Thurloe Street, South Kensington, and I realize I’ve been going there for a very long time. Although since the restaurant has been in business since 1947 there must be people who’ve been going there much longer than I have.   

Below is how the Daquise looked it in 1970 – two doors away from a Wimpy Bar – and it’s survived much longer.  Sometimes (if not all that often) there is justice in the food world.

There was, apparently a very serious fire there in 2005 but the place been restored in order to look very much the way it always did – and the menu has been gently updated without making you think it’s getting fancy.  There’s still borscht and black pudding, but I remember I always used to order the stuffed cabbage and that seems to have gone from the menu.

ENGLISH SCRATCHINGS

You want to know what else I ate while I was in England?  I mean why not, what have you got to lose?

Here’s a bowl of whitebait at Elistano’s, an Italian restaurant in Elystan Street, in Chelsea.  I used to love whitebait when I lived in England, and it seems to be unknown in the States, although the notion of deep fried small fish is hardly very exotic.  So now I always have it whenever I get the chance in England and I’m always somehow vaguely disappointed, but that doesn’t, and won’t, stop me ordering it the next time I get a chance.

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Here are pork scratching’s from Brigade, a “social enterprise” restaurant in Tooley Street on the South Bank.  They say, “We help homeless individuals develop skills and motivation to find employment.”  Which may be so, through the waiters looked more like male models than the homeless but perhaps these two things aren’t mutually exclusive.   The scratchings were very good indeed.

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And here’s the seafood platter for three from the West Mersea Oyster Bar, in Essex.    It was the cockles that really made it for me – and again, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen cockles on a menu in the States, and again I don’t really know why.

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 And here’s the stuffed cabbage from the Daquise in South Kensington, which has been there since 1947 when it was a hub for Polish émigrés.  Later Christine Keeler and Roman Polanski went there.  I hadn’t been for at least twenty years, and although the interior’s been spruced up – in a sort of deliberately distressed way - the menu looked very much the same. I ordered the stuffed cabbage which I know I ordered twenty years ago.  I suspect the food’s become a bit more sophisticated too, without getting at all distressed.  Best thing about the meal: the staff bring the food to the table in saucepans and then dole it out onto your plate – wonderful, simultaneously very sophisticated and very homely.

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And finally here’s the Club Sandwich from Café Opera in the Salts Mill, in Saltaire, on the outskirts of Bradford, where the David Hockney gallery is.  The sandwich contains smoked chicken, bacon, lettuce and tomato, and the potato crisps were really good, though I don’t think they were made on premises.  Best part:  the waitress had one arm tattooed like leopard skin, and I did want to take a picture of that, but I was either too cool or too inhibited, I’m still not sure which.

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