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.

REARRANGING THE DECKCHAIRS

Yes, it must be hard to think up an appropriate name for your fish and kebab shop, but this does make you wonder what other options were on the list:

Walthamstow - photo by Luna Woodyear-Smith.

FUN WITH MEAT - ENGLISH STYLE

What I ate on my travels.

Some barbecued venison in Essex:

Some barbecued lamb in Gloucestershire:

A might pile of miscellaneous meats at the Anatolia restaurant in Hackney:

And a pile of kebab meat from a place in West Hampstead called, I kid you not, Lezziz Express, which turns out not to be an outpost of lesbian separatism, but a halal joint.  The yoghurt sauce was hiding a multitude of sins.  And I was left thinking I should have ordered the chips and cheese: ah well, there'll be another time.