GEOFF DREAMS OF CROQUETTES

 Somebody (was it Giles Coren? AA Gill? Brillat-Savarin?) said somewhere that the ‘secret’ of a good restaurant is that the people running it know what they want to do and then they do it as well as they possibly can. Which of course means it’s no secret at all, though a lot of restaurant managements seem not to know it.

 

So if you’re a proper English pub you don’t start serving fried silk worms and duck fetus – you serve steak pies and ploughmen’s lunches.  If you’re a Bangladeshi restaurant you don’t serve steak pies and ploughmen’s lunches. And so on.  It’s not about authenticity, it’s about understanding the mission.

 

On Sunday afternoon I was in Dirty Dick’s in Spitalfields, and saw there were ox cheek croquettes on the menu, and I was slightly thrown.  In one sense that’s not standard pub fare, on the other hand pig cheeks are surely an ancient and noble British tradition, even if croquettes aren’t.  Well, I’d have taken a chance on them but they were off, so a sausage roll was had instead: that’s Bloody Mary ketchup on the side.

 

PHOTOS BY GANNON STUDIOS

And so to Taro in Walthamstow, a newish Japanese restaurant, part of a small chain that knows what it’s about and delivers as promised.  It may not be the sushi that Jiro dreamed off, but it seemed everything a small local Japanese restaurant ought to be.

 

There was sashimi of tuna, salmon, mackerel, and shrimp

 

tempura vegetables (which actually weren’t that fabulous but I think I’m coming to the conclusion that I don’t really like tempura vegetables)

 

octopus balls - takoyaki

There were Japanese pickles too but we didn’t photograph them.  And here’s the beauty part: the premises used to be an eel and pie shop, and most of the relevant features, especially the tiles, have been retained. 

 

Taro do in fact serve eel, and I might like to think that’s a nod to local culture but then any good Japanese restaurant would serve eel anyway.  So that’s a double win.

 

THE SO-SO GATSBY

I’ve been rereading Scott Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  It’s one of the novels I return to every few years, and although I always think I know it reasonably well, there’s always some surprise, something I’d completely forgotten or didn’t previously take in.  This time I came cross this paragraph describing Gatsby’s parties:

“At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.”

Now, call me naïve and indeed British, but I had never heard the term “pastry pig” and I imagined a whole roast pig wrapped in pastry, a sort of giant pork en croute, which would have been very splendid, a bit like Robert May’s pastry stag.  It would have been extremely hard to cook, but I thought that was the whole point.

However, poking around the internet it seems I’m the only once who thinks this.  Anyone who has an opinion thinks the reference is to “pig in a blanket” which in my country are called sausage rolls, and that seems strangely disappointing and low-key and a bit tacky for a great Gatsby party.  Although of course that may be the whole point, that Gatsby isn't as classy as he thinks he is.

Below is a picture of Gatsby from the Baz Lurhmann movie, which I found just unbearable.  I couldn't tell you what those things are on the plates surrounding Gatsby are, but I'm pretty sure none of them is supposed to be a pig in a blanket.  Not much sign of a harlequin salad or a turkey either.