Food

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Rocket

‘It is rocket science,’ said my husband waving a pinnately lobed leaf snatched from his restaurant salad. He doesn’t much like rocket salad and wishes all supplies had perished along with the lettuces of Spain. So as a distraction I tried telling him that rocket leaves were connected with street urchins, caterpillars, caprices and hedgehogs. The herb rocket is older in English than the sky-rocket, which appeared no earlier than 1566. The firework rocket took its name from rocchetta in Italian, meaning ‘little bobbin’, from the similarity in shape. There is a related old word in English, rock, which once meant ‘distaff’ and is used by historians now to mean

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Vanity project

The Waverly Inn is the house restaurant of Vanity Fair magazine in New York City. It is part-owned by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, whose life, at least since Trump rose, is dedicated to the realisation of social justice using his favourite weapon, which is being friends with celebrities. Carter’s political engagement is like a blusher brush’s political engagement. It is unfit for purpose, and it is too late anyway. Even so, Carter has declared war on Donald Trump by slagging off his restaurant in New York City — the Trump Grill in Trump Tower, which I reviewed, or rather crawled out of whimpering, in my last column

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 26 January 2017

Q. I recently made an arrangement with a flaky friend from university to go to my gym together. Half an hour after we were supposed to meet she called saying she was at the cash machine looking at her bank balance and she didn’t think she could afford the £20 guest entry fee. She suggested cancelling but I was dressed and raring to go so I offered to lend her the money. She politely declined saying, ‘I don’t like owing people money.’ I volunteered to pay the fee. On the way to the gym she said she was hungry and, opening a wallet stuffed with cash, bought luxury snacks costing

Bruce Anderson

Cold War collation

I know an immensely grand aristocratic lady, impeccably mannered, with a regal grace and presence, who cannot be trusted near a tin of caviar. Apart from scoffing far more than her share, she will eventually make off with the tin itself, to lick it clean. Those of us from lesser social milieux should not only treat this as a lesson in etiquette. There are sound environmental arguments for her behaviour. Caviar is so precious, so rare, that it is an ecological crime to waste a single egg. When her ladyship is on the prowl, there is no danger of that. Such thoughts came to me over the weekend, while musing

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Trumped!

Trump Tower sits between Gucci and Tiffany on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It looks like infant Lego, the Duplo brand, but black — porn Duplo, then. It is militarised; by the door are the fattest police officers I have ever seen. They look like they have been dragged out of Overeaters Anonymous and given automatic weapons; and I wonder how much the NYPD really want to keep him alive. He is in the penthouse. The obvious comparison is with Al Pacino’s penthouse in The Devil’s Advocate, in which Pacino played a devil in a penthouse in New York City, but Trump Tower is less subtle than that, and

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 12 January 2017

A few moments after saying the communion rite, the priest looked at his congregation and uttered easily the most disturbing thing I have ever heard said in a church: ‘If anyone wants a gluten-free Eucharist, please queue up on this side.’ The builder boyfriend, already grumpy at being made to go to mass, tittered behind me. We hadn’t been able to find two seats together so I now had to imagine him making a series of faces to my back. I couldn’t resist. I had to turn round and seek his opinion on this most revoltingly PC of moments. I have been going to mass off and on like the

Tuesday

Harry Wallop

Higher prices are the only way of dealing with Britain’s food waste problem

Food waste is on the increase. British households are throwing the equivalent of 500 meals into the bin every year. Understandably, there has been a lot of hand-wringing. Baroness Parminter, the Liberal Democrat’s environment spokeswoman (the party has so few MPs its environment spokeswoman sits in the Lords), declared: ‘We need legislation to make real progress in changing behaviours and cutting waste.’ No we don’t. We just need another recession. An increase in food waste is possibly the clearest sign that food poverty is declining and most people have never had it so good when it comes to filling their stomachs. First, the figures. Household food waste in the UK has increased

Friday

Olivia Potts

How to cook Stilton and broccoli bake

Finally, I almost have my kitchen back. I feel like during Christmas, we give our kitchens over to a higher power: one who insists that we fill our fridges with enough prosecco to see us through a nuclear winter, that everything is spiked with brandy, and followed with a chaser of cheese. We didn’t even host Christmas this year: we were away for Christmas-proper and bookended it with visiting various friends and relatives. There is, really, no excuse, for such a high proportion of festive leftovers. And yet, for the last week, I’ve found soggy mince pies everywhere, and brandy butter I don’t remember buying. But now, I am starting

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Garden variety

Margot is an Italian restaurant on Great Queen Street in the still interesting part of Covent Garden. The uninteresting part is the piazza, once the first classical square in London but now a shopping district so devoted to famous brands that it is essentially Westfield in WC2, and WC2 has no need of it, already having a superior culture of its own. Even so, I expect some day to find St Paul’s church a smouldering pile of ash waiting for an Audi concession. Margot used to be Moti Mahal, an unlamented Indian restaurant next to Freemasons’ Hall, which posed as MI5 in Spooks, a BBC drama in which a one-nation

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Wiltons wonderland

I have agonised over this Christmas review. I ate the Christmas lunch at Harveys Nichols 5th Floor Restaurant, Knightsbridge, next to a roof garden sponsored by Nutella chocolate spread. (The review of that restaurant is 17 words long: don’t go there, especially if you like Nutella chocolate spread, because it will ruin it for you.) The stunt critic dies hard in any writer, for it is easy work laughing at roof gardens. I considered eating in a plastic igloo — an igloo that is not an igloo, but a tent — by Tower Bridge. I even considered visiting whichever Winter Wonderland (‘Blunderland’) that the Daily Mail — the arbiter of

Ben Schott

Traveller’s Notebook

I was drinking in the bar of Manhattan’s Nomad Hotel when in snuck The Most Seen Human Ever To Have Lived. This is an old puzzle: who is the most ‘observed in the flesh’ individual in history? Since we’re discounting depictions (paintings, photographs, films), it has to be someone alive in the jet age with a sustained international career and multi-generational appeal. John Paul II — who visited 129 countries — is a contender as, to a lesser extent, are Billy Graham, the Queen, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. But, for my money, there’s only one candidate: someone who’s still zigzagging the globe after five decades, appearing regularly in front of

Thursday

Mark Mason

A curse on silky teabags

Inventor of the silky teabag, take a bow. You have achieved something that until now no one would have thought possible. You have taken an item so simple, so perfect, so completely suited to its purpose that the idea of ruining it had occurred to literally no one — and you have ruined it. You have ruined the teabag. I first encountered this abomination a couple of years ago. Shoreditch, inevitably, in one of those places with a blackboard proclaiming their Instagram handle and a witty quote. Ordering a tea, I was presented with a cup, a pot of hot water and a teabag. I put the bag into the

The Spectator

Food on the home front

From ‘The food shortage and how to meet it’, The Spectator, 2 December 1916: A rise in prices, if properly understood and properly used, will be our salvation, not our injury. High prices help conservation, and, what is still more important, they help supply… If we artificially cut down prices here, we sterilise instead of stimulating the impulse to feed us from abroad. We are in effect saying to the world: ‘If you are such fools as to send us food, we warn you that you are not going to obtain inflated prices. You will get nothing more here than what we choose to tell you is a fair price. Our

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Meat and greet

Zelman Meats — catchphrase ‘great meat’ — is sustenance for a hard Brexit — a harder Brexit, if you will. It is a snorting meat shack in north Soho; it is also, comfortingly for the reader, mid-market. It is from the owners of Beast, who display their meat in cases, as trophies — and Burger and Lobster, where you get burgers and lobsters for £20 a head. It is thrillingly monomaniacal and simplistic: what do you get at Zelman Meats? Meat, that’s all, comrade. It could theoretically be a butcher’s shop; no, it could be a cow sitting on a bonfire wondering what went wrong. Don’t come here if you

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Autumn riches

A few days ago, on the Dorset/Somerset marches, autumn was still in orderly retreat. Although a pear tree’s leaves had turned sere and yellow, the last fruit was still peeping through. Across the lawn, a horse chestnut was undressing, festooning the lawn with bronze. Out of a cloudless sky, a mild seasonal sun blessed the scene with a gentle glow, as if it were pouring Sauternes. Along the Ladies’ Walk, the yellows and greens were reinforced by bushes in russet mantles and by the triumphant redness of acers and liquidambar. We could have almost been in the New England fall, at least for a few yards. Autumn, fall: the two

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The cheesecake of the apocalypse

Harry Morgan is a Jewish delicatessen and restaurant in the style of New York City on St John’s Wood High Street in north London. St John’s Wood is home to wealthy Muslims and Jews, who are attracted by a lone mosque, many synagogues and more cake shops than even the greediest hedge-funder could eat his swiftly receding feelings in. I am aware I sound like an estate agent. It is really a stage set for the inter-faith organisation the Imams and Rabbis Council of the United Kingdom, about which the joke is, although it isn’t very funny: the Jews pay for it all. I am also aware that I am

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Why I’m boycotting Waitrose

Right, that’s it. No more paying through the nose for sun-dried tomatoes. I am boycotting Waitrose and I urge others to do the same. I am not buying my groceries from a company which has caved into the unscientific balderdash coming from the anti-GM lobby. Waitrose has just announced that it will no longer use GM feed on its farms. I am not usually one for boycotts, but the only way anyone is going to defeat the anti-GM brigade is to play it at its own game. Britain should have been a world leader in GM technology. In the late 1990s we had the minds to develop and grow it.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

No place like Rome

Roma sells ancient-Roman-style food near Fenchurch Street station at the east end of the City, near Aldgate. It is, therefore, a themed restaurant in a conventional, ebbing financial district, a cursed place in need of Windolene; and this is something to applaud, at least theoretically, because it is ambitious. Who remembers ambition, which is more interesting than greed? The last themed restaurant to open in these parts was Fable, a repulsive fake library and fusion destination for lawyers on Holborn Viaduct which I hope has burnt down, or at least been sued for copyright infringement by-makers of fairy tales everywhere. It was as magical as date rape, and the fairies fled.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 20 October 2016

After the Fawlty Towers incident, I decided it was best to research the origin and extraction of all future B&B guests on arrival, before the builder boyfriend got stuck in. You may remember that he accidentally on purpose got a piece of gaffa tape caught on his top lip and held some ceiling felt at a jaunty angle during the stay of the Airbnb customers from Bavaria. Thankfully, they were in another room and didn’t see but I had to shush him because he was making a bad job of whispering, ‘Don’t mention Brexit! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it!’ A girl from Taiwan

Dot Wordsworth

Marmite vs Bovril

‘How can Bovril be suitable for vegetarians?’ asked my husband. ‘Bo- comes from bos, Latin for an ox.’ He was staring at a label that said: ‘Beef Bovril. Beef flavoured drink.’ This is a preparation of dried granules, containing yeast extract but no beef, which therefore not only suits vegetarians but also counts as halal. I must say I shared my husband’s confusion, for there is still the tarry-looking substance in jars labelled ‘Beef Bovril: the original beef extract’, which is 43 per cent beef stock and 24 per cent yeast extract. Bovril is made by Unilever, just like Marmite, which caused 24 hours of yeasty frenzy last week when the price was