Food

Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held up aching over the world’s most charismatic puddle; Harry’s is a transgressive anti-palazzo. It is a world-famous restaurant, the jewel of the Cipriani brand, and it is very conscious of this honour; it sells branded tagliarelli and books about the meals it served 30 years ago to the rich and famous; it is into auto-iconography, like the city it lives in. For this, and so much else, I blame Ernest Hemingway. He ate here after shooting birds in the lagoon and doesn’t the world know it? Some men fought against

There is so much to hate about massively successful TV series Masterchef that I have been glued to it for ten years. But then I always watch Nigel Farage when he pops up on TV, and even sit through that advert for Sheilas’ Wheels. But let me explain why I think Masterchef is so bloody annoying to me, a food-lover and enthusiastic cook. First there are the hosts, John Torode and ‘Mr Spanky’ Greg Wallace, and their parroting of puerile comments. You know what I mean: ‘Saltiness coming from the…’, ‘Sweetness running through…’, ‘Flavours of the sea’, ‘Tang of the…’, ‘ABSOLUTELY beautiful’. Then there is the question of John Torode’s upper lip: where

Do we really mean to kill investment banking, or are we trampling it by accident in a fit of righteous zeal? By ‘we’ I mean politicians, regulators and public opinion, and by ‘kill’ I mean rendering it unattractive or unviable for any shareholder-owned financial business except on the most limited scale — and as uncertain a career choice as, say, Liberal Democrat politics or freelance journalism. The announcement last week of a radical scaling back of Barclays’ trading and deal-making arm has stoked a debate that had been smouldering for some time; for background reading, I recommend recent articles by Philip Augar in the FT and Frances Coppola in Forbes.

Do you know where the chicken in your lunchtime sandwich came from? Where it lived and how it died? For most people, the answer’s probably no, so it might have been a surprise to discover that many restaurants, supermarkets, and even schools have been selling halal meat without labelling it as such. Of course there are people who will argue for both sides of halal. I can understand why people are so against it, as Melanie McDonagh explains in her blog. After all, slitting an animal’s throat while it’s still conscious isn’t the nicest way of doing things. But I’m not sure that halal – or even kosher slaughter, which

It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. At least not very much. The notion, apparently scandalous, that the Great British food market is being contaminated – sorry, infiltrated – by meat slaughtered according to traditional religious practices is the most #MiddleClassProblem of the year. I mean, you know it’s serious when Waitrose is in the dock. Waitrose! Now I can see that there is a case for requiring meat slaughtered without the animal being stunned to be labelled as such. But, as Melanie McDonagh concedes, the proportion of livestock slaughtered in this fashion is tiny. Perhaps 10% of sheep but only 3% of cattle and 4% of poultry. A reasonable person

It is now two decades since I lived in Oxford. I was then a drunk and lonely puddle of a person, with only a gift for screaming; but no matter how low I sank, to paraphrase Alcoholics Anonymous literature, I never sank quite as low as to consider eating at the ’bab van (kebab van) outside Univ (University College) on the High (High Street); I preferred to dine in Hall (a hall). Oxford, you see, has its own native dialect, a sort of pidgin posh best worn with a depressed carnation and a giant inedible chip made of class terror. Perhaps the roots of my eventual redemption were in that

London House is in Battersea, which some people call South Chelsea, but is more East Wandsworth to my mind; or maybe North Clapham, or, even better, West Brixton. This is the self-hatred that the housing bubble has brought to London: we have whole sorrowful postcodes that long to be something else because original posh London, which is SW1 and W1 and SW3, does not really exist any more, or rather it does, but it does not belong to us, so we might as well forget about it. So we have London House. It was obviously a marketing essential to tag this restaurant to London, and also to mention houses, which

Chefs have a problem. Think of much of the best food you have ever eaten. Caviar, English native oysters, sashimi, foie gras, truffles, jamon iberico, grouse, golden plover, properly hung Scotch beef; Stilton, the great soft cheeses: all have one point in common. They require minimal intervention from the kitchen. With the assistance of one female sous-chef, even I could roast a grouse. The chef would come into his own over pudding, and indeed with Welsh rarebit, but one can understand why this does not provide enough outlet for creativity. There are always the great French bourgeois dishes, which few of us eat often enough. Navarin of lamb, blanquette de

Tufted carpets out, flavoured milk in. Canvas shoes in, take away coffee out. Last year we accepted spreadable butter, dropped round lettuce. In 2006 we let in the chicken kiev and waved goodbye to the baseball cap. Call me a foolish commodity fetishist but I love the Consumer Prices Index (CPI). I could happily curl up in bed reading these lists of goods that have (or haven’t) made it into the national shopping basket that is the CPI that the ONS use to track inflation. The ebb and flow of consumables (and rejectables) is as evocative and poignant as any literature could be. Reading the 2010 roll call, I almost found myself

Moro (‘moorish’ or ‘sexist’) is a Spanish restaurant on Exmouth Market, near the bones of the old Guardian and Observer building on Farringdon Road. I don’t mind telling Spectator readers (‘you people’) that I once kissed the bricks of this building, quite seriously, like Jews kiss the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport. (At least that is the story; but I have never seen anyone do it. Kiss some dirty tarmac. What for?) Moro is distinguished as the restaurant in which Guardian journalists first realised Julian Assange is mad. He stood up near an olive and announced he didn’t care if the leaks led informants to be murdered, which is a

How can we encourage children to be closer to nature, when 80% of Britons live in urban areas? This is the question that Michael Gove attempts to answer in his contribution to a recent pamphlet entitled ‘What the Environment means to Conservatives’. He writes, ‘One way we all interact with the natural world is through the food we eat.’ As a result, he wants to apply this thinking to education. He has already made cooking compulsory in schools for all children up to the age of 14 from next September. And his ‘School Food Plan’ aims both to improve the standard of school food, and to teach pupils about where ingredients

One of the more unpalatable news stories of the week was the survey by West Yorkshire councils that seemingly innocuous food was made up of all sorts of things that either weren’t what they claimed to be, or weren’t very much like food at all. It’s another sign of the food problems that this country faces, on top of food banks and poor diet. Recently, though, the food debate has become as poisoned as vodka made from antifreeze, with politicians using food banks in particular as a political football to prove their own points, rather than bothering to examine the complex problems behind them. But one of the MPs who

The ostensible subject matter is misleading, as is any conflation with his lesser relatives’ wassailing peasants and roistering village squares. But Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work is profoundly serious. It has a formidable intellectual content, a Shakespearian emotional range: a sardonic and stoical view of the human condition. There are paintings — ‘The Triumph of Death’, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ — which descend from Hieronymus Bosch. There is also the marvellous ‘Fall of Icarus’. According to recent scholarship, the version we have is not a Bruegel, but a later copy. That is plausible; it looks later. Yet the composition is classic Bruegel. He would be drawn to any legend expressing

Lanes of London serves street food to people who hate streets; that is, it exists to soothe the still-curious mouths of lazy, wealthy paranoiacs. This is the character of the dishonest age: you can ride in a gondola in Las Vegas, ski down a mountain in Dubai, visit a wizard’s castle in Watford Junction, and enjoy the Notting Hill Carnival in Mayfair while sitting down. (Other options include staying in a five-star faux shanty-town hotel in South Africa, complete with corrugated iron shacks and authentic ‘poor people’s rubbish’). It is not for me to call this madness, or to say that as funds grow more grandiose, worlds invariably shrink; or

Give us this day our daily bread: those are also words of great culinary significance. Even if the ‘bread’ takes different forms — rice, pasta, potatoes — billions of people all over the world are following in that prayer’s footsteps. ‘Staple diet’: throughout history, most people have lived off staples, or died when they ran out. Staples stimulated cookery. Over time, though it would be fun to try, even daily caviar might pall: daily bread, somewhat sooner. So those who prepared the basics tried to spice them up. If meat or fish were available, there would be no problem, but they are expensive ingredients. Most of those at subsistence level had