February 07, 2007

St Valentine's Day massacre

I don't want to make the restaurant industry sound too cynical. There are, of course, considerations of shareholder profitability and competition in a tough market but the combination of guaranteed demand and undiscerning, desperate customers doesn't show their best side in them in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, it brings out a sort of crazed, vulpine bloodlust. (A shorter version of this piece appears in The Guardian)

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Posted by Tim at 09:27 AM |

February 02, 2007

The Gadget Graveyard

Please view article in the Guardian newspaper here.

Posted by Tim at 06:49 PM |

January 16, 2007

"That sweet enemy..."

Though St David is often credited with the regeneration of food appreciation in the UK, the way that she redirected the moneyed classes towards France at the moment the privations of war were over means she could equally well be blamed for keeping English cookery in the dark ages for a further three decades. This is a shame, because by all accounts, by the time she was into her later books, 'Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen' and 'English Bread and Yeast Cookery', she had matured enough to realise that perhaps all the sun sea and shagging had turned her head a little in her early years. She acquired a little historical rigour and began to get really interested in English food. Much to her disgust, of course, it was too late to redirect her myrmidons who were rushing off, lemming-like to clog up Provence with their Volvos.

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Posted by Tim at 02:42 PM |

November 27, 2006

Feed Claim

Posted by Tim at 11:17 AM |

September 07, 2006

Spoons

...Not metal spoons, you understand. I've no problem with them. The manly heft of the tablespoon, the witty reflectiveness of the deep bowled soup supper, the cheeky, gamine little teaspoon, I can regard them all with benign equanimity. No, my problem is with the wooden spoon.

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Posted by Tim at 01:23 PM |

July 31, 2006

Long, Low and Slow

I'm bored by the garnet hues of perfectly marbled Wagyu. Any idiot can slap that on a grill, I'm looking for something as complicated as a footballer's knee that can be coaxed, with time and gentle heat into a rich, self-saucing meat jam.

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Posted by Tim at 03:34 PM |

June 27, 2006

Are you a Gourmet Snob?

Please view article in the Guardian newspaper here

Posted by Tim at 09:17 PM |

At the Colomb d'Or - by accident

It was Hell, much as anticipated. The Croisette was awash with body fluids, elderly executives pawed their comely PAs like Soho Humbert Humberts while a midget prostitute in leopardskin cavorted through the hotel lobby. Very last days of Empire.

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Posted by Tim at 09:07 PM |

April 04, 2006

J - Japanese

I loved Nobu Matsuhisa's little lunch counter in West Hollywood, I like conveyor-belt sushi, I love the karaoke izakayas in the West end, I like sashimi, I even like seaweed. My problem is authenticity. People say that Nobu is Japanese/South American fusion for rich Westerners. People say that conveyor belt sushi is so awful that only Westerners would eat it. People say the izakayas are tourist traps.

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Posted by Tim at 10:24 PM |

La mia Pavoni bella

I love my Pavoni. I love it more than any man sensibly should. If I could afford to, I'd set it up with a flat in Mayfair, lavish it with gifts and visit it once a week. I've leered sneakily at the fecund curves of the Francis Francis and even toyed with the idea of plumbing in a semi-pro, pump-pressurised Gaggia but I always come back to the Pavoni.

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Posted by Tim at 12:58 PM |

March 17, 2006

London

Over the past few years I've come to dread being asked for restaurant recommendations. Sure I've got a few places I'm happy to go back to - at the right time and with the right people - but asking if there's anywhere I'd recommend is so absurdly broad a request I just get confused.

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Posted by Tim at 08:10 AM |

Hospitality

For a variety of reasons, not unconnected with my honeymoon, I’ve spent the past fortnight in various parts of the English South. First stop was Ventnor, a faded, dilapidated but stunningly romantic little seaside town on the Isle of Wight. I’d love to say that I’d booked Venice for my honeymoon but ended up in Ventnor due to a keyboard error but, in fact, it was purely intentional.

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Posted by Tim at 07:59 AM |

Barbies for Boys

Last weekend, on a pleasantly sunny Sunday, like half the men in Britain, I did my first barbecue of the year. Unlike the rest of them, this was also my first barbecue of the century and, God willing, my last. I’m not sure what possessed me. Perhaps it was the little portable Weber. It had looked so lovely in the Conran shop but now lurked malevolently under the stairs, reproachful, unloved and still wrapped. It may have been that my partner, (a woman who, though brilliant in every respect has never grasped the concept of ‘clean–as-you-go’) had occupied the kitchen and was now making a carrot cake the way Michael Cimino made ‘Heaven’s Gate’.

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Posted by Tim at 07:52 AM |

Things That Enrage Me

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Posted by Tim at 07:46 AM |

Bread of Heaven

At the back of my freezer, behind a frozen pig trotter and a couple of blocks of fish fumet, lie Sigourney and Sissy. They’re certainly not dead but they’re not exactly alive either. They exist in suspended animation and are the daughters of a sourdough ‘Mother Sponge’ which thrives at the San Francisco Bakery College.

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Posted by Tim at 07:41 AM |

March 14, 2006

Stretching a Chicken

I’m sitting, alone, in the kitchen at 1.13 in the morning. When I say alone, I’m only being partially accurate. There is, of course, the chicken. I admit this is not normal behaviour. A man doesn’t usually leave his bed, his slumbering wife and child and nip down to the kitchen for silent contemplation of dead poultry. On the other hand, this is no ordinary chicken. It’s a Gauloise, the same breed as the legendary poulet de Bresse but from an English farm. It’s organic and unlike the authentic French version which is ‘hand finished’ on a diet of corn soaked in milk, entirely free-range.

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Posted by Tim at 09:52 PM |

Crab Cakes for Lt. Ripley

There is a moment near the beginning of the movie 'Alien' when we catch the first glimpse of the creature they call the ‘Face Hugger’. It is the genius of HR Giger that the creature’s design quotes the legs of spiders, tails of scorpions, skeletal fingers and all manner of invasive phallic imagery. It is intended to provoke, in all who see it, a sense of unease, visceral disgust and revulsion. It made me think of drawn butter.

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Posted by Tim at 09:50 PM |

A Man and his Piano

I think there’s a lot to be said for mid-life crises. We underrate the evanescent flowering where infantile irresponsibility is momentarily overlapped by wealth and experience. That short and heady time when one is finally rich enough to behave like a child. When mine hit, I managed to avoid running off with my secretary or joining an ashram, which left me with one remaining option, I decided to buy a vintage Porsche. Due to some characteristically appalling diary management, this hormonal surge coincided with moving in with my future wife. The more astute among you will have spotted the omens of doom in this scenario.

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Posted by Tim at 09:48 PM |

Knife Rules and Distractions

A couple of weeks ago I watched an autopsy. As the result of a series of rigorous experiments with Chateauneuf du Pape, I found myself slumped in font of the telly at three in the morning watching a pathologist at work. As he sawed his Y incision, did my mind drift to the ultimate frailty of our human shell, the evanescence of our lives; the miracles of the human biology or even a healthy repulsion? No, I found myself wondering how he could bear to work with such a shite knife. I mean dammit, the man had some top kit, people to look after it and, working from rectal temperature at time of death, it wasn’t even as if the meat had had time to toughen up. I’d have done a better job with a Stanley knife.

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Posted by Tim at 09:46 PM |

Corned Beef, Chips and the Tomb of the Cybermen

Meals are made memorable when they involve moments of great emotion. A first date, an important decision or a pregnancy announced and the menu pretty much burns into the cortex. For me, the earliest and most profoundly etched is associated with a series of moments of abject terror on consecutive Saturdays in the early seventies. Most people of a certain age recall hiding behind the sofa or burying their face in cushions when the scariest bits of Dr Who came on. For me this was never an option. No matter what horrific trial Davros was about to visit on the Doctor and his fetching assistant, no piece of upholstery could come between my mouth and my plate.

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Posted by Tim at 05:22 PM |

Mugs and Waitresses

I don’t have a son. If I did, I only have one piece of useful advice to pass on. One single thought that would make his life simpler and happier. If I had a son, I’d take him, as he approached manhood, to a diner or bar and impart this great pearl. ‘Son’, I’d say, a manly tear, misting the fond paternal eye. ‘Always date waitresses’.

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Posted by Tim at 05:20 PM |

March 02, 2006

Apicius

There is a disheartening moment at too many dinner parties when some pompous bore solemnly intones ‘I think it was Oscar Wilde who said…’. Nine times out of ten, it wasn’t. Neither, indeed, was it Winston Churchill, the other catchall for any half remembered quote. The sensible diner is well advised to mentally switch off as this useful warning phrase is spoken. For those who pontificate about food, at either amateur or professional level, there is a similar, usefully vague source – Apicius. He is imagined to be a sage and portly Roman voluptuary, possibly chef to one of the more colourful Caesars, and gets the blame for any culinary myth involving tongues, udders, unlikely birdlife, unspeakable bits of otter or dormice in honey.

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Posted by Tim at 09:53 PM |

A – Aphrodisiacs

“Turtle soup with ambergris, sole à la normande, reindeer fillet in cream sauce, salmis of veal, roasted young pigeon, watercress salad, asparagus in hollandaise sauce, bone marrow pudding, port; Bordeaux, coffee and coca.” This menu, from a C19th collection, was the highest tech amorous enhancement available to a blissfully previagran world. It’s hard to imagine following a blowout like that with a night of anything other than crippling indigestion and drunken flatulence, but perhaps our ancestors were tougher than we credit them.

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Posted by Tim at 08:43 PM |

B – Breakfast

Maybe it’s an English thing, maybe it’s a guy thing but the meal that really seems to stir the emotions more than any other is breakfast. Sure, an intimate diner a deux, a three star gourmet blowout, fast food or even, God help us, barbecue have their place but there’s nothing like breakfast.

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Posted by Tim at 07:44 PM |

C - Courtesy

When did it become the defining characteristic of a culinary genius that he must be a foul-mouthed yahoo with psychopathic tendencies and a hair-trigger?

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Posted by Tim at 06:47 PM |

D - Disgust

We love to get all misty eyed and lyrical about the food we adored as children but few of us care to remember the things we really hated. Any adult who’s ever tried to feed something to an unwilling child will know that the disgust reaction is profoundly physical and all but impossible to overcome. If a kid doesn’t like spinach, no amount of intimidation, cajoling or bribery will make him eat it. When was the last time, though, an adult refused something you’d cooked them? Clearly, we lose some of that visceral disgust as we mature. Except for dieters, vegetarians and those with psychosomatic food ‘allergies’ who, I hope, you have no need to dine with, grown-ups are properly omnivorous or at least polite.

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Posted by Tim at 05:52 PM |

E - Eggs Benedict

An egg is culinary perfection. The protein content of a small chicken in a natural packaging. A perfect emulsifying agent in mayonnaises, a thickener in custards and sauces. Redolent, when flanked by soldiers, of the nursery yet capable of the sophistication of soufflé or omelette Arnold Bennet. Perhaps it is because the egg is so perfect, particularly at breakfast, that cocking it up makes me so angry. People who claim they ‘can’t boil an egg’ frustrate me, people who overcook scrambled eggs make me very ill-tempered but anyone who screws up eggs Benedict can set me into a fulminating, incoherent rage.

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Posted by Tim at 03:56 PM |

F - Fast Food

I think fast food has had bad press. I’m not talking about the stuff in McDonalds and Burger King – anyone who’s ever waited to be served in any of those places will know it’s anything but fast – no, I mean the stuff that‘s cooked by a human; a ‘short-order’ cook. Done right, diner food is cooked, from decent ingredients, right in front of your eyes. You don’t find that in many places that don’t feature Japanese guys with huge knives and tanks of raw fish.

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Posted by Tim at 02:57 PM |

G - Garnish

. My first kitchen job was ‘doing the garni’s’. Laying out lines of limp lettuce leaves on big trays and topping each one with a slice of cucumber and a wedge of tomato. As this was a Bournemouth hotel in the seventies, there was also a smaller number where the tomato was replaced with lemon for fish and a half dozen topped with a pineapple ring for the gammon. I never knew what the garnishes were actually for. Nobody ate them, I’m sure that was considered dreadfully non-U. The staff often whispered that, in cheaper hotels, the dishwasher rescued them and dusted them off for re-use.

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Posted by Tim at 01:58 PM |

H - Health Food

I suppose I only have myself to blame. I chose to live in Camden so my local grocery is a healthfood shop. It opens later than everyone else so I occasionally find myself in there looking for a pint of milk (Organic, additive free, four times as expensive as regular). Last week I found a packet of ‘Ancient Grains’ breakfast cereal made with ‘Quinoa, spelt and Kamut®’. Which Neolithic tribe registered Kamut as a trademark, one has to ask?

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Posted by Tim at 12:01 PM |

I - Indian

It’s an oft-repeated culinary truism that the food you eat in Indian restaurants bears no resemblance to the food of the subcontinent. I’m sure this is entirely true. I’m sure that the fish cuisine of Kerala has to tasted (preferably in situ) to be believed and that the spice mixes of the North have an intoxicating and evanescent finesse that disperses like incense smoke when exported. The problem is that ‘Indian’ has changed so far and so fast that it’s achieved critical mass. It’s a thing alone, like tinned peaches and baked beans - delicious in its own right. Whether you trace it to the Raj, Lascar seamen in London Docks or the first waves of mass immigration, a fork was formed in the evolutionary tree of Indian cooking and the product of our curry houses is a result.

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Posted by Tim at 11:02 AM |

December 23, 2004

The Foie Gras Burger

Surely the world can’t be too bad a place when a man can form the sentence ‘I’d had a little too much foie gras’, and last week I found myself in precisely that happy state. My landlord had left us a housewarming present of a bottle of champagne and a can of foie gras and over three nights we’d worked our way through most of it. On the fourth evening I found it in the refrigerator like a cholesterol hockey puck iced with a glistening crust of clarified butter. Silent, malevolent and faintly recriminatory.

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Posted by Tim at 12:36 PM |






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