Yauatcha: How Not to Treat A Customer

Food blogs are funny things. Ultimately it is just one person's snapshot view of a restaurant. What would bring you to read my views on a restaurant you may well never visit? I guess like all critics, as a s/he is read more and more, the reader compares it with their own experiences and they learn to trust the critic's opinion, or not. They may also come for the writing, or they may even come to satisfy their raging food-porn obsession if the blogger has spent a suitably grotesque amount of money on the latest SLR wonder box of tricks. Did you SEE the bokeh on those?!

Food critics for the New York Times have rules about the number of times they have to eat at a restaurant before they can review it. As to with the Michelin process. Too many times have I seen negative reviews because the kitchen sent a few bad plates out of the thousands that week. It may even have been the only bad plates to get through the pass all year. Nonetheless, bloggers often write up a scathing review and move on to the next terrified bastard holding everyone to Michelin levels. For things that are cheaper like burgers/street food, I will generally try to go several times before writing it up. I understand that everyone pays the same amount for each plate but if only 1% of the orders are duds then it is unfair to say the quality is poor if you’ve only been once and gotten unlucky.

The Karczma: Cultural Oasis in Birmingham

Every country has deep-rooted divisions between its peoples, often stemming from jealousy (or arrogance, depending on which side of the fence you are on). Germany has Bavaria, France has Paris (and Cote D'Azure) and the UK has those living south of the Watford Gap. The UK North/South divide is interesting as it encompasses more than just monetary differences. It’s how you vote, the way you take your tea, what sort of beer you drink, if the person in the next town can understand you. For those of us not fortunate to have been born in this green and pleasant land, it essentially boils down to those in the South thinking the North is a giant barren wasteland full of ugly, smelly, alcoholics on benefits, while the North think Southerners are weak arrogant tossers that think even their farts smell of sunshine and roses. The jury is out as to who is more accurate.

What is a fact though is that London is the best city for food in the UK by both quality and diversity. Vietnamese? Yeah, I know a lovely authentic place run by a family in Camberwell, Korean BBQ - New Malden, Cambodian - a great little place in Camden. French and Spanish is covered on every street in Soho - tapas to cordon bleu - just pick your fancy. 

Lavish Interior Design

London Street Food 2.0: Brick Lane, Kerb, Brockley, Red & Borough

The last time I wrote a street food post it included a multitude of traders over multiple locations. I thought it was an easy way of showing the range of cheap, quality fast food available to the average Londoner. This is the same. I appreciate its rather long but there are also lots of lovely pretty pictures to entertain those with shorter attention spans. 

I was happy when I saw the post getting widely retweeted because these guys work fucking hard and deserve greater publicity than they currently get. The London street food scene has exploded over the last year and there are some great characters and custom modified vans that are beginning to rival the culture found in New York or California. I love street food because it's a great equaliser. Huge bank rolls can only do so much if your product is pants. Put McDonalds onto the streets next to the likes of Burger Bear or BleeckerSt and they wouldn't last a day. Your advertising is limited to who can see your sign, twitter, and people like me. It's capitalism as its most simplistic - those that create a superior product thrive. those that can't match them fall away. Hopefully that means they'll be a race to the top, not the bottom as demonstrated by the recent Horsegate scandal in supermarkets.

Its a well known fact across continental Europe that markets give an area a sense of community and that's what is beginning to happen in and around these sites. Come summer I expect it'll be at its height. Cyncial or overly-manufactured vendors will be shunned. Passionate, hard-working, talented traders will continue to thrive. Vive la révolution. The (Burger)King is dead, long live the King.

Market Happiness

Fairuz: Warm Welcomes

Overly sweet and sour pork with boil in the bag rice; microwaved salmon and tomato pasta; a leg of lamb, still in a roaring oven, whose last traces of blushing pink was lost some 20 minutes ago. Childhood memories, hardly Larousse Gastronomique. It may surprise you however to hear that these are some of my fondest meals. Why? Because they were cooked by my mother. It doesn’t matter if your mother was Delia or a Ramsay kitchen nightmare; her food will always have a special place. Part of the reason for this is the strong emotional bonds between the cook and the customer.

Restaurateurs either ignore this fact, or grossly misjudge it and try to be cringingly 'matey' (read: Jamie's Italian). It is a rare treat in a gastro-joint, or Michelin-starred tasting menu food-palace, that you forge even an inkling of a bond with the chef or his food. You are there to be wowed and to stand in awe at the expensive ingredients and fancy techniques. Too often customers are served the chef’s vision. Emotional attachment is rarely forged through perfection and more from endearing flaws and genuine warmth in the way it is served.

Fairuz

The Diner Soho: Superbowl Burger Excess

The Diner kindly invited several burger enthusiasts for a tasting of a new monster burger they are rolling out for their Superbowl party. Now although they are sold out for that evening (see bottom of this post), for those that aren't fans of 'football', but are fans of burgers as big as your head, this beast will be rolled out for the week following the event, 4 - 10 February.

Its called the Stiff-arm burger (see this for explanation) and is one of those plates that actually get you a little worried when its brought to the table. That little flutter of "fuck, am I actually going to finish that?! How do i even start it?!" while people turn to stare from other tables. You'd be right to be worried. The Stiff-arm contains a 5oz beef patty, an 8oz Jucy Lucy (we'll come to that), jalapeno slaw and 'football' sauce all in cased in a poppy-seed Rinkoff bun. So that's 13oz of meat give or take. Its a fearsome plate of food.

The Stiff-Arm

A Little Slice of History: Ben Spalding @ John Salt

A lost post of 2012, a wonderful evening at John Salt with Ben Spalding at the helm. This is probably the most pointless post of the, still young, year. Why post about a restaurant, whose head chef was usually mentioned in the sentence before his employer's, when he there anymore? Well, two reasons. Firstly, for preservation: to carbonite the evening in space. To 'Han Solo' Ben's cooking if you will. The main reason however is to show people a glimpse of what Ben's cooking is about and that like his Stripped Back street food joint proved, a chef doesn't actually have to have some fancy digs to be a great cook. As I write, this Ben is publicising the first of a series of events on EventBrite.

As was announed late last year, Ben and John Salt parted ways pre-maturely, leaving those with bookings a bit miffed I'd imagine (although provided with a very reasonable 50% discount). That being said, Neil Rankin who best known for wearing the gloves at Pitt Cue, has taken up the rather large mantle and by the look of my twitter feed doing a damn fine job. I'll be going along as soon as I can and I'm as excited as I was the first time around. This post wont go into the reasons why Ben left and frankly, I do not care. That's only half true. I don't care why he left, he is talented enough to pop-up somewhere else soon enough. I do care that I have to wait for that. See, beneath all the crowing and beard-stroking about his techniques, passion, skill and obscene work ethic (he produced his own salt for gods sake), Ben does indeed understand why things should be on a plate. Sure there are some air-balls - kiwi scallops and caramel covered bricks were duds. But there are also some wonderful little gems in things as ridiculous to see on a menu as 'rotten mango juice'. His is a talent that could no more be ignored than that guy who insists on trying to continue the conversation inside a lift.

Weekday 9 Course Menu

Battle of the Giants: Steak Wars

Prost - Senna, Ali - Frazier, Borg - McEnroe, Hendry - O'Sullivan. Since the first person to kick a rock into a cave opening, past an outstretched monkey, man has competed. And competition breeds rivalry. More enthralling than the rivalries and the heights they push themselves to be the best, are the spectators' intense love or hatred for one of the two. Great rivalries: the ones that last, are those where the two competitors are polar opposites. One cool, laid back and usually Nordic. The other an angry, brass young upstart, usually American. You can tell a lot about a person's character by whom they pick out of Ovett or Coe.

Sport and its competitive nature is a metaphor for many things in life. One of those mentioned less often is the rivalry within the food world. There are great examples: the American v Lafayette Coney hotdog war in Detroit, North Carolina v Kansas City for BBQ and the most famous the race-to-the-bottom: McDonalds v Burger King, to make the least edible burger (congratulations McDonalds, you just sneaked it with the McRib)

The reason I live (Note: Not a McRib)