perfect peach

(UNFINISHED BLOG FROM >>>> AGES AGO)

people often ask me: "edwin, what's your favourite mid-price london-based eaterie?"* and to them, i say, "why, it's bocco di lupo, dimwit". it's like tapas, but, liiike, italian, and, to cut a long story short, it serves the best most weird food you could ever hope for. pecorino here, pomegranate there, and untold lashings of strange meats. best of all, there's no pizza.

i've been three times, and every time has been "a delight", as they say. nothing on the menu is familiar (and some of it is actually quite unpleasant), but it's all entertaining. sort of like the best kind of holidays. and when i go out for dinner in soho, my wallet bulging with leftover €5 notes, that's exactly what i want.

last time i went, straight from heathrow, i'd neglected to remember/become aware of the fact that soho had been heavily vandalised during the day's gay pride proceedings. plastic, and worse, littered the streets. i was scandalised! no, obviously i wasn't, but it took a good while to cut through the crowds to where i wanted to be.

what's my point? my point is cheeeese.

although this kind of meat 'n' cheese platter is a bit boring, really, isn't it, even if the meat is lamb proscuitto, sliced 'pon palatine hill fresh from its mother's wooly womb, and drizzled nonchalantly with quadruply virgin olive oil or something. it was nice, though. nice. nice...

ideally, of course, you get a seat by the kitchen, so you can watch swarthy men throw things around with aplomb and wonder at the ease with which food moves from plastic tub to polished plate. and as it's a sort-of tapas place, the most fun is to be found in ordering as many small things as possible. to this end there is an entire section in the menu devoted to crostinis and bruschetta-- essentially "stuff" on toast. some are more radical than others--why have tomato and basil when you can have spleen and ricotta?

spleen! SPLEEN! i don't even know what spleen is! it does something like rid the body of noxious toxins, no doubt, like most of the lesser known organs. and i bet it doesn't taste very nice most hours of the day. but softened with ricotta and drizzled nonchalantly etc it's a fucking mouthful and a half.

the downside to this is that some of the curios are plain disgusting: battered tripe, for example--jazzed up on the menu with lemon, mint, chilli & p-p-pecorino, but inevitably just tasting like a drowned man's fatty back.

i'd never eaten tripe before, partly because i think my mum was so tormented by it as a child that she kept us well away, and partly because of a simpson's episode that i can't remember very clearly. i won't be eating again--by which i mean i probably will be. still, it said what it was on the menu, and i only brought it on myself (and upon my long-suffering friend meliana).

on the up-side there was this octopus and pea combo:

and the highlight of the whole meal: orecchiette with something called "'nduja", an extremely spicy salami that was presumably used in a moderate enough quantity to leave the dish not-extremely spicy. the sauce was like that archetypal italian pasta sauce that everyone raves about: more flavour than seems humanly possible. slurrrrp.

just excuse the photo! i'm not sure what i was trying to achieve... as beautiful as the spoon's handle is.

and... that's that.