double-double

who says fast food doesn't bring happiness?


thanks to san francisco's in'n'out burger for another perfectly nice pile of food.

i gotta hunch

the meek shall inherit the earth, and all its eggs, and all its lumps of sweaty potato:

what is it about brunch? why is it such a big deal? i guess it's because it only actually occurs on those days when there's nothing else to do but sit and blankly flick through newspaper supplements--and those are invariably good days. it's like association or something.

well, here we are in vancouver, and there's an hour or two to kill. jimmy knows a place called commune. it is, essentially, a hipster cafe, so... perfectly suited to us. the menu is written up on a chalkboard*, you can drink something called "lunas organic karmic peace tea" and something else called "st. ambroise apricot wheat ale"--and, oh yeah, it's called commune.

commune! back in the 1950s this place would've been shut down quicker than you can say "get ye to the gulag". inevitably, to demonstrate just how far the socialist experiment has come, there's a guy sitting solo a few tables behind us with an ipad, an ipad stand, and a standalone keyboard--an iworkstation, if you will. an iberkstation. an... ijerkoffstation.

cheap cynicism aside, it is obviously my kind of place. simple booth seating, easy-going food, and waiters who don't shirk from overbearing niceties.

here's brunch, up close and personal:


claggy.

jimmy and walter weren't terribly impressed. mine was a good 25% bigger than theirs, and my poached egg was actually cooked properly. i also possess grace, charm, and an excellent knife and fork technique, which as you can imagine is quite riling. secretly all they wanted was a side of heinz baked beans. jimmy actually became so desperate for that he ordered the closest orange thing he could find:

drip, drip, dripping.

*it's possible that it isn't.

tapas or not tapas

for all our whinging about being broke, having to pay to tour, etc., sometimes, for no particular reason, we're compelled to spend stupid amounts of money on food. i know other bands who do the same thing, and i don't think there should be much shame in it. artists are supposed to be self-destructive--i* just prefer to destroy myself with tapenade rather, than, say cocaine. call me an arsehole; hey, i'll call you an arsehole.

so here we are in portland, oregon, more or less fresh from the plane and as yet without the wallet-lightening that will soon suck our sanity dry. portland, oregon (can it be said any other way?) is undoubtedly an expensive place, grown from hard graft and infused with the scents of hemp and vanilla frappes--a privileged but pleasant two-tone hippydom awash with plaid shirts, fixed gear bikes, and tattoos learing from limb after limb. i love it.

it's also a food place. "food places" are defined, by me, as places so full of food that they soon become about food. truck stops on ohio interstates are, not, for example, food places, whereas the poncy half of new york city quite clearly is. generally speaking you'd think america would be one big food place, given how enormous everyone is--but of course it doesn't work like that. in fact, nothing works like this at all: the fundamental thing about my insightful theory of "food places" being that it's utter bullshit. ba dum ... tsssh, etc.

so, right next to the venue in portland sits this tapas restaurant toro bravo. it has a great reputation, apparently. jack did his usual tripadvisor-based research, and came back with some such statistic about how 107% people agree that it is indeed the pinnacle of culinary good-time party vibes, and how it serves 300 different riojas, and how it once famously poisoned franco himself, blah blah blah.

i wasn't hungry, having eaten an enormous pulled pork sandwich recently around 100 yards down the road. it had been delicious, sort of, in a way, kind of like a snickers chocolate bar is delicious, or a simple mouthful of whipped cream is... --i.e., okay, if you plan to die before your thirties, or at least never progress to mental adulthood, but not exactly my cup of tea.


the menu, long and thin, teases with plentitude: rarely are words more god-damn om-nom-nom than in places like this: pecorino and pomegranate; romesco and romaine; salbitxada and... what even is sabitxada? of course, there's no explanation--and, of course, nothing as crassly mercantile as dollar signs.

so. what's the no. 1 rule of dining at a spanish restaurant. that's right: always drink the sherry. i've only ever drunk sherry at tapas restaurants (approximately as many times as i have left-handed fingers), and with that depth of experience i can assuredly tell you that it is deee-licious. all of it! even the cheap stuff.

get on the sherry traaaain! choo-choo...

this assuredly was cheap stuff. at $12 for the three, and listed as a "sherry flight", i was easily seduced.

what, you wonder, is a sherry flight? well, it brings to mind a proto-plane enthusiastically plummeting over the white cliffs of the dover, spilling with sherry-doused dowagers, headmistresses, and aging suffragettes. that's a good thing, right? right.

i'd like to think the sherry actually gives you wings, as the complementary plank is about as long as a second-rate aircraft carrier and could, in itself, barely provide any kind of run-up for take-off. maybe that's the point: maybe you're supposed to down them with all the spirit of a ww2 pacific-theatre pilot, seconds from shooting haphazardly off into the horizon. either way, the energy conjured up is on of swift, focused action. 1-2-3... go, so to speak.

instead i drank them slow, expecting the same kind of slow seeping satisfaction that i've felt in london's brindisa and polpo. but they just, mm, sliipped down. i guess this is because they were all pretty shit. but with a cute little plank and a graded colour system who could possibly complain?

the no. 2 rule of spanish restaurants, taught me by my favourite sort-of spanish associate "melquin", is that you should always order spinach. in fact this rule goes for most restaurants. spinach is extraordinarily nutritious, and it costs nothing, and it makes everything look good. the vitamin-bling of vegetables; the kerrrching-aling of vegetables; the motherluvvin' king of vegetables.

i think those might be pine nuts. i can't remember. i was still too excited about the flying sherry train.

rule no. 3? nah, this isn't a rule. i just ordered a salad because i wasn't very hungry.

raddichio is good, right? there was something else in there: manchego vinaigrette! as if i could hide from he stuff. it turned out to be about three times as big as my head, and i put it all away. banging.

the real rule no. 3 is: always order the weird cheese. we've all had manchego and ... and... the others. right. some of the others. they're boring! throw caution to the wind: order the pickled pig's cheese smoked in the fires of sodom. or in this case, the marinaded sheep's cheese with rose petal harissa and mint.

globules of "good god!" gobbiness. but what the fuck is rose petal harissa? god knows. it tasted really weird, and i'm not sure i dug it. i'm definitely unsure that it sat with the sherry. but boy was i flying high, and so, belly more or less sated, i went on to this drink:

unfortunately i can't remember what it is. the receipt just says BESITO in big beaming letters. be... sito. i'm guessing, looking at it, that it was some kind of sour. i'm around 50% confident that i ordered it solely because there was some odd vaguely- ingredient in it. er, sherry? a sherry sour? that or it was the horchato-based white russian that i've recently been craving. either way, it was probably quite nice.

and dessert? well, that was balls.

nah, not really. it was brilliant. a sort of affogato (pronounced "ah, fer garrdo..." in the australian style) with espresso-drowned almond ice-cream, it ... it... i dunno. it was just ice-cream, basically.

what else? there were some salted almonds. jack had some grilled asparagus. there was a sausage served with fries that will remain unfeatured. someone who shall remain unnamed had about eleven beers. there was mutinous talk of foie gras, and much silent slurping.

of course the main drawback of going to a tapas restaurant with more than just your closest confidant is that you can't rely on everyone's sense of adventure to make group-orders worthwhile. in our case this is definitely true. jimmy just wants chorizo; walter won't eat fish; jack only wants the bloody potato bravas. and so what could be a feast of much becomes a tight-fist of not-much. and where ten plates should sit and deferentially complement each other, we're left overthinking the three of four we've individually chosen. this is a shame because it's not how these restaurants are supposed to work, and inevitably we went away with a limited experience.

but i'm not whinging, though. not me, no--not ever.

*... am an artist here for rhetorical purposes only.

seizure salad

gordon ramsey's plane food should be the shittest restaurant in the world, for several obvious reasons: gordon ramsey is involved, but has certainly never stepped foot in the kitchen; it's in an airport; and it's full of assholes like me. however, once you get past all of these factors, and take yor seat 'neath what could well be the worst ambient lighting ever, it's actually quite nice. primarily because it's cheap and, you know, unfussy. for an airport. oh, and the caesar salad looks like this:

boy! squidgy egg yolks really turn me on. and check the croutons: hand-hewn from sandstone by stakhanov himself.

i don't know the first thing about caesar salads. they're like martinis in that affectionados will judge their merits and demerits with reference to an obscure century-old code. irrelevant, but entertaining. so how does this rate to the original caesar salad, famously invented by man-with-the-plan julius one idle day in 1793 while taking a bath in cleopatra's fetid breast milk...? i'd say... a 7.3, with added marks for the acrobatic bacon.

it is, as you can see, covered in spunk. it turned out to be anchovy-flavoured spunk--which, if you're walter, is the worst kind of spunk. he doesn't like seafood at all, due to an unfortunate incident in his youth involving a swimming pool, some loose-waisted board shorts, and a truck load of cod roe. and so his salad was left mostly untouched, while mine was polished off with quasi-genocidal relish.

jack is afraid of plain food (truly the pun that keeps giving), so he ordered the "i'm a fussy little shit" takeaway-picnic. it turned out that gordon had actually been in the kitchen at the time, as he left this little note:

what a guy.

mud crab

the one thing i was told to do while in singapore was get out of the hotel district and find some mud crab. mud... crab. what could sound more appealing? crabs are the kings of mud, after all, sitting around in it all day as if they own the stuff. if you're gonna eat some mud, basically, you should make sure to wash it down with a crab or two, if only for the nutritional value. at least i think that's the idea. i wouldn't know, as i didn't leave the hotel.

neither did jimmy, seen here doing his best impersonation of a bathing crab:

a week earlier in suburban sydney, hanging out lazily as "the river" (it was in fact just a river) receded, i was privileged to watch thousands of the stupid little things blinking in the sun, running ferociously sidewards, and scurrying back into their muddy pits whenever anything larger than an apple approached. it was an astonishing sight, but not one that inspired anything less than malicious hunger. i'm sure they have a complex social life, and have cleverly evolved into the most perfectly suited-to-mud creatures on earth, but in the meantime i'm happy to accidentally crush them and throw them in a saucepan. because crab is delicious, isn't it.

especially when it's covered with chilli:

this is from leong's legends, a taiwanese restaurant in london's chinatown famous for its special xiao long bao dim sum (i had to look that up), and less famous for its generic cantonese alternatives.

i've wandered around chinatown before, and had fairly rubbish food. at a.a. gill's insistence i once went to bar shu with a similarly overeager friend, and spent a small fortune on odd, elaborate, and dubiously tasty sichuan food. it's all about the menu choices, isn't it, and for this reason it's essential to go with someone in the know (by "know" i do of couse mean an appropriate genetic heritage, preferably including a childhood of chilli-abuse)--someone, say, like my excellent friend "mel'ung".

i don't really understand a lot of this stuff: it seems to either be mostly mush or catastrophically spicy, and sometimes both at the same time. and what a generalisation! that's like a chinese person saying "i don't understand european food: it's either made of dough or...'' which, while not exactly incorrect, would be met with wildly varied but equally confused indignation by, say, an italian and a swede.

but i've never been to china--i've rarely been to chinatown--and i've grown up in a country mostly littered with disgusting chinese takeaways, so... no, i don't hold myself to blame.

anyway. leong's legend: ignorance aside, it was wonderful.

what isn't to like? the cosy wood panelling, the waitresses' stilted but self-assured service, the table opposite us of chinese businessmen noisily slurping everything in sight--all this is as you'd expect . and the food was delicious--steaming hot and full o' flava.

a light taro and tofu noodle soup, squished up aubergines, and a bowl of braised pork belly in brown-stuff so fatty that one of us couldn't quite finish every slavering mouthful.

the speciality xiao long bao are dumplings delicately filled with some kind of broth. cheerfully likened to pointy little breasts, appropriate chopstick method involved picking them up by their nipples, dipping the mammary whole in ginger and soy, and dropping it down in one. like so:

and the highlight, as above--chilli crab! it took about fifteen minutes of scrabbling fingers to admit to ourselves that there wasn't actually much meat on the thing, but i don't think that's ever really the point. it's a primitive, visceral, carnivourous delight--pulling apart a crustacean like we own the thing. which we most assuredly did.

where's your mud now, huh?

neuuuughdles.

part of the motivation for writing this blog was to record my experiences of eating around the world. naturally enough, you'd think. but i've been putting the whole project off and off for so long that i've missed hundreds of amazing, odd, and disgusting meals. this is a shame, but i'm not one for regrets, and so... from here on i'm aiming to document the ones worth documenting.

in the meantime it'll be retrospectively half-arsed.

so, yes... here's a generic out-of-the-hotel-window shot of shibuya, tokyo.

obviously japan has some crazy food. "crazy" is putting it mildly. it's another world, etc etc. truly alien. a common platitude, but it's unavoidably true. everywhere you go you're confronted with weirdness, often on a fairly basic level: the plastic models of curries and soups sat outside every restaurant advertising the food within, for example--hilarious the first time, but somewhat off-putting every time after that; the bento boxes available here there and everywhere which consist of no single identifiable food stuff--holding a soggy grey cube between your fingers you wonder if it's animal, vegetable or mineral, or potentially none of the above; and the fact that even the western-style packaged sandwiches in convenience stores look like they've been cloned, delivered via caesarean, and then boil-washed.

here's some kind of gravy jelly, from 2008.

and here is a raw shellfish salad.


mmmmmm. notevenkidding.

for better or worse this world tends to incite anecdote-hunting. inspired by sake and a camp sort of macho bravado , i set about on our first tour attempting to one-up anyone who'd have me in the game of "eat the most disgusting that the kitchen can offload on us'" led by my famed (not really) dictum that i will "put anything in my mouth once", i ended up eating raw beef cartilage (which can only be likened to the imagined experience of eating a human ear), raw frozen horse meat (which tastes like... a horse lollipop), raw squid guts (which caused the midnight juggern tm to spontaneously vomit--i proudly held mine down), and a whole bunch of stuff that i've erased from my memory.

fortunately for me this kind of behaviour, as dubious as it is childish, quickly wore thin, and i haven't done it again. unfortunately for you i don't have any photos of any of this. i do, however, have a photo of some ramen noodle soup.

mmm. egg-in-soup. what's not to like? this is from a small cafe somewhere in shibuya which we've been taken to twice recently by our uncompromisingly charming japanese hosts the first time was on arrival into tokyo after a harrowing week-long australian tour of self-deprivation and general self-abuse. fried and frazzled, there was nothing that could have been more comforting than this steaming bowl of uncomplicated deliciousness. fatty strips of pork fall apart at the merest chop-poke of a chopstick, the egg oozes gunk from the get-go, and beneath it all lies a swamp of noodles so heavy and dense that a decent night's sleep is almost guaranteed.

i tried to jazz this photo up a bit because i look so haggard. apparently that's how i roll nowadays. and--look!--my ears are half as big as the rest of my head. but, delinquency and deformity aside, i'm delighted.

i'm reminded of a japanese film that i saw years ago on the secrets behind the stock that goes into these things. no, i don't remember anything else about--certainly not the title--but it did make clear the otherwise murky distinction between great noodle soups and shitty noodle soups: love, skill and witchcraft on the one hand, and an oxo cube on the other. you just can't do that shit at home.

here's walter struggling with a shitty noodle soup elsewhere in south-east asia (begins with sin and ends with pore).

neuuuughdles.

agape

i'm not sure when my mum bought her aga. i think it was when we moved into this house, so... sometime after 1990. i can't remember not having one. it's quite an odd appliance to grow up with, though naturally at the time it felt as much of our family of furniture as the various cats. i did realise at some point in my teens that it is something of a status symbol for the rural middle classes (along with range rovers, shotguns and golliwogs), which is odd given that i grew up on state benefits in an ex-dockyard town. but there's nothing wrong with being aspirational, right? right.

there are no buttons and there's only one dial (and i don't know what it does). it's just on, all of the time, and has indeed been on for all of that time. it heats the kitchen and a lot of the house--especially my old bedroom, which sits directly above. living in a draughty old victorian house with single-glazed windows obviously requires some kind of decent central heating--and what better method than installing a big lumpy hot thing to sit smack back in the middle of it.*

not exactly energy efficient, no, but i like to think we made up for that by never, ever flying. (which, yes, i have in turn also made up for. er.)

of course, i like to think a lot of things. usually, i don't think very much. and growing up with such a useful and yet remarkably useless appliance has certainly shaped my thought in unflattering ways. i don't, for example, think anything about gas marks. i barely know how to use a microwave, grill or sandwich maker. and there's the apocraphyl story of how, while staying at the band house in oxford, i cheerfully filled up an electric kettle with water, turned on the hob, and ... yeah, you know where this is going. it only took a minute or two for the kitchen to be filled with toxic black smoke, and we had pretty much had to evacuate the house immediately to avoid a round of tracheostomies. (i hesitated to point out the irony of heavy smokers worrying about inhalation of toxic fumes).

and what are agas bad for? sponges, souffles, omelettes--anything that requires a specific high or low temperature. and what are they good for? toast.

see: they're really, really good for toast.

reason being: you can slap the bread down on the hob, add whatever you want, put the lid down, and walk off, ideally walking back in time for everything to be at that perfect place between squishy and crispy. that's about it. no need to think, and no need to fuss. delicious cheese on toast, just like mum used to make (and, er, still does).

it's not quite breakfast, but then i did get out of bed four hours late.

agape**.

*don't answer that question.

**defined by paulo coehlo as "the love that consumes," i.e., the highest and purest form of love, one that surpasses all other types of affection.