From the inaugural BurgerMonday pop-up on 24 January 2011 with the Young Turks as guest chefs to the first FryFriday pop-up on 10 February 2012 with Anh Vu and Van Tran of Banhmi11 my dinners have been shared experiences only as good as – but, happily, every bit as good as – the London food obsessives who filled the tables and grasped what it meant to be, feel and eat young&foodish(ly). [Read more...]
A Pop-Up Logo for Me & My Pop-Up Dinners
11 February 2012 By 1 Comment
My Most Read Posts of 2011
So not so burger-manic a year after all. Only half on my most read posts published in 2011 were about burgers:
1. At MEATliquor, Burger Love is Blind
2. My Confidence Cracked in Bistro du Vin Burger
3. Is Devouring a St John Custard Doughnut Truly the Best Thing to Do on a Saturday Morning in London?
4. What Do You Think is Wrong with the Dalston Superstore Burger?
5. Beautiful Pastrami Found on London Pavement
6. My Open Letter to Pierre Hermé
7. Wimpy Mega Burger an Endangered Classic in Fast-Food Design
8. Killing Time & Lovely Coffee at Monmouth Maltby St
30 December 2011 By Leave a Comment
Duke Ellington: King of Jazz & Gluttony
The three-part profile of jazz great Duke Ellington written by Richard O.Boyer for The New Yorker in 1944 isn’t just one of the greatest musical portraits ever written for a magazine. “The Hot Back“ is a classic in food and travel writing, too, a tell-all from a then 45-year-old legend who liked to eat it all and was always worried about keeping his weight down.
26 August 2011 By 2 Comments
Osteria Francescana’s Massimo Bottura: “Our Ideas are in Service of the Most Beautiful Foods”
Chef Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy didn’t win the 2011 The San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards on votes but he was tops in decibels. Roars erupted from Monday night’s audience at London’s Guildhall when the chef at the fourth best restaurant in the world, up two places from 2010, was declared the winner of the Chef’s Choice award.
This was the second great honour bestowed upon Bottura in two weeks. On 4 April the local boy made good was awarded the Medaglia d’Oro – “gold medal” – from the commune of Modena (photos here). [Read more...]
20 April 2011 By 1 Comment
“We believe in the flavour of spices”
When asked why virtually all Indians choose to cook and eat their guinea fowl and chicken without skin, Anirudh Arora, the chef at Moti Mahal in Covent Garden, did not think fat was a factor.
“We believe in the flavour of spices,” reasoned Arora, composing a mantra for all Indian cooking.” [Read more...]
29 October 2010 By Leave a Comment
“Our Pies Are Not Always Round”: In Praise of Imperfection
The food pages are rife with promises of perfection. The guardian.co.uk tells us how to make the perfect pâté and the perfect mayonnaise while posting the perfect hummus debate. The telegraph.co.uk headlines recipes for the perfect sponge and the perfect roast lamb cake. And just today, latimes.com revealed how to grill the perfect steak. [Read more...]
1 July 2010 By 3 Comments
The New Trainee Barista at Penny University
Early this morning, Gwilym Davies was about to board a flight home from Malta to London when he received a urgent call from Tim Styles of the coffee shop Penny University.
Penny U was a man down for the day and Styles wanted to know if Davies, the 2009 World Barista Champion, could fly in as a late substitution. Davis landed at Heathrow, rushed directly to Shoreditch, stopped only long enough to open the door of the men’s boutique where he has his own coffee trolley and then slid behind the bar at Penny U.
So how did Davies, the espresso champ, do on his first day as a barista preparing only pour-over and syphon brews at Penny University? I would give him a 9 out of 10 for the quality of the unplugged filter coffee and a 2 out of 10 for wardrobe. Apparently Davies did not get the company memo about the baristas wearing traditional men’s cotton shirts.
16 June 2010 By Leave a Comment
if third man’s harry lime were a foodie
If Harry Lime, the villain from Carol Reed‘s 1949 British film noir The Third Man, were a food obsessive, as was Orson Welles, the actor who portrayed and embellished the Graham Greene creation, than one of the most famous lines in cinema history might have read somewhat differently:
LIME: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced lasagna, ravioli, risotto, mozzarella di bufala, pecorino romano and pollo alla cacciatora. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? Fondue.
In fact it was Welles who improvised what is known as the cuckoo clock speech. The backdrop was postwar Vienna and Welles apparently did not have pasta on his mind at the time. No, if you watch the scene closely and mute the dialogue you just might get a glimmer of Welles’s preoccupation. I think he’s secretly wondering where he will go that night for tafelspitz and sacher torte.
18 March 2010 By Leave a Comment
