Monthly Archives: March 2012

Charlie Chaplin and whether people who live in the country are inbred

. Drinking, Eating . , , , , , ,

New York City and London are sister cities in many respects. They are unquestionably the global centres of excellence for finance, arts and music. They also have more in common with each other than the cultures of the countries they are based in. You don’t have to travel far outside New York City before you run into entire states full of people who drive pick up trucks, listen to country music and move their lips when they read. London’s isolation is even more pronounced. Britain has no second city to speak of. Outside London you basically have “the country” where people go to visit a pub, enjoy nature and then shoot at it.

Even within the cities there are “no go” areas. These used to be based on personal safety considerations but these days it’s more about cultural preference. Personally I’ve never seen the point of going south of the river Thames in London. It takes almost an hour to drive there from any more civilised part of town. I’d rather keep going south and end up in Paris – only two hours away by train. I was recently taken to an event at the Cinema Museum in Elephant & Castle – far outside my comfort zone. The area is so named after a coaching inn that stood there in the 1760s. I had been in the area once before to visit the passport office. Most people who go there do so for the same reason. Everyone else is trying to get out.

Chaplin, one of the original rags to riches stories

The Cinema Museum is a splendidly quirky place jammed full of vintage cinematographic equipment, posters and bric a brac. There is a wonderfully preserved 36 seater cinema and a large theatre space which was once a chapel. The building itself was formerly the Lambeth Workhouse, a wretched place for the Victorian poor who couldn’t support themselves. Conditions were appalling, some say intentionally so to discourage anyone from staying too long. Poignantly, it was a temporary home to Hannah Chaplin and her seven-year old son Charlie. There is a lot of Chaplin memorabilia at the museum which runs a full film buff’s programme of lectures and screenings.

Looking for sustenance afterwards we wandered towards the river and found ourselves at Brindisa near the Borough Market. The market is a foodie magnet I covered in my blog on Sacred Cows and Bartering for Sex. Brindisa is a tapas bar and restaurant with branches in Soho and Kensington. It was the original “no reservations” restaurant so prepare to stand in line to get in. I was at the original London Bridge location, spitting distance from their store and “Ham School” in Borough Market. They take their ham very seriously here and it is amongst the best I’ve ever tasted. If you are hungry do try the Txuleta rib eye steak (£65 per kilogramme) made from 6-year-old Basque animals. They also have a nice selection of sherry. Sherry has had a significant brand revitalisation from when it was exclusively the drink of maiden aunts and widows. Modern sherry is complex, varied and very much on trend. There is a veritable swarm of Tapas bars with sherry menus cropping up in London including Bar Pepito, Capote y Toros and Jose.

Sherry cocktails are on most menus these days, but the sherry on offer at Brindisa is perfect for drinking straight up. I started with the Manzanilla La Gitana which is frequently drunk before a meal. It is very light in colour and crisp, with a whiff of sea salt. The La Gitana evaporates on the tongue. If you are not sure about sherry this is a good one to start with. In Andalucia this type of dry sherry is frequently drunk as a spritzer with soda or lemonade in a simple cocktail called the Rebujito. Think of it as a Spanish Gin & Tonic with half the alcohol.

The Fino Una Palma I tasted afterwards was also very dry but an altogether more refined proposition. Spanish wines and sherries are almost always consumed with food. The Una Palma tasted great with a few salted almonds. The Almontillado Seco I tried next was also dry but with a deeper colour. It is rich and would taste more familiar to a sherry drinker. Brindisa’s excellent large green Gordal olives stuffed with orange and flavoured with oregano make an excellent counterpoint. Finally, I had the Oloroso Abocado, a deep almost cognac coloured, medium sweet sherry. The Obocado has nice legs and mouth filling flavour. Its sweetness stands up perfectly to some spicier Spanish dishes like padron peppers; small Galician green peppers pan-fried with salt.

You don’t have to stray south of the river to taste Brindisa’s wares. If you are heading for Paris and you run out of gas however, the Borough market area has plenty to offer.

Further Reading

London Cinema Museum
A video tour of the museum

Brindisa Reviews
London Chow
World’s Best Bars

This one is for Nobu

. Uncategorized . ,

Last year around this time I was traveling on a train from downtown Tokyo to Narita airport.  I had based myself in Hong Kong and had travelled to Tokyo on an overnight business visit.   Suddenly the train started bucking on the tracks and swayed alarmingly at a corner, threatening to derail.  We slowed to a complete stop.  The now stationary train continued to sway from side to side.  Earthquake!

I looked outside to see power lines swaying.  I could see the multi level collapsible metal structures used to park cars shaking, the cars bouncing on their springs.  Inside the rail car everyone was calm.  The mostly Japanese travelers looked up from their newspapers, clocked that it was an earthquake and went back to reading.  A few commuters pulled out their TV phones, a piece of technological wizardry that hasn’t made it to the West yet.  I could overhear a Japanese man translating the news reports to his American girlfriend.  I heard the word “tsunami” and walked over to watch over his shoulder.  The images I saw in real-time were devastating and would dominate the world’s TV screens for weeks to come.  Almost 20,000 people were killed and a nuclear catastrophe was narrowly averted.

As the enormity of what was happening began to sink in I shot off emails, Facebook and Twitter updates before the networks jammed.  A colleague got through on the phone from London and was able to calm friends and family back home.  Half a dozen of my work colleagues from London were stranded somewhere in Tokyo.

45 minutes later step ladders were procured and we were allowed onto the tracks. We walked along them to the next train station.  I only had a small valise but many had large suitcases they were struggling with.  As I lent others a hand I got into conversation with Nobutaro “Nobu” Ban, a doctor from Nagoya who was also helping people with their luggage.  It is difficult to get by in Japan without speaking Japanese and I was glad to have an English-speaking companion.  We figured that the airport would be closed and chaotic so decided instead to head for Tokyo.  All trains had stopped running and the motorways which are mostly elevated had been damaged and closed for safety reasons.  We hitchhiked for a while but traffic was barely moving.  We finally decided to walk to Funabashi, a nearby town with several hotels.

All the hotels in Funabashi were booked solid, but had opened their lobbies and any public areas to the mass of displaced people thronging the streets.  Food, drink and phone chargers were being handed out.  We added our names to a waiting list and went out for dinner and a drink.  Japanese beer had never tasted better as Nobu and I finally relaxed.  Nobu had spent some years of his medical residency in the US and was keen to return the hospitality he was shown many years before.  He picked up our dinner tab. I discovered later that he also paid for my hotel room when it finally became available.

Nobu and me

I slept fully clothed that night.  Over a hundred after shocks were recorded in the days following the earthquake and our hotel was evacuated several times.  I got used to the eery sound of doors flexing against their frames as the building bucked and moved with the vibrations. The next day I walked, hitchhiked, found taxis and eventually made it back to Tokyo and was reunited with the rest of my team.  Like all true Brits (not forgetting the Irishman amongst them) they had weathered the earthquake with stiff upper lips – returning to their recently evacuated high-rise to finish a presentation and then walking some two and half hours back to their hotel.  With grit and Bacchanalian elan they had spent the entire night (one of several before we finally made it out) drinking in a karaoke bar.

I was glad to leave Japan that time.   I have been back since however, and plan to visit many more times. The Japanese people showed true grace under pressure.  To me and my friends they were gracious and caring hosts, worrying about our safety and our comfort.  To each other they showed respect and sacrifice.  There was no looting and violence. People in Japan didn’t go feral the way they did after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  This was a nation that was saddened, but unbroken and sure of its values.

Nobu and I have stayed in touch.  We have met and broken bread since, in happier circumstances.  His country has a lot to offer – and some superb drinking traditions which I will cover anon.  For now I just want to say thank you to him and to all my Japanese friends and wish them and their families well as their country recovers.

Further Reading

Japanese Red Cross – the stories one year on from the earthquake

Help the Red Cross prepare for disasters-  Donate to the disaster fund

Are Environmentalists the new Catholics? And what do they drink?

. Drinking, Eating . , , , , , , ,

Non Americans looking upon the hugely entertaining spectacle of the US Presidential election campaign are befuddled by the importance of religion in America. On the right side of the pond the only people who are religious are recent immigrants and senior citizens cramming for their finals. The rest are mostly C&E Christians; they go to church on Christmas and Easter. It is indeed staggering that some normal, educated, not outwardly loony people in America believe that some dude made the world up in six days and then went fishing. No matter. It is all a matter of faith and people are entitled to believe in something. In the post religious world that most of us occupy, the new religion is environmentalism. It has all the hallmarks of a religion; dubious science, the threat of damnation and apocalypse, as well as some dodgy high priests.

The eco religionists can be identified by their beards and their vehicles; either a Toyota Prius or one of those tiny Indian battery operated death traps. They like to talk about recycling. I lunched with a few of them recently in St John’s Square, Clerkenwell, at a restaurant run by a Lesbian Kiwi chef, which is the kind of thing they like. We were joined by Starkers the well known Soho streaker, and He Who Cannot Be Named because he is always strictly off the record.

The Modern Pantry is the creative, exuberant kind of place that you couldn’t have found in London ten years ago. Anna Hansen who opened Providores with Peter Gordon cooks Asian fusion cuisine of a sort rarely done well outside of the Antipodes. Dishes like her prawn omelette with sambal and her Singapore style crab with coconut flatbreads are complex and bursting with flavour. The wines are well matched and reasonable. The week-day £20 two course lunch is a bargain.

This part of Clerkenwell has had a slow burn to gentility following a few colourful centuries. This was the centre of Dickensian London in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century it was the hotbed of radical thought and communism. Lenin published his magazine Iskra (Spark) here in 1902 and had meetings with a young Josef Stalin at the Crown and Anchor pub, now called the Crown Tavern.  The area went into decline after the war (together with the rest of Britain).  Its revival (together with that of the rest of Britain) started in the Thatcher years and continued during the dot com boom. Restaurants and drinking holes followed soon after. Within a stone’s throw of the Modern Pantry are some excellent food and drink venues including the Zetter Hotel with its excellent Bruno Loubet restaurant, the newly opened Zetter Townhouse and the Giant Robot.

The Zetter Townhouse. Photo courtesy Jefferson Smith

Bonkers decor

Seeking a postprandial cocktail we walked into the Zetter Townhouse.  The bar here is run by Tony Conigliaro and Camille Hobby Limon whose other bar, 69 Colebrook Row, I previously reviewed in The Tale of the Socialist and the Good Looking Waitress.  The decor is seriously bonkers – a Dickensian melange of your maiden aunt’s musty living room and a taxidermy. There is red patterned wallpaper and wooden floors with lots of rugs.  A fire crackles invitingly.  Chairs have arms covered in burlap sacking.  There’s a bunch of paintings with landscape and hunting themes.  A stuffed fish is mounted on a wall.  A stuffed cat dressed in a Victorian gown and parasol stands over a stuffed bird. A table is scattered with rusty tin boxes. It’s eclectic,  perhaps even slightly disturbing. However, it grows on you as you spy yet another novelty. I reached for a drink.

The Flintlock and Les Fleurs du Mal

Needing something to settle my stomach I went for the old standby – Fernet Branca, sometimes fondly described as a black licorice flavoured Listerine.  The drink I chose was called a Flintlock and is made with Beafeater 24 gin, gunpowder tincture, sugar, dandelion and burdock bitters and the aforementioned Fernet Branca.  Our waitress flamed my drink with a cotton wick to bring out the traces of gunpowder.  The resulting cocktail is delicate and slightly sweet with bitter afternotes.  There is a hint of gunpowder (never having actually tasted gunpowder I can’t be certain) on the palate.  A slightly bitter but pleasant aftertaste lingers.

Next on the menu was a drink called Les Fleurs du Mal (flowers of evil), a reference to Baudelaire who no doubt would have approved of our Bacchanalian debauchery. True to form the drink includes rose vodka, lemon juice and absinthe.  There is raw egg white which is beaten into a thick, creamy head.  The first impression is of creaminess, followed by the licorice notes of the absinthe.  The rose flavour of the vodka is hidden.  The lightness of the flavours lull you into forgetting the drink’s potency; it’s delightful.

The drinks list here is inventive and tempting.  However, the beardies were complaining that they hadn’t recycled anything yet, so we had to leave.  Our bill came inside an old volume of Dickens.

Come visit St John’s Square on a sunny afternoon.  There’s a great choice of food and cocktails.  Once you’ve had enough to drink you can ignore the beardies.

Further Reading

The Modern Pantry Reviews
A Girl has to Eat
No Expert but I Know What I Like

Zetter Townhouse Reviews
The Cocktail Geek
Domestic Sluttery

Les Fleurs du Mal
Baudelaire’s original verses with their themes of eroticism and decadence