Tag Archives: margaret thatcher

Margaret Thatcher and the Sewer Ditch

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Cold War Warriors. Perfect Hair.

Cold War Warriors. Perfect Hair.

While my preferred martini is made with vodka, I mixed a gin martini and raised a glass in memory of Margaret Thatcher last week.  She and her late husband Denis were fond of the stuff. Once confronted by the press about whether he had a drinking problem, Denis famously responded, “yes, I have a problem, there never seems to be enough of the stuff!”

When the time comes to meet my maker I’d like to meet him at my suite at the Ritz, as Margaret Thatcher did. The history of the Ritz Hotel, from a bankrupt shell sold for just £2.75 million (About US$ 4.2m) in 1975, to its grandeur today is in some ways a reflection of the country pre and post Thatcher. In the 1970’s Britain was the “sick man of Europe,” on life support from the IMF and reduced to three days of electricity a week. Maggie kept the lights on and they have shone ever brighter.

A conviction politician, Thatcher was divisive. Most great leaders are. Apparently people who had well paid union jobs in failing industries supported by public money have never forgiven her for putting them out of work. I don’t know where they live, but I’m told that it’s far away from London and that they are now planning to secede or something.

With Ronald Reagan, she was in the frontline of a movement that defeated communism and forever consigned socialism to the dustbin of history. The only left wing governments left in the world today are a smattering of irrelevant banana republics and France, which is on a fast boat to irrelevancy. France does have good wine and beautiful women, so we’ll go in and rescue them as we do every so often.  A few months ago my local betting shop was offering odds on which remaining left wing dictator would last longer – Chavez or Castro. Castro won, but gets no cigar.

Upstairs at the Rotary Bar & Diner. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what's for lunch.

Upstairs at the Rotary Bar & Diner. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what’s for lunch.

While Britain wrestles with how to recognize Thatcher (a bunch of left wing vegan types still can’t forgive her for getting it right), people like me realise that we only moved here from the US because of the Britain she created. I was having a liquid lunch with Lois Lane, the tallest woman in aviation and another US transplant. We were in Shoreditch, the former wasteland of Soersditch (literally Sewer Ditch) a once shitty part of town now ascendant thanks to the impact of the City of London (a once fading colonial financial hub re-imagined as a global powerhouse by Thatcher) and Silicon Roundabout, a high tech magnet for entrepreneurs (who flourished once the government reduced taxes and got out of the way). Shoreditch is now hipster central, aflood with creative types and techno uber geeks who are the latter day Supermen.

Good loooking drinks. The Adonis and

Good loooking drinks. The Adonis and the Devil behind

The Rotary Bar and Diner and the member’s only Rotary Room is technically a “pop up” operating under a ten month license. Brought to you by the folks from Milk & Honey it is one of the most lavish temporary establishments I’ve seen. Upstairs is a casual bar and diner with sharing tables. Accessed through an insalubrious outside stairwell, the Rotary Room downstairs is all 1970s low lit glamour replete with a tin ceiling, formica tables, and cozy booths. Lois Lane was instantly at home commenting that the décor reminded her of a cross between a Playboy bachelor pad circa 1970 and the living room of the Brady Bunch. There’s a straightforward food menu, divided into pig, fish and beef. There’s nothing for the vegetarians though pigs, fish and cattle are usually vegetarian. The main event here though are the cocktails, which are Latin American influenced. There’s even a decent selection of single village Mezcal.

The louche lounge decor in the Rotary Room

Louche decor in the Rotary Room

As with other establishments in the Milk & Honey franchise, the cocktails are well balanced and tasty. The El Diablo is a long drink made with tequila, cassis, ginger and lime. Instead of using commercial ginger beer, the bartender sends ginger through a centrifuge. The resulting drink packs a serious ginger punch with additional ginger oils adding a sparkle.

The Adonis cocktail is made with dry sherry, red vermouth and orange bitters. Created in 1886 to celebrate the success of a Broadway show, it is surprisingly dry and aromatic. The dry, nutty flavour of the sherry, the fullness in the mouth of the Martini & Rossi red vermouth and a slightly bitter aftertaste makes it a perfect aperitif.

We had a good value Chilean un-oaked Chardonnay. I could have stayed with Lois and drunk cocktails all afternoon, but had a plane to catch and a marathon to run.

Lois you are great all on your own

Cocktails with Lois – another Iron Lady, albeit one with a soft spot for men in coloured underclothes

Many of today’s hipsters weren’t born when Thatcher was in her handbag-wielding prime. However, they are old enough to drink. I will be with some of them on Wednesday and we shall raise a glass together. Rest in Peace.

My Dinner with Nigella

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Being the Chancellor of the Exchequer (a.k.a Finance Minister) is a shitty job. In hard times you get blamed for the tough decisions that have to be taken. In good times everybody else takes the credit. Being the child of a reviled public figure can’t be much fun. Most such offspring shun the limelight and move to the country to do whatever people do in the country. I’m told that cow tipping and wife swapping are popular pastimes in the shires.

Nigel Lawson was an outstanding Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher. He was part of the Tory tribe who liberalised capital markets, lowered taxes, busted the unions and saved Britain from becoming the basket case of Europe. They helped turn Britain from a nation of whining Fabian socialists to a shining beacon for free market capitalism. The hemp and lentil brigade who’d rather we live on welfare, recycle cigarette butts and subsist on roots and seeds, hated him. His daughter Nigella’s riposte is to live well, surely the best revenge. Some of you may have seen a version of the email below:

Living well is the best revenge

Nigella was dining at the next table from mine at Dabbous, Ollie Dabbous’s eponymous new restaurant. My dinner companion used to be a professional diving instructor before he came up for air and got sucked into the city.  Long years of diving have given him perfect, virtually Vitruvian proportions.  Vitruvian man wistfully commented that Nigella looked twenty years younger than her pictures. Her Earth Mother meets Marilyn Monroe looks have that effect on most people. The ultra hip wait staff, straight and gay, went doolally around her.

Ollie Dabbous trained with Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, staged at The Fat Duck and cheffed at Texture. These are all Michelin starred restaurants. He is young (31) and adept at the modern scientific methods of cooking perfected by Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck. You wouldn’t know it however, from the way the food is presented; it is unpretentious with no overweening explanations of technique. The overwhelming impression of Dabbous is of youth, confidence, technical brilliance and unmitigated joy in serving very, very good food.

The Coddled Free Range Hen Egg at Dabbous. Never known a cock to lay one.

We had the tasting menu. It included a coddled egg; the egg is lightly scrambled and mixed with wild mushrooms and smoked butter before being returned to its shell. These are flavours that were made for each other. It looked amazing and tasted divine. Critics rave about the barbecued Iberico pork. I could go on about the food, but the Bacchanalian delights are what I came for.

The restaurant on the ground floor has an industrial warehouse décor circa 1990. It’s dark with cold surfaces and hard edges. The basement bar is even darker; Oskar’s Bar is run by Oskar Kinberg formerly of the Cuckoo Club. He has developed a kick ass cocktail list. The Mellow Yellow had a base of Cazadores Blanco tequila, with Cointreau, cigar syrup, lime juice mellowed with yellow pepper, served in a whisky rinsed glass. There’s a lot going on in this drink and plenty that could go wrong, but it worked. I had a fleeting hint of cigar on the nose before tasting a very rich margarita. A masculine drink. The Accomplice is made with Diplomatico Blanco rum, greengage liqueur, elderflower cordial, lime juice, agave syrup and bitters, served straight up and rubbed with sage. There is a nice sharpness on the tongue from the greengage with sage and bitters after-notes.

Dabbous has been open since February 2012, but has already gained a reputation for serving the best Negroni in town. Charlie who was bartending, reached for a special barrel of Negroni he’s been ageing for six weeks. Ageing cocktails is not new, but it is of the moment – the ingredients oxidise and react with the wood in the barrel to create a more complex, but still recognizable drink. Charlie uses Sacred gin (a British boutique gin brewed near my home) and Antica Formula vermouth in his Negroni. The drink was pleasantly bitter in the mouth with a long finish. We had it straight up. I’d never known ice to do much more than chill a drink. However, when Charlie introduced ice into the mix, the flavor actually changed. The drink tasted wetter, the ingredients somehow bound together more tightly, the flavor was smoother. I think I had three.

Industrial chic

Dabbous is accessible, friendly and shockingly inexpensive. Starters cost around £7 (US $11) and mains are around £15 (US $23). The drinks were mostly around £8.50 (US $13). The foodie staff knows how good the food and drink is and want you to enjoy it. They don’t turn the tables here – there is just one sitting for dinner. You are encouraged to dally. This is also the hottest restaurant in London. The chances of Silvio Berlusconi being appointed to run a home for recovering nymphomaniacs are greater than your ability to get a reservation here before March 2013. It is worth the wait. Nigella loved it.

Further Reading

Blogger reviews of Dabbous from Eats, Treats and Leaves and Twelve Point Five Percent. Mixologist Jeffrey Morganthaler discusses ageing cocktails and provides directions for barrel ageing Negroni cocktails.  You don’t have to fill an entire whiskey barrel with booze – most bars in London use small wooden barrels of a few litres in capacity of the type traditionally made by Eastern European Coopers.
Dabbous on Urbanspoon

Maggie Thatcher and Drinking Baby Milk Formula

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Britain has a funny way of thanking it’s heroes. Churchill wins the war and is immediately shot out of office. Margaret Thatcher, possibly the greatest post war leader in the West, saves the country from bankruptcy, busts the unions and superbly executes a vision of a prosperous post war Britain – and is hounded out of office by her own party. The country is now deep in the throes of vilifying and possibly destroying its financial services industry, the best in the world and the greatest single source of jobs and wealth in the economy. A few bankers motivated by simple greed and the animal spirit of capitalism created more jobs and wealth than all of the hemp and lentil brigade combined. It now appears that the country wishes to deport anyone who wishes to generate wealth to Zug. Zug is in Switzerland. It has nothing going for it except its tax regime. I have been to Zug. It’s full of bored rich people who’d like to immigrate to Britain if the tax authorities promise not to mug them at Heathrow.

The first time I lived in Britain it was shaking off the privations of WW2, some forty years on. People wore ugly clothes and holidayed in Blackpool. Supermarkets ran out of food on Fridays and closed on Sundays. People seemed actually grateful to buy stuff without ration cards. Cars didn’t have air conditioning. Restaurants served over cooked overpriced food. If you complained about anything you were accused of being an American. Cool Britannia hadn’t happened. The country had yet to find its mojo.

The Whistling Shop claims to bring both the glamour and the squalor of a Victorian Gin Palace to modern London

I was reminded of those dark times as I wondered down Worship Street looking for a drink. Worship street is one of those streets that prosperity bypassed. This is low rent back office territory sitting surprisingly close to the very heart of the city.  Round the corner at Finsbury Square there is an Occupy camp.  I was a bit surprised to see them – I thought the movement had collapsed when their non hierarchical culture couldn’t figure out how to organise a Starbuck’s run.  I hope they get turfed out by the time it is warm enough to play croquet and drink cold champagne on this bucolic square.

Down Worship street is the Whistling Shop, one of a new breed of cocktail bars opening across London.  The “molecular mixologists” at these bars bring a touch of Heston Blumenthal to the world of cocktails; science and mixology combine to make intriguing cocktails. The Whistling Shop has taken the science of cocktail making to an art form.  It is frequently written up, including by the  Gin Monkey and at Real Ale Reviews. The Whistling Shop is the brainchild of Ryan Chetiyawardana who apart from having many syllables in his last name (I am allowed to say stuff like that when I spot a Sri Lankan name), has also won many awards acknowledging him as one of the leading bartenders in the UK.

JP the bartender in the mixology lab

I went to the Whistling Shop with a group of friends including the naturist swimmer.  She only goes au-naturale at expensive private pools in Monaco so I wasn’t too worried that she’d take up with the Occupy lot on the way to a drink.  The Whistling Shop is in a basement.  Initially, one is uncertain about what kind of a place it is.  The bartenders wear curious belted contraptions that could easily pass for S&M wear.  However they are a friendly lot.  JP, the Brazilian bartender in attendance took us on a tour of their lab which has two distillation machines – cold, low pressure distillation stills they use to brew some pretty exotic concoctions.  The lab was filled with salts, solvents and spices.  There is actually a “kitchen” where the drinks are prepared for the evening.  Up front there is a huge, clear block of ice which is chipped into the drinks.  JP was clearly proud and passionate about what they have achieved at the Whistling Shop.

So what have they achieved?  You will not find these drinks anywhere else:

The Cappuccino Baby tasted somewhere between a White and a Black Russian.  On a base of Ketel One vodka, home made cola and coffee, they use baby milk formula to give the drink body.  The drink grew on us after we got over the fact that we were drinking baby formula!  The phantasmagoric concoctions continued.

The Panacea tasted like whiskey sour with honey notes.  On a base of Compass Box whisky this drink has a mix of lavender and vinegar reduced for three hours.  Honey is added for sweetness . Some raw egg white is added for body and foam.  I explained to an American friend that the alcohol would kill any salmonella in the raw egg white.  I don’t know if its true, but it seems plausible and he believed it.

Belvedere Vodka, Gancia Bianco (a sweet vermouth), coriander and black pepper are exploded in a high pressure hydrosol to make an Exploded Vodka Martini.  It is surprisingly delicate and light on the palate with lingering spice notes. Perhaps my favourite.

The Punch and Judy involves 23 year old Zacapa rum from Guatemala with Walnut Ketchup.  I know the ingredients sound weird but these are seriously tasty drinks.  This one was a wonderfully warming winter drink.  I tasted some Walnut Ketchup by itself; a concoction of port with pickled walnut, chocolate, saffron and some 20 other spices cooked in a bain-marie (a water bath).  It was a spicy port that weirdly did taste like ketchup.  It was delicious.

The Gold Dust is made with a home made beetroot liqueur with added bitters,  topped up with British Nyetimber cuvee.  It was light, yet earthy.  A bit like wine with a beer flavour…

We worked our way through a goodly chunk of the menu before our livers broke.  We will go back to taste the rest.  Cynics will question whether all of the science and the exotic ingredients really make the drinks taste any better.  I used to question that of Heston Blumenthal’s cooking as well.  Until I tasted his triple cooked french fries…