we go now.

But our feelings about it aren't quite as uncomplicated as those of the bottle opener. Well, almost. We had fun, but we're ready to be home.

One reason we've got to get home is for Mara's Head Enhancement surgery. We're going to try and bump her up a size or two. You know, something flattering without being excessive, something that fits the rest of her body, not like that Heidi Montag freakshow.

Finally went to The Queens pub, which we'd avoided b/c we'd heard crappy things about the barstaff, but it was a totally fine way to spend an hour not being rained on.

I have to say, if you're only going to order a half pint of beer, a sturdy little miniature mug makes you feel slightly more manly about it.

Mara ordered a suprisingly good pea, mint, parmesan, and arugula risotto that was essentially a delicious sleeping pill.

Then we laid down and looked at the ceiling.

and, breathe.

So, we're taking just about every other day "off", and today's version of that meant that we slept late, had coffee, and then read books in bed ALL DAY LONG (Mara finished this, and I read this) while it rained. It was great.

We're trying to cleanse ourselves and clean out the refrigerator, so our food consumption has been limited to tuna sandwiches and raw carrots...

Mara played RAVIOLIS during our Scrabble game yesterday, and yes it's a word.

Compared to most television, the BBC is just awesome. Continuing my current inexplicable fascination with war stories, we watched a documentary based on this tonight, great stuff. I'm still not really understanding how my "caring about history" switch got flipped, I guess it was the Morse Family Tree experience. It's still only the 20th century that's pulling me in at the moment, which thankfully keeps things manageable.

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cost-benefit analysis.

Other stuff happened yesterday, but I should get this out of the way first...

Yes, what to say about The Harwood Arms. I guess, inevitably, whatever I would say ends up saying more about our current tastes and preferences than it does about their food.

We have a difficult relationship with restaurants these days: since scaling down our lifestyle several years ago, we've gone from eating out once or twice a week to maybe once a month if that, more like four times a year. If that.

This means that when we do pay someone else to cook for us, it has to meet a couple of criteria. Perhaps most importantly, it has to be reasonably priced, an extremely subjective and qualitative criterion, I know, but it's one of the biggest reasons we don't eat out much.

I don't necessarily mean that the food has to be "cheap": I mostly mean that it needs to be honestly priced, with some relation to the actual cost of producing it. But there's no ignoring that our monthly income is small, and our budget reflects that. To spend 100 euros on one dinner is twice our weekly grocery budget, and a quarter of our rent + utilities for the month.

Also, it has to be comfortable. I'm thoroughly uninterested in a dining atmosphere that goes out of its way to construct or convey some sort of aura of "privilege", as if I'm lucky to be there. In truth, in the big picture, I am lucky to be there, I'm lucky to be anywhere, I'm lucky to not be sleeping outside, I'm lucky to have running water, I'm lucky to be able to afford a dinner at a restaurant, etc. But you know what I mean. If the attitude or ambience is trying to tell me to be thankful for my seat, then the food really has a lot of work to do.

Lastly, it really helps if we're served food that we couldn't ourselves cook in our own kitchen. This is a very important factor, but it's also the most jettisonable: if it's a welcoming vibe, and the prices are reasonable, I'm having fun, and the food tastes good, I'm likely to forget about the degree of difficulty involved. But it's always a plus when I'm surprised (in a good way) by what's on my plate. On vacation, there's an extra element here that has to do with local ingredients: things I simply can't find where I live, and that counts for something as well.

Fussy presentations fit in here somewhere, but mostly as a sort of wild-card. I guess, like most creative risks, when they pay off, the results can be elevated disproportionately. When they fall flat, you just end up looking kind of silly. In the end, I'd much rather be served something that looks like a "burst colostomy bag" (to quote someone on eG) and tastes incredible than something that looks like a graphic design project and tastes like one too.

So I say all of the above because, rather obviously, I don't think we're necessarily the right audience for a lot of restaurant cooking these days, and so anything I say on this site about a "professional" dining experience we've had should be appreciated or ignored in the context of the above manifesto.

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Thus: The Harwood Arms.

I will say that greeting me with the phrase "we need you to give up your table by 9pm" is not setting off in the right direction (see discussion of privilege and comfort above). Also, not having a list of beers is a bit strange: this means I have to get up and go to the bar if I want to see what the choices are.

Which would be fine, but everyone looked at me like "What's wrong?". Nothing's wrong, I'd like a beer. You're a pub, right? And then I order from the barman and he says he'll have it sent over to the table. It's just a bit odd. I'm already standing up, you're pouring the beer, why don't I just take it back with me to the table?

But whatever. We did eventually warm to our server a bit, and after a beer or two I didn't mind the weirdness of having to get up and order them myself.

About the food. Nothing was bad. The bread and butter was delicious. For our starters, the venison Scotch egg (see previous post) was just about the best thing I ate all night. The smoked eel tart was nice, something to try at home; the rabbit/prune sausage roll also pleasant and satisfying, if not especially rabbitty; etc.

Entrees were a bit more problematic, as they almost always are everywhere. Although I thought the beef cheeks and snails (yes, that's what I said) themselves were 100% enjoyable, I didn't have the revelatory bone marrow experience that many people seem to enjoy, my toast seemed like it had been toasted some time ago, and the parsley salad was kind of misguided or at the very least underdressed.

The mackerel started out disappointingly bland, but when combined with everything else on the plate it seemed to come into its own, and by the end of it I was enjoying it quite a bit. This dish reminded me very strongly of the cooking at St. John Bread and Wine, in fact.

The rhubarb jelly donuts? A tiny bit dry, but otherwise good.

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So.

Yes, the presentation was beyond what we're capable of under normal circumstances. Could I go into my kitchen tonight and make that Scotch egg? Not even close, no way. Could I possibly spend twice as long in the kitchen tonight and get my smoked eel tart to look like theirs? Maybe. Did I fully appreciate the difficulty in serving a perfectly-boned mackerel? Not really.

But while nothing was bad about the food, we immediately compared this experience to the pani puri and bhel from East Ham the other day. Is this just our bias towards Asian food rearing its head? Maybe. But while the braised beef was really really good, it was still just almost as good as someone else's braised beef that lives right down the street and doesn't charge me €20 for a plate of it.

I'm enjoying the Harwood meal more in retrospect than I did at the table, probably because my expectations are gone now. Walking through Fulham after the meal, the comparison that kept coming up was Marius in Amsterdam. Even though we've only eaten there once, I've seen nothing to contradict the impression we had of it: at Marius, there's no hurry, there's no concern on your part, and no sense that the kitchen is trying to impress you with anything, even though that's usually what it's doing despite itself. It's an extremely comfortable dining experience, and it all feels kind of predeterminedly natural and good.

OK. You get my point probably. Pictured below: warm smoked eel tart with rhubarb and horseradish cream; stout-braised beef cheeks with Herefordshire snails, smoked bone marrow on toast, parsley salad, and potato mash; stuffed mackerel with a sourdough crust, Isle of Wight tomatoes, greens, and horseradish; warm rhubarb jelly donuts with stem ginger and sour cream.

pick up the pieces.

Oi. Another busy day here in London Town. We started out at the Saatchi Gallery, where the best things we saw were the things that surprised us most. But we're suckers for the unexpected. Above: looks like someone lost their balloon bouquet. Below: upon closer inspection, it's a small child...

This next piece was probably our favorite of the day. Mara actually gasped when I pointed it out to her, and I think as a visual artist that's a good place to aim for, an involuntary visceral reaction. It's nowhere near as unsettling in these photos, but in person it caused a good 30 seconds of real unease. First view:

Closer up:

They're made of foam.

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Coming up (brace yourself):

fatigue.

Imagine you've been at a party, maybe 4 or 5 hours' worth, maybe more, you've had a good time, laughed, eaten, drank, enjoyed/suffered moments of quiet reflection, engaged in deep a deep heartfelt conversation or two, made ridiculous small talk, laughed, eaten, and drank some more, and then suddenly? You have to go home. Immediately.

That's where we are, I think. It's a matter of timing probably more than anything. I stand by our original decision to stay for more than a week: a week would've been rushing things. But it's entirely possible that 10 days would've been perfect.

This is Day 11: we miss our apartment, cats, friends, kitchen, bed, creative utensils, etc. Mara's been away from home for 6 out of the last 9 weeks. I'm tired of trying to cook in a kitchen that's been whittled down to the absolute minimum.

We have eaten Really Poorly when trying to cook here in our lodgings. Like laughably so. Saturday night's dinner was: for me, vegetarian sausage and sauerkraut, abominable; Mara's was tuna noodle penne, except we forgot that we broke the can opener earlier in the day during the disgusting steak and kidney pie experiment, so she was left with celery, onions, and penne. And cheddar, I think, because it doesn't make sense to buy Parmesan here if you're not going to use it all, and we have to leave the fridge as empty as possible when we go.

The rest of the week we've subsisted on coffee, toast, eggs, bananas, mushy peas, carrots, peanut butter, and Pimm's Cups, it's a bit like college. The one exceptional thing I've cooked here has been something I call "duck egg over easy with maple syrup and coarse salt". Yum. And the mushy peas out of a can were OK.

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Tonight is dinner at the Harwood Arms, perhaps this will rejuvenate our asses.

Oh, and Happy Anniversary, Baby!
14 years13 years and counting, yo...

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the second time around.

Not a post about reincarnation, though we did walk through this tiny 200-year-old cemetery today during our search for a replacement can opener (the other one broke during our steak and kidney pie tasting, a post which may not see the light of day).

The post title's actually about Shalamar, and our second, marginally less euphoric but still delicious visit to Banner's, where we shared an untiny shrimp roti, coconut rice, coleslaw, and The Legendary Spoonbread. Food was good, but we missed our warm and friendly bartender Emma, instead we were faced with a tough old tattooed broad who seemed unhappy with her chosen profession. On the upside, she made me feel very young for my age.

Here's a Guardian article about the restaurant's tap water policy that makes us feel better about our patronage.

east ham pani puri.

Pictured above: our East Ham pani puri, really different from anything we've previously put in our mouths.

View VDuck in London in a larger map

Below: our extremely sweet pani puri vendor, located on Gladstone Ave, just around the corner from Thattukada.

The pani puri were 4 for £1, but he gave us one extra puri and a cup of hot halwa, which was pretty incredible. I usually don't love halwa, but this reminded me of pureed gulab jamun, a dream substance.

Below: this is bhel from the vendor across the street from Thattukada (£1.50). She was considerably less outgoing than the Gladstone guy, but her bhel was very good, best I've had in London, though still not topping my possibly idealized version from Indian Delights in Decatur, GA.

This food was all amazingly inexpensive for London: however, the 45-minute tube journey from Crouch End was £2.40 per person, so it's worth factoring that in. Still, I think we'd go back in a second if schedules permitted.

Above: East Ham. We both felt strangely comfortable here, everyone was exceedingly personable. I think if we had an East Ham in Amsterdam I'd be there all the time. Below: mango lassi from Chennai Dosa, where everything looked and smelled awesome, but sadly we'd just eaten.

Above: Houses of Parliament as seen from Victoria Tower Gardens. It was a very good idea to get off the tube at Westminster and walk down to the Tate Britain from there.

Above: Pimm's Cup @ Morpeth Arms after seeing the very nice Henry Moore exhibit at the Tate Britain. The inside of Morpeth Arms was loud and soulless, but the sidewalk would've been a very pleasant place for a summer drink if 100 less people had been there.

Above: splitting a burger at Cask Pub & Kitchen. The burger was very much like something you'd be served in an American back yard: soft bun, well-done but juicy patty, plenty of condiments. Fries/chips nothing to write home about. Beer and music very good. Below: the bar at Cask.

Above: Pimlico by night. One of the more downcast neighborhoods we've seen in terms of the populace; a good number of lost, bedraggled-looking locals limping around, quite a contrast to the impressive Regency architecture (don't worry, I just learned that term).

Down In The Tube Station at, well, 10PM, thankfully. This was a pretty good day.

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hello pork pie.

Did some interesting research this morning to try and figure out what are generally considered the worst London neighbourhoods in terms of violent crime. It didn't really start out as "research", I was just wondering about some of the unscheduled areas of town we were going to visit, and then one thing led to another.

Anyway, the winners are: Peckham/Deptford/New Cross in the southeast; Harlesden and much of Brent in the northwest; Chelsea around King St, and further out, Hounslow in the southwest; and Green Lanes/Seven Sisters/Hackney in the northeast, not so terribly far from Finsbury Park. Brixton showed up quite a bit, but having been there a couple times myself, I think that if you used common sense and avoided places like Angell Town Estate, you'd be alright.

Obviously, this is all totally broad-brush. I'm sure actual Londoners would disagree with some of this list, and of course, plenty of places have their own legendarily dangerous estates, especially after dark. I myself haven't seen anything remotely unsettling yet. I didn't use this site for my research but it provided an interestingly detailed view of the sitch.

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Of probably more interest to the plural you is the other research I've been doing: unusual (for me) British grocery store finds. Among the booty so far: cute and tiny pork pies; freakishly large duck eggs; extremely unnatural potato chip flavors; horrifically black pickled walnuts; and a canned steak & kidney pie.

Today's exploration: the Pork & Pickle Pie from Pork Farms. Very cute, very dainty, very porky. With cheeky packaging.

Some more background here, but not too much. I can imagine that the pork pie was originally designed as a workman's lunch, portable and requiring no preparation, it seems to be intended to be eaten slightly cooler than room temperature, usually with some sort of pickle. As you can see, with this version of their pie, Pork Farms has gone the extra mile for you the consumer by building the pickle into the pie. Let's cut a mother open.

It reminded me of an especially lardy empanada (moist, flaky, dense) filled with a pork terrine. The pickle component was underpronounced, I probably would've added still more pickle to this if I hadn't been so hungry. I realize that it's hard to appreciate the size of these things from the photos thus far, so:

Look at how wrinkly my hand is! Please send moisturizer.

Anyway...repeatable? Taste-wise, yes, good, but not a knockout or anything, a bit safe on the seasoning, understandably. Dietarily? Ehh...maybe not. Each tiny pie is 330 calories of lardy goodness, with plenty of sat fat. An occasional treat, thus.

like sardines.

Due to problems with uploading images in Blogger, I'm quite far behind in the ol' photodocumentation business. I'll just make some notes here that I can fill in with images and, you know, real text when I get a chance.

Last night we went to see Phosphorescent at the London ICA, which I can't say anything about yet b/c I want their Amsterdam performance to be a surprise for some. This photo above isn't them, it's Forest Fire, the opener.

Before ICA, we shared a burger at the Golden Lion in St. James. This is quite obviously a terrible photo, somehow my flash got turned back on, plus Blogger has added some crazy color distortion, but this is the only photo that displays both of the notable things about this burger: the cornichon garnish on top (speared with a toothpick), and that thing that looks like a misplaced home fry between the top bun and the bacon portion of the burger. It's not a potato at all, it's about 100 grams of Stilton.

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IN OTHER NEWS: We're talking about conducting a Navy SEAL-like mission to East Ham to check out the Real Deal WRT South Indian street food, read about it here.

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no thanks.

I sometimes like to get up early on vacation, especially if the weather's nice, and double especially if I manage to drag my ass outside into it.

This morning I was up at 6:45, it was indeed beautiful outside, so I took a shower, fucked around for a bit, then walked into town (Crouch End I mean). I got there at 8:20 or so, and noticed a long line of people standing around. I thought maybe they were waiting to cross the street, but when the light changed, nobody moved.

Turns out they were in line for the bus heading to the tube station.












Another obvious and nice thing about being awake at unusual hours (unusual for you) is that you see things you don't normally see, like morning rush hour, and it can be a not-so-subtle reminder of how different your current daily life is from what it used to be, and how different it is from a large segment of the population.

To celebrate this difference, I bought a scone.*

* I bought a scone after I saw the line for the bus, that much is true.

But before that: after I saw the line for the bus, I went into Tesco so I could replace the soy milk we'd snagged from our absent hosts' cupboard.

After browsing carefully for 15 minutes or so and filling my basket with odd low-budget British staples, I stood in the slowly advancing rush hour checkout line for a few minutes and was feeling pretty pleased with my morning's accomplishments until I went to pay and didn't have any money or debit cards or anything.

Which is always a shitty feeling I imagine, but the most upsetting thing about this was that I knew I'd specifically picked my paper money off the coffee table and definitely put it in my pocket before I left.

So I slouched back home, hungry and empty-handed, visually scouring the streets for my lost poundage, of course not finding it, it was a windy day, and then calculating how much money I'd essentially just thrown away, at least 60 pounds, at most 100 pounds, which is 150 dollars, etc. Then trying to figure out how to mentally come to a peaceful place with this loss so that I might enjoy the rest of my day.

I'd already been kind of bumming about how much money we were spending, and now this. So I considered possibly pretending that my dental work had cost 100 extra pounds, or adding 100 pounds to the price of the ferry we took here. The sort of questionable accounting practices that happen all the time, right?

By the time I got home I still hadn't found a satisfactory way to lie to myself about this error. I trudged upstairs, prepared to face the undeniable evidence of my idiocy, but no, my undisturbed pile of pound notes was just sitting there in the sunlit mess of the coffee table. I put the stack of bills in my pocket,went downstairs, took a deep breath, and stepped back out into the sunshine to basically repeat the morning's post-shower activities all over again, this time making an extra stop to buy a scone for Le Moop before heading back.

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jimmy "spoonbread" wallbanger.

Brief notes: cold and rainy today, lots of sleeping, even for me (two naps!); a late excursion to Villiers, ostensibly for the pub quiz, but we just couldn't stomach the terrible, unignorable, soulsuckingly shitty lounge music (which we'd previously encountered on Friday but had hoped was a one-time thing...conversation with the friendly bar staff revealed that it was a mgmt-decreed constant), and bailed after a couple drinks.

What a fantastic decision that was. Walking into to Banner's (which had been recommended by our absent hosts), suddenly everything was OK again. Ali Hassan Kuban and Nass El-Ghiwane were on the stereo, a perfect bowl of popcorn was plunked in front of us on the bar, and on the wall a specials board of Jamaican and Sri Lankan food (sort of a direct hit on the home base of my taste buds). The wonderfully retro cocktails menu featured a Harvey Wallbanger, a name that I hadn't seen since I sneaked a sip of Harvey Wallbanger mix from my grandparents' rec room bar in the late 70s (and then wondered what all the fuss about alcohol was...I didn't feel anything!). So of course the Mara had to order one (below).

Even better than all that, the food was really good. We shared some jerk chicken and some kind of manchego nachos thing, which could've been totally pedestrian, but every homemade thing on our plates—the jerk, salsas, guac, chutney, spoonbread, beans—was impressively and mysteriously delicious, and these are the kinds of foods that, if we're knowledgeable about anything, this is it.

The highlight: the spoonbread may have been the best cornbread-like concoction we've ever eaten. Ever. And that is really saying something. We will be back soon...our lovely bartender Emma said that their breakfast is even better.

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more men, mice, 'merica.

Part Two of yesterday continued at The Lexington, which, unbeknownst to us, was another American-style bar! With Sierra Nevada on tap and BBQ ribs on the menu. WTF. We really didn't plan it this way.

We ended up here embarrassingly early as a result of scrapping the day's schedule and not really knowing the area at all. Rather than mess with the fragile sense of accomplishment engendered by the All Star Lanes save, we thought we'd just pop in here for a beer and regroup.

Three hours and two Scrabble games later, the Rough Trade Quiz began, and suddenly we really had something to be embarrassed about. Yes we used to have a record shop and at a certain point we knew quite a bit about "new music". But this was hard.

I'm not saying there weren't some answerable questions (What band is comprised of Mike, Michael, Peter, and Bill? What was the first band Annie Lennox was in with Dave Stewart (not the Eurythmics, BTW)? What 2005 album did Dennis Hopper provide vocals for? What is Meat Loaf's real name?). But even in our geekiest years I'm pretty sure we would not have been able to answer questions like these:

1) What is the current #1 song in the UK?

2) How many times has the UK finished last in the Eurovision Song Contest?

3) Where is the Primavera festival held?

4) Whose new video premièred on the Bury City Council's website last week?

After we realized how hard the quiz was going to be, our answers became not entirely serious, which would prove embarrassing at the end of the quiz when you swapped answer sheets with the table next to you for grading purposes. Oops! The whole Brian Eno/Fatboy Slim thing's not so funny anymore, is it? Below are the Badly Drawing Boy and the Picture rounds. Not pictured: the Stephen Hawking lyrics round and all 10 (ten) questions of the Eurovision Song Contest round. Oh, and what rock/pop artist is Anal Cigar Suit Hire an anagram of (answer here)?

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