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#244 – London Journal #10 – Eaten
I am writing this from a café a block away from the Royal Opera House. It’s 6:15 PM on Monday, September 10. In 30 minutes, I’m meeting Tony Holden for the premiere of the new opera season and a new production, Iphigenia en Tauride.
It’s hard to believe I’ve been here a week – that it’s been that short AND that long. As much as I love London, I find two things about it I don’t like – the food and the expense. And I don’t mind the expense very much.
Right now, for instance, I am eating a decent cheese sandwich for £3.50. And it’s just decent, and it’s seven bucks. As expensive as real estate is in London, I can’t believe a lot of the meal price is tied up in the physical layout or the decor. I’m technically eating indoors, but my table and chair are refugees from someone’s patio, and the floor is the concrete of the sidewalk just on the otherwise of the “wall,” a screen with big holes punched out of it.
I am filled with admiration for London. There are so many things I adore about it. But if there is a patronizing tone in what follows, it is intentional.
Nobody comes to London for the food. The food is awful, but they try REALLY hard. I think there’s an ordinance that there has to be three restaurants for every person living in the city. Every street has a restaurant in every other storefront. And every back alley is actually a courtyard for several other places to eat. They have bars, pubs, cafes, tratorias, brassieries, inns, houses, clubs, grills, and cantinas. And they are all dreadful. I find it fitting that the two markets near my hotel are called “Simply Food” and “Absolutely Starving.”
Almost uniformly, there seems to be an aversion to vegetables or, indeed, anything with a crunch. On the other hand, if it’s part of a pie, salad, paste, or sauce, anything goes. Even fried food in London is crunchless.
My appreciation of the desperate state of London gastronomy is made acute by my friendship with Annie Duke. If not for Annie, I’d just pick up a meat pie at the Underground station near my hotel and keep my opinions to myself. But she is a veritable POSTER of health, having lost 15 pounds AND given up nicotine and caffeine since the World Series. She employed some kind of 30-day chemical voodoo plan from which she emerged reborn and vigilant about the evils of fats, meats, calories, carbs, breads, sauces, and nearly everything else, except for these bars she wields like hot pokers. (I should have taken the one she offered me, if only to remove it from circulation.)
[As I type this at 2:30 AM on Saturday, September 15, I see that the Main Event is down to 32 players and Annie is among them. Her only hope of succeeding is if she imports food from America for the duration, or her supply of bars holds out.]
We sat in a restaurant the other night and she ordered a plate of vegetables. It took near-hysteria on her part of get the waitress to agree to leave off the oyster sauce and bacon. But in their defense, they probably don’t know what to make of Annie. She told of one restaurant that offers a “chip sandwich,” which is several big greasy french fries slapped between two slices of bread. Heck, until two months ago, you could probably order it with a side of cigarettes. (And Annie, two months ago, would have lit up.)
I still say my third best meal in London is a meat pie from the Underground station. And I feel bad about that because some of my hosts have tried to feed me. Anthony Holden, for example, took me for lunch my first full day in town to Simpsons on the Strand. It’s a landmark, almost a museum of London cuisine. Charles Dickens ate lunch their regularly. The room is dark, the tables and chairs and banquettes are dark. This is the place that probably invented the idea of the waiter rolling the trolley to your table and carving your meat table-side.
I can’t say it was awful, but the roast beef looked a little … gray.
Paul Fussell, in his book CLASS, a brilliant and hilarious analysis of the hidden class system in America, makes the point that the traditional view is that food isn’t supposed to taste good. The super-rich – the real old money, we’re talking about here – have always eaten dull, flavorless meals. It’s a new phenomenon, from the new rich, that food has to be special, cost a lot, have a lot of flavor, have a lot of presentation, etc.
Fussell probably has it right and it’s a sign of my lack of class that I want more from food than nutrition – not, as Annie Duke will tell you, that these Brits are going out of their way to assure themselves or their culinary victims an especially nutritious experience. It was wonderful for Holden to take me to such venerable restaurant and to pay for the meal. Even if the food was bland, the place is a part of history. And literary history at that, so I can say I experienced it.
As we walked the streets, we passed a restaurant named Rules. Another historic institution, Tony said something about it being a place we could have chosen instead. I didn’t listen very carefully because I was reading a plaque outside the entrance. London’s oldest restaurant. Regulars have included Thackeray, Well, and Dickens.
Dickens? Was the man eating two lunches every day?
That’s when I realized we should have eaten at both places. On the same day. No doubt, if Charles Dickens started his afternoons at Simpsons, he had to be getting his ACTUAL lunch someplace else.
