Lockdown Lunches #2: 24 Hour Carnitas

My birthday last week was the first one for 20 years in which I haven't been to the pub.

And even in 2000 I did manage a quick birthday pint with my Sports coverage colleagues in the BBC Club at Television Centre, where I was working at the time.

I used to commute there every day - imagine that! On buses and tubes! To work in a big, doughnutty building with hundreds of people!


Anyway, as promised, here a few further thoughts on Lockdown and this whole COVID-19 thing. Some of these opinions will be controversial. If you can't handle that, skip straight to the Carnitas recipe, or fuck off back to your videos of kittens or whatever you're doing to pass the time.

So, this rather peculiar, locked-down birthday reminded me of how much I miss going to the pub. Going to the pub to socialise and drink cask beer is one of my things. Like going to church to sing in the choir, going to football matches to support the mighty CCFC, going to gigs to complain that the band isn't as good as they used to be, and so on.

All gone from my life.

Croydon boxes clever

Since we moved out of London into more rural pastures, our nearest 'town centre' for 'doing stuff' has become Croydon (which, technically involves venturing back into London, but you can't have everything.)

Oft maligned as a humdrum 1960s concrete jungle in the same vein as Coventry or Slough, Croydon is nevertheless an important hub for South London and indeed substantial parts of Surrey and Kent. East Croydon station is actually the busiest in all of Greater London apart from the central termini, which - if you don't know the area - gives you some idea of its prominence.

Following this months thunderingly calamitous election result, which was even worse than my pessimistic prediction, Croydon Central is also our nearest Labour seat. As I say, can't have everything.

Eat. Drink. Play. Apparently.

One thing we do have now in Croydon, right bang in the centre, immediately next door to East Croydon station and therefore impossible to miss, is a shiny new BOXPARK. Which means eating, drinking, socialising, and general happeningness. The sort of 'contemporary space' that you really wouldn't ever associate with Croydon. Until now.

The Pimm's Lagerita

It was back to school for me this week as I attended a 'How to Judge Beer' day course with fellow British Guild of Beer Writers members at the Institute of Brewing and Distilling.

Now, I know what you're thinking: 'But Ben, you're an expert on all things beer. You don't need to be told how to taste the difference between a Lemon Saison and an Imperial Chocolate Stout. You're fucking amazing, you are.'

Phenolic! Diacetyl! Taste those off-flavours!

Well, quite, but we all have gaps in our knowledge and this course happily focused on a few key things that I've never formally studied, particularly around the detection of off-flavours in beer.


It's not just about telling the difference between good beer, and beer that has gone off either. There are several differents kinds of off-flavours arising from myriad different causes, not all of them are considered universally unpleasant, and some are even tolerated by brewers and drinkers, to the point that they're not necessarily considered off-flavours at all, but a de facto characteristic of the beer!

Plenty of drink for thought, and another set of things to consider next time I'm on a judging panel.

Fajita of Contentment

Stop the world, I want to get the fuck off!

Actually, that would result in floating indefinitely through space, but the infinite-voidy stuff would probably be quite peaceful once you got used to it.

Sorta like El Chico's. I'll explain presently.

In a couple of days I shall be 36. That means I'm closer to 50 than to 20! What the aged fuck?!?

El Chico's

Another sobering thought is that a few days ago I lost another grandparent - that's three dead in the space of 18 months - and as that generation rapidly disappears from my life I feel not only a sense of enforced having-to-grow-up, but also of rapid, irreversible, tragic change.

Fortunately in this ever-changing world, there are some things that pretty much stay the same. And sometimes you just need familiar creature comforts like that.

I can cling to the fact that the denouement of the new Scooby-Doo movie will probably involve a janitor or sheriff revealed inside an apparition costume. I can enjoy listening to Queen and the Beatles knowing that I know their entire catalogue and there won't be any unpleasant surprises from here on in.

It's a hot comfortable bath of reassurance.

And on Thursday I'll be going to the Tower of London to witness the Ceremony of the Keys - and while this is a new experience for me, I take comfort from the fact that I'll be witnessing something that has been exactly the same, every single night, for about literally hundreds of years.

I think the last time they changed the format for the ceremony was round about the last time El Chico's  changed their menu!

Ah, the old ones are the oldest...

Doing stuff in the wrong order

When I was a child, my primary hobby was probably collecting Star Wars figures. Han, Luke, Leia; Ree Yees, Bib Fortuna, The Gamorrean Guard. I had them all. Well, most of them.

The hunt to find them all excited me to such an extent that until relatively recently I still purchased vintage figures on Ebay in an attempt to complete my collection, and even now I occasionally have dreams that I’ve found a shop with a rare, new figure I haven’t seen before.

Yeah, I know. Victim of commercialism. At such a tender age. Tragic.

All my childhood hopes and dreams!

What is surprising though is that I was a bit of a late arrival on the scene, only having been born in 1977.

That was the year that the first of the three Star Wars films was released (there are only three Star Wars films and if you think otherwise you are a Stormtrooper's cock) and the first that I saw was actually the final part of the trilogy: Return of the Jedi.

This was 1983. In the Streatham Odeon back when it had three proper, big auditoria instead of 138 micro screens. Good times.

It opens with the resolution of a cliffhanger from Empire Strikes Back, but, being six, this didn’t bother me in the slightest. I got to see Ree Yees, Bib Fortuna and the Gamorrean Guard brought to life and so, to me, ROTJ was Star Wars, at least until we rented the first and second instalments from the video shop and I got to see the earlier portion of the trilogy.

I was also fascinated by the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus by virtue of not having seen it. When I was about eight they showed series 2 and 3 on TV and I was addicted. Utterly.

But in those days there was a very strange policy that the BBC could or would not repeat programmes more than three times, which is why the first series wasn’t shown in my lifetime until the rules were relaxed in the late 1980s, by which time I was 12 and Python was 20!

It’s hard to imagine this kind of reality these days, when channels like UK Gold and Dave show the same episodes of the same programmes ad infinitium, and you can watch them on Youtube whenever you feel like it.

I swear, every time I notice that an episode of Fawlty Towers is on, it’s always The Anniversary – Series 2, Episode 5 – which includes memorable appearances from the late Ken Campbell, and strident comic actress Pat Keen who used to live in the flat above me in Ipswich!

Why am I banging on about this shit?

Anyway, one thing I concluded from all this is that there isn’t necessarily any harm in ‘doing stuff in the wrong order’. Except when there is, obviously.

This lunchtime - following a pint or three in the consistently excellent Craft Beer Company - I finally made it to Daddy Donkey in Leather Lane. And given my enthusiasm for the Craft, I must have walked past the self-styled 'Kick Ass Mexican Grill' more times than I've seen Polly pretending to be Sybil Fawlty. Which, UK Gold and Dave, is a lot of times!

There are perhaps two reasons why the order of events could be said to be 'wrong' in this instance:

a) I’d already been a couple of times to their spin-off Burger van, ‘Boom’, which appeared on the scene far more recently and;

b) Daddy Donkey actually pre-empted all the other conveyer-belt Mexican food chains, like Tortilla, which I’ve previously favourably reviewed.

The twin towers of takeaway street

Boom Burger was never going to win any prizes in my search for the best burger in London.

It's fast and cheap (£4.95 for a burger with a couple of toppings and £6.50 for the deluxe version with fries and 'slaw - toppings extra) but the quality of beef just isn't up to the mark, and the char-grilled meat has a strange, burnt, shish-kebab-like flavour.

Whack that in a bog-standard toasted sesame bun and you've got a burger that tastes like it's come from a kebab shop late at night, and if you were in a kebab shop late at night you would, surely, have a kebab, no?

Also, food that might be acceptable late at night, when everywhere else is closed and you're staggering pissed, seldom hits the spot in the cold light of lunchtime, which is the only time that Boom is open.

Burr(it)o!

But I can probably forgive Daddy Donkey his lacklustre beef offspring for the simple reason that the 'Kick Ass Mexican Grill' does indeed kick ass and I really wish I'd sampled it earlier.

The formula is the same as that which has been copied by Tortilla. You choose your meat and rice and veg and salsa and they wrap it up in a big, err, wrap, and you're tucking in within seconds. Simple.

Fresh, fresh, fresh

It's classic street food and fairly good value at £5.95 - certainly given the choice between a substandard burger and a good buritto at a similar price, I know which one I'd plump for, and that might explain why Daddy Donkey typically sports a lengthy queue, while Boom Burger can serve you straight away.

 
Sometimes when things are assembled 'fresh', the components taste anything but, having been lying around all day, but this isn't the case here. The charcoally flavour in the burgers is nowhere to be found, and the grilled beef here is lean, tender and nicely seasoned. 

It would be tasty enough on it's own, but it's even better with the accoutrements of sour cream and salsa - which comes at a temperature of your choosing, though even the 'medium' version is actually fairly hot. 


While the beef is probably best, you can also choose from pork or chicken, and the number of possible combinations available, depending on what exactly you want on it, is almost beyond calculation.

Beany Breakfast burritos are available from 7 to 11 AM, when the lunch service takes over. They pack up at 4 PM, sometimes earlier.

That'll do, Donkey, that'll do

For my money the quality of the food is superior to the Tortilla chain and the portion is a tad more generous. Then again, Boom burger is a one off, run by the same people, and yet it's notably inferior to chains like Byron and Haché, so there are no hard and fast rules.

I could admit now that 'Jedi' is actually my favourite Star Wars film, but then I'd probably get beaten up by somebody, or force-fed Boom Burgers or something...

Where to find it

Daddy Donkey
Leather Lane

Clerkenwell,
EC1N 7TE
*********
Boom Burger

Leather Lane

Clerkenwell,
EC1N 7TE
********* 

Adios, Diccionario Mexicana!

It might be a widely-propagated myth that the Eskimos have 83 different words for snow, but Mexicans definitely have at least a dozen different words for Mexican food.

Tacos, burritos, taquitos, fajitas, tortillas, enchiladas, tamales, chimichangas, hongos, rellenos – who knows what it really all means when you see it on a menu in a Mexican restaurant?

We've all spent time handing plates around the table, trying to figure out which one of the near-identical dishes is which, before saying 'fuck it, it's all good'.

You know that no matter what you order, you’ll always get either a soft thing or a crispy thing, it will be filled with some combination of meat, rice, cheese, beans, salad, salsa, sour cream and guacamole, and it will normally be pretty damn delicious.

Yes, ‘tostada’ implies that it will be one of the crispy ones, and ‘quesadillas’ and ‘carnitas’ will contain cheese and meat respectively, but then so could any of the other items on the menu. I like it. I like going to Mexican restaurants and I liked the food in Mexico itself when I briefly found myself there a few years ago - but let's not kid ourselves that it's not all the same kind of stuff.

I’ve no idea why Mexican restaurants have such a bewildering array of menu items – just list the components and let folks choose exactly what configuration they chose for fucks sake.