EO2HO: The sequel

With the various flavours of lockdown now looking like they might just be retreating into history, it's time to get out there and support 'the industry'.

OK, I won't say it again because I fucking hate that term, but it's not rocket surgery: Drink in as many pubs as you can, eat in restaurants, go to cafes and coffee shops and anywhere else you can eat and drink. Revisit old favourites, try new places, and generally enjoy it all while the experience is possible. (Just in case the worst should happen yet again.)

I recently checked out a couple of places that were new to me, and both are well worth visiting if you're ever in the Camden or Tooting areas, or don't mind going to places on the Northern Line!

Eating out to help out - let's do it!

Who's the real jerk?

Compared to many foodie blogsters, I'm not usually all that bothered about 'service' in restaurants.

Most of the time, if the food is good it'll take a lot to make me notice that other departments are lacking and even when I do, I tend to take a pretty relaxed and forgiving view.

So this review of The Real Jerk on Streatham Hill is going to be a bit of a strange one, because stuff other than the food has actually been bad enough for me to notice and indeed care about it!

When Porky met Curry

What's the best option when eating out? Indian, right?

What's the best roasted meat? Pork, right?

Why can't you get curried pork in Indian restaurants? That would be the most amazing thing ever, right?

It is, however, even in this age of every-conceivable-fusion, still remarkably rare. Never the twain shall met. Which is a bit odd. I know there is a cultural and religious explanation, but it's a lazy one, and under scrutiny it doesn't  really make a whole lot of sense.

Yes, I think they probably know it's Christmas by now

If, like me, you grew up in the 1980s, you probably have a view of Ethiopia that is pretty hard to shake off, defined largely by the media and celebrities of the day.

As impressionable children we witnessed Band Aid, Live Aid, Sport Aid (Remember that one -  'Everybody wants to Run the World'?) and the inaugural Comic Relief. Loads of money raised for a good cause. A cause that was relentlessly branded upon our collective conscience, pretty much all the time. For some years.

Ethiopia was deserts, flies and starving children. Ethiopian food? Well it wasn't anything was it? There was a famine. OK, maybe the diet consisted of the contents of those food packages paid for with the moneys raised by Bob, Midge and Lenny.

And that was the virtually intractable image we all had in our minds. That was Ethiopia.

Cultural learnings of St Johns Wood for make benefit dubious sense of nostalgia

These days we're all told to 'check our privilege' - I must never lose sight of all the advantages in life I get simply from being a white, middle-class male, some of them so covertly advantageous that I won't even consciously be aware of them.

My gut reaction to this is that there's probably a fair amount of truth in the narrative, but it's far from universal and things are not that straightforward or simplistic.

One of the more nuanced downsides of being a person like me can be the lack of any sense of cultural belonging when it comes to food and drink. We'll never properly know or understand the 'homecoming' that others experience. We don't get to 'feel' aloo gobi deep in our bones.

Why does everything have to have a 'quarter' these days?

Whatever claim BoxPark Croydon stakes to being South London's premier nightlife hub, it was always going to have a little local competition in the form of the stuff that was there already.

Croydon may still be short of a genuinely world-class pub, but it doesn't lack restuarants. Indeed the stretch of road south of Croydon Flyover has a concentration of eateries of just about every nationality and the area is now branded officially as the 'Restaurant Quarter'.

Honestly there are so many here, I do wonder if the area can sustain that much food. Especially overpriced, indifferent dining experiences of dubious quality.

Beer Circus used to be round these parts too, a small continental style bar that was one of the first in London to offer genuinely interesting imported beers on draught. It's long gone though, so you'll have to make do with the two Wetherspoons that top and tail the Restaurant Quarter (and the Milan Bar, at the Northern end of the stretch, is up for sale and won't be there much longer.)

Whenever places boast a 'French Quarter', or indeed a Restaurant Quarter, I'm always slightly bemused by the expression. What if it takes up more than 25% of the available space? What if you have French, Italian, Baroque, Chinese and Bohemian Quarters, shouldn't they technically be Quinters or something?

It annoys me.

Anyway, not particularly good restaurants in Croydon. Let's go!

I should Cocoro

Pokémonimania, or whatever the fuck we should call the phenomenon, doesn't really interest me. I wasn't into it the first time around, and I have so much of a 'collector' mindset that if I ever started trying to 'catch em all' I'd literally be unable to stop until I did. And I've got better things to collect, like beers.

What this fad does afford me, however, is a rather tenuous angle with which to introduce a blog. Take that, Pikachu! I'm the one exploiting you!

Anyway, I've never been to Japan, and could be completely and utterly wrong, but my view of Japanese culture is that it's more insanely polarised than Brexit Britain.

On one hand you have a younger generation that is creative, exciting and spontaneous, leading the world in innovation, technology and brightly-lit things, and then behind the scenes there is an older Japan with very conservative values - family-oriented with a stereotypically strong work ethic. Quite the contradiction.

The Tragedy about a Daylight Robbery

Earlier this year, we saw The Play That Goes Wrong at the Duchess Theatre. All things considered, it's a pretty good production, subverting as it does a wide range of theatrical tropes to comedic effect. I laughed quite a bit. All good so far.

Then, a few weeks later we went to see the spin-off, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, which was less fun - perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the supply of ideas for stuff that can go wrong was probably thin on the ground following the sheer number of things that, rightly, went wrong in The Play That Goes Wrong.

Nonetheless, it was still just about worth watching, in a sort of pantomimey, passing-the-timey sort of way.

No more paltry poultry

There are few foodstuffs more homogenised in our culture than chicken.

In Britain we eat more than a pound per person per week, but the vast majority is consumed as a staple commodity, without pride or pleasure. It's the 'sliced white' of the meat industry, for sure. 

We're happy eating it in nugget, tikka or Coronation form, but are we maybe doing a disservice to the humble chicken by passing it off as a mere canvas for more interesting things? I like a Chicken Jalfrezi and I'll happily polish off a giant plate of buffalo wings. But, let's be honest, none of these are really about the chicken, are they?

A nicely roasted free-range chicken can be a thing of beauty for sure, but we hardly ever eat it these days. Sadly, we're far more likely to be stopping off at Chicken Cottage at 2AM for cheap battery chicken scraps, where the lack of underlying flavour is concealed by swathes of fat and a secret blend of herbs and spices. It's depressing; probably more so if you're a chicken!