The curry of my youth - Lamb Tikka Rogan

Back in the 80s, the longest shadow hanging over the world was the hole in the Ozone layer. Then it was Third World Debt, then the Banking Crisis.

Now it's Shit Takeaways.

I used to be staunchly of the opinion that any curry cooked at home would never be quite as good as the equivalent dish from your local Tandoori restaurant. They had the specialist equipment; The spices you can't buy anywhere without being in the know; The proper Tandoor oven.

Now I'm not so sure - while there are some perfectly good places plying their trade in the 21st century marketplaces of Just Eat and HungryHouse, there are also some right munters, pigstrotters and tugboats out there. (If you accept that these terms can apply as equally to shit takeaways as they might to someone picked up in a shit nightclub before picking up a shit takeaway!)

Expensive 'Spoons, expensive countries and a very expensive poo

One of the most insane weekends of my life involved a stag night in Tallinn, eight years ago.

We set off at stupid'o'clock on a Friday morning, on a minibus from Ipswich, started drinking in the Stansted Wetherspoons, and got to the Estonian capital shortly after midday local time, if I recall correctly.

There then followed a marathon afternoon and evening of spiced beer and shots of pepper vodka, followed by weird, tasty, offally food. I suspect I drank more than anybody else. At least eight pints plus half a dozen shots, I'd imagine.

Very Mean Numbers

I have a theory that if you make a statement and attach a number to it, some people will be impressed, , even if the numbers really aren't impressive, simply because you've taken the time to make the statement.

Or, to put it another way, people think that if it's worth mentioning, it must be worth mentioning, even when it isn't. If that makes sense?

This blog gets over *100* visitors EVERY SINGLE DAY!

See what I did there? It's true, it has a number in it, and it's made to sound impressive even though it really isn't.

But I guarantee there'll be someone somewhere not even reading this sentence properly because a part of their brain is still going 'ooh, hundred visitors, eh, that's not bad, is it? Bully for him'

Let's try and send a few more of you off into the realms of bemused agreement, shall we...


"Houses in this street go for upwards of £100,000!"

"Look at that bloke over there - he must be well over 5 foot tall!"

"You'll be generously remunerated with a five-figure salary package!"

All technically correct, yet all absolute wanky, misleading nonsense. Most of the time, you won't hear people extolling such modest virtues, because, well, it sounds ridiculous, but it happens a lot in the food and drink industry. Probably more than I'm comfortable with.

Look at all the cheap whiskies on an off-license shelf. 'Aged 8 years' they proudly proclaim, as though it's a mature old gentleman, in comparison to all those two and three year old whiskies out there.

'Seven whole days' (not one in seven, apparently...)

The truth is that - outside of the specialist market for young whisky, which isn't particularly cheap - you'd be hard-pressed to find a malt aged for fewer than eight years, and most Scotch will be blended from similar stuff. It's pretty much the lowest of low end. The youngest of the young.

You can see why an 18- or 25-year-old malt would want to proclaim its age, in order to distinguish it from the 8s, but the selling point of whisky is almost always age, not youth, so why do they do it with the youngest ones?

Greene King's ad campaign for Abbot Ale used to boast of how the beer was matured for 'seven whole days' and I have no doubt that there were some Abbot drinkers who considered this a very long time simply because they'd been told about it. To put it into a more realistic perspective, Cantillon in Brussels typically mature their beer for a year to 18 months and often quite a lot longer than this. A week is fuck-all.

Damning with faint hyperbole. Shouting about modest numbers. Unshrinking Violet Theory. This thing really should have an official name.

I have a beef

It's the same deal with 14-day aged steak, a familiar sight on pub menus. Imagine that! A whole fortnight! How impressed we all are...

Except that 14 days is pretty much the minimum maturation period for any cut of beef marketed as 'steak'. 35- and 50- day aged steak is not hard to find, and you can get stupid beef that's been hung for three months or so, though experiments show that peak taste is achieved at around 45.


Back to the supermarket, let's have a look at the packaging for ready meals:

'Be good to yourself' Lasagne - only 397 calories!!! 

 Buyers will think that's a low calorie count because the packaging proclaims it. Yet, a couple of items downstream towards the frozen aisle, there's a different lasagne ready meal, rather understated and not branded as lo-calorie that has a calorie count of 394. Fractionally lower than the diet version.

I don't know what we can do to stop this phenomenon, after all, they're essentially telling the truth, which, in advertising, is a feat in itself.

I just wish people would be less gullible and look at the numbers in context rather than isolation.

After all, we're always told that just because someone says something, it doesn't make it true. How about 'just because someone says something that is true, it doesn't make it impressive'?

Non-alcoholics Anonymous

When they first went mainstream back in the late 1980s, non-alcoholic and low alcohol beers swiftly became the butt of jokes. They were right up there with Eastern Bloc cars and straight-to-video horror films on the International Crapness Scale.

Apparently you can still buy this stuff

Barbican. Kaliber. Possibly a bottle of Clausthaler if you were in an upmarket wine bar and wanted your non-alcohol imported. It was all woeful.

Maybe you're lucky enough to be too young to remember. Unfortunately I'm not. And because they were non-alcoholic I recall them with greater clarity than any other beers I drank as a teenager.

Even then, it wasn't just about the not-getting-drunk either. They tasted so extraordinarily bland that they didn't even qualify as a good soft drink. An afternoon drinking Kaliber and skipping school left one yearning for a can of Quatro. Remember that? Quatro?

BV London Pub of the Year 2014-15 - the results

Choosing a Pub of the Year is never easy.

It's not, for example, like choosing socks, which is one of the simplest decisions facing mankind. You can't just pick pubs out of the sock drawer and say 'yep, these'll do', or chuck it back in on the basis that a vibrantly-coloured Pac-Man design might not be the most appropriate internal footwear for your grandfather's funeral.

This is the fourth BV Pub of the Year contest, and one thing I learned pretty quickly is that it's difficult. Your brain becomes the battlefield for endless power-struggles over which pubs to exclude, why one pub worth seven points is not quite as good than other with the same score, or why that might be unfair on the first pub. You've never had a bad pint at Pub X, but in your heart of hearts, you know that the atmosphere doesn't live up to Pub Y, but your head of heads can't qualify exactly why not...

It's like having a massive fuck-off draw full of flawless, fragrant-smelling pairs of socks, none of which could possibly cause offence to anybody at any time.

Irresponsible Drinking

So, it's the start of London Beer City.

What a week it's going to be - just look at the schedule. A whole host of fantastic beery events taking place all over the capital.

Brewery open days, one-off brews, beer and food pairings, it all looks lovely, doesn't it?

Trouble is, there's hardly space for any beer in this room, given the massive, trumpeting elephant that's stamping all over common sense and reason as we speak.

IT'S THE SAME FUCKING WEEK AS THE GBBF!!!

The same week. Who in their right mind could possibly think that this insane scheduling is a good idea, hmm?

Don't ASK

Oftentimes, when reviewing places to eat, I have a tendency to ramble on, just a bit.

If the food is good, I'll wax endlessly about the succulence of the crispy fat and the opulent richness of the sauce, and if it's bad you won't be able to stop me banging on about the ropey quality of the beef and how the pastry tasted of margarine and poor peoples kitchens.

This review, however, I should be able to motor through in just a few short paragraphs because the food was so absolutely, utterly unmemorable.