the food rant thread

[perpetual dan]

I found we want plates earlier! This ought to appeal to ian...


 

[menthel]

I found we want plates earlier! This ought to appeal to ian...


 

That can fuck right off! For a start, how are you supposed to eat it? Its also on bloody scales- its taking versus man vs food too far! If I want to die eating burgers I will just order lots of them.

[Mr Larrington]

And another thing, Mr Sainsbury's House of Toothy Comestibles!  You appear to have stopped selling your own-brand not-butter.  I do not wish to spend double the amount on poncey Lurpak, I am boycotting Country Life because J Rotten, and Anchor tastes funny and not in a good way.

Kerrygold it is, then.

The Dutchy Organic one is nice

But you have to pass it on the left-hand side, which is a problem if you live alone.

(Says "Biddly-Biddly-Biddly-Biddly Bong!"  Is carted off to funny farm)

[Andrij]

I found we want plates earlier! This ought to appeal to ian...


 

The mug-o-chips is for throwing at staff to knock them unconscious.  One then uses the scales to measure out a pound of flesh from each of them in retribution.

[Tigerrr]

Top rant from Ian, catching the mood of the middle aged male diner perfectly.
Ian, have you tried coffee lately? Perhaps some reviews of (ideally 'artisan') coffee shops is needed. Or artisan bakers.
Seems to me the decline of the working class artisan has heralded the arrival of the mockney ex public school artisan food retailer, with all that 'passion' enabling pop up pricing for the iPad wearers.
I am thinking of a chain of artisan porridge pop up stores, operating from reclaimed Mr Whippy vans, sited by London tube stations in the morning. each van with its own mill, grinding and pressing single varietal oats from named rustic farms, in hessian sacks. Served in brown cardboard boxes like the olden days, eaten with a wooden spoon. Could be a winner.

[ian]

The burger on the scales is either some kind of truly heinous brilliance, or a dystopian metaphor for our battle with the food that sustains yet kills us. Or it's Hoxton tossery squared.

My wife got jenga chips last night. Ten carefully balanced chips. Unfortunately, the waitress knocked them over at the table and the whole thing had to go back to back kitchen for reassembly. As it was Denmark they probably didn't beat the poor girl, though I'm sure the chef/architect had strong words. I've found structural food assemblies quite common in Scandinavia, I think it's the entire Ikea thing. It did apparently come on a plate, though for some reason her veg got its own little dish to prevent food group miscegenation. That's a common theme, like macaroni cheese in those little enamel bathtubs, and the growing need for restaurants to serve breakfast in a dinky little frying pan with a pair of egg-tits wobbling on top.

Yesterday's lunch of disappointment was skewered and grilled ennui on a deathbed of buckwheat kasha. I should know better. It was like shoveling soil from my own grave into my mouth. There was an arterial splash of vibrant red sauce on the side that promised to taste of something but tasted like precisely titrated nothing. It was all served on a plate at least.

Coffee, don't get me going, I was dragged to a coffee shop the other day, run by New Zealanders and populated with MacBooks and their owners. Perhaps our Kiwi friends are wired directly into the caffeinated zeitgeist and thus uniquely qualified to sell coffee and afghan biscuits, all I know is that my gritty americano cost about the same as a return ticket to Auckland and tasted marginally worse than the free coffee from the machines aboard the mothership.

[Mr Larrington]

ian, have you considered a career change into restaurant criticism?

[woollypigs]

Yeah become secret eater, or what ever they are called, and get free grub for a rant

[Jurek]

I envisage the staff in their entirety, trembling in fear of loss of their collective careers, as Ian crosses the threshold and takes his place at the table....

[Tigerrr]

i think Ian should have a column, to review life in general. I would subscribe.

[madcow]

Top rant from Ian, catching the mood of the middle aged male diner perfectly.
Ian, have you tried coffee lately? Perhaps some reviews of (ideally 'artisan') coffee shops is needed. Or artisan bakers.
Seems to me the decline of the working class artisan has heralded the arrival of the mockney ex public school artisan food retailer, with all that 'passion' enabling pop up pricing for the iPad wearers.
I am thinking of a chain of artisan porridge pop up stores, operating from reclaimed Mr Whippy vans, sited by London tube stations in the morning. each van with its own mill, grinding and pressing single varietal oats from named rustic farms, in hessian sacks. Served in brown cardboard boxes like the olden days, eaten with a wooden spoon. Could be a winner.

Too late , except it's not in that there London http://www.yelp.co.uk/biz/stoats-porridge-bar-van-edinburgh 

[Tigerrr]

I think Stoats porridge is 'scottish' inasmuch as it is essentially an oat base for the sweet toppings, like condensed milk, jam, syrup etc, required on food north of the border. (Only in fiction do real scots put salt on porridge, in real life they want melted mars bars on it, and Irn Bru  on top.)
Metropolitan artisan porridge would be about named source oat varietals, the roast, grain specs, and bran quotient. Plus honey maybe. Definitely not the scottish thing, although I can see that going well at football matches.

[ian]

There is a cereal cafe on Brick Lane. For about £3.50 you can get a bowl of cornflakes served to you by people with beards. While being surrounded by people with beards. I figure you're paying a hefty surcharge for the increasingly dense forests of facial hair once you cross City Road. The Old Street roundabout is like a portal to their world. Lacking facial hair and wearing trousers that fit, I will always be a stranger in a strange land. There was an aspirationally stupid article in one of the papers (has to be the Guardian) complaining that the poor people of Tower Hamlets wouldn't be able to afford £4.50 for a bowl of Golden Grahams and mini-marshmallows sloshing around in a pond of strawberry-flavoured milk. Come on, social equality everyone, those people need £1.50 bowls of supermarket own-brand cereals.

I've no idea if they serve porridge. I'm sure they wouldn't want oat clag in those recently coiffured beards. I did have breakfast near Spitalfields the other week and that was an obligatory pan and egg-tits affair.

As for restaurant criticism, I can be rude to anyone. Like in most things, I'm a Philistine (not a bad thing in a critic, perhaps, given their historical tendency for gouging). I've lost track of the number of times over the years when I'd happily swap my expensive plate of whatever for a crisp sandwich. I'd make sandwiches with pies and cocktails with Tizer. My mother's best recipe was burnt fish fingers which I had to trawl from a small ocean of perilously lumpy parsley sauce. To this day, given the opportunity, I'll build a parsley sauce volcano out of mashed potato and provide a voiceover for what I call The Grim Plight of the Five Fish Fingers. It doesn't end well for them.

[hellymedic]

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/shoreditch-cereal-caf-founders-set-to-publish-book-about-cereal-10204368.html

[Torslanda]

And another thing, Mr Sainsbury's House of Toothy Comestibles!  You appear to have stopped selling your own-brand not-butter.  I do not wish to spend double the amount on poncey Lurpak, I am boycotting Country Life because J Rotten, and Anchor tastes funny and not in a good way.

Kerrygold it is, then.

The Dutchy Organic one is nice

Yeo Valley butter is lovely, and a proper yellow colour, not like that white forrin stuff.

In defence of 'that white forrin' stuff we are converts to President butter (which is yellow BTW) and we discovered this in France thanks to our cosmopolitan jet-setting* lifestyle...





*If you can describe holidaying in a Peugeot van as 'jet-setting'.

[hellymedic]

I have had Lurpak since conception.

[Mr Larrington]

Miss von Brandenburg and I ventured east of the Old Street roundabout the other week, mostly for a gig but also to observe the passing facial topiary through the window of Pizza Express.  She reckoned I shout fit right in, a charge I refute on the grounds of looking more like a Hawkwind roadie who has just stumbled out of that police call box he wandered into while tripping at Glastonbury in 1971.

[tiermat]

I reckon Ian is really A. A. Gill.

[Mr Larrington]

I reckon Ian is really A. A. Gill.

If he is then Miss von Brandenburg will be round to stab him in the throat with a rusty fork shortly.

[Torslanda]

Does he not deserve a ti spork?

[Mr Larrington]

AA Gill doesn't, the terrible menk.

[fuzzy]

A plate of food that looks like it should be displayed in a gilded frame on the wall of the National Gallery?

Fuck off. Good solid food, piled on the plate, the elements of the meal having the temerity to actullay touch each other and served with a gravy or sauce which is poured on the meat, not artistically swirled around the edge of the plate. As for putting a jus or coulis or whatever the fuck they are called on food- no! Sauce or gravy.

(I still like Masterchef though).

[ian]

Gravy. That’s such an awful, proletarian sauce. The sort of meal time ruffian that puts the lump in lumpen. Jus, on the other hand, is a svelte little thing, back on the Eurostar from a weekend in the south of France, giggling coquettishly over your julienned vegetables and waving to the coy little splatter of coulis on the edge of your plate. Jus is from a world where things aren't brutally mashed, they're elegantly puréed and blitzed, then daintily arrayed so they can gaze flirtatiously at one another across the empty grey expanse of slate that lies between them. Gravy, on the other hand, looms over your food like a hard-faced bailiff waiting to take your TV. Gravy, I’m sure, lives some place monochrome up north. In the next few years, somewhere in Hackney, there'll be a gravy café, serving all manner of exotic gravies* for facially hirsute Guardian readers. It'll even be served in a literal boat.

I have a fear of gravy, dating to the monstrous stuff that was served by my parents. It had the texture of lumpy wallpaper paste, a kind of unctuous sludge that would gum up your mouth and make everything for the next two days taste of Bisto. With cornflakes, you name it. It’d ooze over the plate like a mudslide. It wasn't helped by my father’s fervour for hot food, merely serving food from the stove wasn’t enough, the plate not only had to be warmed to a cherry red glow beforehand, the entire sizzling mess then had to go back into the oven to be warmed for another twenty minutes. The result, by the time it arrived at the table, sizzling and popping like a volcanic mud pool. I've never actually tasted a volcanic mud pool but I doubt I'd be surprised.

I confess a secret hankering for Count Chocula. Admittedly, it would be healthier and marginally less addictive to just give your kids a couple of rocks of crack.


*not as outlandish as it may seem, a couple of years ago at a conference in Florida, I was surveying the distributed buffet options (it was an outside do, arrayed around the patio and pool) and I discovered an entire table of differently flavoured mashed potato. Cheese and chive, tomato and chilli, bacon, you name it, I swear about a dozen kinds of cheerfully confected potato. I was in stodge heaven. I swear by the end of the evening every Brit and Irish person in southern Florida had been drawn to that table, while the Americans looked on in horror.

[lahoski]

Cheese and chive, tomato and chilli, bacon, you name it, I swear about a dozen kinds of cheerfully confected potato. I was in stodge heaven.

No kimchi though?

[menthel]

The word unctious. I bloody hate it. My mother uses it, usually accompanied with a silly gesture and face. Its very bloody annoying- in fact its one of the few truly annoying things about my dear, sweet, simple mother. That and the fact my son has some how picked up the gesture and face. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH.