Monday, June 11, 2007

Memorable Dining in London

h/t Tim Blair:

Chicken, cashew nut and coriander looked like a hippo’s inflamed tonsil; the smell of it was like vinegar in the eyes. With noodles, you chose an ingredient (meat, fish, chicken), a noodle (rice, wheat, egg) and a “topping” (spicy, healthy, Thai, teriyaki) and then flipped a coin for either wokked or soup. The Blonde had salmon, Japanese noodles and Hong Kong topping as soup. What arrived was a daunting bowl of stuff that was the colour of beetroot water, though disturbingly nothing solid in it was red, and it tasted as though there was nothing in it at all. A spicy chicken soup was a large bowl of thin, hot, smelly water. My wokked pork fillet with egg noodles was a foul, grey, greasy, overcooked confection that you might expect to find in a fire station or a sixth-form common room. I have never met a Pot Noodle I wouldn’t have preferred.

Heh, sounds like the reviewer met his match and the food won. It makes me want to visit the restaurant out of simple morbid curiosity. Read the whole thing 'cause it begins with an equally caustic attack on the green armies of perdition that goes like so:

But let me tell you, you Peruvian-hatted puritan apostles of grassy nihilism, the single hottest problem facing the planet is not global warming, but the viciously smug fundamentalist prohibitionists of the green movement. Those wholemealy-mouthed ecologists, who devoutly wish to reduce everyone else’s existence to a self-righteous nose-drip probity that never moves more than four miles from the communal yurt, never eats anything that hasn’t been grown in the communal dung and never thinks anything that isn’t collectively miserabilist, are going to destroy life as we know it faster than an equator of traffic jams, a continent of unlagged lofts and a squadron of circling jumbos.
If there is a wrong side of bed, this guy has found it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I grew up in LA with what was then called a "health food store" at the end of the block. Most of the patrons looked sickly and emaciated - as if they had been drifting on a raft for three weeks. In contrast, all those at the counter at Du-Pars at the Farmer's Market gorging on roast beef sandwiches and lemon meringue pies looked just fine.