Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
Dec
What is it about French waiters? by @OliverThring
Paris yesterday, cold and bright. Cream stone, pursed mouths, a brown ribbon of river. I've been here every year since my late teens, I grew up in a Swiss village a mile from the border, my dad still lives in France – but I've only recently begun to realise something about the locals. You know what a Frenchman thinks of you not by his acts or words but by the look he gives you. And I like that: the clean, steady vivisection of personality.
Dec
“Sharing” plates: the grim trend of 2009 by @OliverThring
So 2009 wheezes out the decade. As I write this, snow is falling outside, unsettlingly. This is a fearful time for restaurants: they're hyping their Christmas menus with all the urgent gloom of a closing down sale. Those glorious, spending tables will stand desolate in January, the glasses unfilled, the rooms idle and voiceless.
Dec
Authentically Meaningless by @OliverThring
Something's got my goat recently. Kid, curd and little beard. It began as a niggling irritant but has steadily descended into vein-bulging rage. It's a word, a single word, sneering back at me on every menu I scan, on every restaurant website I shrink from, in every conversation I have about food.
Nov
Restaurants at Christmas by @OliverThring
Christmas looms, and that means we're veering into office party season, that sloshed embittered wasteland of social interaction. Nigel, gazing into his Rioja, dolefully telling his bored neighbour how he wished he'd taken that job in Dubai in '98. Anne from Accounts gigglingly fumbling with Terry the IT guy's fly. Secretaries in Santa hats shrieking Noddy Holder. And dropped trousers and camera flashes and panicked hangovers and global emails and cold unsmiling disciplinary hearings. It's as British as beer, but more bitter.
Nov
The horrors of restaurant websites by @OliverThring
I spend an inordinate amount of time on restaurant websites. It's the occupational hazard of food blogging. People come to you and say, 'I'm off to a nose flute recital in Neasden tonight. What's the best coeliac Mongolian round there?' And because I'm petrified of looking thick I say 'Let me have a quick think,' and scurry to Google or my groaning shelf of restaurant guides and click and flick and say 'Yes, I've got it - it's Wheat Got the Wok'.
Nov
@OliverThring: The spread of the burrito in the UK
Whenever I was in the States, and began to compare (as we all do) home and away, I used to think that what London needed wasn't malls, multiplexes or Taco Bells, or the grating guff of I'm-Wanda-and-I'll-be-your-waitress, or Creosote portions or super-hormoned beef. What London needed like tonic needs gin were joints flogging fat juicy burritos, roaring with chilli, sludging with guac, spattered with rice, crunching with veg, and with sweet melting shreddy strands of slow, slow-cooked pork. I'd meet a friend for lunch in midtown, and we'd head to Chipotle and queue and I'd say: 'This would really work back home. Let's set one up. We'd be millionaires'. And he'd nod distractedly and stare into the middle distance and ask something à propos of nothing.