I'll have whatever Pixie Geldof is having.....

A very shallow dish :Observer food monthly

It’s sad fact that the Guardian/Observer are getting more slight, trite and shallow every day they seem to have mistaken an obsession with celebrity, fashion and vain aspirational shopping for what people really want from a newspaper enjoyable, informed, accessible writing.
Take the food monthly, today we have “the 50 coolest places to eat” you’ll note not the best, worst, cheapest, tastiest but coolest.

You can tell how muddle headed this is, of the places on the list I’ve been to they aren’t even the best places to eat of their kind in London. Brindisa is a fairly average tapas bar in everything except the bill, and the rock and soul plaice is jolly (love the mural down stairs) and the fish is good but their chips just aren’t that nice. As for the Vietnamese place in Kingsland road it’s tasty and cheap but so is the one down the road and the one in Camberwell or the one on Deptford high street. Also there’s no Hungarian cool places to eat nor any ones in Leeds or Bromley. They all seem to be near shops that sell clothes.

Of course the media always think cool is an immutable idea that their definition is the only one that counts but they forget that when I was 6 the coolest place to eat was BHS cafe because they had raspberry flavoured pop, that chips are better eaten sat on a cast iron bench fighting off the seagulls on a blustery seafront, that cool doesn’t just mean “whatever Marc Jacobs does”. I’m not sure that sitting four tables away from the bass player of T’arctic monkeys is going to make a kebab taste any better and lastly any paper that asks models for their opinions on where to eat has left the path of wisdom

PS: Oh and in a straight forward good piece about a top Danish restaurant did Jay Rayner really need to tell us what Valhalla is or are we now to assume that the constant waffle about Jade Goody has forced out a working knowledge of Norse mythology (or in deed anything other than the gender of Lindsay Lohan’s current squeeze) out of the heads of educated readers.

Next week Tanya Gold tells us that posh people go to the Chelsea Flower show (sorry it seems she already done that story)

Down (the) market

What we learnt from last nights Telly:The True Cost of Cheap Food

"Pies damned pies and statistics!
I finally caught up with my celebratory stalker's
programme on cheap food (thanks to every one for the Deptford tip off). It was all good stuff straightforward if strangely old school journalism i.e. Jay Rayner went out and found out stuff and then told us about it. Basically cheaper food could be a bit better nutritionally for very little extra cost, this cost the supermarkets could swallow in their huge profits. It was good for a food programme not to be too preachy about the necessity of many people to shop cheaply which often means shopping at supermarkets.
For ease of access presumably he filmed down Deptford market (after all he does only live in Brixton!) he did avoid quoting TS Elliot which was a shame.

"This is a Local shop"

In some respects Deptford is slightly anomalous place to test the programmes theories because it has a really good and relatively thriving market. The market is run at least 3 days a week and also has wealth of small independent food shops (which makes it sound poncy but they're just grocers, butchers, fish mongers etc.) You can get good meat, a range of veg from far and near most of what you'd want apart from in my case cheese and perhaps beer. The only chain supermarket is Iceland and the nearest big supermarket is a bus ride away in New Cross.

Another irony is that down the bottom of the high street there are 2 pie and mash shops (Jay was handing out pies for people to taste and compare) ideally placed at one time to feed the workers from the now closed docks and the power station but a bit out of the way for the main market. Also almost opposite where Jay set up his pretend pie stall was the former shop of south London favourite Kennedy's sausages which sold locally made pies up until last year.

I think I'm lucky to live near such a good market and get a large proportion of my food (and Vinyl)! from there, only going to chain supermarkets if I must. Obviously someone shopping for3 or 4 people will have lots to carry but the people who shop in Deptford probably don't have cars anyway so unless they get a taxi with the added cost or struggle onto a bus the local supermarkets aren't much help. Also there are plenty of people in London with small or no families who still drive 1-2 miles to shop at supermarkets rather than walk to the shops.

Obviously in many places people don't have the choice of a market like we do but when I visit supermarkets I'm not totally convinced of their virtues, I'm always amazed at how long it takes to pay for the food, they aren't that cheap plus they encourage you to overspend with their mulitbuy deals etc.

People complain about Tescos (and the woman on Hugh complicated names programme this evening was a particular poor example of your corporate type the way she blustered and evaded was shameful) et al but well if you have a local choice why not use it and perhaps try to find someone that sells pies with more than 10% meat in 'em.