Top 10 food experiences

My top 10 food experiences isn't meant as a mere add-on to the top 10 dishes and restaurants, but as distinct recognition of other things which I've really liked this year:

10. Pearl: My one posh, haute meal of the year, when I took Rabs out for her 60th birthday and it was a really super meal, in a lovely room, with great service and all-round happiness.
9. Raisin bread from Marylebone farmers's market: good, fruity brown bread with blue cheese, nice combo.
8. Laduree macaroons - esp passion fruit and chocolate: loveliest food present out there I reckon.
7. Manstree fruit picking: great fun (with secret fruit scoffing out of sight of the owners) with a wonderful selection of berries and plums.
6. Suzy's cooking: home-made Japanese food, lucky old me.
5. Having a doughnut party/sushi-making: Food-making and eating with friends, makes you glad to be alive.
4. Park lunches: taking turns to make sandwiches and eat it in the park with two old friends, makes me look back with fondness on 07.
3. Neal's Yard: great British cheeses and a wonderfuls service ethos.
2. Borough: it really is still good.
1. Chapel Street: my local fruit and veg market, with more nugget deals than anywhere else and lots of good banter with the stallholders (sample, me: "How you doing mate?", veg man: "I'm tired, I'm cold and I'm unloved!"). Fantastic quality of produce at great prices all year round.

Top 10 dishes

Coming up with the top 10 dishes of the year ain't easy by any means, and there are some great things which have missed out on the list, but writing this makes me excited about food, about continuing blogging and enjoying good things with people in 08. Here we go:

10. Ricotta, pea, olive oil and rock salt salad: Ok, I made it for myself, but damn! if this isn't one of the finest summery combinations you can imagine. Ricotta from Olga's, olive oil and salt from Sainsies, peas from the market, and a happy walk home to make this.
9. Marine Ices: I just love Marine Ices, most especially the chocolate ice cream, especially when eaten on a bench on Hampstead Heath.
8. Pecorino Tartufo di Toscana from Gazzano's: truffled pecorino... feels weak at knees.
7. Tart of onion and thyme with hollandaise, Roxburghe House: classic cooking in the best wedding meal I've ever had I think.
6. Cafe Corfu spinach filo pie: Number7 recognised how amazingly good this was as we ate it, predicting that we would be back for more, and she's right that the memory of it is really sweet.
5. Dhal: The doctor's recipe is amazing - mustard seeds, I'm a believer.
4. Mr Falafel: great people, great philosophy, great felafel sandwiches.
3. St Moritz: the service may be a bit shabby but we know for sure that they make London's best version of the most regal of all cheese dishes.
2. Mish: a dish so good that you can forget about it and when you come back to it, it's like "Oh my God, this is amaaaazing!" Best thing on toast ever.
1. Doughnut Plant donut with coconut cream: the best doughnuts on the planet; almost mystically good, made by the man they call "the Don Quixote of doughnuts" who is pushing the envelope of deep-fried bakery products to new dimensions. I reckon I think about them more or less every week.

Top 10s

It's getting near the end of the year and while I want to believe that the best meals are still to come, I thought it'd be kinda fun to look back through the blog and come up with some top 10s for the year. I'll begin with my top ten restos (includes service, ambiance etc), before moving on to dishes and then my top 10 food experiences of the year. I've tried to share the love around a bit in having three top 10s and will aim not to repeat too many places across them.

So, thinking about my top 10 restaurants, one of the things which quickly became clear to me was that my fave places are almost all ones which I've been to many times. This may reflect a certain conservatism on my part, but I like to think that it reveals these to be restaurants which are super reliable, where there is in all cases good service and a nice place to eat, as well as truly delicious food. London gets 9 of the 10 and all of them are at the budget-midrange end of things, which reflects very well on the capital as a city where you can eat exceptionally well without going crazy. Here they are then, in reverse order...:

10. Smiths of Smithfield: I don't think the food is that amazing, but what a building and what a buzz. Actually, the veggie breakfast is delicious and there's nowhere I'd rather have brunch.
9. Abu Zaad: still the best cheese sambousek, and much else that is great besides (including the fantastic lemon and mint juices).
8. The Eagle: not been lately, but the food does tend to be great and their beer and wine selection is fantastic.
7. Tbilisi: one visit was enough to convert me to the deep yumminess of Georgian food. We must go back.
6. Ganapati: Peckham south Indian - again just visited once, but a super vibe and the most amazingly delicious beetroot.
5. Ciao Bella: big pizzas you can eat outside in Bloomsbury at sizx or seven quid, with amazing olives, breadsticks and hunks of parmigiano as a free starter: I'm there.
4. King's Sandwich Bar: Somewhere I can walk in, grab a Diet Coke from the fridge, shoot the breeze with my main man behind the counter, and not have to order, because he knows I always have a giant bap with cheese, salad and colelslaw. Quite simply one of the places that makes me love food and being alive.
3. Plaza: the best sag paneer I had all year was in Birmingham's balti triangle. Hot damn it was delicious.
2. El Vergel: love the place, the people, the cherry cheesecake and the amazing tacos.
1. Pho: hope to go there tonight with Number7: hot, healthy Vitnamese food, which you get to wear bibs to eat, with the best crunchy tofu ever and a really nice atmosphere too. Pho, you are a worthy winner of lacroixduroi's restaurant of the year award. The owner's very friendly so we may tell him this later.

A good left-over idea

I had some average rice and beans left over, and was pleasantly surprised that with addition of some salad, some yoghurt, Tabasco and fajita wraps, they made a really tasty dinner the next day.

Leon

It may not be quite as good as it thinks it is, but Leon's claim to be the acceptable face of fast food is pretty much true in my book. McFlurries aside, I cannot remember the last time I had a burger from the Golden Arches or BK, but I was genuinely pleased to have Leon's superfood salad again today: a winning mix of sprouts, broccoli, quinoa, sheep's cheese and a yummy dressing. Along with a bowl of houmous and a Diet Coke, this was a v. satisfying meal, and I like the styling at their outfit in Spitalfields.

Some days

Some days the end of a working week is just well-finished with a pizza, a Sprite and some onion rings. Shame that the bases of Penton Pizzas taste like old cardboard, but the toppings were just fine.

TGI Friday's

What to do when London's trendy Wahaca and its nuevo market-style Mexican cuisine demands a 90-minute wait? Well, walk across the road to TGI Friday's for old style Tex-Mex as it happens. It may go without saying that the place was cheesy (and I'm not just talking about b's quesadillas, which were one of the highlights) but it was definitely fun, and the dishes which were good (the quesadillas and some 'Mac and cheese bites') were really tasty. My burger and chips was rubbish, but it was partly my error for not takin' it to the border, Tex-Mex style. Kudos to any eaterie that offers a deep fried ball of cheese and macaroni as a starter.

Birthday food

Day 2 of Jake's birthday celebrations and I made some rice and beans, since that's one of his faves. To be honest, they weren't great, but Tabasco livened them up (especially when rolled into fajitas as leftovers by Edo and I today), and the vegetables cooked with Fajita seasoning and topped with cheddar were kinda yummy. Pudding consisted of some truly amazing (as in, kinda weird but good) candied satsumas from Granada, brought back by R+J, which were whole fruits that had been sugarised so that they became sort of marmaladey, but in a good way.

Ganapati

Ganapati in Peckham wins both my 'Indian of the week' award and may well also be heading for some gongs in my end of year awards. I went there for Jake's birthday and we ate 'family style' on tables of six, where we shared the main dishes, though we each had a thali plate with rice, poppadom, a delicious chilli salad, and a nifty personalised name badge courtesy of Rebs.

One of the things I liked most about the place was that it was cool, but not in a flash London way, but more like a treasured backstreets restaurant in somewhere like Montpellier in Bristol. It has that nice chilled-out-verging-on-stoner feel to it, with Indian etchings on the wall, relaxed staff and a low-key good-time feel. Of course all this would be for naught if the food was not good and it is just excellent: good daal (if not quite as fine as Wednesday's), a yummy coconut dish, and an absolutely stunning beetroot dish, which was one of the finest things I've eaten all your. I will admit that I was totally seduced by the deep purple of this dish - and quite pissed on some cocktails and amazing beers from London's Meantime brewing company - but there was something subtly moreish about the beetroot and I intend to return to work my way properly through the menu. Any takers?

Nice food, shame about the asshole waiters

To Ravishankar on Drummond St with b for 'Thursday night is saag paneer night' and what a treat the food is: you get a tray, as seen in the photo, with a salad, a mint dressing, three chapatis, a good portion of God's own Indian dish, and some rice pudding (I conformed to type and didn't like the latter). The saag is just bloody delicious, with excellent spinach, lush paneer and a really decent heat to the dish; what's more it combines very well with the chapatis, and by the end you feel you've had a really interesting and filling meal for £6.95.

Yet if the food merits an 'A' the service is grade 'D', pushing towards 'N' or 'U'. B had eaten there before with the Red Devil and they had had problems with the staff, so this was by no means a one off (and external reports have reached our food network of other disgruntled customers). The staff are, at best, offhand, and frankly rather rude in their surliness and the general impression they give off of not giving two hoots about their customers, seeing them only as a bottom line (by which I mean a line of bottoms that come in, sit down, and then file out).

I guess that in the end I may come to view this place simply as somewhere that has famously bad service, and learn to roll with it, but in a town where service is generally pretty good, I don't think I'll be back on any day other than a Thursday.

Delish daal

I was stumped as to what to cook for dinner and followed the doctor's suggestion of rice and daal. I didn't really need to add a salad of red peppers, avocado and feta, because the daal (cooked with cumin, coriander, turmeric and mustard seeds) was one of the yummiest things I've cooked in ages, so much so that Edo and I overate to the point where we needed to lie down. High praise indeed for food. The trick, and a source of much fun, is appara all in the popping of the mustard seeds in a heated pan as you begin.

Masala Zone

Last week saw me eat at three Indian restaurants, so it is perhaps a little harsh on Masala Zone on Upper Street to say that the food was probably slightly weaker than the other two, but I did very much appreciate the distinctiveness of its menu, which includes some interesting dishes featuring fruits and a karahi vegetable selection. B and I had thalis, which come with a variety of vegetables of the day as well as your curry of choice, and before that we shared a street food/puri plate, which was pretty tasty. All the food felt rather healthy and, if anything, I think I would have liked a touch more unhealthiness, but these are small quibbles for it was a very tasty meal and I'd have no hesitation in going back. The fact that it is not your average Indian restaurant is in no way a criticism, and the more I write about the healthy flavours, the more I think I will want to return.

Best dish description of the year

And the award goes to a cafe on Exmouth Market whose name I've forgotten (Ayla's maybe) for one of their many breakfast options which is called 'Fill me up son'. That really amuses me no end, as it did the Merovingian (who liked it so much that he had it) and Edo, who, like me, had a big baked potato. A real no-nonsense, cheap joint with tasty food and chirpy service: what is not to like, apart from my failure to remember its name and to take my camera?

Take me to the border

To Tortilla with Number7 to celebrate a very successful week at work for her after quite a number of months of great effort preparing for an inspection. Some time ago she had noted that a Tex-Mex war had broken out on Upper St as two new places had opened up within months of each other, and last night we tried Tortilla, which is reputed to be winnng the battle of the bandidos.

This was an especially good choice as only this week I was thinking to myself how much I had enjoyed eating at Chilli's in the Emirates, and how nice it would be to have a no-nonsense Tex-Mex diner me. Well now I've got one! It is very much a diner or cafe rather than a restaurant, with utilitarian benches and a fast-food style counter, but it's a far from unpleasant place to be (the walls could lose the red paint I guess), especially once you've started to eat. I had a large burrito (£5.50) full of black beans, Spanish rice, cheese, guacamole, sauteed peppers and onions, and some truly delicious hot sauce. It was a monster dish and went straight to the part of the soul that deals with food. On the side we had nachos, some very good guacamole (you could see the evidence of it having been made with real fruit) and some super sour cream. Drinks were Diet Coke and Sprite, with bottomless cups from the self-service machine, which also had an ice dispenser (fun!). I can't think of much else to say about the food other than that it was just damned delicious and it really is a pretty fantastic addition to the suddenly burgeoning Mexican dining scene in London.

Afterwards we went to see Women of Troy at the National (more on this once b has been) and saw the nifty neon display on the South Bank.

Dinner with Rabs

I sent out an urgent text to b and Number7 on Tues asking for dinner suggestions near Paddington as Rabs was taking a train home from there and wanted to eat close to the station. Unfortunately I will have to save the excellent ideas of Mandalay and other Edgware Road places for the future (the very near future I hope) as we in the end settled on an Indian place called the Golden Shalimar which is less than 5 mins from the station (good for those who fear they may miss their train, and that evening's epidode of Spooks). Anyways, I would say that the resto is completely unremarkable and all the better for that: the food is as yummy as you would expect in a decent neighbourhood Indian restaurant, the staff are very polite, and the feeling of well-spiced staisfaction at the end was just what was called for.

Lunch with Rabs

Quite pleased with this salad of rocket, pear, rocquefort and hazelnuts. The chipsticks weren't bad either, but I don't want to give the impression that we had crisp sandwiches for lunch...

Perhaps losing weight isn't so bad after all

Earlier this week I may have given the impression that my having lost weight was something of a personal tragedy. On reflection, and having viewed a lot of photos of me when I was tubby, it is quite nice to have lost weight, and while I still conflicted about the importance of all these things, in a simple way it does feel good to be lighter. After writing earlier in the week, one thing that I did notice was that in spite of all my proclamations about learning to disassociate guilt from food, I felt really bad about having a pizza for lunch on Thursday and then having a massive dinner. I convinced myself that this was the start of a slippery slope and I was back to being fat, which is rather an extreme reaction to one day of gorging, but I just don't know if I'll ever be the kind of person who can be svelte-ish and have a guilt-free relationship with food. In the meantime, I'll try and enjoy having just one chin, and places like my fave riverside pub in the picture (the Angel in Bermondsey).

Complements II

Damn, these sides were good. Forget the clunky main dish which was couscous with red pepper, chickpeas, artichoke hearts and feta, and check out the spinach with yoghurt, nutmeg and olive oil; and the big field mushrooms just cooked with olive oil. I believe it was Nigel Slater's take on food porn which first led me to realise just how incredibly delicious well-cooked, big field mushrooms are, and one of the great things about fruit and veg markets is that the quality of 'shroom you get there is invariably way better than those from supermarkets. A good one like this basically a meal in itself and its warmth much to be recommended in these days of gloom and bleakness in which the weather's so dank that the raindrops themselves are little icerdrops when they land on you.

Complements

One advantage of having gone to the market at the weekend is that I have loads of vegetables in the fridge and, rather than simply making some carb dish which has veggies and cheese chucked in, I can make a dish with something on the side, which I reckon makes for a more enjoyable meal. This was rice with red wine, spring onions, peppers and radicchio, with a salad of avocado, tomato, feta and olive oil, and a big dollop of Total. Nae bad at all, and it was the salad which was by far the nicest element, though tough for a fan of carbs to have just that by itself, and I suppose its flavours and weight were really a complement to the stodgy rice. I think I shall stop now before I start bigging myself up any more (I have had some real cooking disasters of late which haven't made it up here...).

I'll never have a six-pack

At the age of 36 I feel quite confident in saying that I'll never have a six-pack. I may never own a silver BMW like the dude who splashed me on my way to work. A second home in Bulgaria seems unlikely. But I don't give that much of a shit.

Such thoughts have been crossing my mind for two reasons. The first is that I am coming towards the end of this year's blog (I will be back in some form in '08!) and I have been reflecting on the reasons as to why I started blogging. One of them, you may well remember, was that I thought that writing about food might help me lose weight. At the time this seemed a rather odd claim to make, but this connects to my second reason for not worrying that I'll never have that six-pack that the man in black-and-white with the cheesy grin has each month on the cover of Men's Health magazine, which is that I have lost quite a lot of weight, and in some ways I've been wondering why this hasn't cheered me up; for in fact it's done quite the reverse.

So this may be a slightly unusual blog entry, of a more personal nature than most I have written, which is, I suppose, to say that it may be more like a conventional blog. You have been warned!

Let me, though, begin with some try to assess how I think I have lost weight, before moving onto good things about losing weight, and then the stuff about how it's all a bag of sand, or whatever they say (and I guess it is a bag of sand off my back because I'm now 73kg, having been 85kg for ages, and up to 89kg at times). "Now here's the deal", as a favourite Alabaman of some of our acquaintance used to say: I reckon each of us has their own way of losing weight, so there's possibly no transferability from my method. Would basically stopping eating bread be a big deal for you? I guess that it has been for me because I bloody love that stuff and find it reasonably hard to describe how much pleasure the sight of a new loaf and packet of unsalted butter would give me after a hard day at work. Anyways, I just don't have bread in the house much these days, so that was part one for me. Part 2 was getting into a breakfast routine because I like breakfast, but veered between wildly abstemious breakfasts (OK, there weren't many of them) and just wild breakfasts (mmm, pizza in the fridge; mmmm, curry in the fridge; mmmmm risotto in the fridge). I can actually picture myself laughing as I tuck into a breakfast of pasta or risotto from the fridge, and in many ways it's quite sad to think that every single day I now have a bowl of cereal (usually maple and pecan crunch, which is yummy) and a yoghurt. Actually, it's quite a fine breakfast, with a double espresso and a Berocca on the side.

Part 3 is the key for me which is that when I am at work - and therefore most stressed and hassled - I just have fruit and vegetables for lunch. It doesn't seem a hardship because there's so much going on, and it is by no means as regimented as breakfast for when I work in the library or it's a weekend, then I allow myself whatever I want, including real treats like giant baps from King's or a sandwich from Mr Felafel. For dinner I have the kind of meals I post on here, which are hardly ultra-healthy, and if I walk past a shop with amazing cakes I have one (or, more like it, if I'm in Budgen's, as I was yesterday, and there is a bag of four white chocolate chip cookies going for 49p, I have them). I exercise plenty, but then I always did that, and I basically don't eat any junk food whatsoever - no crisps, choccie bars etc - but that's simply because I don't want 'em. Chips, on the other hand, I want on a fairly regular basis, and I have them.

In some ways, you may be coming to appreciate that it is actually a slight mystery as to how I've lost a lot of weight, and I guess it's quite conceivable that a button will flick and I'll put most of it back on. We'll see. I recall promising to talk about some positive aspects of losing weight. I guess the main thing is that you come to quite like parts of your body which you didn't much like before. Second, in some ways losing weight can be a way of really enjoying food when you choose to enjoy it, for it cuts out the guilt as you eat into a fudge doughnut, as you know that you've earned it. This, though, is dodgy logic in my book because food offers so much damn pleasure in life, where we might not find it otherwise, that to get caught up in any of these cycles of guilt about food is a dangerous thing. I suppose that what one can say is that moderation offers a pleasure in itself, but even writing that I think of times when gluttony does that too, and I don't think we value being absolutely bloody gorged in our culture. The third thing is that losing weight allows other people to compliment you, for they invariably say that you look younger/healthier for having slimmed-down. In truth I feel no healthier these days and I am evidently rather older, but I do quite like getting compliments, though even this is somewhat double-edged for I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that we should damn well compliment people we like and love whether they like it or not. Do people really need earn our compliments through 'achievements' like losing weight? I think the next time I see a friend looking rough after a cold and a bad night, that's the moment to show the love. Anyway, you know what I mean.

And the grim news is that I haven't even got onto the bad aspects of losing weight yet!

That, essentially, is that we are all so wrapped-up in a body-image obsessed culture that, no matter how blase we think we may be about such things, we think that there's some happiness waiting at the end of a successful diet. Maybe there is for some people, and I guess this is super dependent on all sorts of other variables, but I guess that I am now the lightest I've been in years and I am filled more with a sense of futility at having been suckered by the diet myth than by any genuine sense of satisfaction. I want to be well, I want to look good, and these things have some connection to weight, but I have to say that there's little happiness to be found in dieting. Pleasure in the end, I've concluded, can be found in biting into that triple-layer of fudge icing, doughy doughnut and custard filling, and happiness is about a whole load of things, but it ain't about weight. Dieting is essentially about the self and happiness, it seems to me, is more about you and other people, about the great reflectedness of our world as we see the wonder of who other people are and they reveal the goodness they see in us.

So don't be surprised if I now do a pretty good impersonation of De Niro in Raging Bull as he moves from being a lean fighter to a fat pasta addict. He's supposed to be a loser at the end, but, damn, eating all that pasta must have felt good.

To make a point, I may have overstated some things in this entry, and I know that it doesn't feel nice when one feels fat, and it can feel good in a small way when one loses weight, and I shan't deny that happy medium, but I'm coming to conclude that it's quite nice to simply hover up and down around the weights we are, getting pleasure from food and the people we eat with, and the small ups and downs that thinking about weight can bring, rather than the grand claims that I thought it might hold. I may even come round to like my pot-belly in time, because no matter how light I get, it'll stay, and I'm pleased that six-pack'll never be mine.