Archives for 2011

There are 55 branches of Yo! Sushi in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so this is clearly a threat worth paying attention to. Naturally, when Scotland secedes, it may take its Yo! Sushis with it; the alternative – that they be expelled from the country to form a latter-day Antonine Wall of conveyor belts bearing tuna maki – is a strange, though not altogether displeasing, possibility. After all, the resistance of Scotland’s premier to a foreign cuisine, one of whose chief components is a raw version of his near homonym, would be entirely understandable.

Not that there’s anything very Japanese about Yo! Sushi. For a start, I don’t imagine any self-respecting Japanese person has ever said “Yo!” in their lives, as such a fatuous exclamation runs utterly counter to a culture that prides itself in a disciplined and meditative conformity. No, Yo! Sushi is the brainchild of some clever Brit who sold out to a big corporate years ago, and who now enjoys his moneyed reclusion – I imagine – listening to old Steely Dan albums and raising epigones.

Indeed, it’s equally difficult to imagine what cultural nexus Yo! Sushi belongs within as it is to analyse the semiotics of, say, Hey! Cottage Pie or Whoops! Sorghum. The restaurants feature lurid orange paint jobs, curvilinear vinyl booths straight out of 2001 (the movie and the year), functionalist ducts trumpeting down on the diners, and the much-talked-about conveyor belts.

Let me get this straight: I love the conveyor belts at Yo! Sushi, just as I adore any food delivery system that incorporates the automated. To sit at the counter picking colour-coded dish after dish from the cheerful, rattling segments of the conveyor belt, and to watch that belt wend its way past the diners, then loop back into the exposed food preparation area where another dish is added . . . Well, this is some kind of crazy bliss. The first time I visited Yo! Sushi

I said to my companion: “I haven’t had so much fun since my childhood, when I would spend mealtimes at my grandparents’ with my head stuck inside the dumbwaiter.” Nowadays most people would probably call that paedophilia.

I love the conveyor belts at Yo! Sushi – love them rather more, I suspect, than the food they convey. Not that there’s anything bad about the sushi rolls, sushi nigiri, sashimi, etc that they churn out at Yo!, but the sheer fact of it arriving on a conveyor belt sadly militates against the credo of freshness otherwise promoted by having the kitchen in view. It makes the eating experience curiously confusing – there you sit, watching your titbit being assembled right in front of you, yet by the time it’s made its way around the counter you’ve become convinced that because it’s on an assembly line, it must be stale factory food.

Once, in the Yo! Sushi at Paddington Station, I was so discombobulated by these countervailing gastronomic currents that I tried to eat the conveyor belt instead of the food on it. The management immediately called the police, and I was detained. I mean, as a campaigning journalist, one expects to get arrested from time to time in the pursuit of one’s beliefs – but to be banged up for eating a conveyor belt, the shame of it! Still, it hasn’t put me off Yo! and I’m glad of that, because the other evening in Brighton I took Number One Son along to his local branch and we had a rather tasty repast. Why? I think ordering mostly off the hot menu helped, that way avoiding the conflict between preparation and conveyance. I also took full advantage of the Yo! deal whereby if you order green tea or miso you can have unlimited refills. There’s something about a grossly distended belly, like one of those happy pseudo-Buddhas, that makes it impossible to think ill of the world.

There were these factors – and there was my golden boy, first fruit of my loins, a budding historian studying at Asa Briggs’s old university. It was a pleasure to sit with him beside the trundling conveyor belt of bogus futurism and discuss the rumbling tumbrels of the recent past. Golden Boy, being something of a rightist, took the view that the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden was wholly acceptable; I demurred, pointing out that Bin Laden didn’t pilot any of the 11 September attack planes and that, far from being a hierarchical command structure – like the US army – al-Qaeda was more in the manner of a franchise: you approach them with your death-dealing idea, and they provide funding, expertise and branding.

“Sort of like a restaurant chain,” GB mused, “like al-Sushi . . . or possibly Yo! Qaeda.”

I make some apology for writing about the Paul chain of French bakeries – some but not much. After all, the first Paul opened in Britain only 11 years ago, and while there are just 29 outlets in the UK to date, all confined to London, you can confidently expect, given the gathering speed of its territorial acquisition, to have a Paul on most high streets within another decade or two.

The Blair government argued for the liberalisation of licensing laws on the grounds that it would facilitate a change in our national drinking pattern. No longer would we be northern horn-heads, knocking down pint after short until we went berserk (or, at any rate, berT-shirt); instead, we would sip vin de pays at sidewalk cafés while gently tinkering with our boules.

But how could major thinkers such as James Purnell have failed to anticipate this development? That, instead of taking French cafés as our model, we would seize upon the bakeries. If anything characterised the Blair years, it was a huge appetite for speciality breads. We began the 1990s as a nation besotted with Ridley Scott’s atmospheric Hovis adverts and stuffed full of Mothers Pride; we ended the decade deftly dipping focaccia in olive oil, our hot heads wrapped in Egyptian flatbread.

In la belle France, many regard Paul rather derisively. It may be une maison de qualité, fondée en 1889, but as it is the largest chain bakery in the land, it has the cachet of our beloved Greggs. My French teacher, Arlette, would often refer with disdain to the branch of Paul on High Holborn next to the language school where she was valiantly attempting to inculcate me with the grammar of Montaigne, the vocabulary of Sainte-Beuve and the speech rhythms of Baudelaire. So often did she employ patisseries and coffee-style drinks from Paul as examples in our conversations that I began to conceive of Paul as an individual, picturing him in my mind’s eye thus: a dapper type with a waxed moustache, sporting a lightly checked suit and sitting in a fake empire saloon – reclaimed wood panelling, chandeliers and so on – awaiting the arrival of some pseudo-salonnières. “Ça va, Paul,” I found myself saying involuntarily, when I popped in to get a coffee on my way to our lessons.

Still, however much we can deride Paul for his – I mean, its – French finish, the fact remains: Paul is the French Greggs! That’s how advanced French gastronomy is, in comparison to that of our own bicarbonated isle. Instead of sausage roll, there’s a “chaud saucisse” (complete with béchamel sauce, Emmental cheese and pain à l’ancienne); in lieu of a polystyrene cup full of tepid tomato soup, there flows a wide variety of soupes du jour; and where Greggs might tempt us with a mere iced bun, Paul enacts a full seduction with his grand macaron framboise, a titbit of such extreme sweetness that I suspect it may be more than 100 per cent refined sugar.

The other afternoon, feeling that life was altogether de trop and finding myself limping through the subterranean concourse of London Bridge Station, I didn’t hesitate to stop off at a dinky little branch of Paul for a tourte aux légumes followed by a tarte aux abricots. “Wow!” I thought to myself, as I staggered towards a table laden with boxes labelled “Paul” in that distinctively neoclassical and austere typeface. “This is a lot of pastry.” And it was – about the most I’d eaten at one sitting in around a decade.

There’s a lot to choose from when it comes to contemporary fast food – within sight of my table at Paul London Bridge, there were branches of the following: Banger Bros, the Bagel Factory, Cranberry, a South African-themed delicatessen called (get this) the Savanna, and a Cards Galore. I suppose some readers might object that Cards Galore isn’t, as such, a food outlet – but as I’d never consider buying a card from there to give to someone, eating them seems a reasonable course of action.

What I’m trying to get across is that, until Paul has secured market saturation, elbowing out Greggs and even taking down Subway, it will remain the thinking man’s – and woman’s – bakery. Apart from me, there were only femmes d’un certain âge at my Paul – at least, I thought this was the case until the longish, dyed-blonde coiffure at the next table turned to expose the careworn features of . . . the former secretary of state for culture, media and, um, sport.

In his column in the London Evening Standard, Sam Leith writes – apropos allegations that the Energy Secretary persuaded an aide to take his speeding points – “Which of us . . . wouldn’t try to wriggle off that particular hook – however much we may tut-tut when others do it?” But can Leith really mean this? I wouldn’t lie in order to avoid the consequences of an illegal action (so long as I believed the law justifiable), and nor would I “tut-tut” if I heard someone had perverted the course of justice; I’d get on the horn to Plod Central and suggest they arrest the malefactor.

I suppose by “particular hook” Leith only means avoiding a driving ban and not, say, committing perjury at a libel trial in order to cover up your dalliances with prostitutes while scooping up half a million in damages (Jeffrey?Archer style). But whoever you are, lying is lying.

Wherefrom comes this peculiar moral latitude in respect of driving offences? Well, just as collective tolerance of that deranged institution the monarchy derives in part from residual belief in the divine right of kings, so all sorts of madness can be explained by the divine right of drivers. Unlike the stars of the popular US science-fiction TV series Heroes, the average Briton possesses only one superpower: the kind measured in horses. To drive a car is to experience a huge augmentation of strength; push your foot down a few inches and you – together with a quarter-tonne of steel – are thrust hundreds of yards in a matter of seconds. Depress the other sole and the entire shebang screeches to a halt – hopefully in time to avoid killing someone.

Car manufacturers understand the mystical character of driving only too well, which is why their more or less identical little boxes are commonly advertised as shape-shifting chimeras. It’s a panther! It’s a giant dancing robot! It and you are melded together into a serpent of light that coils over hills and loops through valleys. In adverts, cars and their drivers stop time, leap over tall buildings and otherwise contravene the laws of physics – which is bonkers, considering that what drivers on our right, tight little island mostly do is exhibit inertia as they squat, motionless, in traffic, the exhausts of their £15,000 padded cells farting out carbon monoxide, lead, particulate matter, petrol that hasn’t been combusted, etc etc.

The image of the car, which was forged during a time of expanding horizons and – naturally – low levels of car ownership, has yet to adapt to our current era, when motorways are car parks abutting airfields tessellated with the steely oblongs of unsold cars. If modern-day drivers took a long, hard look at themselves, they would realise that they exist pretty much to pilot these carnivorous vehicles through time, rather than space; that the private car has become a strange parasite that depends on us for its obscene propagation, forcing us to slave long hours so we can buy the next expensive phenotype.

I don’t need to tell you what madness transpires when the unstoppable divine right of drivers impacts with the immovable traffic, because you’ll all have witnessed it thousands upon thousands of times. From the odd obscene gesture and shouted epithet to full-blown Kenneth Noye-style beatings to death, the experience of driving on modern roads is more akin to the chaotic moiling you can witness on a crowded psychiatric ward than locomotion as rationally understood.

No wonder that, when the opportunity presents itself, people speed – to speed is to slip the surly bonds of earth and dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings; while to be pulled up by some time-serving traffic cop is to collapse back into a present in which you’re confined to an old metallic Nissan stinking of new-car-smell air freshener.

The divine right of drivers is responsible for the rise and fall of governments, the death of hundreds of thousands and the most comprehensive alterations to our physical environment since the woodland clearances of the Bronze Age. Truly, we revolve the roundabout of life according to its precepts. And if it’s bad enough to be an ordinary human being deprived of said right, what must it be like to be a thrusting, puissant Lib Dem politician so arraigned?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all airline food aspires to the condition of potato dauphinoise – or, possibly, Irish stew. Any given dish may start out its life in the great catering kampongs of Gate Gourmet, being fluffed, beaten and otherwise teased into a variety of shapes, but, by the time it’s been wadded into foil trays, covered, stacked, chilled, loaded and lifted off into the tame, grey yonder, it will have been compressed into layers of a slightly undercooked, whitish, root-vegetable consistency, interspersed with a reassuring, beige juice.

I say reassuring because airline food is all about comfort and nothing else. Unlike other meals, its taste is solely a product of the diner’s anxiety. The nervy flyer, wedged between John Grisham fans and contemplating a death that, for sheer, quotidian pathos – “Died in that air crash, you say? On her way to a city break in Tallinn? Blimey, what a pointless way to go!” – is equalled only by slipping in the shower stall on a cake of Imperial Leather, will reach joyfully for the proffered tray because, after all, if you’re eating, you must be alive, no?

All of this flickered through my mind as the British Airways Airbus 320 grumble-bumped over the tarmac of Boryspil Airport near Kiev. Visibility was meagre, rain was lashing the plane window and the wind speed was probably some ghastly rate of knots – it was Polish-president-killing weather and I was in pole position to experience it. I’d had a hefty dinner the night before in a themed “Soviet-era” restaurant, where I was served – get this! – a chicken Kiev by a waitress in a knee-length, flared, black skirt and a white, lace apron. My Ukrainian hosts, whom I’d asked to order for me, couldn’t understand why I roared with laughter when the butter-stuffed fowl was plonked in front of me – and I had to go into a long, halting explanation that took in the 1970s, Abigail’s Party, the winter of discontent, blah, blah, blah.

Then, bleak dawn found me in the restaurant of my upscale hotel, woefully contemplating a buffet of Romanov extravagance: everything from sushi to custom-made omelette and back again was on offer, when all I wanted was a slice of toast and a glass of orange juice. However, it was a flat fee of 320 hryvnia – and, at those prices, I wasn’t about to be short-changed.

So, as the plane strained aloft, there was I, caffeinated to the gills and with an unpleasantly distended belly. I was also still stuck in my 1970s reverie, and mulling over the awful truth that if the plane was diverted, then crashed on to a mountain range, mine would be the buttocks the other passengers would make a beeline for, plying their 50mm-long nail clippers. This was why, when the BA trolley dolly came back after take-off and offered me hors d’oeuvres, I naturally said, “Yes.” Yes to scary roundels of white bread, topped with scary roundels of cream cheese, scattered with a few limp chives; yes to the cutlery wrapped in its linen winding sheet; and yes to the main course of pork, which turned out to be greyish nodules, accompanied by peas, carrots and . . . yes! Potato dauphinoise.

Mmm, yummy, I thought as I chowed down. People are so snotty about airline food, but this stuff was great. On I munched, reflecting on how there was something existentially lovely about the two Ritz Crackers wrapped in clingfilm that accompanied wedges of Cheddar and Cheshire cheese. I ate it all – every last crumb, even the scary-looking dessert: a spongy cake, sitting in a pool of cream, which looked as if it had lost control of its bowels. I ate it all – and ate it with relish – and then I finished off with one, two, three more cups of the superfine British Airways coffee. I also fell in love with the steward. I pictured our civil partnership ceremony at the Camden register office on Judd Street and his Ealing flat that I’d move into. On his layovers, he would bring me airline meals he’d filched and I would grow morbidly obese on the oh-so-comforting potato dauphinoise. This was better than the cannibalism daymare I’d had during take-off, but we were now dallying down over London and it was time for me to face the facts: I was alive, I had survived, I’d eaten three huge meals in the space of 12 hours and I now had suitably punitive indigestion.

An army may well march on its stomach – but for a civilian to fly on his has to be a strategic mistake.