Archives for May 2013

In the 1970s, when the world was just as evil and scuzzy as it is today but my gastrointestinal tract had a certain innocence – and even freshness – there was a pizza joint in Hampstead with the predictable name (at least to the ears of our current era) of Pizzaland. I remember nothing much about Pizzaland’s food but the decor has lodged in my memory – “lodge” being wholly apposite, because it consisted of banquettes topped off with little pitched roofs like lychgates, a lot of wooden fretwork, and a series of murals depicting skiing scenes that looked as if they’d been painted using an Old English sheepdog dipped in Artex.

Why it was that this Neapolitan foodstuff had come to be associated with the Tyrol is beyond me. I thought no more about Pizzaland from that day until this; there was no need, as in the intervening years more and more pizza joints have come slaloming into my consciousness. Then, casting around for another chain restaurant to add to the mighty skein of Real Meals, I alighted on Bella Italia. Bella Italia has only 80 outlets – which makes it a mere charm bracelet when dangled beside the mighty hawsers of Domino’s and Pizza Express et al – but these are spread throughout Britain, a legacy of the fact that in the 1990s it was a much greater thing: an amalgamation of Pizza Piazza, Prima Pasta, Bella Pasta and – yes, you guessed it – Pizzaland that boasted 200 restaurants countrywide.

Now, only the rebranded Bella Italias remain, a mere rump of the former imperium. Yet these Bella Italias have – dare I mix my coinages? – a certain je ne sais quoi. They are, to put it bluntly, such incredible fucking clichés, what with ristorante plastered across their façades and their sepia-scumbled interiors cluttered up with more pseudo-Italianate cod-rustic gubbins than you can shake a breadstick at. The branch we ate in boasted a framed poster for La Dolce Vita, wallmounted spice racks and jars, pot plants and raffia baskets and a trompe l’oeil map of the bootylicious peninsula that compressed so many layers of illusion into a single surface that it made my poor old head spin.

To elaborate: the “map” was painted to resemble a parchment hung on the wall but the wall was further embellished with the effect of plaster having fallen away to expose brickwork, which was itself painted. And rather than being in some Tuscan hilltop town, the whole assemblage was in the middle of an English city. Still, the extent to which this can be called fakery is debatable; indeed, sitting quite happily in Bella Italia (in brutta Bretagna), two things occurred to me: first, that while the country may appear to be chockfull with a Babel of polyglot eateries, there remains this historic stratum of trattorias; and second, that just as the Tudorbethan style of English suburbia was so ubiquitous that it deserves to be viewed as an authentic architectural period, so there is nothing remotely inauthentic about the likes of Bella Italia.

Cheered by these insights, we turned our attention to the menu – and then turned it away again, because there was nothing there to hold our attention, just the usual spread of pizza, pasta, fish and meat dishes. As I pondered the drinks list, my eye was caught by the “Appletini”, a cocktail composed of Martini Bianco and apple juice “topped” with lemonade, and I cast my mind back to the darkest and most desperate periods of my own alcoholism, trying to decide whether even then, I would’ve considered putting anything that sounded quite this vile in my hurting mouth.

I ordered a salmon salad, the boy spaghetti and meatballs. Long since having ceased to be a denizen of the mad realm ruled over by King Alcohol, I ordered a sparkling mineral water – yet (and hopefully never) to have become one, the boy called for an Appletini (sans the Martini and apple juice). The food was bearable but the saving grace – as so often in such establishments – was the staff, who were courteous, considerate and responsive to our picky requests (me for no onion or garlic, he for his meatballs not to be “too spicy”). A few years ago, Bella Italia got into trouble for skimming off its waiters’ tips but that unpleasantness is over now. Still, these folk won’t have been on more than minimum wage plus a cut of the overall tip kitty, and despite such slim pickings they maintained their good cheer; either that – or this was just another illusion to add to all the rest, and they were actually nipping out the back every few minutes for a beaker full of the warm south.

“Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!” So, it is said, the gladiators of old addressed the Roman emperors before they went about the entertaining business of mutual butchering. It was drizzling and outside the grey-dun hulk of the Colosseum there was a small gaggle of modern Romans dressed up not as gladiators but as tacky-looking legionaries. I wanted to accost them and say: “You can do better than this: hanging around in this Gibbonian drag, hustling the odd euro by having your picture taken with marauding phalanxes of orthodontically challenged Benelux schoolkids.” Then I wanted to climb up on a shattered column, strike a pose and orate: “Give me your poor and huddled masses of legionary impersonators! Come with me to London, where there are plenty of creative opportunities for enterprising folk prepared to spray-paint themselves silver and stand on a cardboard box all day!”

Of course I did nothing of the sort, because I was a tourist and tourists are money; and the Colosseum is a great big begging box. Underneath the stands, where once the Roman mob disported itself, there were instead long lines of money inching forward to the ticket windows.

Frankly, I hadn’t been feeling that good to begin with: on the early-morning flight out of Gatwick, I’d come down with one of those blitzkrieg colds that precision-bomb a sluice gate in your mucous membranes. Luckily there were two free seats next to me, so I lay down sideways and slept deeply, awaking only occasionally to the sound of snot dripdrip-dripping on to the carpet below. I would have felt worse about this if it hadn’t been a low-cost airline. If you don’t want to spend a two-hour flight from Rome to Gatwick with your feet dabbling in my effluvia, then fly the fucking flag.

Now, standing in the thick of the crowd with a brace of my offspring and their mother, I was assailed by nausea – there were so many queues and so many queuing styles in this pan-European crowd mash-up. Stolid Scandinavians and thrifty Germans waited patiently in their restrained, fawn-coloured leisurewear; lisping and excitable Spaniards in transparent rain capes fluttered around like exotic birds; contraflows of captious and stentorian Brits threatened anarchy; while one tight little testudo of denim-clad Americans simply barged its way through.

In a gap between the seething bodies, we spotted a sign reading “Tour didactica” above a ticket window with only a handful of people in front of it and so were able to pay five euros a head extra to skip the Hydra-headed queue. Still, inside the arena things weren’t that much better. For just short of 1,800 years – until the construction of the Crystal Palace – the Colosseum was the largest manmade enclosed space in the world. But on this drizzly bad Friday, it felt as packed-out as the stateroom in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. It didn’t help that there was a mandated route around this colossal heap of ancient masonry, so that all the tributary queues from beneath the stands now flowed into one mighty gyre: along the periphery, up the stairs, through the exhibition on Constantine, then down again and finally out into the street where the bogus legionaries were still brandishing for tips.

You might have thought that anyone as crowd-phobic as I am would have called it a day at that point – but when in Rome, I always like to visit the Pantheon and have a coffee at the nearby Sant’Eustachio café (where I once partook of the elusive “God shot”, the espresso that convinces even hardened sceptics of the existence of a transcendent barista). True, the crowds are, if anything, denser and more polyglot in the Pantheon but here there is no signage, no admission fee and inside, under what is still – after nearly two millennia – the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, the tightly packed human herd positively lows with devotion as it swirls about the curved walls.

Christians would doubtless maintain that it’s because the Pantheon has long since been dedicated as a Catholic church that, upon entering, the masses become so meek and mild. The Colosseum, by contrast, still bears the taint of sadistic voyeurism, a psychic charge that infects even the meekest tourist. And you know what, shuffling from one oily icon to the next, I was inclined to agree – but then, in the interests of stemming my own viral tide, I hadn’t just had the one God shot at Sant’Eustachio but three in one.

I once had lunch with the late Malcolm McLaren. It was during his short-lived run for the London mayoralty and I confess I can remember none of the following: a) where we ate; b) what we ate; I’d like to be able to say that both these amnesias were because of the strange and unearthly fascination exerted on me by the discourse of this famed bowdleriser of the Situationist International’s détournement, but sad to relate I cannot recall; c) a single word that he said. This must’ve been in the early years of the last decade – at any rate, not that long ago. By contrast, I can recall, note-and-letter-perfect, “Buffalo Gals”, the proto-hiphop ditty McLaren released in 1982, including his serially offending yelps of “Two buffalo gals go around the outside/’Round the outside, ’round the outside …” Such is the queer pretzel-shaped path that time’s arrow describes.

Last week, undertaking a neo-situationist dérive across Paris with my colleague Joel Anderson, the buffalo gals came back to haunt me. We began in the northern banlieue of Épinay-sur-Seine, underneath the soaring concrete arches of the bridge that carries the A15 over this loop of the river. In front of us, on the claggy bank, was a Roma bidonville that would’ve gladdened the heart of any exploitative pop entrepreneur: tumbledown shacks, mounds of trash and actual half-naked brown babies playing in puddles of dirty water. We asked a hawk-nosed man wheeling a bike where his people were from, but he replied in perfect French that he didn’t speak French.

With the giant novelty cruet of the Eiffel Tower in the distance to guide us – our destination was hard by Les Invalides – we headed first west through Argenteuil, then south-east through Gennevilliers. Crossing the bridge into Clichy and smelling the distinctive pissflorescence of Paris proper, I raised the question of lunch with Joel and asked him to name his favoured French chain restaurant. He didn’t hesitate. “Definitely the Buffalo Grill,” he said. “I remember flying into Charles de Gaulle all the time and seeing its signature giant horns pronging up into the sky.”

A quick auxiliary brain search revealed that we were no more that a dosie-do away from a branch. After a morning wandering ’round the outside of Paris, lunch takes on a buffalo stance in the Place du Maréchal-Juin, so my partner and I hip-hopped there with out any more ado. There is, of course, a species of détournement involved in eating in a joint like this when almost any street in central Paris still boasts a family-run bistro offering a perfectly reasonable €15 or €20 prix-fixe menu. Sadly, there were no giant horns ’round the outside of this Buffalo Grill but there was a scarlet canopy with the enlarged head of Wild Bill Hickok (or possibly Buffalo Bill) picked out of it in white.

Once we were seated, Joel called my attention to the oxblood-coloured faux-leather wall coverings, framed pictures of old French cowboy comics and, lurking on a nearby ledge, a wooden bust of Wild Bill Hickok (or possibly Buffalo Bill), who appeared to be earwigging the conversation of some rather voluble Senegalese.

Unwilling to eat actual buffalo in the eponymous establishment (bison was on the menu but it would have been like choking down a slug on a lettuce leaf in the Slug and Lettuce), I opted instead for an inoffensive bit of grilled chicken and some frites. Joel had some salmon he claimed was perfectly tasty – my chicken was as tough as an insufficiently chewed moccasin, but still: what was I expecting? Along with a big bottle avec gaz the bill came to €29.60 (service compris), and we strode out into rue de Courcelles if not exactly replete, at any rate no longer famished.

Then the trouble began. A simple mental transposition was all that was required for grills to become girls, and girls to metamorphose into gals. On we tramped – turning into the Champs-Élysées and then the gourmandising Avenue Winston Churchill – but for me the gold-leafed magnificence of the Grand and Petit Palais were nought but a blur, and even the reappearance of the Seine failed to register. All I could think of – if you can call it cogitating – was: “Round-the-outside-’round-the-outside-’round-the-outside …” Over and over again, a demented, humped and woolly buffalo of an earworm that rampaged around my head. If I ever join Malcolm up in heaven, I’ll make sure I pay more attention to what he says over lunch. Of course, if we’re in the big fire there’ll be no chitchat as we get cosmically overcooked.