Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Food & drink
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Decaffeinated
Feeling in an experimental and somewhat jittery mood, I decided to stop drinking coffee for a short spell, to see what would happen.
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Cooking with tongue
An important part of being a card-carrying member of the North London glitterati is the ability to harp on like a tedious idiot about buying the cheaper, more hilarious cuts of meat from the butcher rather than relying on neatly-packaged and sanitised lumps from Sainsbury’s. I’ve been letting the side down in that respect, so here’s a story about how I tried to cook some ox tongue the other day.
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Borough Market
Recently I visited London’s Famous Borough Market for the first time. I’ve lived in London now for nearly two years and it was only ever a brief Tube journey away (as brief as things can be on the Tube, that is), but then I’m someone who lived in Canterbury for five years and still only visted the Cathedral during my final month, so the jaunt to Borough Market is still pretty rushed by my standards.
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In Defence of Chains
We hear a lot about how generic English town centres are due to the proliferation of chain stores and restaurants, and I’ve complained about this in the past. Today, partly because I’ve just had a nice lunch in Café Rouge (nearly 100 branches throughout the UK) and am sitting in a comfy brown leather chair in Café Nero (over 300 branches), I’m going on the defensive. Is a generic English town centre actually as bad as we’re led to believe?
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An open letter to St. John Bread and Wine
There aren’t many subjects in the world I feel confident enough to speak on, but breakfast is certainly one of them. I have had many breakfasts; I’d guess at least one a day for about the last 28 years, so I think I can be considered a credible source when I say that it should not take 45 minutes to make a bacon sandwich.
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Pizzatarian
For the last 18 months or so, I’ve done fairly well in avoiding fast food and takeaways, and I’d like to say that this was due to will power, but it isn’t, it’s almost entirely down to laziness — so long as the effort involved in getting fast food delivered to me is marginally greater than simply cooking some pasta, I was safe. Domino’s Pizza has, tragically, discovered a chink in my armour — they allow me to order pizza via the internet. Bastards.
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Tea and Chocolate
The transition from Summer to Autumn in the UK is usually a fairly swift one; one week the sun is blazing high in the sky, the next week everyone’s wearing three layers in order to dress for both hot and cold temperatures, and finally this is followed by that week of unusual stillness, where the sun is out, there isn’t a cloud in the sky, and you can see your breath fogging up the air before you. Then it rains for the next three months.
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The Perfect Steak
I have recently spent some time refining my steak cooking technique, and am now documenting it here for future generations and myself if I happen to forget. Please note that this is a way of cooking my perfect steak — your perfect steak will undoubtedly be completely different (and, obviously, completely wrong).
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Unhappy Food
So I’ve written about junk food and I’ve written about health food, but it’s time now to explore a different category that I’ve only lately realised exists; unhappy food, i.e., food that, when eaten, causes the eater to be unhappy.
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Café Culture
When spending a significant amount of time in a town or city, there are two things I like to be sure of; one is where I can get a decent cup of coffee in nice surroundings, and the other is where I can go to the toilet. I’m about to write about the former, because an article about the latter would just list ‘Debenhams; by the Covered Market; underneath Magdalen Bridge’, and wouldn’t be much of a read.
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Five Times a Day
Nutritionists, politicians and the entire food industry all agree that we should all be eating a minimum of five portions of fruit and vegetables every day in order to prevent death by happiness. Five portions a day, plus keep your salt intake to below 6g a day and your fat intake to below 90g; have any of you actually tried to do this? It’s just not that chuffing simple!
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Taste the Difference
If you live in Oxford then you probably shop at Tesco. This is not a social comment, it’s just that with a Tesco Metro serving the whole of East Oxford and a large out-of-town Tesco serving the rest, you’re not left with much choice in the matter. While there are other options — Marks & Spencers for the disgustingly wealthy, a miniscule Co-Op for the smelly hippies and two blink-and-you’ll-miss them (yet horrifically busy) Sainsburys in the middle of the town centre, Tesco is where most Oxford residents will find themselves, time and again.
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English Coffee
So I was out and about, a stylish man-about-town, and I popped in to Pret a Manger for a quick espresso. Actually, that’s a bit redundant, isn’t it? Surely all espressos are quick espressos. Hmm.
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Willpower
I can be fairly strong-willed at times. Though my increasing supply of gadgets might suggest otherwise, that’s just because it’s what you can see. If you could see all the crap I don’t buy, well, you’d be dead impressed.
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The Big Bang
Although Oxford has pubs and shops and restaurants in abundance, like most English towns it’s overwhelmed by chains. Though a certain amount of snobbery has kept the likes of Woolworths and Wilkinsons away from the centre and safely tucked away in the surrounding smaller towns, the central retail areas still lean dangerously close to generic.
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