Ni L'un Ni L'Autre

Where do you go to eat in Mayfair with an hour to spare and much less cash – during a January of self-imposed sober spartanism – for a pre cinema meal?

We had no idea – we normally stick to our prescribed side of Regent Street (designed in the nineteenth century to keep the Soho scum out and doing a spectacular job to this day) – so we haplessly wandered into Shepherd Market near the Curzon. Pub grub seemed too grubby, the Indian looked loneliness in excelsis, a Mediterranean too starchy, and the Italian more like an estate agent’s than an enclave of conviviality.

Which led us, naturally, to a jam-packed Polish/Mexican hybrid operating under the French soubriquet L’AUTRE. I haven’t had special needs fusion since a disastruous experience in a Japanese/Mexican place in California, but the faces on the little people in its little window hinted at something special, or intriguing at the very least.

A joyfully cramped front room type place, L'Autra boasts an assortment of décor so wilfully barmy it would put a howling trolley-pushing street lunatic to shame. Black and white film posters peek out through their military hat collection; Tijuana junk statues smile distractedly upon a bed of foreign currency alongside a lone candle lighting a shrine to nothing at all. A smal fire crackles while halfway down the stairs an alcove bearing some dishes of Mexican and Polish cuisine turns out to be our dinner.

Once we’d made our way through velvet curtains that metamorphosised into someone’s anorak (it really is a small place) it was time for belly-filling, and fast. The girlfriend was predictably possessed by the gung-ho nihilism of a 6am Vegas gambler and ordered something she knew would be terrible (but might just not be, this time) viz. a Mexican option. Indifference prevents me from remembering what exactly it was supposed to be, but it slithered up the stairs a sloppy and creamy amalgamation of Eastern European perceptions of Mexican food, not pretending to aspire to even Tex-Mex notions of proper South American cuisine. It was the kind of enchiltacito you might imagine Travelodge Burnley to whip up for a wedding fiesta.

Polish food, on the other hand, these Polish people do well. Diners lapped Borscht with gusto and supermarket-looking bread and my wild boar with Polish hunter’s casserole came hot and steamy and sticky and filling. Quite what hunting the cassoulet was setting me up for I do not know but its gloopy mix of sausage, mushroom, bacon and cabbage worked a treat. The wild boar collapsed at the touch faster than Woolworths and the whole thing is done an injustice by the captured cowpat presented here.



Despite the hustle and bustle of the place and the quite obvious mark up their prices afford, the starched ladies in linen behind the bar looked miserable as sin. We didn’t care, we were in and out in 45 and (half)full of hope for bet-hedging restaurants worldwide.

Ibiza Cocks

Meet anyone with even a modicum of travel experience under their money belts (who wears those things anyway?), and they usually have a few pieces of well-worn wisdom - useless fact nuggets that gets repeated again and again with the turning of the globe and clog our collective psychic arteries like fried clichés. Mauspassant had it down with his description of a group of high society’s womens’ conversation: “they explained which was their favourite season, with all the obvious reasons which clutter people’s heads like dust hanging about a room.”



(Note to self: don't google "bel ami" sans "maupassant" again)

These kinds of repetitions are so boring, and pile atop one another as age advances you, and I wonder if they’re the cause for my late grandfather’s propensity to silence. He literally partook in every conversation going, and saw no need to waste the breath.

The one I’m thinking of is “Ibiza’s so lovely outside San Antonio – you have to see it”. My response (in my head, I can’t summon the strength to say it out loud), is that even if the rest of the island is idyll itself, Thomas Moore’s wet dream and the greatest place on earth, you still have to get a BudgetJet flight full of morons, rogues, dimwits, Hogarthian hen parties and hedonist heathens (the wrong sort) there and back. Thus your dream trip is bookended by the sad and very loud reminder of what a high percentage of the western world is taken up by useless people. Red-necked chav hillbillies in a puke-stained football shirt. And their boyfriends. Sorry, but I’d rather spend my credit crunch crumbles somewhere genuinely celestial, where everything’s perfect and the cracks in the veneer are kept to quiet resentment behind ceramic staff smiles.

And if Ibiza seems beautiful, it’s purely by contrast. After 48 hours in the bowels of hell (the Ibiza Rocks hotel), fending off catcalls from every pot-bellied sphincter-faced regulation-shaved MUM-tattooed loser lounging on his balcony with nothing to do but contemplate his grim future, with only excursions to bars populated by drunken fools talking about sexual proclivities that (unsurprisingly) hover near the ‘rape’ end of the erotic spectrum, even Bigg Market would seem like Puerto Vallarta. Oh, and she might be your mum but he sure aint your dad, sucker.

So it’s no surprise that the Restaurant Sa Caleta in the tiny cove of the same name was heaven on earth.



The same overcooked steak I’d been eating all week melted on grateful taste buds that were being told by eyes and ears that took in beauty for the first time again that everything was all right. Chips cooked in the same way as every Union Jack-clad San An diner filled the stomach of a truly relaxed and happy man. The peppercorn packet sauce could have come straight from the Le Pont De La Tour. Red wine, my comfort blanket against the impending cattle flight home, tasted like the blood of Bacchus, as I stretched my tired legs under the table and felt my capillaries relax under salt water-tightened skin.

There’s a guy on the sofa next to me cleaning the windows of Eat. If only he could see what I’m writing.

You don’t quite fully appreciate the state of London's roads until you’ve ridden them hungover on a bike with loose spokes. Every pothole, every segment of patched together concrete, tarmac tectonic and fallen traffic cone conspire to send shudders up your rock shox to pain central in the cerebral cortex and back down your spine to the ground from whence they came.
I’ve been doing a fair bit of hair of the dog riding recently, determined to not let copious boozing infringe on the morning hours any longer. I’m at an awkward crossroads in my life, where Viceland is losing its appeal, pints at gigs and free cocktails merge into one long memory loss. The natural, wholesome world is beckoning but I’m not quite ready to submit to sensible trousers and compasses for birthdays quite yet. I ride to work in stupidly unfashionable clunky New Balance, revelling in their comfort and all-around appropriateness, before ditching them for flat, pointless hipster shoes from Brick Lane before being seen by anyone I know.
Back to potholes. There’s no potholes on the ride across the heath to The Spaniards Inn, just a platoon of No Cycling signs spray painted onto the tarmac that criss-cross the greenery like backpackers’ bad tribal tattoos. So you have to walk, which is alright as I usually go there on a Sunday, hungover and wincing too much to actually ride.
Birthplace of both Dick Turpin and Keats’ ‘Ode To A Nightingale’, rural muse for Dickens, Bram Stoker and Karl Marx, The Spaniards Inn is a pub steeped in literary history way before this masterpiece. And arguably the best roast in London. I don’t take that accolade lightly. It’s a crown that few wear for long, (most recently the Crown And Goose in Camden), easily stolen and dependent on multiple criteria, which – in the spirit of blogbrevity - I’ll discuss elsewhere.
Politely overlooking the we’re-out-of-the-chicken-and-the-lamb lack of choice, roast beef was generous, succulent, fatty and smothered in gravy thicker that a Holloway street urchin. Joining it were an all-too-small handful of perfectly seasoned and crispy roasties, carrot and herb puree that was just this side of pretentioux, broccoli, and leeks, an unexpected guest at this suburban flavour-swapping orgy. It was the perfect combination of quality and not quite enough quantity that made me want to order another, if that didn’t involve another hour-long wait. Strawberry Fruli and a spicy Cab Sav were my poison while she had summer ale, although there are more varieties of drink here than there are types of cobbled together rustic furniture in the huge garden.
The Spaniards is perfect: creaking floors, knackered armchairs in board game-strewn snugs, open fireplaces, oak beams. It’s all chalkboard signs and too much information; the hens out the back had a longer biography than Nelson Mandela, which made that emotional bond between them and the well-behaved children tucking into roast cousin Plucky all the stronger. There’s a doggy wash outside. It’s the perfect embodiment of city countrylife, offering four hours of quasi-rural joy before we slip back into the grubby confines of our metropolitan dream.

Fo Shoko

They really were spoiling my view. There, jutting out into the Barcelona skyline, plump and firm as a darts player’s belly, as old and loved as a childhood sporting trophy, stood the weirdest pair of breasts you’d ever see this side of a drunk Google trip. Standing far too close together, they peered straight out – laughing in the face of nature or aesthetics – like the goggle-eyed appendages of some deep-sea creature.
The mammary equivalent of a startled cartoon character’s eyes made frequent struts round the crowded pool area, brandished by a brick-coloured woman that resembled a cross between Mariah Carey and a guy at work we call Gollum. And by Mariah Carey I mean the real, sexless, try-hard bundle of vanity, not the version this hideous woman would see.
Anyway, the view from Grand Hotel Central’s rooftop pool was almost as unnerving as the sight of her Morph’s-head boobs that obscured it. Forget vertigo: there was an unease in the fact that, as we sat slurping cava and toasting the fact we could afford this place (for one night only), the backdrop we’d paid for was one of unmitigated shanty town. New Cross in the sun.



This schoolboy dichotomy represents much of Barcelona. A historic ‘old town’ left for dead and picked apart by vultures brandishing guidebooks and bum bags. The dilapidated Barrio district becoming ‘chic’. Except on our late-night visit, when the vintage clothes shops were shut, the kebab shops open and it was about as chic as Bristol city centre. The age-old routine of displacing real residents to make way for huge developments that weren’t asked for, as with the Forum district.
It seemed – on my Ryanair carbon killer 48-hour trip at least – to be a city worshipping artifice like nowhere else. And nowhere else represents artifice quite like Barceloneta, which is artificial in only the way a beach built fifteen years ago can be. It was on this stretch of manufactured idyll that we found, by way of hotel reception, Shoko.
For a birthday meal by the setting sun of the Mediterranean, and at a hefty premium, I was hoping for something more glamorous than the overcooked stringfellows and tinned spaghetti sauce of my early self-cooking days. But that’s what ‘Cod fish with tomato confit and crunchy potatoes’ was. At least with the time saved not bothering to look up ‘confit’ they managed to insert a few more bones into the fish; it had more skeleton than the London Dungeon. Luckily the starter, foie terrine with fig marmalade and toasts’ did itself an injustice in translation. The terrine was as seductively soft as I’ve ever had and the plate came painted with a variety of drizzles and rocket that clearly hadn’t picked up as many airmiles as me. The place had eastern pretensions so the birthday girl had a wokful of king prawns – nicely displayed and as good as any high street takeaway apparently. Now I don’t know if and how and when God sends us signs in life, but as I just typed ‘seductively soft’ sitting outside Monmouth Coffee Company, a pigeon shat on my laptop.

So good I licked my skillet clean

How long do you wait for the best? My recommendation might have been three months old by now, the mag it came from botty cushion fodder for pampered pets at best, but that didn’t stop the queue snaking its way out the door and into the nearest den of antique pretension. So we went elsewhere.



Camden Passage is a colon of artifice, squeezing stick thin mahogany wives and men in All Saints shirts through its narrow gap, small gluts of useless Islington faecal matter sticking to the sides on antique furniture and snacking on menus raped from various budget flight destinations. Something about non-hung-over Saturdays brings out the middle-aged bourgeois in me so we decided to deposit ourselves in the midst of baby buggies and cute dogs on the acceptable side of scruffy outside The Elk In The Woods.



Following the trend for laziness as luxury it was half decorated, half-staffed and half-baked. Inside – where you have to go and get your Bloody Inconvenient Mary yourself (“sorry sir we don’t have a license to take drinks out to people”) – paint’s peeling, concrete looms, dilapidation reigns. “Potato and pancetta skillet with baked eggs, red pepper and tomato with toast” comes in the skillet it was cooked in, as if the chef couldn’t be arsed to slide the nonchalantly congealing mess onto anything as functional as a plate. Notes of Persil and the previous diner’s pancetta came at no extra cost. Which would be fine, if the previous diner hadn’t apparently liked their skillet clean; there’s a definite – albeit perhaps psychosomatic – soupcon of spittle. The baked eggs dominate, stretching their sinewy albumen over what in a French Lidl, if such a thing exists yet, might be labelled ‘Lardons Super-economique’.





The Blonde (permit me this for the first ever blog at least) ordered “wholemeal fennel seed scone with grilled field mushroom, Parmesan, mizuna and balsamic”. What’s mizuna? It’s rocket. Well call it that then. And why didn’t you mention the regurgitated olive paste that sat between the wholemeal fennel seed scone and grilled field mushroom arrogantly dominating the flavour of the whole dish with the same all-conquering evil Russell Brand exerts over modern culture. This monstrosity – coupled with the flatpack Bloody Mary, crafted unashamedly with the finest Studentvomlikoff vodka, sent her on a walk down the passage to recover while I perused the papers with the studied intention of avoiding the detritus facing us and mocking our £35 outlay.



Our passages will never be the same again.



http://www.the-elk-in-the-woods.co.uk/