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/