Good morning and welcome to Vittles. All contributors to Vittles are paid. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out. All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year - please note the new prices! If you wish to receive the newsletter for free, or wish to access all paid articles, please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support! A review of myself and about 150 restaurantsI have never kept a journal but I do file my tax return inefficiently, which is the same thing. Every December I spend a day trawling through my entire bank statement for the tax year, revealing an itemised list of food purchases and dates that more or less add up to the self, an Annie Ernaux novel with less fucking and more fried chicken. This year’s return has been an unexpectedly emotionally fraught process, every entry a memory – a purchase for a sausage sandwich is a record of a failed holiday, a beautiful walk through the woods, an important conversation about the future with a loved one; a bill for a meal reveals an argument, a chance meeting, a reconciliation. I barely remember anymore what I was doing yesterday so why does a line stating ‘£25.94 at Aladin’s Kebabish’ bring back, in high definition, who I was with nine months ago, what we talked about, what I was feeling? The different selves I have been have passed through me as quickly as a nihari, but at least there is a record of them here on Excel, my emotion and location tracked like a Panic! At the Disco name generator. Depression! At the Rayners Lane Pakistani Buffet. The documentary maker Chris Marker once said he couldn’t understand how people who don’t make films remember their lives; for him, cinema had taken the place of his memory. The statements I have used to recall the first half of this year in this newsletter, and the photos of food on my phone that accompany them, serve much the same function. Strangely, for a year in which I co-wrote and released a book on London food, I did not do much writing on restaurants in 2022 that I can draw on to tell you exactly what I tasted and how good it was. I think it’s because I have grown to distrust my own lists and maps. I come back to these seemingly authoritative guides only to violently disagree with the person who wrote them, who is a buffoon and a fraud. Instead, I mostly sent out my recommendations as photos on Instagram Stories, without much value judgement or commentary, here today and gone the next. This has suited me just fine. As much as I’d just like to tell you what the best places to eat are, I think I am also telling myself what I was doing and who I was, mapping out me instead. January
The year begins and ends at a snooker hall. It starts on Green Lanes. Melek takes us to Haringey Corbacisi, a new soup shop below Harringay Snooker Club which quickly becomes a regular haunt, particularly if I, or someone I know, is ill. The kelle paca, despite the floating blobs of brain and head viscera, is perfect sick food for the convalescent, especially my mum, who repeatedly uses its existence as an excuse for me to bring her food. Feroz brings along a whole bag of Grace’s Fried Chicken Breading, a flour and spice mix made in Ireland that is reputedly made in accordance with Colonel Sanders’s original recipe. It is handed out in zip-lock baggies which makes us immediately look bait. The night ends up at Antepliler Kunefe where everyone is dancing to Despacito and the spinning kunefe wheels make the cook look like he’s playing a Boiler Room DJ set.
A few weeks later I’m further up Green Lanes, nearer my childhood home, bringing my mum soup and walking round the strange hinterland between Wood Green station and Palmers Green, which suffers the ignominy of not even technically being Green Lanes. Things open and close here before I have a chance to register them, but I always tell myself I’ll visit next time. I rarely do. At this point, a new casual Polish café, which I think is called Onion but turns out to be called On’On, is in the process of renovating – its food truck equivalent will later be reviewed by a big YouTube food scran account. There’s an Albanian version of Nusr-et called Illyrian Grill House where you can get a tomahawk steak for £60. All of this is amusing to me. Is there a word, like gentrification, which describes the process of an area becoming more chaotic? A part of me feels aggrieved that Palmers Green is moving on without me.
February...Subscribe to Vittles to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Vittles to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
Read Vittles in the app Listen to posts, join subscriber chats, and never miss an update from Vittles.
|
