Eat Meat

Friend came up with a particularly exotic challenge recently, something to really get my tongue wagging. And here’s a picture of it. That right there is my tongue. Or would be if I was constructed from reconstituted bits of mushroom shit that some ‘food’ purveyors would like to think is a decent impersonation of meat. You see, friend is a VEGEMARIAN. The great thing about friend is that she is wonderful enough for me to overlook this slight character transgression. Of course, people are allowed to do whatever they like. Within reason. Using the heads of small children to paint your castle ceiling is probably pushing it, as would forcing grannies to get their labia pierced, but if someone wants to give up meat then that’s absolutely fine. But it doesn’t stop me thinking a little less of them. So really, vegemarians just have to work that extra bit harder. Because I reserve the opinion that they are in some way demented. Meat is good. Fact. And me putting the word fact there makes it exactly that. Fact. Not only does it taste really really great, scrunching around in my mouth, but it is scientifically proven that eating 8 rashers of proper bacon a day makes your dick bigger. Fact.

So it was with some significant scorn that I settled in to my latest challenge. Fakin bacon. First we must tackle the name. Now, I work with words, that is my job. Nonetheless, I’m not literally literarily perfect. Largely this is because people are very rarely literally anything. Make a note of that, because if you get it wrong I will hunt you down and LITERALLY fist your belly button. But Fakin, it upsets my sensibilities. Someone has sat down and decided to go to print with a blazing spelling mistake on their product. This is probably due to the resounding truth that people who eat fimo-flesh are soft in the head. In reality they don’t even have brains, instead their bonces are filled with great, curdled clods of tofu. Wobbly, hand-mashed tofu, stuff that hasn’t even been deep-fried and covered in salt, chilli and garlic to edify the horror.

To be fair to friend, she doesn’t eat fakin bacon. She’s superb, so she wouldn’t – people who eat this metallically-tinged cardboard have wax-dipped mouths. She also hasn’t tried to hang any ethical cause-celebre on to her bonkers decision to forgo chop chomping. She just doesn’t like meat much. Now, I do care about where my meat comes from. To the extent that I’ve stopped eating it from my cafeteria and other disreputable food dispensaries. If I am going to eat meat I don’t want it to have been wearing an antibiotic pesary for the entirety of its miserable tox-in-a-box life. I also don’t want its Frankenstein existence to have been cut short in an abattoir that sees sadism as prerequisite.  In spite of this, I will never ever eat the fungal-abortion that is fakin bacon again. I will simply buy farm-assured pork. Fact.

SANS LE NUIT - Review of Dans le Noir

Concept restaurants have always been a bit of a flunk. In fact, concept anything is invariably tosh. Take green tomato ketchup, or marmite chocolate, or foam parties. It’s messing with the tried and tested. Why go to a party that chugs large quantities of chemical slug-spunk at your face as you defend your honour from rugby-tackling fanny-pests who get you on the floor and try to stick their fluorescent whistles in your mouth? And so it was with Dans le Noir. Why go sit in a pitch-black room next to chatty strangers and gobby groups of women, enacting a dirty-protest with your food, when you could go to Hix and laugh at the crap Tracy Emin smudges on the walls instead? Because it was about the same price as Hix. No jokes. £45 each. But for only two courses. Without the wine. And placky food.

You're led by the shoulder of a blind man into a silkily-black hole. The name of the game is to pick a colour, any colour, from surprise white, meat red, fish blue or vegetarian green. But you’re surprised whatever you choose, because it’s dark, and because the chef has no palate. I chose the surprise and then bullied friend into getting meat. Thus it was that we started with a slab of fridgily cold meat with foliage and a smear or two. The crockery is square and huge. This is so that when you’re trafficking your food across the plate it doesn’t plop into your lap. Our morgue-fresh hunk of flesh was particularly resilient to both cutting and fork-stabbing, so mostly we just chased it about to a cacophony of clashing cutlery. Friend said she could taste a bit of chocolate somewhere. I had some kind of fruit and a leaf or two ended up on my fingers. So far so sordid.

You are told at the end of the meal what you actually ate. At this stage I was thinking school-dinner beef with rocket. But apparently we shared a venison carpaccio with mustard greens and a chocolate and raspberry flourish. Carpaccio my thumb, which is exactly how thick it was, and it tasted very very cooked. Friend was cross by now and shrieked ‘I hope no-one is sitting next to us’ as a couple sat down next to us. You see, the dark prangs the senses and everything feels rather tripped-up and chronic when you can’t see, so quiet is loud and tasty is disgusting. That was her excuse anyway.

Then came the main. My first bite was saffron infused mutton with a fish stick. There was something tapenade-filled at one corner and I was very excited to find a pocket of what could only have been buttery Swiss chard. Normality became a treat in this bat-shit cave. Sure sure, they told me it was shark and ostrich and wagyu beef, but it was really very dark and all on the same plate, so I’m not convinced. Besides, I don’t want saffron and olives and butter and shark and tough-old-bird and very expensive beef, and a splurge of different bodily sauces and foams, all in my mouth at once. Though the overall flavour may have been tainted with transference, as I did end up patting down my plate and then sucking on my fingers just in case I had missed something delicious. Tube-yum.

The pudding was nice, because it tasted of chocolate raspberries and the textures were good, layers of crunch and jelly too. Something simple and thought out. And it could be fun too, the eating in the dark nonsense, with the right foodstuffs and friends. Just blindfold your guests and serve them tequila jellies and blue mac ‘n cheese. None of this jasmine and truffle infused urchin guts, or terrapin ballotine with civet-musk potatoes twattery. Don't go. Just don't.

AND SO IT IS - A TRYER BEFORE YOU BUYER BLOG

I have a blog, this is my blog, I am agog with blog.

And I know what you're thinking, blogs are a bit shite. Which is true, but I promise this riff-splaff will never be the anxst-ridden sob-ride or 2000 word extrapolation on fortune cookies that many seem to be. Rather this is to be an informative page of reviews. Reviews of anything at all. Imagine there is a restaurant you have always wanted to try, yet are still uncertain whether you want to splurdge £50 of you hard-earned monies without knowing for damned-near-certain that it's good. This is because you can't believe critics, they have an agenda. And you can ask me exactly what to try on the menu. I am spending money so you don't have to. Or some other vacuous sales-team nonsense.

You can then apply this formula to anything. Almost anything. I will only review things up to £50 and it must be within reason. I am not going to try frotting a red panda at the behest of some grubbly little filth-wizard. But I'll do suchlike as clothes, shops, recipes, bars, art, spa bollocks, cosmetics trash, adventure weekends, sports, sexual techniques, exceterah exceterah. And in all honesty. I can even do books, but I do books for a living, so if you send me your book and it is rubbish you have been warned.

I have written for food magazine Posh Nosh, the clothes horse that is Sunday Time Style, plus various online magazines, edited and submitted for the rumpypump madness of The Erotic Review and am now Assistant Editor at a global publishing house. I will only post if I have something to say, all I need from you lot is a challenge. Because if I have to sit here at my formica pod, discussing fonts and slowly growing a back-hump for another 3 years, without any kind of intrigue...  Well, I'm going to go postal.

So, anything you want me to try before you buy?