Crispy Pigs’ Ears

Whilst The Salt Yard is a restaurant and therefore, not exactly an unexpected place to enjoy a meal, I found it quite by accident looking for a pub. An hour or so early to meet friends, I’d been looking forward to a leisurely mooch but the pouring rain drove me inside. The outside of the Opera Tavern is black, tiled, with etched windows, just like any other old British pub, so I felt like Mr Ben when I stepped inside to find myself in a classically Spanish tapas bar. So surprised that I doubted my sanity (not for the first time), and stepped back onto the street to look again at the pub….Yes, it looked exactly like an old fashioned boozer….so I pushed the door open and stepped back in…and like Dr Who with the Tardis, found myself back in a corner of Spain….with a very lovely waiter asking if I was ok…so I threw caution to the wind and asked for a table up at the long bar, each place set with an enormous wine glass and gleaming white plates.

I am 5’1”, (in heels and with big hair…) and those are some high stools so I was definitely ready for a glass of wine once I had hauled myself onto the seat, (with apologies to the waiter who I may have injured  irreparably-sorry)…having texted the rest of the tribe to meet me there, I set about falling in love with the menu. The crispy Iberico pigs’ ears were like pieces of salty, crunchy lace. The olives were grass green spheres of juice and sunshine. I had been geared up for a cheese sandwich and a glass of pub wine, so I was really really pleased to be served a whopper of a Barbera del Monfratto, a rich warming red in the Alice in Wonderland-like glass. I soaked it up with some chargrilled bread and alioli and waited patiently for my chorizo with marjoram. Yum!

As one by one the others arrived, we added to the number of plates on the bar. Oh Lord we worked our way through that menu, and more wine.  And it wasn’t just me, each one of them thought they were about to walk into a traditional pub and were instead transported to Spain (and a bit of Italy) by walking through that door…

We went to the theatre, all very nice yada yada… and then sped back to the Salt Yard  to resume gnawing on those pigs’ ears and guzzling the wine…it was fabtastic! It is on Catherine Street, a spit away from The Aldwych…or Seville, who knows…

Oh and on the way out, I spotted the trotters masquerading as door handles. The secret sign I had missed…

Gin Fizz in Florence

So Florence, but not the tourist bit- very very definitely not the tourist bit-in fact, tourists were not very welcome. AT ALL. We had found a food market-huge covered affair it was, shiny fruit, ripe and perfect veg, cured and still-hanging meat, pungent cheese, the whole shebang. And as we wandered around ahh-ing and ooh-ing to stallholders who were serving Italian housewives, not interested in welcoming any foreign interlopers, we saw a staircase to the upper floor.

We tottered up (it was very steep) and mooched into a room/bar that housed a few market workers-big beefy meat porters and aproned stallholders on their break and NO TOURISTS. But the fifties jazz music coming from the tinny speakers and the sight of a zinc topped bar made us brave, and the more confident we got as we edged further into the room, the more the atmosphere thawed-it had been decidedly frosty at the doorway!

Now picture Moe from The Simpsons…Italian…now picture him with one arm….that’s the guy. To a tee. He ran the bar and he was very very pleased to have some new blood…he smiled right at us so the others left us to their aqua vita breakfasts and stopped wanting to kill us and leave us on a stray meat hook. And he looked straight at us and said “English”…(how do they know, how do they always know) “…Gin Fizz…”… and before we said a word, he started to mix up a cocktail more deftly that I have seen a two-armed barmen ever do.  He was Tom Cruise on ice…at last he had an audience…and then he served us the most sublime, the most unrepeatedly flawless gin fizz the world has ever known…and we sat there and drank them in this room full of meat porters…and looked at him with awe. And as we drank these glasses of joy, he set about cleaning glasses (his part upper arm clutching the glass and the polishing cloth in his good hand) as he nodded at the inhabitants and newcomers, then nodded his head towards us (“look what I’ve got)…he exhibited us to anyone who walked through the door.  If I believe we had some more….memory gets hazy thereafter…

And there began the Holy Grail, Ladies and Gentlemen, there started my mission and I chose to take it….I have ordered gin fizzes wherever they are on a list in an attempt to find once more that fatal mix and no, never, ever, has it even come close…and I don’t know where that market is on a map, and as Thomas Wolfe, says, “you can’t go home again” and the home of the gin fizz is a one armed barman up a dark staircase in a market in Florence…

Hot Toddy

Stepping off the boat, appetite whetted by the sight of the mussel fisherman diving all around us and harvesting the succulent molluscs in their cupped hands, we walked towards the blackened shack close to the shore.

Our genial host was more genial than most as he had been drinking the local toddy since dawn. He had already managed to set fire to his kitchen and he showed us the blackened wreckage with pride as he offered to cook us the huge prawns that he had caught an hour before.

After sharing a slug of his freshly harvested and fermented toddy, his enthusiasm was truly catching. Also, the conflagration meant the shack was probably as sterile as a clinical laboratory!

Those prawns, eaten on rickety patio chairs served on leaves were wonderful, meaty and luscious; we went back for more and more until our exhausted chef bailed out on us and returned to the toddy bottle, leaving us to sit in the sun and wash them down with beer. Bliss!

A Ghanaian Breakfast

So there I was, sitting on a broken car seat on the ground beneath a bridge teeming with rush hour traffic in downtown Accra, still reeling from finding myself on my first anthropological fieldtrip-and hungry as a wolf.

Cigarette Ash and Zucchini in Pisa

Of course, a restaurant is not an unexpected place to find food, nor is it beyond the realms of possibility that this food may be good, but I make no apology for including the odd restaurant meals in this blog as they were often unpredictably lunatic, with extraordinary owners, and incredible food.

Lal Salam Darling

George is a fellow anthropologist-in fact he was my teacher. An anthropologist studies people and their funny little ways, and unlike most of us who stand on the sidelines muttering and taking notes, George gets deeply involved with the communities he studies. The central feature of anthropological practice is “participant observation” but in reality, this is entered into in varying degrees depending on the culture in question.

Sewers and Sardines-Lunch in Venice

There is a tiny restaurant, no more than a kitchen and a courtyard with 3 tables, in a backstreet in Venice, presided over by a fierce but tiny grandmother. (Remember the mother in the Golden Girls!?). She rules her customers with a rod of steel, and they in turn, adore her. 

Philippe’s Jungle Duck

Holidaying in Mehelia, the Maltese food had been very far from exciting.So far as to be off radar… In desperation, the three of us hired a car and followed our stomachs, which very sensibly took us to Philippe. (*Not to be mistaken for the well known restaurant Chez Philippe in Gzira).

Mango, Chilli Powder and Salt in Kumarakom

Walking along the banks of the backwaters of Kumarakom in Kerala, we were returning to our lovely little wooden cottage, without a thought in our tiny touristy heads.The landscape was beautiful; clear water reflecting the palm trees-on the banks, fruit trees lined some of the paths and as we looked up into the branches of one especially fine speciman, we saw a crop of small hard mangoes, yet to ripen.

Raw Sea Anemone on Halki

I travelled to the island of Halki with a girl friend for the first time some years ago-then it had no hotel, one road, and the fresh water was delivered once a week by boat. It often ran out before the next delivery-usually when I was in the shower and swathed in soap… It has changed  so much since then; now the harbour has a dozen tavernas and a hotel which is full throughout the summer months.

Unexpected Feasts in Unlikely Places

This blog is about those wonderful meals that come about in improbable situations and in the most unexpected places. Often unrepeatable, as the place cannot be found again or the moment passes, these are my recollections of some unexpected feasts in unlikely places.

Some of the most delicious banquets have been in the most insalubrious surroundings and some of the more modest and simple meals have been against the backdrop of lavish opulence. The connection is that they all came about through a love of food, and a boundless curiosity; a meal is the best way to make friends!

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