Fisch & Chips

Just when I promised to get all nasty, I'm going to post a bit of happy talk about London food. Yes, you read that right. Happy talk about London food.

A week ago, I discovered this amazing restaurant in Covent Garden, a few minutes from my office. It's called Food for Thought, a cute vegetarian nook on Neal St. just around the corner from Scoop, a gelateria that compares favorably to Perché No in Florence. And let's be fair, I discovered it in much the way Europeans discovered America. One of the women in my department has been eating there for almost forty years. Much as I want to colonize this restaurant, I did stop short of leaving small pox blankets for the staff, so perhaps the analogy is imperfect.

Food for Thought is a friendly little place where aside from two or three standards most everything on offer is “Today’s Special.” On the first of my four visits in this discovery week, I had a spicy stew of chick peas, potatoes, shredded beats, peppers, onions, green & black olives, incredibly bright green parsley and almonds. It was AMAZING! I wish I could have disentangled the spice combination because I’d love to try a version of this at home. So I went back the next day and had a stellar butternut squash and sage gnocchi served with a fennel, tomato, green bean, black olive, walnut and aubergine salad (I'm making the UK linguistic conversion to recipe) that deserves to be made often. I skipped the next day, but only because I was nowhere near Covent Garden. I seriously considered making the nearly six mile bike ride just to eat. Holy crap, it's good.

The days of bad English food are so long gone. I’ve eaten incredibly well since coming to London. Yes, I’ve been eating out almost every night as my stuff is still on a boat crossing the Atlantic. Check that, my stuff is now in a customs warehouse where underpaid (but health insured) agents and drug dogs are curiously pouring over my spice collection and the boxes of Levis I hope to resell in order to delay organ harvesting as a way to manage the extortionary cost of living in this city.

I’ve been trying to suss out small (and reasonably inexpensive) places and have had remarkable success. Even Thursday night’s nicoise salad from my local pizza place was a delicious riot of beautifully fresh vegetables, chunks of Italian white tuna, and fat white anchovy filets rather than those fuzzy black disasters most places use. My local Thai place also understands the meaning of the word "spicy". Actually, to be more precise, one of my local Thai places, O's, understands the meaning of the word spicy. The other, the sadly closer and aptly named Thaitanic, seems to understand the meaning of the word "microwave".

I’m also very fond of the near absence of high-fructose corn syrup. Even sodas here are made with actual sugar and generally a lot less of it. OK, even made with sugar, a Coke is pretty much still a Coke. But, for example, Pret’s ginger beer is actually spicy and refreshing rather than a can of concentrated simple syrup over which someone has whispered the word "ginger."

More on food later. As you know, I like to eat.