Because We Can

Last month I completed twenty-five years as an inhabitant of the great and glorious wen that is our capital city. As I am only forty-nine and three-quarters, this means I have now spent more than half my life here. I had wondered if I might now, finally, be entitled to call myself a Londoner - or at least an honorary one - but I remain unsure to whom I might apply for verification. Perhaps there might be an opportunity here for Ken Livingstone to make himself useful.

My first job was in the Brinks MAT building in grimy Great Eastern Street, in the then dead-zone between Liverpool Street station and Old Street. If anybody had suggested that I tarry for an evening of fusion in a pop-up round the corner in Holywell Lane I probably would have assumed they had consumed more whizz, weed or E than even I had and humoured them gently, without having the first clue what they were on about.

Now, of course, I know very well that a pop-up may be considered as a temporary incarnation or iteration of a commercial enterprise (or an activity sponsored by one) in a temporary location other than that normally occupied by it and - far more importantly - just how jolly, jolly exciting it all is.

But blow me down if restaurateur Peter Gordon's one-night stand at the Underground Village on Tuesday night didn't chip a little hole in my quarter-century thick carapace of jaded metropolitanism and worldly ennui. Well done that Kiwi fusionista!

The boyish but urbane Mr Gordon declared that - in a word of locavores, many of whom risk locabore status - he considers the whole world to be his region. The first of four courses - delightfully described by him as "hilarious" - illustrated the point. Trudging out of Brinks MAT (without a gold bar to my name) the 24-year-old me knew well enough what smoked salmon was; and roast baby beets would have been explicable, if strange; but the dashi jellies and kikones would have been culinary terra incognita. Nonetheless, all those I spoke to shared my delight with this carefully orchestrated, texturally counter-pointed culinary jeu d'esprit.

There was no such thing - almost literally - as Kiwi wine in 1985, but a bakers' dozen of brilliant examples from the likes of Seresin, Craggy Range and Gordon's own Waitaki carried us along with a homely ham-hock terrine (accompanied by jicama, which is presumably homely somewhere) and some of the best venison I've ever had.

So why would a man with a successful, much-loved restaurant like The Providores wish to decamp five miles east to a cavernous industrial space with "three power-points and a sink - like just a normal sink. Really."? Well, it's that "dancer and the dance" thing, isn't it? The one that defies all logic and can shoot a vein of purple and joy through even the greyest of urban lives - if only we let it. With girlish glee, Melanie Ellis, Gordon's bar manager told me simply: "Because we can."