Tanya Gold reviews Potato Merchant

Exmouth Market is a small collection of paved streets near the Farringdon Travelodge, which specialises in monomaniacal restaurants and has a blue plaque dedicated to the dead clown Joseph Grimaldi. We are near King’s Cross, the least magical of London’s districts, and the early summer air chokes the dying trees. There are restaurants that ‘do’ hummus, restaurants that ‘do’ sausages and now a restaurant that ‘does’ potatoes, opened, I suspect, by some mad -potato fetishists for whom I have developed something like love. It is called Potato Merchant and when I first saw it advertised I thought it was a bag of potatoes with a restaurant loitering somewhere within.

I am here because I love potatoes; sometimes I dream about them, twitch my nostrils, snore. When the early European explorers dreamed of El Dorado, did they mean the several thousand species of potatoes I imagine nestling among the Aztec ruins, seeking only a boat for England and a marketing campaign? In my head I have visited the Potato Museum in Canada, which has a 14ft fibreglass potato, with a diameter of 7ft, and is the sort of place where Humbert Humbert took Lolita. (They are very precise about the dimensions in the publicity blurb, as if a 13ft fibreglass potato would have nothing like the same allure. As Martha Gellhorn said, human behaviour is still the most fascinating thing on earth.) A 14ft fibreglass potato? Why not? You can, if you are minded, get quite high on potatoes. Did you know that? Pah, you are all innocents.

So here I am with R., who doesn’t really eat carbohydrates, I suspect for sexual reasons, on a Saturday afternoon that smells of ennui, gasping car innards, and drains. People sit by tables in the street, eating hummus or sausages, reading the Independent, looking like liberals in search of a lost cause, in this case potatoes.