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Friday

Zoe Strimpel

Israeli nightlife is slowly returning

Tel Aviv is the size of Bristol, with about 400,000 residents each. While Bristol has 400 pubs and bars, and just shy of a thousand restaurants, the rough concrete charm of Tel Aviv yields no fewer than 1,750 cafes, bars and clubs and more than 4,000 places to eat. Tel Aviv is a dense, hedonistic city: friendly, creative and edgy without the nasty underbelly of European cities. It is known in Israel as ‘the bubble’, secular and in its own world of sun, sea, late nights and wine, apparently separated from the problems of wider Israel.   Below the bureaucracy there are amazingly efficient relationships that seem alien to those of us used to

Thursday

Sean Thomas

What’s wrong with eating dog? 

From my desk, as I write this, in a lofty room in a soaring new hotel in Phnom Penh, I can look down at the bustling streets and see the concrete, mosque-meets-spaceship dome of the Cambodian capital’s famous Central Market. Which also happens to be the place where, 20 years ago, I ate the single most disgusting thing in my life. A dried frog. This thing, this whole dried frog, was so repulsive in taste and texture – like eating a tiny, desiccated alien made of poisonously rancid rubber – that I seldom choose to recall it. But today I am forced to, because of the intriguing news from South

Marcus Walker

Hell is the multi-faith prayer room at Bristol Airport

When the Roman Emperor Justinian finished building the Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople in 537 he compared it to the great temple in Jerusalem. ‘Solomon, I have surpassed thee,’ he declared. Some 400 years later, as visiting ambassadors from Kyiv were led into the same ethereal structure, they remarked: ‘We did not know if we were in heaven or earth.’ There will be no such confusion when people enter the newly opened ‘multi-faith area’ in the free waiting zone car park of Bristol Airport. To the casual observer it looks like a bus stop with greyed-out Perspex glass windows and walls that do not quite reach the ground (presumably to

Wednesday

James Jeffrey

In praise of the späti, Berlin’s late-night corner shops

The späti is a Berlin institution. These late-night corner shops began popping up in the former German Democratic Republic for workers clocking off from their evening shifts. Serving as a mixture of mini-supermarket and meeting place, spätis have outdoor seating, often wobbly wooden tables and benches on which locals sit and drink cheap bottles of beer from the amply stocked fridges. Spätis are much cheaper than bars, with most beers going for around €1.50 a bottle Spätis are much cheaper than bars, with most beers going for around €1.50 a bottle (and some as big as half a litre). They continue a quiet and benign form of East German egalitarianism,

Linden Kemkaran

I’m an Aga convert

I never thought it would be possible to feel such emotion about a lump of hot metal but I am in love and like all new passions it’s threatening to become all-consuming. I find reasons to drop it into conversation, I seek out others and join groups on social media that share the same predilection just for the joy of swapping photos and snippets of information. Admirers of the Aga will tell you it’s so much more than just a cooker The object of my adoration is the half-a-tonne of enamelled cast iron that squats at one end of the kitchen in my new house. Nestled firmly into a brick

John Sturgis

Britain’s curious pub naming conventions

The big London restaurant opening of the autumn has been The Devonshire in Denman Street, Soho, close to Piccadilly Circus. There was a run on bookings as soon as the reviews appeared. Giles Coren in the Times wrote: ‘What a place. What. A. Place.’ Jimi Famurewa’s review in the Evening Standard appeared under the headline: ‘Nothing beats a good pub – and this is as good as it gets’. Because – as well as being an exciting new restaurant – The Devonshire is also very much a pub. What must foreign visitors make of all this confusing disconnection between pub name and location? There’s been a pub on the site since 1793. It was

Tuesday

Robin Ashenden

Hungary, the autumnal civilisation

A couple of weeks ago, I made the dish I always make at this time of year. It’s a Hungarian gulyás – or more correctly, a pörkölt – a mixture of beef, onions, peppers, tomatoes and paprika, stewed very slowly and served with plenty of sour cream. It’s appropriate this dish should be from Hungary, as no season suits the country better. Come to that, no country suits the season better either. It isn’t just that the Buda Hills look ravishing once the trees start to turn rust and golden or that the city’s bridges look more graceful and melancholic than ever. It isn’t even the mist – not to say

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

So long to the landline

So Debrett’s has really got behind the latest technology by issuing a guide to the appropriate use of the mobile phone, or rather, ten commandments. The oldies are warned that young people take fright at an unexpected call – text first to see if it’s convenient – and the young are told that they should give a caller their undivided attention on the basis that it’s perfectly obvious if you’re doing something else and ‘This can be very alienating for the recipient, who feels marginalised and deprioritised’.   The thing about the demise of landlines is that it’s pretty well impossible to get hold of anyone easily without it That’s all