An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Fancy a slappy? It’s not what you think – unless you’re from Wigan, in which case you’ll know exactly what I’m offering. A slappy, otherwise known as a ‘Wigan Kebab’, is a whole pie served inside a sliced barm cake (not cake, but a soft, sweetish bread roll). Wiganers are known as ‘pie eaters’. I
After a week in which Israel triumphed at the Eurovision Song Contest with second place – western Europe is for them, eastern Europe slightly less so (plus ça change) – I review Babbo, the new neighbourhood restaurant in St John’s Wood. Restaurants tend to drift in, settle and drift onwards here. The Victorians knew it
33 min listen
Daria Lavelle was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and raised in New York. Her work explores themes of identity and belonging and her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, and elsewhere. Daria is the author of the critically acclaimed new novel Aftertaste which explores food, grief and the uncanny. On the podcast she tells Liv
In Bradford a few weeks ago, I popped into a pub called Jacobs Well. It’s a squat old building, all but submerged behind the stultifyingly ugly road that grinds around the edges of the town centre. The Well was fairly quiet on a Monday night, but everyone there was congregated around the bar and it
We had been discussing Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, the possibility of a nuclear exchange across the Punjab and other trifling matters. It was decided to change the subject. A youngster was planning to write a piece on lunching and suggested I might know something about that. I did not disagree. In the old days, lunching was
Iam standing in my kitchen preparing kidneys for devilling. Snipping their white cores away piece by piece until they come free and I’m left with just the wibbly, burgundy kidney, ready for their spiced flour, I pause. There is no denying that even fresh raw kidneys can smell a little… challenging. And for one moment
‘What? You don’t like chocolate?’ The British Airways attendant almost shouted at me in incomprehension as she was passing out little packets of chocolate digestives. I had had the temerity to ask (in economy, of course) whether there might be any other biscuits on offer. To which she had responded with a concerned enquiry about
Delamina Townhouse is on Tavistock Street in Covent Garden. It is an Israeli restaurant, and a very fine and subtle one, though Israeli restaurants are rebranding as ‘eastern Mediterranean’ these days due to growing Jew hate on London’s streets, which fills me with rage. (I am not talking about criticism of Israel. I welcome all
Attempting to make lunch for a friend today, I discovered I had run out of anchovies – even though I always have some in stock: tins and jars of the salted variety in oil, tubs of boquerones in vinegar, and, lurking in the back of the fridge, a tube of anchovy paste. I was bordering
25 min listen
Mary-Ellen McTague is a chef based in Manchester. She is the culinary driving force behind Aunbury, 4244, the Creameries and her newest venture, Pip at the Treehouse Hotel. Mary-Ellen is also the co-founder of Eat Well MCR, which has delivered almost 100,000 meals across Greater Manchester since 2020 to those sidelined by poverty. On the
There are many reasons to like Kyrgyzstan. It has extraordinarily lovely women: some mad collision of Persian, Turkish, Russian, Mongol and Chinese genes makes for supermodels at every bus stop. It is safe, friendly, cheap. Its cities are commonly free of rubbish and graffiti (how does Central Asia do this, yet we cannot?). Despite these
When did you last eat at a McDonald’s? If I’d asked this question a decade or so ago, I imagine the answer would probably have been ‘more recently than I’d care to admit’. The Golden Arches were the ultimate fast-food guilty pleasure, where, for considerably less than a tenner, the hungry, hungover or intoxicated could
My first memories of limoncello, I expect like most people, are from an Italian holiday, the slender bottles as yellow and radiant as the Amalfi sunshine. And at a local, family-run Italian restaurant, cheerfully slammed down on the table at meal’s end. The lemon liqueur is now having a new lease of life, born again
I have never seen a baked Alaska in the wild. Have you? I knew what they looked like, of course, all meringue cheekbones and technicolor interior, but I haven’t actually come across one. For whatever reason, they seem to be an endangered species – so I took to making them myself. The pudding was invented
Western Sicily is one of the most wonderful places on Earth. From the Greek temples in the south to the Arab-Norman architecture and frescos around Palermo, there are endless treasures and glories. There are also records of fascinating characters, especially the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Stupor Mundi. Historians still argue whether he was a prototype
Are you hungry, peckish, esurient? Join me at Josie’s diner in Lexington, Kentucky, in the heart of Bluegrass country, where the horses are lean and very many people are, let me be frank, not. Josie’s is heaving at 8 a.m. as the well-upholstered clientele arrive for the morning feed. A mercifully slim student at the
I keep on my bedside table, where others might place religious texts, Keith Waterhouse’s seminal The Theory and Practice of Lunch. Waterhouse, that magnificent chronicler of Fleet Street’s liquid lunches and disappearing afternoons, understood what modern efficiency cultists cannot: that civilisation is measured not by what we produce but by how elegantly we pause. His
Claro is at 12 Waterloo Place, St James’s, and, when I tried to find out what it used to be – it has the energy of a bank – I found an advert from the Crown Estate offering the lease for a ‘retail or wellness opportunity’. 12 Waterloo Place was pictured in pen and ink,
20 min listen
Roger Pizey is a baker, chef and one of the most influential pâtissiers in the UK. He started his culinary journey as an apprentice at La Gavroche under Albert Roux before taking on the role of head of pastry at Marco Pierre White’s Harveys, during the time it achieved three Michelin stars. He has since
Lindt has opened a ‘first of its kind’ flagship store at Piccadilly Circus. Roger Federer was wheeled out to cut the ribbon. It features the UK’s largest Lindt truffle pick ’n’ mix counter (a snip at £6.50/100g), a ‘barista-style’ hot chocolate bar and an ice cream station. There’s even jars of chocolate spread for those
While the US continues to use the price of chicken eggs as a political (American) football, closer to home our concern is with eggs of a sweeter kind. This year has seen chocolate prices rise dramatically. The price of cocoa had remained stable for decades, but in November 2023 it rocketed and has remained high
Every Easter, the Creme Egg dominates supermarket shelves. It is, Cadbury’s marketing department loves to remind us, ‘the nation’s favourite Easter egg’. Its popularity sometimes verges on cultlike. In 2016, when Cadbury opened a pop-up café in Soho called Crème de la Creme Egg Café, people queued down the street to eat something they could
Roast lamb is as expected on the Easter table as turkey is at Christmas. But as a nation, we are falling out of love with lamb. Meat consumption in Britain is at its lowest level since records began, and according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), lamb has been in particular decline for
In 1999, a relatively unknown American chef wrote an essay in the New Yorker uncovering the secrets of restaurants. ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’ lifted the lid on both the underworld of professional kitchens and the mentality of chefs. In it, the writer meticulously took down ordering fish on a Monday (old), eating steak well
China: what next? Around the time of the millennium, I wrote that during this century, many of the world’s great questions would be answered in Chinese characters and that great fortunes would be made, and lost, in the China trade. That is one prophecy which might hold good. No one ever says that they could
Having long been a man whose spirits wilted if meat was not the centre of his meal, I have become almost vegetarian. It’s routinely predictable for age to lead us astray from our youthful socialism, but I find my dietary change more difficult to explain. My younger self would view my politics with horror and
There’s a well-known clip from daytime TV show This Morning where celebrity chef Gino D’Acampo is cooking a classic Italian pasta dish. Holly Willoughby, one of the presenters, tastes it and says: ‘Do you know, if it had, like, ham in it, it’s closer to a British carbonara?’ D’Acampo, in his Italian-accented perfect English, looks
The drift began with the Anglicised version of tapas – a word meaning ‘to cover’, or ‘lid’, that originally described the small pieces of food used to cover and protect drinks. But ‘small plates’, now a mainstay of those fashionable, overpriced restaurants that pride themselves on being the antidote to stuffy and formal, have dominated
I assumed that the headline in the Mail about ‘pasty wars’ would involve some grievous insult to Cornish pride, including something other than beef, onions, potato and turnip; perhaps pointing out that the turnip was actually a swede. Instead, it was about how a deli in Mousehole, where I live, was charging a tenner for
