Category: Food & Drink

Lockdown Partner

Beauty, Disaster, Food & Drink

Forget for a moment that we’re mostly all Old Married Pharttes, and imagine that you’re going to be in lockdown with a hottie — to be more specific, a hottie chef, because regardless of how hot she is, at some point you’re gonna have to eat, and you don’t want to be stuck in that situation with Jennifer Aniston, who can’t boil a lettuce.

So here are the contenders, in no specific order:

Nigella Lawson

Rachel Allen

Rachel Khoo

Giada De Laurentiis

Lisa Faulkner

Marcella Valladolid

Rachel Ray

Ingrid Hoffmann

Cat Cora
Okay, Cat Cora is probably disqualified because sadly, she’s a lesbianist.  In her place, therefore:

Mary Berg

(That’s for my Canucki Readers…)

As an aside, three of the above are named Rachel.  Coincidence?  I think not.

 

And for my long-suffering Lady Readers, who are always being left out of these things:

Curtis Stone(I know, Australian therefore should be disqualified.  Shuddup or I’ll add Guy Fieri.)

James Martin

Jean-Christophe Novelli

Phil Vickery

And in the interests of good taste and such, I haven’t bothered with Gordon Ramsay, because I would refuse to pay your hearing-aid bills after you’ve been in a three-week lockdown with him.

 

Feel free to add your favorite chefs in Comments.

Missing Comfort

Food & Drink, Guy Stuff, Traditions

As any fule kno, I am partial to the occasional visit to a pub.  [pause to let laughter die down]

But  not just any pub.  I have strict rules for places which charge me far too much for the pleasure of indulging myself, because if I am going to be hit with a $7 (or more) tab for a single beer (!!!), the establishment had better offer me more than just a pint.  Here’s a short list of necessities:

Decent beer.  Any bar in the U.S. which doesn’t give me a choice of at least three British-ale equivalents won’t see me after a single awful American beer, and never again as well.  (Curiously, I find Mexico’s Negra Modelo  to be the closest thing to a decent ale, although I do have to pour it from glass to glass a few times to get rid of the appalling and excessive fizz.)  If they serve Fuller’s London Pride or Boddington’s, then we can be friends and they can be assured of a follow-up visit (or two, or three).  And if the beer isn’t up to snuff, they’d damn well better have a decent selection of single-malts or gins, or else it’s to the door I’ll be heading.

No loud music.  I’ve talked before about my hatred for this piece of modernism, whereby the acceptable noise of drunken people having a good time has to be drowned out by music — any kind of music, really, not just the revolting  thumpa-thumpa  of hip-hop — as though the background noise of simple conversation and occasional laughter are somehow incompatible with drinking pleasure.

Loud TV programs.  I can live with this if a.) it’s a “sports” bar or b.) there’s a big game being played (e.g. Bears vs. Packers or Chelsea vs. Arsenal).  But if I walk into a bar and there’s a large-screen TV showing ESPN’s SportsCenter (i.e. people talking about sport instead of playing it), I turn around and walk out.  Don’t even get me started if it’s CNN, Fox News or (gawd help us) Oprah Winfrey (I had to endure that once — client lunch, so I had no control — and it took me days to recover).

A foot-rail at the bar counter.  This may seem a strange one, but it’s a critical part of drinking that’s too often overlooked.  Note this otherwise-excellent setup (in a private house, withal):

But the Arrow Of Accusation points to the missing piece, and the whole pub is ruined by the glaring omission.

It’s a simple thing, really.  I (and many others) actually prefer to drink standing up, and especially around the bar counter, where space is at a premium.  It’s the one time I don’t mind being in a crowd, because I am in the company of people with a common goal, that of getting a good buzz on and enjoying life, and I far prefer a crowded bar to a nearly-empty one, which is depressing.  If one is enjoying the company of a lady, standing close to her bar stool makes the whole activity more intimate, too.  But if you’re going to stand, you must have a rail to rest a foot on, because otherwise you get tired of standing.  (I don’t know why that it, but it’s a fact nevertheless.)  Look at this place:

That picture simply screams out that I’ll be there till closing time, or later (don’t ask; I’m still banned from The Blue Cow which, needless to say, served about five excellent ales — all of which I sampled extensively —  and had a brass foot-rail).

Decent decor.  I hate modernist interior design, as all my Readers know well, but while I prefer the traditional pub style, it doesn’t have to be that.  Here’s the inside of the fantastic Randolph’s Bar at the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan:

…and yes of course it has a foot-rail at the counter.  And yes, I have been tossed out of that place too, several times, but always gently as I used to be a frequent guest there (hi, Carlo!).  On each of those occasions, the company was excellent and much disposed towards trying to finish all the Scotch in the place, but the atmosphere and decor did no harm to the attempt, either.

Here’s yet another of my favorite haunts, the Coq d’Or at the Drake Hotel in Chicago (where I do not have a tempestuous history, albeit not for lack of trying):

It’s a little hard to see (bottom left), but yes, there is a foot-rail, and it’s brass.

All this bar talk is making me thirsty.  And now, if you’ll excuse me, my post-birthday hangover needs a little TLC and that gin isn’t going to drink itself.

Under The Knife

Food & Drink

I remember the day I quit exercising.

I was thirty years old, in really good shape, and while visiting my mother I went for my regular morning jog.  At the time, she lived in Umhlanga Rocks, a little seaside resort town just north of Durban, and to say that the Indian Ocean coast has a tropical climate is to understate the thing.  It’s not only hot, it’s humid — so humid that I, a Joburg boy, actually had trouble breathing the thick, moist air (Johannesburg is 6,000ft above sea level).

But I had to stay in shape, and I liked the way I looked, so off I went.  I kept the jog short, maybe two or three miles up the coast road, and then I turned around and went back, taking a little detour along the concrete boardwalk that runs past the luxury hotels and separates them from the beach.

By now, I was deeply uncomfortable and miserable:  the sweat was pouring off me, I was tired and more than a little sunburned because while I usually jogged without a shirt up in Johannesburg, it was not an issue there — but down here, in the blazing tropical sun, my fair skin was going extra-crispy, and fast.

I was coming up to the last leg of the trip, where I could make the turn and head back to my mother’s house.  At that point, one of the hotels had a patio cafe right on the boardwalk, and sitting at a table under a large Cinzano umbrella were two rather pretty younger women.  As I ran past, one whistled and called out in Afrikaans, “Nice bod!”

I waved over my back at her, ran about a dozen more yards, and stopped dead in my tracks, chest heaving and my breath wheezing like a beached whale as the epiphany struck me.  I was doing all this — the tiredness, the sweatiness, the sunburn, the aching muscles — just so a stranger could compliment me on my “mooi lyfie” ?

I walked back to my Mom’s house, and never jogged again.

All this came back to me when I read the story of how Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter Kelly has had gastric sleeve surgery and thus lost over 80lbs.

Now I’m not going to go into some stupid amateur psycho-analysis as to why she would want to do this.  She was always a plump little thing, and clearly she didn’t like the way she looked (hence all the tattoos she had inflicted on herself, tattoos which she is now having removed — draw your own conclusions).  And she looks quite fetching now (see the link above)… but that just leads me to my earlier conclusion:  why would she undergo so radical a surgery, just so a stranger like me could think she was “quite fetching”?

I know several women who have had gastric sleeve surgery, and every single one has told me that had they known what the consequences were going to be (other than the massive weight loss), they would never have done it.  You see, the weight loss may be all very well, but what the gastric sleeve does is make eating food a profoundly uncomfortable experience:  nausea, pain, discomfort and a general malaise all follow if you eat so much as a single forkful of food too many, and after a while you begin to hate the sight of food.  Any food.

And what happens next is that some of the joy goes out of your life.  Eating is such a wonderful and enjoyable experience, really:  nothing quite compares to the feeling of satisfaction, of well-being and happiness that a good meal gives you.  It’s one of life’s simple, and paradoxically one of life’s greatest pleasures.  And with gastric sleeve surgery (which is irreversible), it’s gone forever.

So while everyone — and every one a stranger — is complimenting Kelly Osbourne on how great she looks, know too that her previous unhappiness at being overweight has been replaced with a much greater one.

And frankly, I never thought she was that fat to begin with.

Let Them Eat Cake

Food & Drink

Via email, Alert Reader Mike L sends me this news:

Subway bread isn’t legally bread, according to Ireland’s highest court.

Not having eaten anything from Subway in over twenty years, my memory may be a little cloudy on this topic;  but I do know that the reason for that has to do with the taste of their bread, which always prompted the question:  “What have I just put into my mouth?”  [as the actress said to the bishop]

It’s foul, and I know that when driving in strange areas of the country looking for something to eat, Subway is never an option.  Ghastly stuff.

Har Har Har

Food & Drink, Funny Stuff

Responding to yesterday’s post about Glen Fohdry single malt, Reader Roy waxed rhapsodic about various single malt Scotches, ending with:

Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I still like fine bourbon whiskey too.

…which reminded me of the old homo joke:  “Women are okay, but they’re not like the real thing.”

I feel the same way about bourbon.