I’ve been fortunate (although, more accurately, “forced”) to hop between London and Tokyo of late, owing primarily to a mixture of desperate incompetence on the part of others and a strange twisting of Darwinian logic as regards employee layoffs.
It would be a gross falsehood to say I do not still carry some scars and a good deal of well justified rancour from the way circumstances unfolded, but it has gone to prove that, if you squint hard, ever cloud does indeed have a silver lining.
For one, I have been fortunate to escape the worst of the Tokyo summer, instead enjoying blissful long evenings in gardens and on balconies in comfortable temperatures. I have found a happy home in Elephant and Castle, a part of London I had only previously noted for its inexplicable name. I have enjoyed Saturday morning parkruns, delighted in celebratory barbeques in pub gardens and capably manhandled the seemingly endless progeny of my much more grown-up friends.
I have also, to be perfectly honest, been lamenting my full-time departure from the Tokyo food scene with a tear in my eye and a piece of cold, hard bread in my throat. The tear because I know my regular food horizons will never be as incredible as when I lived on the Sakura-lined streets of Fudomae, and with a lump of cold, hard bread in my throat because, well, that is really what you eat in London these days.
I used to defend the London food scene. “If you know where to go, it’s good” I would say. “Try this place” I would implore, as weary foreign visitors signalled their disappointment after over-sampling the UK’s endless supply of white carbs.
Unfortunately, my eyes have now been opened, and when people tell me the food in the UK is bad, I shrug, laugh in a kind of pitiable agreement and then direct them to one of the few places that I remember being good in 2016.
The issue is, you see, that once you’ve had access to the good stuff on a regular basis, it’s difficult to go back to a place where getting a good meal is a treat and not a right. And to be clear here, a good meal doesn’t have to be expensive or fancy. The thing about Tokyo is that even when it is not expensive or fancy, it is invariably good.
A 900yen helping of soba noodles at a train station stand-up bar, presented in a big bowl of tasty broth and with a fried chicken slice on top - inhaled after a big day of downhill mountain biking in a distant prefecture - is an absolute dream. A simple plate of soy sauce and cream pasta at Tokyo Meat after work with my wife is an affordable, delicious and regular occurrence. You don’t have to pay extra there for stuff to be good. Quality is not strived for, it is assumed.
Rampant inflation in London has led to a total disconnect between price and quality. A single pastel de nata in an ordinary Paul bakery was advertised at £4,60 (a fiver if you eat in). A lamentable looking sausage roll, which had likely sat idly under a heat lamp for the better part of a day at a sad looking kiosk in Clapham Junction, was nearly £7. I almost fell off the platform it was such an outrage. £7? Seven quid in Tokyo would get you, at worst, one of the ten best bowls of ramen you’d ever eaten. And maybe some change for your train ride home. I thought back to my train station soba and wondered how much I’d have to pay for a sausage roll that didn’t look so sad.
I had two sets of out-of-town visitors to London over the summer. One set were from Hong Kong, so I took them to Le Relais De Venise, a touristy French steak-frites restaurant in Marylebone, and which was the inspiration for my favourite Friday boys-night dinner place in HK itself, La Vache. The waitress was surly to them and nice to me, which led to a discussion of how London is more intolerant of foreigners than it used to be – especially to people who speak perfect English with a slight East Asian accent – and led me to feel like I should apologise further for the sad state of affairs here. It was also expensive, at nearly £50 a head without booze.
The second set of friends (well, friend), was from the US and so, in true British style, I decided to educate him on the virtues of a proper Sunday roast. Blacklock in Soho is my venue of choice for demonstrating this kind of cultural imperialism, because however bad British food is, it will always be able to look down and s**t hard on that of our American friends. The trouble was that my wife and I had, only a few hours earlier, partaken in a particularly carb-heavy lunch at the house of a friend, where pastry had appeared in various forms in all three courses. This assault of flour and fat was still in the digestion stage when the second wave of rib-sticking Sunday lunch came knocking, making the whole experience feel more like gravy-filled purgatory than pleasure.
Maybe I’m just too used to good food. Or maybe I prioritise it too much. But London does have other pleasures. Like being able to watch my favourite football team throw away a 2-1 lead in person against an opposition who is one man down. Or watching outdoor cinema under a blanket in August. Or getting fabulously good value last minute tickets to see the Book of Mormon. Or actually being able to read the menus without Google translate.
In fact, much like my rancour at short sighted corporate thinking, my less than positive views of London’s food scene should really be filed under the “twitter rant” category. These are things which, however ridiculous and misinformed, are cathartic to vocalise once, but should then be viewed forever after with a good degree of caution and embarrassment. Sometimes it’s good just to let it out, realise how ridiculous it sounds, and move on. You can’t unsay the words or unthink the things, but you can try to grudgingly accept that there isn’t anything you can do about it, so you may as well leave the feelings behind and move on.
So while I will miss Tokyo dearly, here’s to london. White carbs, friends, family, silver linings and new adventures. Bring it on.
