Now that I have a few more grey hairs and a bit more salt than pepper in my beard, I tend to do what lots of old people do and romanticise the past whilst also carping relentlessly about the present. The past is glorified, the bad bits forgotten or edited out. You remember the great holidays and frivolous Friday nights at the pub of your mid-20s, whilst conveniently forgetting the misery of spending more than half your pay on rent, hangovers and lack of wall-to-wall internet coverage. My brain contorts itself to believe that times were better when I didn’t have the entirety of human history in my left-hand pocket, accessible in just a few clicks, and instead was forced to navigate unfamiliar places with outdated oversized maps which never folded back together properly.
Occasionally I have to stop myself being so silly, by remembering that the ability to navigate to an eatery from my phone that I have some confidence over beats the hell out of going to the same place as everyone else who bought the 2006 Lonely Planet for Thailand.
But still there are moments in the past which felt more innocent and less self-conscious. Living through things before they became a thing was nice.
Take pop ups and supperclubs. In my mid and late 20s I started to become aware of these strange things that weren’t proper restaurants, but where you could still get a pretty damn fine meal. Early mailing lists began to emerge, listing off nooks and crannies of London where these places would appear, as if my magic. Before that, a food truck meant a kebab van, and a pop-up restaurant wasn’t even really a phrase.
How glad I was, though, these were becoming a thing. I would spend my days scouring websites for them, whilst working to save my pennies to spend. In my evenings and weekends I would trek to strange and unusual parts of the city I knew so well, if I could secure a reservation, that was. A couple of memories stick out.
One was an Italian themed dinner on a rooftop somewhere in Shoreditch, where I took an - irritatingly unimpressed - date, having spent vast time and expense securing tickets. I think she thought the orange school-like plastic chairs and the idea of talking to strangers at the communal table a bit wearisome. At the time I thought she was pretentious and just didn’t get it, but on reflection maybe she was just a bit cold, saw through my cheery banter and didn’t like eating outside in November.
A second, more fruitful, occasion was in a pub back room somewhere in central. I was there with a very good friend and we were treated to a quite spectacular meal from a renowned chef who just happened to have been a bit down on his luck and was trying to get back on the ladder. I recall eating foie gras with frozen truffle liberally shaved over it as a starter. In a bloody pub! My brain has conveniently edited out the monumental hangover the next day, leaving only the cherished memory of the food and a great time.
But ever so gently, the snowball started rolling down hill, and a few pebbles eventually became an avalanche. Pop-ups and food trucks were the norm. Top chefs would open airstream trailers to sell to the masses. Food trucks weren’t just a thing, they were pretty much the only thing. But things also went the other way, which is when I felt like we really entered the upside down. The rooftop Italian popup I mentioned? Now a respectable brick and mortar establishment in Camberwell. It is like flared jeans coming back into fashion. Having worn straight leg for so long, I feel disorientated and confused. Should I be searching out the latest food truck or finding somewhere with a roof for its diners?
To avoid such irritating mental gymnastics, and having just returned for a stint in the UK and realising I don’t have the first clue about where to eat any more, I now leave my dining choices to other, better-informed, people. This is how I ended up at The Lookout Café at Biggin Hill Airport in the green part of Southern England, eating disappointing cheese and pulled pork panini one Sunday lunchtime.
And no, this wasn’t a hipsterised panini. Or an ironic grating of plastic cheese. It was just a basic old English caff, the kind with a tea urn and probably not the foggiest idea what a supperclub is.
My friends, you see, don't live in London anymore. Even the well informed foodie ones who know what the Lucky Peach is and who used to live in a trendy one bed apartment in East London that they should have bought before the prices went beserk. These are people who know what they are doing when it comes to food. Who know Rachel Khoo is a philistine and that you only get the real deal by going on holiday to Asia. But alas, they grew up, had kids, and do what sensible right thinking people do. They moved out of the one bed and moved to Kent, where they have a lovely house with a big garden and live, all in all, a very enviable life.
One of the compromises of living out in the sticks though, is that a food truck there still typically means a kebab van in a layby next to a dual carriageway, and a supperclub is just going round to your kids' friend's house for dinner at 5pm, because that is when kids eat.
The Lookout Cafe's menu is, like a food truck, short and to the point. Sandwiches, jacket potatoes, some cake, a few cans of fizzy drinks. All serviceable in a beige carb kind of way. But let's be fair, you're there to catch up with your friends for the first time in too long while the kids are hopefully occupied by the frequent sight of landing aircraft.
We reminisce about supperclubs and pop-ups and Asian food in Asia and out of print hipster food magazines. We take turns watching the kids play outside in the freezing cold while hyped on fanta. It might sound corny, but this is absolutely as it should be. There is a time and a place for everything, and sometimes the company of good friends really is more important than what’s on your plate. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Not eating foie gras in a pub, or even stupendous Italian food on the roof of a disused building in Shoreditch. Sometimes it’s fine for a food truck to be a kebab van and a cafe just to be a proper old school caff.
