I was recently in a Uniqlo in Battersea Power Station and it crossed my mind that one of the weird things in the modern world is that, however far you travel, you can usually get the same things you could at home.
Uniqlo in Calcutta is probably much the same as Uniqlo in London. I mean, the price tags have all the currencies on them anyway. So isn’t it kinda weird that we travel to just get the same things? I am planning a trip to Taiwan soon, when presumably at some point I will wander past or (if my travelling companion has anything to do with it) into a Uniqlo. Meaning I will have travelled approximately 10,000km to look at the same jumper I was able to by taking a short bus ride from home.
And yet we still bring that stuff back with us. More often than not, this is for reasons of cheapstakeness. Uniqlo in Taipei may have the coat I like for a tenner less than in London, which makes it a no brainer when you’re on holiday and think about it for long enough.
I look embarrassed over my shoulder at the thought of my former self carrying supermarket provisions back to Hong Kong from London to save money. It is only an enduring sense of shame that prevents me naming them in full here.
Sometimes though, you actually can’t get stuff at home. Or the quality really is better abroad. Which is how, for some reason, we ended up with 15kg of top end Japanese rice in the apartment having hand carried it back in hold luggage on two separate occasions. It is also why I hand carried back to the UK, perilously and with some sense of foreboding, an opened and clumsily re-sealed bottle of specialist mirin from cooking school in Nagano. Only to find that the same, very well sealed and not at all risky to carry, product was available in a supermarket in the US on my next trip there. Having being told it was specialist stuff in Japan and probably not even available in Tokyo, I was slightly peeved.
And yet, despite this glorious globalization. Despite my local Tesco basically having a specialist section stocked full of quirky mirins from the land of the rising run, London’s mid-range eateries still continue to defy the tide. Logic would dictate that they now operate in a global market, so I should be able to buy a good pad thai in London at a reasonable price, just like in Bangkok. Yes, it might cost a couple of quid more – like my Uniqlo jacket – but it should be available and roughly the same, right? Wrong.
Central London’s mid range eateries – here I mean under £30 a head for food – are generally shocking. These are the type of places you should eat often, and yet they are largely the very worst.
A carve out here is that the higher end is, like any metropolitan city, fantastic. And the low end is a bit hit and miss, unless you know where to go, because inflation means that even a McDonalds is now about a tenner.
But back to the mid range and its endless grotty chains. A Mexican one. A thai one. A burger one. A Vietnamese one where the pho tastes like chicken stock. Sob. All uniformly depressing when you part with a good chunk of change for something you could often make better at home. There are exceptions, of course. Chaska Maska in Brockley and Lao Dao in Elephant and Castle stand out, but the drop off is precipitous as you head closer to central London, when you are basically left with Koya City and a few pizza places.
Enter the fray, like a superhero to challenge my gloominess, Seoul Tokyo, which is quickly becoming my favourite go to mid-week cacual eatery. I was alerted to this anomaly by a Korean friend, and have since deviously coopted it as my own find.
With mains priced in the £10-£15 range, and starters under a tenner, you would be forgiven for thinking they would compromise on quality. But, incredibly, they don’t. The soups and stews are particularly excellent, but I still haven’t had a bad dish there. The fried chicken isn’t as good as at Taeyang Pocha, but then again I’m in Borough and not New Cross, and can take the downgrade for the convenience. Even the bibimbap – not a usual go to of mine – is great and comes with a large squeezy bottle of sauce for extra sauciness.
Real insiders will know to take cash and, therefore, advantage of the “middle finger up to HMRC” 10% discount, which always feels like a bit of a cheat code. The only mystery is why they have put “Tokyo” in their name, as the only Japanese dish I could see on the menu was takoyaki.
It's the kind of casual, affordable, homey vibe I’ve been searching for, and which, frankly, is so difficult to come by in this city at this price point. It’s like being in Seoul. Or Tokyo. Or both. And I didn’t even have to travel this time.
