Straight Reppin: The Flavour Major. London

One city. One fat bastard. So many bites to take.

[theflavourmajor]

Lesson #1: Pimp Your Fast-Casual Game.

First of all: ‘Fast-casual’ is a really horrible phrase. It’s right out of the same business-and-bollocks phrase-book as ’synergy’ and ‘action that initiative’ and people who say it should be regarded with nothing better than an icy cold stare of pure disdain, to let them know that in your eyes, they’ve fucked up. If you’re holding a drink, preferably hot or even more preferably cold, take this opportunity to pour it down the offender’s trousers, while maintaining fierce eye contact. And when I say down the trousers, I don’t mean spill it on the denim, corduroy or cotton that happens to be covering their legs and genitals. The fabric didn’t do you any harm. The fabric didn’t say "fast-casual”. No, I mean slowly and calmly pull said-trousers away from the waist, in order that you may pour said-drink directly onto the genitals. If done with the perfect icy stare said-offendor will realise his mistake and be driven to shamefully accept his punishment with the same silence which you so generously give him. Thus the whole operation may be a soundless one. Beautiful. And much like in Peter Pan, every time you do this, someone who works in HR dies.

Anyway, I should explain what ‘fast-casual’ actually means. Fast-casual refers to restaurants that serve fast and cheap-to-make food in a casual restaurant setting. Thus your food comes quick but you can stay as long as you want eating it. Examples: Nandos, Wagamama, Wahaca, Yo Sushi, Byron Burger, Giraffe, Chipotle. 

Pizza Express invented this type of dining, or at least brought it to the UK’s mainstream, and when they did so they revolutionised the way our parents ate out. Suddenly there was a place you could go that was a restaurant, but didn’t feel as stuffy or formal as the full eating-out experience. Kids were welcome, the interiors were strictly controlled by branding companies’ look-books so as to never be off-puttingly ugly or intimidatingly stylish, and the food was tasty, affordable and 100% reliable. Now Pizza Express's successors dominate our high streets, serving up decent food for decent prices across the UK. This is a key word: decent. No one should settle for decent. Settling for decent sucks. But enough of this for now.

Fast-casual is now the UK’s favourite way of eating out, and the businesses who do it make big fucking money. Let me say that again, BIG fucking money. Byron Burger sold for £100m, despite only having 34 sites. And the dudes who bought it weren’t buying 34 x £2.9mil restaurants, they were buying £100m of brand. Opening a restaurant is hard, really hard. It’s pretty much the hardest thing you can do. 95% of new restaurants in the UK fail within one year. That number goes up to 98% if you just look at London. Yet the Pizza Express brand is able to sustain 400 profitable restaurants in the UK. So Byron’s worth 100mil not because they have 34 restaurants, but because they could have 400. And £100m for 400 profitable restaurants is actually pretty cheap.

But, numbers aside, if - like me - you get a little sick at the thought of anyone mass-producing ‘premium’ burgers across 400 sites (or really any disconnect between cooking and a chef’s passion), here’s a silver lining to the corporate cloud of fast-casual: it’s inspiring its own little counter revolution. Where once there was only Pizza Express standing bravely in an empty wasteland, a field of competition it had created and now utterly dominated, now there is Homeslice and Pizza East. David might be so small that Goliath doesn’t give a shit about him, but hell, who cares as long as David makes great pizza and you know where he lives? 

Wagamama was set up by the same guy who founded michelin-starred Hakkasan and Yauatcha, so to say that he knows how to make good food is a bit of an understatement. The theory behind his highstreet shop was that people outside the 1% would now be able to afford to eat decent quality, flavourful Asian food. And that’s great. I mean that - if it sounds like I’m slagging off fast-casual, I’m not. I do think that’s really great. But if you live in London, congratulations, because for you there’s something greater. Actually there’s three things: Bonedaddies, Koya and Tonkotsu. I won’t go into detail about the places I’m recommending now, because I think a lot of them will get their own posts sometime in the future. But take my word for it, you don’t want to go to Nandos, you want to go to Chicken Shop. And, most of all, please: you don’t want to go to Byron, if you can go to Patty and Bun. 

The only problem with knowing these places is that they come with a curse. What I like to call ‘The Burden of Knowledge’. And what my friends call, ‘Tom being a food dickhead’. See, I used to love Wagamamas, I still do love Nandos to an extent, and the first time I ate a Byron Burger I thought my world had changed forever. Because Byron used to make great burgers. Or, rather, I used to think they made great burgers, and this is the problem: I can’t honestly say now, looking back, whether they genuinely did make great burgers and they’ve dropped the ball since, or whether my standards are just so impossibly high these days, so generously pumped up by London’s burger revolution, that I simply cannot appreciate anymore what - to most people - is still a damn good burger. Now when I have to go to regular fast-casual places I feel a bit like I imagine recovered drug addicts do: penitent, guilty almost that I’ve experienced things that most people don’t get to experience, but still faintly incredulous that normality is really this drab. 

So anyway, I’ve rambled a bit here, but to conclude, in summation, and at the end of the day: Byron are crap. And if you love Byron, and you think I’m an intolerable food snob, just hold that judgment until you've tried somewhere better. Go to Patty and Bun. Get a burger, get some wings. It’ll change your life. You’re welcome.

Signed,

The Flavour Major.

[theflavourmajor]

Adventure #1: Caravan.

This blog will not be a restaurant review site. No, my wallet isn’t thick enough, and my list of synonyms for ’tender' is far too short (I’ve only got, like, 3 or summin).

What is it going to be? It is going to be recipes, probably, it is going to be investigative journalism, certainly, it is going to be taste-testing, fad-following, and yes, occasionally, restaurant reviews. It is going to be a recording of the thoughts, opinions, and tastebuds of a man who has achieved level 37 on Quizup’s ‘Food’ category (ladies…).

However, as I sit here in my underpants, sipping a cold Peruvian beer and occasionally scratching in ways that would make me unattractive to females, I have a problem: Where to start. I could discuss my new-found respect for certain drinkers of soy milk, I could lament how slowly the fad of sourdough pizza is passing away (my objection is a moral one btw), or I could raise a hymn of thanks for the continuing rise of the food truck (we are not worthy, O mighty Roy Choi); I could even tell you which kombucha drinks you should be drinking - I mean, that is, if you can get past the fact that you hate them to realise that you actually love them.

I could do all of these things, but, I won’t. Because 3 days ago I went to Caravan for dinner, and I made a very important conclusion: Caravan is the best restaurant in London. And that’s something that requires my immediate attention. See, I’ve been to Caravan lots of times before, and I’ve always held it in the highest esteem, but on Friday night something clicked. I realised, the best restaurant in London doesn’t have to serve the tastiest food in London (I don’t know where that would be, but I do know it would be out of price range). So here are my reasons why Caravan is, quietly, the best:

As I’ve just said, I can’t afford whatever the tastiest food in London is. But, do you know what, I bet I would appreciate it more than the people who can. Therefore, although imaginary Restaurant X with 3 michelin stars cooks damn flavourful food, in the mouths of the bored and cynical 1%’ers who eat there, I bet Restaurant X’s 3-michelin star cuisine becomes a lot poorer than Caravan’s humbler fare in the more sensitive mouths of the food-worshippers who trek  there from far and wide. Food: check.

Dayyyyum look at that scallop carpaccio with spiced popcorn and grapefruit peeking out at the bottom left.

A little while ago, I was given a voucher for dinner at the Ritz. This was a harrowing experience. The food was exceptional, but the service was militant. At one point I tried to take my jacket off and was practically rugby tackled by the swat-team of silver service waiters who swarm around your table making sure that no one is laughing or having fun. I think he would have tazered me if he’d had one to hand. In such an environment I spent the night talking in a hushed whisper, petrified that I might be discovered as not owning half of Yorkshire or Abu Dhabi, as my presence at the table implied. The only fun I had was from perverting the rules to the extreme, cracking covert circle-jerk jokes and making up scenes for a porn parody of the silver-service waitresses, but only in the quietest voice I could muster, so that not even my friends heard them. That kind of experience isn’t fun, I don’t care how tasty the food is. Caravan is the opposite, an atmosphere that has almost as much cool as Patty and Bun or The Breakfast Club, but with a real sincere friendliness. They went through a short phase about a year ago of only hiring outrageous hipsters, who weren’t great on a sunday morning, but they’ve sorted that out and these days the staff are exceptional. On Friday a waitress gently mocked me for my pronunciation of nduja sausage and I’ve never wanted more for someone to be my friend.

Range. This is the big one, and to be honest, even on it’s own it's a good enough reason to stand up the audacious claim I’m making. I first heard about Caravan from a man who runs one of London’s best coffee shops (I won’t say which one). I was selling him 10 cases of a branded soft-drink (again, I should probably keep that anonymous), so our relationship was professional rather than company-customer. I asked him, honestly, who was doing the best coffee in London at that moment in time, and he said Caravan. He then added bitterly: “they’re not even a fucking coffee shop”. This says a lot about Caravan. Who does the best breakfast/brunch in London? From my (wide) experience, definitely Caravan. Who does the best cocktails in London? Caravan are definitely up there. Who does the best tapas in London? Caravan are definitely in with a shout. You get the picture. Caravan are definitely fucking good. At everything.

2-course breakfasts. Hello. The desert is sweet coconut bread with rhubarb and lemon curd. Stop it Caravan you little minx.

This extraordinary range translates into a kind of time-defying element: From 8am they’re busy with coffee drinkers, from 10 they’re rammed with brunchers, from 12 they’re packed with the cool families of unbelievably lucky kids, who eat amazing pizzas and tapas until 3 or 4. Then at about 6 they start to fill up for dinner, which can be as experimental and modernist as michelin haute-cuisine, and then the cocktails keep the place heaving until midnight. That’s awesome. That’s so awesome. One day, when I’m feeling really baller, I’m going to go at 8am and stay till midnight. Just because I can.

There are two of them, and they have different menu’s. And that means, if you’re ever really, really baller you can do the 8-midnight move... In both of them. And now, good reader, if you ever are that baller, you’ll be compelled to do so. My work here is done.

Signed

The Flavour Major

View from the restaurants at: Kings Cross, above. Exmouth Mkt, below. Both hella good places for a date. You're welcome.

[theflavourmajor]

Welcome To The Greatest Adventure.

Allow me to introduce myself: I am the Flavour Major. Food is my vice.

Most people spend the money they can’t afford on booze, drugs, cigarettes, clothes. Me? Chickpeas, chorizo, coconut water, cow.

I’m such a foodie, when I say which of the two Brick Lane beigel shops is better, people actually listen. Note: I don’t care what qualifications you have, this is the single greatest test of both your clout as a judger-of-food, and your powers as a rhetorician. If you call yourself a foodie, come back to me when you can break down the raw tribal differences between camp Beigel Bake and camp Beigel Shop. If I wasn’t such a humble motherfucker, I’d say I was the Nelson Mandela of East London’s tense beigel community. 

Not only is my palate more sensitive to sweet, sharp, succulent, soy or spice than Kanye to the subject of leather jogging pants, but all senses combine in one to make food the opiate, the holy elixir of my craven life. With nose alert and quivering, ears alive to crunch or crackle and eyes pealed for colour, steam and fire, your humble hero walks abroad the streets of London, eager for the food adventures that await him.

Will you, courageous reader, take his hand?

Signed,

The Flavour Major.