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19 May
Webster’s defines serendipity as ‘the phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for’. The OED is more precise:
Serendipity: stopping to tie one’s shoelace and finding a Lebanese restaurant.
Until a fortnight ago, The Three Ways Restaurant had never graced my radar. I have thought long and hard about how this could happen, and have concluded that either:
a) the elaborate window-dressing at The Carphone Warehouse has, over the years, so absorbed my attention that I am blind to all else within a fifty-yard radius; or (more likely)
b) my new spectacles conduct high-frequency food-waves directly into my brain’s falafel receptors.
It’s now half-past lunchtime on Saturday, and we have anniversary presents to buy each other. Wooden ones.
A spoon, I’m told, would be inappropriate, and we’ve used up our parking permit quota, thereby killing off my dreams for a Trojan horse. It’s clear that I’m floundering and I need inspirational fuel.
Mrs Wifey also needs fuel, but can afford to go easy on the inspiration because she already knows what she’s going to buy. All I know is that my capacity for abstract thought no longer extends beyond cous cous.
Up above Going Places we claim the window nook overlooking Pret a Manger. It’s hardly a tough bag though – we are, as ever, the last of the lunch crowd, and have the entire place to ourselves.
I have the mixed mezze: chicken kebab, a couple of salady things, the second-best hummus I’ve ever eaten, and, for the first time in living memory, more bread than I can possibly force down my carb-loving cakehole. Mrs Wifey (maker of the first-best hummus I have ever eaten) has the soup, which comes with a wrap the size of a rounders bat.
Great food: eleven quid (plus drinks). Could this be Norwich’s best value lunch?
I could start worrying about how something this excellent could be so cheap, but instead I put it down to karma. Statistically, I must have done something good at some point, surely?
I shop. I succeed. Mrs Wifey shops. Norwich fails her. Whatever it is that she’s after, Norwich doesn’t sell it.
I’m no theologist, but this must be sign that I am a *better* person. Looks like I don’t need to start that Animal Hospital subscription after all.
Eat here: regularly
Keywords: tahini tingle
21 April 2007
Spring is here, and with it bluebells, barbecues and the butter mountains of brilliant flesh that no man should ever see. It is a time to absorb every last golden drop of sun, ideally with beer in hand.
But what to do at lunch time? Dining outside is less easy in Norwich than, say, Nice – unless of course you’re happy to snatch a pasty on the steps of Next, and observe the local teenagers be, as they say, alternative (which, as far as I can discern, amounts to little more than girls spitting and boys sharing make-up).
Two minutes’ walk from the increasingly serious gotholick posturing is The Belgian Monk. Here we find a blessedly discreet terrace out back, where, in the absence of shade, one can settle down to an indecent variety of Belgian beers and soak up the UV till exquisitely pink. The beer starts at around Stella strength and increases in liability from there. They’ll also serve it with a straw, for those on a budget.
For those unfamiliar with Belgium’s contribution to cuisine, it broadly comes down to chocolate and moules frites – The Belgian Monk focuses more on the latter, with some thirteen different ways of serving them (twenty-six if you count the snack-sized servings). There may well be a chocolate menu, but I had red mist for meatballs and was disinclined to check.
However, I was under orders to get mussels for Mrs Wifey (she having baggsied the sitting down and holding the table out in the sun job), and so I ordered her moules with salmon and leek.
One seldom has the opportunity to use both ‘medieval’ and ‘sconce’ in the same sentence, but with the chips arriving in such a vessel, it was, linguistically speaking, a dream come true.
Yet it was also grossly disheartening, as the best fries in the world are [arguably] Belgian by birth – or at least cooking technique. Serving a chubby chip with your moules is like buying a box of Leonidas and finding a Double Decker inside. However, Mrs Wifey was happy, and that was the most important thing.
I was also happy: the meatballs were good.
As a monk-free provincial Belgo, it fills a market niche, but the wise money comes during the week for the dubbel deal menu.
Eat here: but don’t make a habit of it. A habit! Ha! I’m here all week!
Keywords: lager lager lager
31 March 2007
Some people can pogo, others can understand vectors. Once, I even read about a bloke who could write different academic papers with each hand while holding an unrelated conversation (less useful than it sounds, apparently). Mrs Wifey – she can sleep.
Sometimes – when she’s really been champing at the bit – I leave her to it. Everyone needs their me time, and besides, it’s good to have hobbies. By midday though, I see that our breakfast-meter has ticked over from fashionably late to positively indecent, with vulgar sloth on the none too distant horizon.
The weekend shopping trip therefore begins somewhat behind schedule, and the list is necessarily stripped down to the bare bones. Yet despite this reduced agenda, our spirit cracks after just ten minutes in Gap and we are in urgent need of soul food.
However, in the absence of rice and peas and Red Rip (Norwich not being a hotbed of West Indian cuisine), we’re ready to compromise for anything within 200 yards.
Now, I’m a man of simple double standards. For example, if I can’t see inside a pub, I’ll not venture in. Pressganging may be less common these days, but business is brisk in wicker man pubs, and we are in Norfolk, after all.
When it comes to eating, however, I ain’t so proud. The door next to Thorns hardware store is open, and all that’s visible is the stairwell and the promise of burger.
Two flights later, we enter a well-windowed expanse that looks onto Pottergate. It’s much larger and lighter than Captain America’s, just around the corner, it has better beer (ie not just watery US lager) and St Gregory’s church makes good scenery.
It also has the best picture of a North Sea drilling platform that I’ve ever seen in a gent’s toilet, *anywhere*. I asked for the skinny: ‘It was like that when we got here.’
The burgers weren’t *bad*, but my heart and head always dip when I can’t have my beef rare. The chilli was less sweet and meaty than at Captain America’s (a good thing) but also had too much tomato paste (a bad thing). As for the chips – they were nice. But they weren’t fries.
Norwich has an abundance of American-style chow houses, and Zaks, for one, does a better burger spread. Maybe we should sacrifice this one and redevelop the oil rig niche.
Eat here: with 2 for 1 offer flyer
Keywords: high up rig chic
24 March 2007
Getting out of bed on Saturday is already hard enough, but without comprehensive emergency assistance from the fire service, Jack Bauer and, very likely, the AA, my leaving the house with any degree of haste is less likely than Joss Stone scoring a barefoot hattrick in the FA Cup final, for Norwich.
Due to the locally prescribed lunch period (thass jus’ saavage ter ea' arfter 2 o’claark) this significantly reduces lunching options to the faster variety.
I’m not one to dismiss the virtues of the hot sausage, but (heavens!) there’s a time and a place for such vulgarity. I am therefore grateful for the noodle coming to Norwich.
The Wagamama window affords the opportunity to observe the hoodie phenomenon in its natural habitat (‘See how the alpha male flirts with his harem by successively grabbing each by the crotch. One day the younger males will challenge the alpha for his authority, but for now they look on, their whooping and grunting signalling respect and admiration…’)
Between machine-gunned interrogations from our waitress, the semi-circular eyebrows of a nearby customer caused me much distraction. When men shave off eyebrows, (a) it’s done for the craic and (b) they generally belong to other people. As she didn’t look the type for such behaviour, I was left to speculate why she chose this look of perpetual astonishment. Does she choose her daily expression between ablutions and breakfast? (‘Today, Matthew, my brow is balancing dreamy sophistication and ruthless determination. Think Impressionism meets kamikaze pilot…’)
The noodles arrived and spoiled the conjecture. I also ordered pickles and extra chillies, a good idea and entirely pointless, respectively. I’ve no idea what those pickles were, other than that they weren’t gherkins or silverskin onions. I have every idea what the extra chilli was, however. It was a red chilli, cut into tiny pieces. With hindsight, I should have thought this through better.
The stir-fry ginger chicken in the miso soup was delicately charred, and along with everything else, very well received. The chicken chilli men also went down well. In fact, it was still going down as my plate was taken away. Her bowl still quite full, Mrs Wifey signalled displeasure at our being hounded out using her expressive (natural) eyebrows.
She was allowed to finish swallowing before her bowl was also snatched.
Eat here: quickly
Keywords: good chow (noodles) high brow doodles
10 March 2007
Buffets, for me, bring to mind an overabundance of sausage rolls and dearth of decent salad. They invariably leave me full of pastry and protein, with a possible baby tomato or two as a nod to the five-a-day vegetable pushing fascists (*Twenty* grapes is one portion? Come off it!) – But I digress.
Mrs wifey doesn’t like buffets. She doesn’t know when she’s eaten enough. We recently found out that this is something to do with the difference between hunger and appetite. As Jeffrey Steingarten describes:
‘hunger is an nagging sensation that triggers constant thoughts of food and
reminds you that your body wants to eat … Appetite is simply the tendency to eat.’
This partly explains how you can be fit to burst with lasagne yet somehow still have space for tiramisu. Or, in the case of tapas, how you (read I) just don’t know when to stop.
With tapas, experience has taught me to exercise restraint. It’s like a buffet with less pastry and more meatballs. And salad. Oh, and you can get it on your plate without having to get out of your chair.
Of course, you’ll not get much on your plate at any one moment, as La Tasca support the tiny plate technique, probably to maximise the other dishes on the table, as it does seem to fill very quickly.
The menu seems a little tamer than the last time we went – possibly it’s a seasonal thing, possibly it has been dumbed down. Either way, there’s no platter of whitebait to gnaw at. Instead we have fresh anchovies. It’s a naïve choice – despite the day’s glorious sun, one swallow does not a summer make. They would have been much better for a July lunch.
We also have the ‘famous’ meatballs, ribs, tortilla and salad. The ribs are tasty, if a bit scanty, but everything else (even the salad) ticks its food group box. The music, however, sucks. Techno-carnival beats do not facilitate digestion or conversation. But neither are they the end of the world.
La Tasca does not offer most exciting, authentic Spanish experience in Norwich, but it’s perfectly serviceable for the money, I’ve never had to book, and (this might be all in the mind) it feels a damn sight warmer than La Torero.
Eat here: For meatballs, brandy and flamenco techno
Keywords: Got your big plate Alan?
3 March 2007
I don’t recall my worst ever Saturday. Sure, there’s been a couple of times when Jose Cuervo’s Friday partying has kicked the following days into touch, but away from the sauce, nothing sticks in mind. That’s not to say that this Saturday was the worst on record, but it was a contender.
A six-day working week sucks. That much is undisputed. But when the first five days have been 12-hour shifts, so that working a mere five hours on Saturday seems blessedly light, you know something’s gone to cock. However, I’ve got it easy. Mrs wifey adds another day on the front of that, tailing it off by finishing a seven-hour Saturday at 2130. And then she’s thinking about making dinner.
A truly modern man would have used his two-hour lead time to prepare some fancy chow to present his better half as she crossed the finish line. Not this man though. My kitchen expertise extends to a full English (no beans), sandwiches, and washing up. I excel at washing up. My dish-washing game is up. My technique is fully academic shaolin temple black belt ninja Tokyo-stomping Godzilla Krypton Factor good. But you can’t eat it.
But you *can* eat chips.
I think this through. (1) She will appreciate not having to cook, but (2) she will be perfectly within her rights to dismiss a Saturday night chip supper as a disappointing, unhealthy, peasant-like manner of capping off a generally dismal day. Even if we eat off crockery.
The addition of champagne, however, changes that equation. Suddenly the whole package is tied together with enough profane decadence to stick two fingers up at the day.
This is partly because champagne is so grossly overpriced that it would be cheaper to wash down the chips with a pint of Bells; but also because the fizzy dryness cuts through the grease so much better than you could reasonably expect.
And what is it about chip butties that makes them hit the spot so well? You don’t put pasta on toast. You don’t put rice in your pitta. But ‘Fries? In a sandwich?!’, as I’m told John Cusack greeted his first chip butty – you’re on to a winner.
Grinning like gravy-sated Bisto kids, we pat our swollen bellies and pass out from exhaustion.
Keywords: decadent trash
Eat here: when you know you shouldn’t but you’re hella gonna
24 February 2007
It’s a lunchtime dilemma – it’s quarter to two, I’ve got the steak sandwich craving, but the missus fancies soup. Hot Fuzz starts in three quarters of an hour, so while there’s not an overabundance of time to digest said cow, there’s certainly sufficient by any reasonable bistro’s reasonable standard. Café Rouge is just around the corner and by now, one would think, the lunchtime rush will have passed its peak.
Of course, that would assume that the busy peak is due to an excess of customers, rather than efforts on the part of the staff to hold on to their dear clientele until they expire from want. When George Romero makes Lunchtime of the Dead, it will surely be in Café Rouge. Twenty minutes after ordering, our drinks finally arrive. The spring water is served with slice and ice. I fail to see the logic in making fresh water taste like dishwater, but come the revolution, the proprietors of Café Rouge won’t be the only restaurateurs up against the wall for hydrovillainy. Although they’ll probably be last to arrive.
Forty minutes after ordering our food arrives. Yep, that’s soup of the day and a steak sandwich; heaven help anyone who ordered the Dordogne duck confit served with orange liqueur sauce, French beans and dauphinoise potatoes or the braised rack of lamb in a rich red wine sauce served with fresh herb mash and French beans.
To be fair, the onion soup went down well, but it certainly wasn’t an eight quid sandwich. Perhaps one pays for the ambience? With the bill arriving some ten minutes after requesting it, there’s certainly time to gorge on the surroundings.
The longer one sits in Café Rouge, the more the contrived décor begins to grate – the deliberately mismatched lampshades, the faux-rustic doodlings on the walls, and so forth. It’s not so much a *design vision*, as the gallic shrug of a designer broken by a committee that can’t decide between chic metropolitan bistro or rough village café.
Twenty quid might not be an almighty sum to pay for lunch, but if it only buys dishwater and a dog’s dinner, is it really worth it? Cross the road and hit the tapas bar instead.
Keywords: je n’ai pas le temps
Eat here: or die trying
10 February 2007Some hangovers only need paracetamol. Even after the lie-in, this one is going to take litres of coffee, orange juice and water, a couple of hours of self-pity/regret, a nap, prescription painkillers, hair of the dog and lots and lots of salt. I remember the exact whisky when this dawned on me, and then necking it anyway. Sometimes being right really sucks.
Rolling out of bed, I look like I’ve been thrown up after a Singapore-Heathrow flight, sitting next to tag-team bawling babies. I spend the next two hours welling up in front of Spiderman 2, clearly more drained and emotionally fraught than the initial diagnosis suggested.
Hangovers like this not only drive otherwise rational adults to McDonald’s, but also turn that Big Mac into the best burger *ever*. There’s a chemical reason for this, I know, but I don’t pretend to understand it. All I know is that I too need hot minced beef.
The options are thus getting washed, dressed and motivated, or staying in my bedclothes and fixing cat-food on toast.
Zaks is off the beaten track and a ten-minute walk from my house. Like Wimpy, they provide real cutlery. Unlike Wimpy, you can get a beer. It’s a no-brainer, which is fortunate, given my current absence of cerebral activity.
Zaks’ shtick is American memorabilia. The main room is arguably more A17 than Route 66, but the conservatory is nice – pleasantly warm and lined with old tin signs. It looks on to the terrace, which looks on to the river and Cow Tower. Even with today’s pizzling mist, it’s a good look.
Zaks’ burgers are all under a tenner. They are gigantic (the cutlery is indispensable). Mine is rare enough to taste the pink. There are more chips than I can possibly eat, but thanks to vulgar gluttony, I still do pretty well (experience recommends avoiding the wedges). My Corona hits the spot.
The service is friendly, helpful and courteous. Anyone expecting fawning ass-kissing will be disappointed. But then again, they shouldn’t be eating in diners in the first place.
Quibbles are negligible: (a) anaemic salad tomatoes (although this is a national problem, not limited to Zaks); and (b) the conservatory lighting is a bit, well, green, and makes a good pink steak look well done. It doesn’t detract from the flavour, but it does take part of the fun out of devouring raw-looking flesh.
Keywords: meat, chips, cutlery.
Eat here: when you’re a bit peaky.
