85 Piccadilly, W1 (020-7493 3424)
Do you know how to tell if you are being short-changed by your newspaper? Just count how many times in each issue you are told the opinion of a taxi driver. The places you are most likely to find a cab driver’s opinion are in a foreign correspondent’s copy or a celebrity column. You shouldn’t, but you always will. This is because celebrities and foreign correspondents never meet anybody at all apart from cab drivers.
Thus when Imogen Stubbs wrote a piece about going to Guatemala for The Daily Telegraph (May 31), she began by recounting a conversation she had with her Guatemalan cab driver. Likewise, when Dom Joly wrote about going to Las Vegas in his column in The Independent on Sunday (May 18) it was mostly about the cab driver who took him from the airport to the hotel. The Daily Mail sent Arabella Weir to the Paris fashion shows (March 13) and got
an interview with her cab driver in return. The actress Harriet Walter, writing in the Telegraph (July 25) about performing Shakespeare in Sicily, gave us a long spiel on what her cab driver thought of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
All the above represent instances of a celebrity trying to show that they are not too starry to talk to normal people, but revealing that they never actually meet any (it’s never “my bus driver said”) and that cab drivers are their only interface with local opinion. But proper journalists do it, too, I’m afraid. Consulting my scrapbook of shame,
I find a piece filed to The Daily Telegraph from Camp David (April 2) that tells us what Andrew Marr’s cab driver thought about the war in Afghanistan. Then I have Jasper Gerard in Faliraki for The Sunday Times (August 24), Cindy Blake in Tenerife for the Daily Mail (April 5), Daily Mail sportswriter Ian Wooldridge in Australia (on January 7), Guardian political editor Michael White on Commons reform (January 11), and young journalist of the year Johann Hari in a 90th birthday interview with Michael Foot for The Independent (July 20) all “colouring up” their pieces with what their honest-to-goodness, werry humble taxi driver said to them on the way.
My favourite is a Guardian piece about the first Gulf War by Maggie O’Kane (February 14) in which she recalls an illuminating conversation she had 12 years ago with… her cab driver. According to my scrapbook, O’Kane has conducted 31 interviews with “a taxi driver” in various parts of the world since 1992.
Cab drivers’ opinions are clear, folksy, democratic, and covered by expenses. A hack flies in, settles into the passenger seat and asks the cabbie (who, conveniently, speaks English) what he thinks of whatever the subject of the piece is. The hack bangs out the piece as soon as he gets to the hotel and then heads for the pool.
So when I said “Fakhreldine on Piccadilly” to the minicab driver taking me to this week’s review, and he replied, “You lunch with Arabs?”, I did not encourage him. I do not need anybody’s thoughts in my review but mine. His bald head was peanut brown, his spectacles were tinted, his suit was beige, he chewed cardamom and he told me what he thought of Lebanese food with the faint disdain for Arabs that is so particular to expatriate Persians. He tried very, very hard to muscle in on my review.
“This cuisine of Turkman empire is same, same, same everywhere you go. Hoummos, aubergine, tomato, only the prices change, and the wallpapers, but the food is same, same, same. You know why is so many tomatoes and aubergines? Is easy to preserve by drying and makes quick to prepare. You ever go to he named another Lebanese restaurant? Very fine. You know where he got his money? Seventies he came here with suitcase full of cocaine, sold it, began restaurant. Arab crazy money.
“Now you know. I owned restaurant, very, very good, Persian. But burnt down one week after insurance expired, so now I drive cab. Now it is easy to have restaurant. Everybody eats out. In new buildings they do not even put kitchens. Serious. You know why always there are arches in Arab restaurants? Flat roofs do not exist in the desert. Serious. You be careful with mezze. These rich Lebanese they order many many dishes, eat little, then they will try to serve to you the leftover like new. Fakhreldine is very, very famous restaurant. You know how much I spend in there with five friends? Twelve hundred fifty pound. You think it is not true? Twelve Hundred Fifty Pound. Serious. It is big room like Bedouin tent, crazy, crazy. Before Revolution I was famous architect of Iran. I tell all staff in my restaurant that the taste of food is 50 per cent in the service. I have many children…”
As it happens, Fakhreldine is no longer like a Bedouin tent, crazy, crazy. A huge refurbishment has turned it into something more like a Sofitel lobby: low-ceilings, stripy carpet, uni-wood table tops, spotlights, charcoal armchairs. It’s Hakkasan with a nice view of Green Park
I’d gone because they said a guy called Karim Haidar (presumably no relation of the Austrian political charmer, Jorg) had taken over in the kitchen (to go with the refurb) and was going to be departing from the standard Lebanese menu. He’s been cooking in Paris and is seen as a bit of an iconoclast. I always like to eat to the music of icons clasting.
I had the 20 plates for £26 deal, and a bargain it was, too. Same as every other Lebanese meal you’ll eat in London apart from the very, very good ones and the very, very bad. Of the mezze I’d pick out the baba ganoush (with twinkling pomegranate seeds), and some of the cheesy pastries as particularly good. Some of the home-made sausage was lively, too, but much was conceptually dusty and dull to the palate. “Hoummous lahmé” was oddly spelt and not the lush tumble of ground lamb, pine nuts and oil that it can be. The raw lamb dishes were very ordinary, and I found the manner in which the kitchen presented the smooth pink slightly tangy flesh, moulded into what looked like tapering lips, a little gynaecological.
Five-spice lamb with bukhari rice was a step up from some of the duller meat dishes one sees after the mezze pages, and I enjoyed the samke harra, which was, apparently, black mullet (never heard of it) cooked in lemon and cumin. The menu didn’t say it would be cold so I don’t know
if that was a mistake or not. If so, don’t worry, it’s OK cold. Sticky fritters with orange-blossom syrup were rather lovely, or at least went well with the coffee. Service was very attentive and very European old-school from a waitress who would have done justice to a Seventies Scandinavian Airlines advert.
I love Lebanese food in all its predictability. I love the surly waiters and the crazy piling of tiny plates around a bowl of ice-cold crudités that nobody touches, and the experiments with North African rosés which may or may not be supposed to taste like that. But I went to Fakhreldine expecting a shock - big-shot chef from Paris, pricey refit, etc - and came away thinking rather that: “Only price and wallpaper change, Lebanese food all same, same, same.” But at least I found it out for myself.
Food: 5
Dining room: 5
Service: 7
Price: mezze as above but you could burn £100 a couple with ease
Alwaha
75 Westbourne Grove, W2 (020-7229 0806)
Alwaha eschews the belly-dancing silliness of traditional idiom without going all Euro-bland. The unflashy
split-level dining room offers the best Lebanese delicacies around, and they’re a whiz with the raw lamb.
Al-Shami
25 Walton Crescent, Oxford (01865 310066)
No mucking about with daft music and brass hookahs, just tiled floors, big crudités, brilliant Lebanese mezze and wines in the felicitously named district of Jericho. Further opinions from the nearest cab rank, 300 yards away on St Giles’ just the other side of Walton Street.
If you are a cabdriver with an opinion, e-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and maybe we’ll go out for a meal. Or maybe not.
