The morning in 1979 when my friend Brook Lyndon-Stanford arrived at school with what appeared to be a red packet of Monster Munch was a morning that changed my life. Monster Munch packets were yellow. The snacks themselves were shaped like fat dragons, were ochre with brown flecks, and tasted of the salty, stubbly chin of my great grandpa Harry, whom I had to kiss whenever
we visited him in his flat on Green Lanes. Why they called
it “Roast Beef” I don’t know.
I suppose “Nonagenarian Pole” was not a flavour that they
felt would fly off the shelves in those gastronomically less adventurous times.But Brook’s packet was red and said “Pickled Onion” on it. The morsels were paler and shaped like a monster’s foot (monster’s feet, I was able to infer, are shaped like small calamari rings with four stubby toes) and they tasted of something that was not a flavour at all, but a chemical reaction, all fizzy and poppy like Space Dust, like sulphur and saltpetre with a hint of desiccated lemon, like salt’n’vinegar Chipsticks eaten straight after chocolate.
I spent my week’s pocket money on ten packets (10 x 10p = £1) and ate them all in a sitting. I puked little tangy tennis balls for an hour and never ate a Monster Munch again. And then the other day I was chatting about the cricket with Mr Patel in the corner shop (he thinks it’s hilarious that England took three days to beat Zimbabwe) when he asked, apropos of nothing, if I wanted a free trial packet
of Vanilla Ice-Cream flavoured Monster Munch.
Now, he’s got a powerful accent, has Mr Patel (to the extent that I often just nod and laugh, assuming that he is once again telling me how many Indian batsmen would have to die horribly in a plane crash before they selected Robert Key or John Crawley), and I at first thought he had said “manzanilla and bream” flavour - a far less preposterous notion, which I would have been only too willing to try.
But vanilla? This was the sort of salt-sweet japery you expect from Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adria, or an unattended nine-year-old in a snack factory. But not Walker’s of Leicester. I opened the packet. They looked like Pickled Onion Monster Munch. They smelt of Milky Bar.
I stuck one on my tongue. I felt the rough granulation that usually prefigures an explosion of Disodium 5’ ribonucleotide and MSG but achieved only slight salination of the middle tongue followed by a rush of sweetness and faint yellow nostalgia, unattached to previous taste-texture combinations. Except, perhaps, Butterkist popcorn rolled on the floor of the smoking section in a Seventies cinema auditorium - the very sort of nostalgic synaesthesia, funnily enough, that Blumenthal is in quest of at The Fat Duck.
I know that there has been a bout of vanillafication of old favourites on the cornershop rack recently, but try these, they’re fun, and they’re only available for a few weeks. A word of warning, though: don’t wash them down with new Vanilla Coke. The palatal tautology creates the zilchy effect of woodlouse husks rolling in own-brand cola.
With which reflections on the subversion of flavour expectations, we come to Tom Aikens, a hugely admired chef three or four years ago who disappeared for a while only to reappear with his own place in Chelsea which he has named, in that Godlike manner of all chefs of a certain age, after himself.
The critics who already knew his work have declared themselves delighted with his return to the fray and announced that the fallow period has enhanced his skill. I hit the restaurant without preconceptions and found myself in Monster Munch Land.
Anouska Hempel has done a fair job of disguising Tom Aikens as a normal dining room, but come on: if the inventiveness of the menu was scary (how about scallops with poached grapes and Pernod followed by the steamed pigeon?) the waiter was no creative slouch either, responding to my father’s request for an espresso by asking if he wouldn’t prefer a cappuccino “for a change” - the oddest question I have ever heard in a restaurant.
The chap might as well have asked my dad, when he ordered the foie gras terrine, if he wouldn’t rather have the eel and apple soup - an equally daft question to put to a man of 64 who didn’t get where he is today by drinking cappuccinos or snake-and-fruit soup.
I ordered it though (because that is how I got where I am today) and was delighted by the accompanying eel beignets which provided an explosion of bacon-like eeliness worthy of Smoky Eel flavour Monster Munch. Alas, their effect on the very mild eel and apple soup that had been poured on to two poached quail’s eggs in a vast ashtray was dramatic. They did to it what Vanilla Ice-Cream flavoured Monster Munch did to the Vanilla Coke: cancelled it, trumped it, wedgied it by its pants to the hatstand and left me with a bowl of apple soup, which is OK if you like that sort of thing, but a tad spooky. And on the side was cold apple froth in a cup, obviously.
Greedy blighter that I am, I took a second starter: frogs’ legs with what the menu called “poached lettuce, chervil pasta, morels and chervil sauce” but contained also peas, baby broad beans and asparagus. A brilliant dish: hearty and at the same time full of spring. The meat was concentrated at one end of each amphibious leg, creating a small (and faintly monstrous) satay effect on the tiny bone. My dad’s foie gras was, he said, blinding, and the layers of cool green marble between were a deliberately plain artichoke terrine perfectly matched to accentuate the herby power of the liver.
Next, I had one of those rectangular plate meals that seem to have been laid out by a proud biology student to get maximum illustration points in his A level. There was pig’s head braised with ginger, a roundel of stuffed trotter, tongue, and then a crackly sliver of belly. Atop them scampered frizzles of crispy ear. Each item was marvellously tasty, the whole thing both robustly piggy and faintly anachronistic, as if the brilliant Mr Aikens had this rectangular crockery knocking about and had finally come up with a way of getting most of a pig on to it.
My old man had the lobster wrapped in ham with a little roll of something next to it which he wouldn’t let me try (which
is usually a good sign), and he thought the cheese portions small - he spent some minutes trying to secure a piece of Roquefort large enough to convince him that it was not merely a part of the plate design.
We were too stuffed for pudding, but they brought us a bowl of lovely madeleines, just in case we were critics who wanted to pretend we’d read Proust. But if I were just some vain literary analogist you’d have had a paragraph on Eliot’s Eeldrop and Appleplex back when we were discussing the soup.
Skill: 8
Control: 9
Atmosphere: 6
Dinner for two sans grog: £100
Restaurant guide: Chelsea
Lots Road Pub and Dining Room
114 Lots Road, SW10 (020-7352 6645)
This manky old Chelsea pub was first Firkinned and then last year brutally gastro’d. It is now a lovely big room with high curving windows that draw loads of sunlight on Sunday afternoons to illuminate Hoorays on the way to the antiques sales, very pretty staff and gastropub standards executed with skill and attentiveness.
Gordon Ramsay
68 Royal Hospital Road, SW3 (020-7352 4441)
Yes, obvious, but the comparison is a good one. The combination of imaginative brilliance and obsessive control of the plate was what marked Ramsay out to the critics all those years ago, and is what most impresses about Aikens. Underneath all the buggering about with crockery Aikens is probably this good.
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if there’s somewhere you think we should go; it’s time I took a reader out for lunch again.
