The deputy ambassador asked me out to dinner. I normally get the temporary
media-liaison girl from the British Council, but as I was travelling with
Jeremy off the telly, I got upgraded. “There’s a place we use, nothing
special, obviously not what you’re used to,” he said, with that air of
self-deprecation that miraculously increases the stature. It’s a trick
diplomats are taught in the witchcraft school of the Foreign Office.
What was odd, not to say bizarre, about this was that we were in Baghdad. We
sat outside in the balmy evening, around tables with gingham cloths under
palm trees, in a courtyard screened by a labyrinth of blast walls and
partitions of sandbags. At the other tables were men in smart tropical
casual having a late dinner, their assault rifles propped against their
chairs and 9mm pistols beside their duty-free Marlboro Lights.
It was all out of bounds to American personnel, so it was the only place in
Baghdad that seemed properly international. The waiters were jolly Iraqis.
The food was meze, some rather good hummus and a mixed grill and chips that
was on the cold, clammy side.
But that was all beside the point. Just to sit here for an hour and go through
the ritual of hospitality was an act of faith, homesickness and bravado.
Restaurants are the summit of civilisation. It took us 10,000 years to get
to one. You have to have a lot of other things in place before you hire a
head waiter: safe streets, a reliable supply of utilities and ingredients,
clean water, customers with disposable income, freedom of association, peace
and goodwill. None of which Iraq can stretch to at the moment.
So, sitting here, chewing the tepid fat while the American Black Hawks
wop-wopped overhead like Tolkien’s dark riders, was doing something that was
either foolish or important. It was rearranging the deckchairs on the
Titanic — or a vote of confidence that you could, in fact, rebuild the
Titanic at sea as it sank, starting with the chips.
I also ate at the American commissariat, Uday’s shag palace, now a huge
canteen for soldiers; trestle tables of edgy, camouflaged men and women with
that corpulent look of America’s underclass. Around the walls was a
help-yourself cornucopia of American comestibles — gluts of burgers and hot
dogs, flocks of fried chicken, sweet potatoes, pizzas, chops — all fatty,
sweet and familiar, served on huge plates with supersize cartons of Day-Glo
soda. I had never seen comfort eating of such concentrated, panoramic
intensity. They were heads down, cramming their mouths with home. How you
eat and what you eat are symbols of what and who you are — and this is never
so potent as when a man is continuously scared, day after day, and a long
way from his bedroom.
The Americans regarded us with suspicion and blank hostility. This wasn’t the
texture and taste of our home. We were trespassing on the communion of their
lunch, the remembrance of a thousand small-town diners, trailer-park
kitchens and back-yard barbecues. The high altar of the canteen was the
ice-cream counter. It was the real thing, served in a one-size bucket you
could have drowned kittens in. The flavours revolved, new ones arriving
every three weeks as the old ones were sent home. Tank crews would drive
hundreds of miles to get a new taste of Stateside. Soldiers carried tubs
back to Humvees and personnel carriers like holy relics; a mouthful of sweet
unction to calm the churning shock and awe.
Someone dropped a tray. The crash echoed into the high dome and a thousand
kids lurched for their weapons, ducked for the floor, eyes staring, teeth
bared, choking on tutti-frutti.
Which brings us — or doesn’t bring us — to Roast, a new restaurant in Borough
Market. The weekend market here has become a foodie Groucho Club for
organophiles and artisan producers who see food as politics and social
science before breakfast. I don’t mean that to be snide. They’re right. But
sometimes their proselytising makes promises their sausages can’t rise to.
Roast is a nice, big, airy room. The menu is British: not the tarty “Brit with
a twist” of Gary Rhodes, but the low-church, born-again Camelot of Fergus
Henderson, whose restaurant St John must now be the most influential kitchen
in the country. This is a marvellous and hopeful thing, but a lot of
Henderson’s would-be acolytes are finding that the transparently simple
menus and recipes are actually druidically difficult. The fewer the
ingredients and the more straightforward the method, the fewer the places to
hide dull ingredients and clumsy preparation. Roast is some way behind the
curve of its aspiration to be the Lancelot of British grub.
I started with a duck salad that consisted of a fan of labial magret, a hunch
of little gem and three boiled, bland mini carrots. It was a depressing bit
of catering construction.
Next I had grilled ox heart. I haven’t eaten an ox heart since they forced
abattoirs to slash their ventricles and, with one stab, murdered a
transcendent British dish: roast stuffed heart. Grilled in slices, it has
the texture of liver and the thin, sharp flavour of fillet, which was
augmented with nice dabs of bone marrow. It was fine, but not really an
improvement on calf’s liver, unless you are doing a Duke of Edinburgh award
in offal. Puddings were the usual best-of-Brit treacle tart with anaemic,
flabby pastry, and a sticky toffee pudding that was just badly made.
There were some good things: the pilchards and the Dublin Bay prawns were
nice. Overall, though, Roast is lacking in confidence and generosity. For
weekend lunch, it will have to compete with the stalls and new-age medieval
pie men of the market, and there is still some way to go before it becomes
an evening destination. If you want to cook British, you have got to be a
bit more Falstaff in the kitchen. Roast just doesn’t have enough greed or
gusto.
Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-3pm, Sat and Sun, noon-4pm; dinner, Mon-Fri,
5.30pm-11pm, Sat, 6pm-11pm
